Centauri Device

by John H. Harrison

  'Less of that for a start,' he said.

  They took him to a cell that opened off the passageway from the charge room and unlocked the restrainer so he could sit in front of a small metal-topped table on which the contents of his pockets had been spread. One of them left, the other stood behind him fidgeting and sighing occasionally as if he hoped Truck might try to engage him in conversation.

  For half an hour nothing happened. A draft carried a strong smell of disinfectant into the cell.

  Eventually two men came in: an IWG agent in plain clothes carrying a blue plastic folder, and a middle-aged sergeant of the civil (effectively, Port Authority) police with a long, jowled face and a rumpled uniform. They sat down on the other side of the table, not looking at Truck. The agent gave his file to Truck's guard. 'Take that to Whillans for me, will you.'

  'Whillans is sick,' the guard told him, 'sir.'

  'Well, give it to Jansen, then.' He examined Truck's papers. He seemed interested in the log book from My Ella Speed. He was young-looking and tanned, but partly bald, and there were deep lines running down from his nose to the corners of his mouth.

  'We know he was on Morpheus, whatever the BCA have to say,' he said to the sergeant.

  Suddenly, he turned to Truck and asked, 'Who are you selling to these days?'

  'I'm not selling,' said Truck. He had to give them something, so he went on, 'I admit I was at Veronica's place, but I was only consuming.' He'd had precious little time to do any of that.

  'I'm not selling anything — '

  The sergeant got up noisily and pointed his finger at Truck. He was slack in the belly and shoulders, which is where West Central weighs heaviest on its executives. He shook his finger accusingly.

  'You'd better straighten yourself up. You're up to your ears in Earth heroin and morphine.

  We could break your leg and no one would care. In here we could break your leg.'

  Truck had always avoided the opium derivatives. Nobody wanted colonial heroin because papaver somniforum lacked 'bite' when grown away from Earth, and its alkaloids were always either weak or peculiar. Rigid control of growing by both IWG and UASR had shut down the black market — there was simply raw material to be had; so the only trade in the genuine article was gray, a thin trickle of refined and packaged material stolen mainly from military medical supplies, traveling a precarious conveyer belt to the cutting factories of the giant H and M monopolies of Earth.

  It was scarce, it was expensive, and it was profitable enough for the monopolies to protect their connections jealously. Truck had never wanted his head blown off.

  (There was a second reason, one that seemed odd even to Truck. He called it squeamishness because he didn't think he had any right to a moral stance. In that, he was probably correct. But underneath his leather hat and funny clothes lived a puritan. He wouldn't sell anything he didn't believe in taking himself. He never ceased wondering about it He thought of it as a fatal flaw in his character.)

  'Earth heroin can get you killed,' he said. 'You know that as well as I do.'

  The IWG man rapped the table. 'He's not playing fair with us, sergeant,' he said distantly.

  The sergeant sat down. 'Why don't we make it harder for him?' he complained, looking at his blunt, hairy hands as if he loathed them. The IWG man was staring vaguely up at the ceiling.

  'There's an easy way and a hard way of getting things straight,' he agreed. He opened the log book again, flicked its pages over. He began to poke Truck's belongings about.

  'You're not co-operating John,' he said. 'Look, this, could have been harder for you personally; we've shown you a lot of consideration.' His eyes were blue and watery, aimless; he gave his full attention to anything they happened to focus on, like an old animal. He blinked, and everything had equal weight for him. 'We know you were on Morpheus, not too many years back, dealing in amphetamines. Your operation made a significant contribution to the Butter Putsch, so we can assume you have a political involvement. Now you turn up in a raid on Veronica's. Why shouldn't you have a heroin connection as well?

  'You're in a bit of a mess, John.'

  In those callow days, drifting among the dark machine-tool factories and vast rolling mills, concerned only with making enough money to buy back his indentures and get off the planet, Truck hadn't been able to tell a political involvement from a vomiting fit. He was still having trouble.

  'I don't know what you're talking about,' he confessed. 'I don't see what H has to do with politics. I've never had much to do with either.'

  The sergeant jumped to his feet again. This time his chair fell over. He made a fist and slammed it down on the table in front of John Truck's nose. His face had grown very red.

  Small objects rolled about the table top, dropping off the edge.

  'You're working for Veronica!' he hissed. 'Don't try to deny it.' He sneered. 'Just tell me one thing,' he said: 'Which are you? Anarcho-Syndicalist or Situationalist? Which is it?'

  'Oh Christ,' said Truck, amazed.

  The IWG man winced. 'Could you let me handle the political angle, Sergeant?' he murmured. He began to fumble through his pockets.

  'It's bloody obvious,' said the sergeant. He sat down, staring aggressively at Truck.

  'Look,' said the IWG man, 'really this is a Fleet matter, Sergeant. Medical supplies are involved. There's a "hold" order out on this man from General Gaw herself.' He found a piece of paper.

  The sergeant looked impressed. Truck felt as if a fish was trying to escape from his lungs.

  He squirmed about in his chair, trying to think of something to do. The local law had been allowed its pound of flesh, then circumvented.

  'I'll tell you everything, Sergeant!' he said desperately. 'I'm a small cog in a vast machine.

  A chemist on Sad al Bari is planning to flood the market with an augmented heroin/AdAc mixture. He has Trotskyist-Leninist backing — but I'll only tell you — '

  The sergeant hissed and bent over the table. An expression of triumph crossed his thick features. 'I knew it!' he whispered. Then he shook his head ruefully. 'Taken out of my hands,' he said. 'Taken right out of my hands — ' He glanced sulkily at the IWG man. 'I could have made it to lieutenant.'

  Truck jumped to his feet and ran for the cell door. Furniture clattered behind him. He was halfway there when the IWG agent kicked him effortlessly in the base of the spine. He hit his head on the wall. These days, he always seemed to be falling down. He noticed that the lice had stopped biting him; he suspected they'd left the sinking ship.

  The IWG man turned out to be called Nodes. He seemed peculiarly out of touch with his own situation. He even introduced himself formally as he walked Track through the sterile but greasy corridors of West Central (institutional corridors have this quality; they combine against odds asepticism and grime, as if the ancient cycle of daylight fouling and midnight disinfectant has imparted a glaze, an intermediate patina, to their walls) toward the dreary Carter's Snort morning outside.

  He said that there was no reason for them to have a negative relationship; he said that he was as human a being as Truck, since he had a wife and three fine children; he insisted on calling Truck 'John,' unaware that by attempting to change their traditional roles, he was simply implementing and reinforcing them. In short, he was a policeman. 'We shouldn't be alienated,' he said.

  Truck tried to catch his watery, old-animal eyes.

  'You're off your head. You know this charge is a frame? You know this General Gaw woman?'

  Nodes smiled, staring off down the corridors.

  'You know, that isn't much of a contribution, is it John? Honestly? If I offer you a more constructive relationship than that of officer and detainee, you should come some way to meet me, shouldn't you?'

  'For Christ's sake stop calling me that.'

  Truck thought, I should have kept moving, I could have been halfway across the Galaxy by now (steering for the bloody edge). It was too late for that. He felt the world turn beneath him, obstinate,
grinding, heavy. 'Too much gravity.'

  'What was that you said, John?'

  The corridors paled, cooled; they came into a sort of front lobby with wide glass doors. A drunken spacer slumped on a bench, belching ruminatively; he glanced up as Truck passed.

  'The fact is, bos'n, I need surety — ' he began, blinking. He saw Nodes, shrugged, closed his eyes, and retched disinterestedly. Outside, a thin gray sleet was falling on half a dozen blunt, armored Fleet vehicles drawn up against the curb, spattering across the wide, wet street on brief gusts of wind. Fleet marksmen with oily reaction rifles and subtly polarized contact lenses covered the surrounding area — lounging bored and professional, eyes slitted against the wind.

  General Gaw was waiting for him there — he saw her through a scum of condensation on the glass. She had discarded her Women's Army uniform for a black coverall which accentuated her small but well-shaped potbelly and brutal thighs. She was carrying a yellow riot helmet in the crook of her arm. She grinned as Nodes ushered Truck through the doors, said something to one of the marksmen. A short, metallic laugh rang down the quiet street

  'Welcome home, sonny. Cold enough to freeze your bum, eh?' Truck hesitated on the shining pavement; the wind whipped his hair across his eyes; he shivered, and fumbled with the zip of his second-best jacket. The General, though, was impervious to weather. She scowled ferociously up at him like a one-eyed parrot, her head turned slightly. Shook her index finger at him.

  'Oh' — drawing the syllable right out and clicking her tongue with huge enjoyment — 'oh, but you've done it now. If only you'd been a bit sensible about it all, lad. I could have saved you all this — '

  She took his arm in a steely possessive grip. The Fleet executioners shifted unobtrusively into a pattern of maximum security, placing themselves on likely lines of fire, their hard eyes flickering to and fro across Truck before going to sweep the misty intersection at the end of the block, the slick, damp rooftops. The sleet fell faster, soft and wet. 'You and I are going to have a quiet talk, laddie, somewhere nice and dry.' She laughed. 'A quiet talk!' she repeated loudly, grinning round at the marksmen.

  Abruptly, one of them let out a high-pitched cry, raucous and mechanical. He fluttered his fingers rapidly in front of his eyes to adjust the polarization of his contact lenses, and began firing off his weapon. Bolts flared up into the sleet, vanished utterly. At the intersection, gray shapes shifted jerkily in the murk.

  General Gaw shoved Truck powerfully away from her and screamed, 'Get him back in there, Nodes, get him back — !' She seated the yellow helmet like a bulbous growth on her head, spun away. 'Well talk later, Truck, when I've squashed these rats.'

  As she vanished into the gloom a great, groaning concussion shook the street, filling the air with bits of floating paper and plastic and dust.

  FIVE

  Under the Snort with the King of the Moment

  For an instant, the sleet fell as mud, bellying like a curtain in a storm wind as the wave front of the explosion pushed it down the conduit of the street. Track staggered back toward the doors of West Central with his knees quivering and his hair wrapped round his face (the cilia of some wet friendly animal, tickling his eyes and filling his mouth). Above him, the concrete symbol of hinterland justice broke up into powder and stones and fell like a waterfall, the globes shattered, the balance dropping away, the grasping hand dissolved.

  'Sodding hell!'

  He stared up at it, terrified,

  Lumps of it bruised his shoulders, beat him coughing to the floor. Nodes dragged him into the lobby, pushed him headlong into the cool plastic floor where he lay trying to ignore his soaking wet trousers. Something burned its way through the glass and battered itself into a glowing smear on the further wall, hissing furiously. The drunken spacer surfaced from some maudlin contemplation of his confinement, stared wildly about him. He shouted, 'Christ, skipper, Number Five's dropped its load again!' blinked enormously, and rolled under his bench.

  Truck twisted round to get a look at the street. Visibility was a dead loss. Engines raced as the Fleet tried to get its vehicles out from under; patched with a dermatitis of half-melted sleet, they maneuvered in blunt confusion, booming and roaring. General Gaw was invisible in the murk, but he could hear her voice raised in anger. Slow red bolides arced through the weather to a common vanishing point, and the reaction rifles coughed and choked like sick old men.

  'Who the hell is that out there?' he demanded of Nodes.

  The IWG man gave it consideration, his tired eyes resting on the commotion outside. 'I'd say that's a politically naïve question even from you,' he decided. His hands discovered a small Chambers pistol in one of his pockets. He pointed it at Track. 'I think we'd be safer away from here, don't you, John?'

  As they backed cautiously out of the lobby, the spacer stirred beneath his bench. Down in the abused recesses of his skull some vestige of a martial emotion prodded his bruised brain.

  He raised a wavering contralto and, after a couple of false starts, assayed a passage from the Finnsburg fragment:

  ' "Each man made his private piece with Reagan/And, at a signal, released/Heat seekers, side winders, desiccant, decorticant, defoliant;/They ran out their salvaged disrupter grids,/Swallowed their anti-sympathy pills,/Hoping for a sight of the enemy." '

  His delivery was round and tremolando; he drew great sobbing breaths between the lines and beat out the intervals with his horny hand. Pleased with the acoustics of West Central, he began on 'Salute the Fleet!' — guttered into a gloomy silence three bars in.

  'God bless you, bos'n,' he called after Truck. He belched, gazed disconsolately round the flickering, vacant lobby. 'You're a sterner man than I am!'

  Later, Truck said, 'I think we're — ' But then, he owed IWG nothing. He shuffled along, feeling dismal and exposed, while Nodes pursued a steadily downward course, into the chilly and echoic deep-detention levels where nobody had bothered to plaster the walls. Every three or four minutes, a fresh explosion — perceptible here only as a sustained vibration in the soles of the feet — shook the peripheries of the building.

  Condensation dripped from the expansion joints in the ceilings, growing milky nubs of mineral, and seeped across the sour untreated floors. It was a warren of right angles: clusters of small-bore pipes followed the passages, faithfully, like giant circuitry; dust furred the ventilators. Peculiar underground winds whistled aimlessly in the stairwells. Nodes avoided the elevators, 'in case of power failure, John.'

  'Look, I think we're being followed,' Truck admitted finally. The soft whisper of feet — receding feathery echoes, hesitant, spasmodic — had unnerved him.

  The warren opened out into an underground motor pool, a wistful gray light leaking down its access ramp. It was empty but for a few Port Authority five-tonners, jacked up and incomplete. Old rags and bits of paper blew around the oily floor and mere were little mounds of dust in the corners.

  'That would be a pity, John,' said Nodes absently, working his way round the walls, inspecting each vehicle in turn. He stopped, rubbed at a smear of oil on his gun hand with his other thumb (the Chambers threatened erratically: a support pier; a pile of sixty-inch wheels; and a notice which read DISCIPLINARY ACTION WILL BE TAKEN AGAINST OFFICERS CAUGHT — the rest was grimy and illegible). 'None of these work, you see.'

  He stared up the ramp. 'You may not be much use to the General in other hands. In those circumstances, I suspect you would be a definite danger to security.'

  'What other hands? Come on, Nodes!'

  'Frankly, John, I have orders to kill you if that looks likely.' Nodes's eyes became interested in the stairwell that had dropped them into the pool. Truck backed off rapidly; he didn't know whether it was fear or repugnance; he felt entitled to either, but outrage looked like eclipsing them both.

  'I've had it with you, Nodes! I'm sick of being "John"! I'm sick of being it!' He waved his arms about. Evaporating sweat chilled his skin. 'My God, you lot crawl out of your holes and turn the
entire Galaxy into an asylum. Whose hands?' He wiped the hair out of his eyes. 'And as for General bleeding Gaw's bleeding "sentient bomb" — '

  Nodes swung on him, alert and tense. The old-animal eyes focused properly on Truck for the first time since he had entered the interrogation cell.

  'Don't go on,' he said quietly. 'That is information classified above my level, and I'm not prepared to hear it.' He made a most human gesture with his free hand. 'You can only damage us both by giving information I'm not cleared to hear. I suggest we — '

  A scrape of bootsoles like the sound of bandages tearing.

  A shadowy figure in the stairwell.

  Nodes turned far too late.

  His Chambers blew a pit in the concrete at his feet; splashback set his trouser-legs on fire.

  He tangoed back, trying to shake both legs at once, looking horrified. Fizzing and moaning like an angry cat — like Tiny Skeffern's Fender — a five millimeter shell took him full in the chest and began to burn its way in. He fell on his back, crying 'Shoot! Oh, shoot!' trying to get a final desperate message to his fingers. The figure on the stairwell cackled softly, its feet scraping like torn cloth, like butter muslin, faint destroyed, on it came.

  Nodes emptied the reaction pistol at the ceiling, attempting to get Truck. Down on one knee over the maimed ribcage, choking on the stink and smoke, Truck took it gently away from him and tossed it across the garage. It clattered and rang. Nodes groaned, put his fingers in the soft wet edge of his atrocious wound. 'I have an odd blood-group, Mary,' he said clearly. 'Oh Jesus Mother Christ.'

  'You needn't have done that,' accused Truck, getting reluctantly to his feet 'I swear you all take pleasure from it.'

  The King chuckled faintly. He was wearing a white leather jumpsuit of peculiar cut, tight round the crotch and armpits, hanging loosely off his old frame elsewhere. His hands were quite steady, puncture marks standing up among the hairs on their backs, sore scarlet against the gray junk grime deep in the very cells of his wrinkled pachydermic skin.

  'Ingenuousness spoils the Moment, Captain Truck,' he whispered. 'It can't be your cynical amorality they all want you for. Are you out of your wits?'