Fisk crossed the office. It was an irregular space of six sides about forty feet across at its widest point. Merill sat with his back to the narrowest of the walls and with the widest wall at an angle to his right. A computer-actuated map of the United States covered that surface, its color-intensity lines of red, blue and purple showing traffic density on the great expressway arteries that criss-crossed the nation. The ceiling was a similar map, this one showing the entire western hemisphere and confined to the Prime-1 arteries of twenty lanes or greater.
Fisk dropped into the chair across the desk from Merill, pushed a lock of dark hair back from his forehead, feeling the nervous perspiration there. Blast it! he thought. I’ll have to take another pill!
“Well?” Merill said.
“It’s all here,” Fisk said, slapping the briefcase onto Merill’s desk. “Ten days, forty thousand miles of travel and eighteen personal interviews plus fifty-one other interviews and reports from my assistants.”
“You know the President’s worried about this,” Merill said. “I hope you have it in some kind of order so I can present it to him this afternoon.”
“It’s in order,” Fisk said. “But you’re not going to like it.”
“Yeah, well I was prepared for that,” Merill said. “I don’t like much of what comes across this desk.” He glanced up suddenly at a strip of yellow that appeared on the overhead map indicating a partial blockage on the intercontinental throughway near Caracas. His right hand hovered over an intercom button, poised there as the yellow was replaced by red then blue shading into purple.
“Fourth problem in that area in two days,” Merill said removing his hand from the button. “Have to work a talk with Mendoza into this morning’s schedule. Okay” He turned back to Fisk. “Give me your economy model brief rundown. What’s got into these kooks who’re moving all over the landscape?”
“I’ve about twenty interlocking factors to reinforce my original hunch,” Fisk said. “The Psych department confirms it. The question is whether this thing’ll settle into some kind of steady pattern and even out. You might caution the President, off the record, that there are heavy political implications in this. Touchy ones if this leaks out the wrong way.”
Merill pushed a recording button on his desk, said: “Okay, Marty, put the rest on the record. Recap and summate. I’ll listen to it for review while I’m reading your report.”
Fisk nodded. “Right.” He pulled sheaves of papers in file folders out of the briefcase, lined them up in front of him. “We had the original report, of course, that people were making bold moves from one end of the country to the other in higher than usual numbers, from unlikely starting places to unlikelier destinations. And these people turned out to be mostly mild, timid types instead of bold pioneers who’d pulled up their roots in the spirit of adventure.”
“Are the psych profiles in your report?” Merill asked. “I’m going to have a time convincing the President unless I have all the evidence.”
“Right here,” Fisk said, tapping one of the folders. “I also have photostats of billings from the mobile refueling tankers and mobile food canteens to show that the people in these reports are actually the ones we’ve analyzed.”
“Weird,” Merill said. He glanced at another brief flicker of yellow on the overhead map near Seattle, returned his attention to Fisk.
“State and Federal income-tax reports are here,” Fisk said, touching another of the folders. “And, oh yes, car ownership breakdowns by area. I also have data on driver’s license transfers, bank and loan company records to show the business transactions involved in these moves. You know, some of these kooks sold profitable businesses at a loss and took up different trades at their new locations. Others took new jobs at lower pay. Some big industries are worried about this. They’ve lost key people for reasons that don’t make sense. And the Welfare Department figures that…”
“Yeah, but what’s this about car ownership breakdowns?” Merill asked.
Trust him to dive right through to the sensitive area, Fisk thought. He said: “There’s a steep decline in car ownership among these people.”
“Do the Detroit people suspect?” Merill asked.
“I covered my tracks best I could,” Fisk said, “but there’re bound to be some rumbles when their investigators interview the same people I did.”
“We’d better invite them to review our findings,” Merill said. “There’re some big political contributors in that area. What’s the pattern on communities chosen by these kooks?”
“Pretty indicative,” Fisk said. “Most of the areas receiving a big influx are what our highway engineers irreverently call ‘headwater swamps’—meaning area where the highway feeder routes thin out and make it easy to leave the expressways.”
“For example?”
“Oh … New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles.”
“That all?”
“No. There’ve been some significant population increases in areas where highway construction slowed traffic. There’ve been waves into Bangor, Maine … Blaine, Washington … and, my God! Calexico, California! They were hit on two consecutive weekends by one hundred and seventy of these weird newcomers.”
In a tired voice, Merill said: “I suppose the concentration pattern’s consistent?”
“Right down the line. They’re all of middle age or past, drove well-preserved older cars, are afraid to travel by air, are reluctant to explain why they moved such long distances. The complexion of entire areas in these headwater regions is being changed. There’s sameness to them—people all conservative, timid … you know the pattern.”
“I’m afraid I do. Bound to have political repercussions, too. Congressional representation from these areas will change to fit the new pattern, sure as hell. That’s what you meant, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.” Fisk saw that he only had a few minutes more, began to feel his nervousness mount. He wondered if he’d dare gulp a pill in front of Merill, decided against it, said: “And you’d better look into the insurance angle. Costs are going up and people are beginning to complain. I saw a report on my desk when I checked in last night. These kooks were almost to a man low-risk drivers. As they get entirely out of the market, that throws a bigger load onto the others.”
“I’ll have the possibility of a subsidy investigated,” Merill said. “Anything else? You’re running out of time.”
Running out of time, Fisk thought. The story of our lives. He touched another of the folders, said: “Here are the missing persons reports. There’s a graph curve in them to fit this theory. I also have divorce records that are worth reviewing—wives who refused to join their husbands in one of these moves, that sort of thing.”
“Husband moved and the wife refused to join him, eh?”
“That’s the usual pattern. There are a couple of them, though, where the wife moved and refused to come back. Desertion charged … very indicative.”
“Yeah, I was afraid of that,” Merill said. “Okay, I’ll review this when…”
“One thing more, Chief,” Fisk said. “The telegrams and moving company records.” He touched a thicker folder on the right. “I had photocopies made because few people would believe them without seeing them.”
“Yeah?”
“The moving company gets an order from, say, Bangor, to move household belongings there from, for example, Tulsa, Oklahoma. The request contains a plea to feed the cat, the dog, the parrot or whatever. The movers go to the address and they find a hungry dog or cat in the house—or even a dead one on some occasions. One mover found a bowl of dead goldfish.”
“So?”
“These houses fit right into the pattern,” Fisk said. “The moving men find dinners that’ve been left cooking, plates on the table—all kinds of signs that people left and intended to come back … but didn’t. They’ve got a name for this kind of thing in the moving industry. They call it the ‘Mary Celeste’ move after the story of the sailing ship that…”
“I know the story,” Merill said in a sour voice.
Merill passed a hand wearily across his face, dropped the hand to the desk with a thump. “Okay, Marty, it fits,” he said. “These characters go out for a Saturday or Sunday afternoon drive. They take a wrong turn onto a one-way access ramp and get trapped onto one of the high-speed expressways. They’ve never driven over 150 before in their lives and the expressway carrier beam forces them up to 280 or 300 and they panic, lock onto the automatic and then they’re afraid to touch the controls until they reach a region where the automatics slow them for diverging traffic. And after that you’re lucky if you can ever get them into something with wheels on it again.”
“They sell their cars,” Fisk said. “They stick to local tube and surface transportation. Used car buyers have come to spot these people, call them ‘Panics.’ A kook with out-of-state licenses drives in all glassy-eyed and trembling, asks: ‘How much you give me for my car?’ The dealer makes a killing, of course.”
“Of course,” Merill said. “Well, we’ve got to keep this under wraps at least until after Congress passes the appropriation for the new trans-Huron expressway. After that…” He shrugged. “I don’t know, but we’ll think of something.” He waved a hand to dismiss Fisk, bent to a report-corder that folded out of the desk and said: “Stay where I can get you in a hurry, Marty.”
* * *
Within seconds, Fisk was out in the hallway facing the guidelanes to the high-speed ramp that would carry him to his own office. A man bumped into him and Fisk found that he was standing on the office lip reluctant to move out into the whizzing throngs of the corridor.
No, he thought, I’m not reluctant. I’m afraid.
He was honest enough with himself, though, to realize that he wasn’t afraid of the high-speed ramp. It was what the ramp signified, where it could carry him.
I wonder what my car would bring? he asked himself. And he thought: Would my wife move? He dried his sweating palm on his sleeve before taking another green pill from his pocket and gulping it. Then he stepped out into the hall.
GREENSLAVES
He looked pretty much like the bastard offspring of a Guarani Indio and some backwoods farmer’s daughter, some sertanista who had tried to forget her enslavement to the encomendero system by “eating the iron”—which is what they call lovemaking through the grill of a consel gate.
The type-look was almost perfect except when he forgot himself while passing through one of the deeper jungle glades.
His skin tended to shade down to green then, fading him into the background of leaves and vines, giving a strange disembodiment to the mud-gray shirt and ragged trousers, the inevitable frayed straw hat and rawhide sandals soled with pieces cut from worn tires.
Such lapses became less and less frequent the farther he got from the Parana headwaters, the sertao hinterland of Goyaz where men with his bang-cut black hair and glittering dark eyes were common.
By the time he reached bandeirantes country, he had achieved almost perfect control over the chameleon effect.
But now he was out of the jungle growth and into the brown dirt tracks that separated the parceled farms of the resettlement plan. In his own way, he knew he was approaching the bandeirante checkpoints, and with an almost human gesture, he fingered the cedula de gracias al sacar, the certificate of white blood, tucked safely beneath his shirt. Now and again, when humans were not near, he practiced speaking aloud the name that had been chosen for him—“Antonio Raposo Tavares.”
The sound was a bit stridulate, harsh on the edges, but he knew it would pass. It already had. Goyaz Indios were notorious for the strange inflection of their speech. The farm folk who had given him a roof and fed him the previous night had said as much.
When their questions had become pressing, he had squatted on the doorstep and played his flute, the qena of the Andes Indian that he carried in a leather purse hung from his shoulder. He had kept the sound to a conventional non-dangerous pitch. The gesture of the flute was a symbol of the region. When a Guarani put flute to nose and began playing, that was a sign words were ended.
The farm folk had shrugged and retired.
Now, he could see red-brown rooftops ahead and the white crystal shimmering of a bandeirante tower with its aircars alighting and departing. The scene held an odd hive-look. He stopped, finding himself momentarily overcome by the touch of instincts that he knew he had to master or fail in the ordeal to come.
He united his mental identity then, thinking, We are greenslaves subservient to the greater whole. The thought lent him an air of servility that was like a shield against the stares of the humans trudging past all around him. His kind knew many mannerisms and had learned early that servility was a form of concealment.
Presently, he resumed his plodding course toward the town and the tower.
The dirt track gave way to a two-lane paved market road with its footpaths in the ditches on both sides. This, in turn, curved alongside a four-deck commercial transport highway where even the footpaths were paved. And now there were groundcars and aircars in greater number, and he noted that the flow of people on foot was increasing.
Thus far, he had attracted no dangerous attention. The occasional snickering side-glance from natives of the area could be safely ignored, he knew. Probing stares held peril, and he had detected none. The servility shielded him.
The sun was well along toward mid-morning and the day’s heat was beginning to press down on the earth, raising a moist hothouse stink from the dirt beside the pathway, mingling the perspiration odors of humanity around him.
And they were around him now, close and pressing, moving slower and slower as they approached the checkpoint bottleneck. Presently, the forward motion stopped. Progress resolved itself into shuffle and stop, shuffle and stop.
This was the critical test now and there was no avoiding it. He waited with something like an Indian’s stoic patience. His breathing had grown deeper to compensate for the heat, and he adjusted it to match that of the people around him, suffering the temperature rise for the sake of blending into his surroundings.
Andes Indians didn’t breathe deeply here in the lowlands.
Shuffle and stop.
Shuffle and stop.
He could see the checkpoint now.
Fastidious bandeirantes in sealed white cloaks with plastic helmets, gloves, and boots stood in a double row within a shaded brick corridor leading into the town. He could see sunlight hot on the street beyond the corridor and people hurrying away there after passing the gantlet.
The sight of that free area beyond the corridor sent an ache of longing through all the parts of him. The suppression warning flashed out instantly on the heels of that instinctive reaching emotion.
No distraction could be permitted now; he was into the hands of the first bandeirante, a hulking blond fellow with pink skin and blue eyes.
“Step along now! Lively now!” the fellow said.
A gloved hand propelled him toward two bandeirantes standing on the right side of the line.
“Give this one an extra treatment,” the blond giant called. “He’s from the upcountry by the look of him.”
The other two bandeirantes had him now, one jamming a breather mask over his face, the other fitting a plastic bag over him. A tube trailed from the bag out to machinery somewhere in the street beyond the corridor.
“Double shot!” one of the bandeirantes called.
Fuming blue gas puffed out the bag around him, and he took a sharp, gasping breath through the mask.
Agony!
The gas drove through every multiple linkage of his being with needles of pain.
We must not weaken, he thought.
But it was a deadly pain, killing. The linkages were beginning to weaken.
“Okay on this one,” the bag handler called.
The mask was pulled away. The bag was slipped off. Hands propelled him down the corridor toward the sunlight.
“Lively now! Don’t ho
ld up the line.”
The stink of the poison gas was all around him. It was a new one—a dissembler. They hadn’t prepared him for this poison!
Now, he was into the sunlight and turning down a street lined with fruit stalls, merchants bartering with customers or standing fat and watchful behind their displays.
In his extremity, the fruit beckoned to him with the promise of life-saving sanctuary for a few parts of him, but the integrating totality fought off the lure. He shuffled as fast as he dared, dodging past the customers, through the knots of idlers.
“You like to buy some fresh oranges?”
An oily dark hand thrust two oranges toward his face.
“Fresh oranges from the green country. Never been a bug anywhere near these.”
He avoided the hand, although the odor of the oranges came near overpowering him.
Now, he was clear of the stalls, around a corner down a narrow side street. Another corner and he saw far away to his left, the lure of greenery in open country, the free area beyond the town.
He turned toward the green, increasing his speed, measuring out the time still available to him. There was still a chance. Poison clung to his clothing, but fresh air was filtering through the fabric—and the thought of victory was like an antidote.
We can make it yet!
The green drew closer and closer—trees and ferns beside a river bank. He heard the running water. There was a bridge thronging with foot traffic from converging streets.
No help for it: he joined the throng, avoided contact as much as possible. The linkages of his legs and back were beginning to go, and he knew the wrong kind of blow could dislodge whole segments. He was over the bridge without disaster. A dirt track led off the path and down toward the river.
He turned toward it, stumbled against one of two men carrying a pig in a net slung between them. Part of the shell on his right upper leg gave way and he could feel it begin to slip down inside his pants.
The man he had hit took two backward steps, almost dropped the end of the burden.
The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert Page 55
