“The plate,” Ellen Ackers whispered. “It responded to the plate.”
The M had been roused by Heimie Rosenburg’s looking for it. But Beam still felt the presence of David Lantano. The big man was still here in the room; the sense of heaviness, the proximity of weight and ponderousness had arrived with the machine, as it moved, sketching Lantano’s existence. As he fixedly watched, the machine produced a fragment of cloth fabric and pressed it into a nearby heap of grid-mesh. Other elements, blood and tobacco and hair, were being produced, but they were too small for him to see. The machine pressed a heel mark into the dust of the floor and then projected a nozzle from its anterior section.
Her arm over her eyes, Ellen Ackers ran away. But the machine was not interested in her; revolving in the direction of the workbench it raised itself and fired. An explosive pellet, released by the nozzle, traveled across the workbench and entered the debris heaped across the bench. The pellet detonated; bits of wire and nails showered in particles.
Heimie’s dead, Beam thought, and went on watching. The machine was searching for the plate, trying to locate and destroy the synthetic neural emission. It swiveled, lowered its nozzle hesitantly, and then fired again. Behind the workbench, the wall burst and settled into itself.
Beam, holding the cigarette lighter, walked toward the M. A receptor stalk waved toward him and the machine retreated. Its lines wavered, flowed, and then painfully reformed. For an interval, the device struggled with itself; then, reluctantly, the portable TV unit again became visible. From the machine a high-pitched whine emerged, an anguished squeal. Conflicting stimuli were present; the machine was unable to make a decision.
The machine was developing a situation neurosis and the ambivalence of its response was destroying it. In a way its anguish had a human quality, but he could not feel sorry for it. It was a mechanical contraption trying to assume a posture of disguise and attack at the same time; the breakdown was one of relays and tubes, not of a living brain. And it had been a living brain into which it had fired its original pellet. Heimie Rosenburg was dead, and there were no more like him and no possibility that more could be assembled. He went over to the machine and nudged it onto its back with his foot.
The machine whirred snake-like and spun away. “Ugh, damn it!” it said. It showered bits of tobacco as it rolled off; drops of blood and flakes of blue enamel fell from it as it disappeared into the corridor. Beam could hear it moving about, bumping into the walls like a blind, damaged organism. After a moment he followed after it.
In the corridor, the machine was traveling in a slow circle. It was erecting around itself a wall of particles: cloth and hairs and burnt matches and bits of tobacco, the mass cemented together with blood.
“Ugh, damn it,” the machine said in its heavy masculine voice. It went on working, and Beam returned to the other room.
“Where’s a phone?” he said to Ellen Ackers.
She stared at him vacantly.
“It won’t hurt you,” he said. He felt dull and worn-out. “It’s in a closed cycle. It’ll go on until it runs down.”
“It went crazy,” she said. She shuddered.
“No,” he said. “Regression. It’s trying to hide.”
From the corridor the machine said, “Ugh. Damn it.” Beam found the phone and called Edward Ackers.
Banishment for Paul Tirol meant first a procession of bands of darkness and then a protracted, infuriating interval in which empty matter drifted randomly around him, arranging itself into first one pattern and then another.
The period between the time Ellen Ackers attacked him and the time banishment sentence had been pronounced was vague and dim in his mind. Like the present shadows, it was hard to pin down.
He had—he thought—awakened in Ackers’ apartment. Yes, that was it; and Leroy Beam was there, too. A sort of transcendental Leroy Beam who hovered robustly around, arranging everybody in configurations of his choice. A doctor had come. And finally Edward Ackers had shown up to face his wife and the situation.
Bandaged, and on his way into Interior, he had caught a glimpse of a man going out. The ponderous, bulbous shape of David Lantano, on his way home to his luxurious stone mansion and acre of grass.
At sight of him Tirol had felt a goad of fear. Lantano hadn’t even noticed him; an acutely thoughtful expression on his face, Lantano padded into a waiting car and departed.
“You have one thousand dollars,” Edward Ackers was saying wearily, during the final phase. Distorted, Ackers’ face bloomed again in the drifting shadows around Tirol, an image of the man’s last appearance. Ackers, too, was ruined, but in a different way. “The law supplies you with one thousand dollars to meet your immediate needs, also you’ll find a pocket dictionary of representative out-system dialects.”
Ionization itself was painless. He had no memory of it; only a blank space darker than the blurred images on either side.
“You hate me,” he had declared accusingly, his last words to Ackers. “I destroyed you. But… it wasn’t you.” He had been confused. “Lantano. Maneuvered but not. How? You did …”
But Lantano had had nothing to do with it. Lantano had shambled off home, a withdrawn spectator throughout. The hell with Lantano. The hell with Ackers and Leroy Beam and—reluctantly—the hell with Mrs. Ellen Ackers.
“Wow,” Tirol babbled, as his drifting body finally collected physical shape. “We had a lot of good times … didn’t we, Ellen?”
And then a roaring hot field of sunlight was radiating down on him. Stupefied, he sat slumped over, limp and passive. Yellow, scalding sunlight… everywhere. Nothing but the dancing heat of it, blinding him, cowing him into submission.
He was sprawled in the middle of a yellow clay road. To his right was a baking, drying field of corn wilted in the midday heat. A pair of large, disreputable-looking birds wheeled silently overhead. A long way off was a line of blunted hills: ragged troughs and peaks that seemed nothing more than heaps of dust. At their base was a meager lump of man-made buildings.
At least he hoped they were man-made.
As he climbed shakily to his feet, a feeble noise drifted to his ears. Coming down the hot, dirty road was a car of some sort. Apprehensive and cautious, Tirol walked to meet it.
The driver was human, a thin, almost emaciated youth with pebbled black skin and a heavy mass of weed-colored hair. He wore a stained canvas shirt and overalls. A bent, unlit cigarette hung from his lower lip. The car was a combustion-driven model and had rolled out of the twentieth century; battered and twisted, it rattled to a halt as the driver critically inspected Tirol. From the car’s radio yammered a torrent of tinny dance music.
“You a tax collector?” the driver asked.
“Certainly not,” Tirol said, knowing the bucolic hostility toward tax collectors. But—he floundered. He couldn’t confess that he was a banished criminal from Earth; that was an invitation to be massacred, usually in some picturesque way. “I’m an inspector,” he announced, “Department of Health.”
Satisfied, the driver nodded. “Lots of scuttly cutbeede, these days. You fellows got a spray, yet? Losing one crop after another.”
Tirol gratefully climbed into the car. “I didn’t realize the sun was so hot,” he murmured.
“You’ve got an accent,” the youth observed, starting up the engine. “Where you from?”
“Speech impediment,” Tirol said cagily. “How long before we reach town?”
“Oh, maybe an hour,” the youth answered, as the car wandered lazily forward.
Tirol was afraid to ask the name of the planet. It would give him away. But he was consumed with the need to know. He might be two star-systems away or two million; he might be a month out of Earth or seventy years. Naturally, he had to get back; he had no intention of becoming a sharecropper on some backwater colony planet.
“Pretty swip,” the youth said, indicating the torrent of noxious jazz pouring from the car radio. “That’s Calamine Freddy and his Woolybear Creole Ori
ginal Band. Know that tune?”
“No,” Tirol muttered. The sun and dryness and heat made his head ache, and he wished to God he knew where he was.
The town was miserably tiny. The houses were dilapidated; the streets were dirt. A kind of domestic chicken roamed here and there, pecking in the rubbish. Under a porch a bluish quasi-dog lay sleeping. Perspiring and unhappy, Paul Tirol entered the bus station and located a schedule. A series of meaningless entries flashed by: names of towns. The name of the planet, of course, was not listed.
“What’s the fare to the nearest port?” he asked the indolent official behind the ticket window.
The official considered. “Depends on what sort of port you want. Where you planning to go?”
“Toward Center,” Tirol said. “Center” was the term used in out-systems for the Sol Group.
Dispassionately, the official shook his head. “No inter-system port around here.”
Tirol was baffled. Evidently, he wasn’t on the hub planet of this particular system. “Well,” he said, “then the nearest interplan port.”
The official consulted a vast reference book. “You want to go to which system-member?”
“Whichever one has the inter-system port,” Tirol said patiently. He would leave from there.
“That would be Venus.”
Astonished, Tirol said: “Then this system—“ He broke off, chagrined, as he remembered. It was the parochial custom in many out-systems, especially those a long way out, to name their member planets after the original nine. This one was probably called “Mars” or “Jupiter” or “Earth,” depending on its position in the group. “Fine,” Tirol finished. “One-way ticket to—Venus.”
Venus, or what passed for Venus, was a dismal orb no larger than an asteroid. A bleak cloud of metallic haze hung over it, obscuring the sun. Except for mining and smelting operations the planet was deserted. A few dreary shacks dotted the barren countryside. A perpetual wind blew, scattering debris and trash.
But the inter-system port was here, the field which linked the planet to its nearest star-neighbor and, ultimately, with the balance of the universe. At the moment a giant freighter was taking ore.
Tirol entered the ticket office. Spreading out most of his remaining money he said: “I want a one-way ticket taking me toward Center. As far as I can go.”
The clerk calculated. “You care what class?”
“No,” he said, mopping his forehead.
“How fast?”
“No.”
The clerk said: “That’ll carry you as far as the Betelgeuse System.”
“Good enough,” Tirol said, wondering what he did then. But at least he could contact his organization from there; he was already back in the charted universe. But now he was almost broke. He felt a prickle of icy fear, despite the heat.
The hub planet of the Betelgeuse System was called Plantagenet III. It was a thriving junction for passenger carriers transporting settlers to undeveloped colony planets. As soon as Tirol’s ship landed he hurried across the field to the taxi stand.
“Take me to Tirol Enterprises,” he instructed, praying there was an outlet here. There had to be, but it might be operating under a front name. Years ago he lost track of the particulars of his sprawling empire.
“Tirol Enterprises,” the cab driver repeated thoughtfully. “Nope, no such outfit, mister.”
Stunned, Tirol said: “Who does the slaving around here?”
The driver eyed him. He was a wizened, dried-up little man with glasses; he peered turtle-wise, without compassion. “Well,” he said, “I’ve been told you can get carried out-system without papers. There’s a shipping contractor… called—” He reflected. Tirol, trembling, handed him a last bill.
“The Reliable Export-Import,” the driver said.
That was one of Lantano’s fronts. In horror Tirol said: “And that’s it?”
The driver nodded.
Dazed, Tirol moved away from the cab. The buildings of the field danced around him; he settled down on a bench to catch his breath. Under his coat his heart pounded unevenly. He tried to breathe, but his breath caught painfully in his throat. The bruise on his head where Ellen Ackers had hit him began to throb. It was true, and he was gradually beginning to understand and believe it. He was not going to get to Earth; he was going to spend the rest of his life here on this rural world, cut off from his organization and everything he had built up over the years.
And, he realized, as he sat struggling to breathe, the rest of his life was not going to be very long.
He thought about Heimie Rosenburg.
“Betrayed,” he said, and coughed wrackingly. “You betrayed me. You hear that? Because of you I’m here. It’s your fault; I never should have hired you.”
He thought about Ellen Ackers. “You too,” he gasped, coughing. Sitting on the bench he alternately coughed and gasped and thought about the people who had betrayed him. There were hundreds of them.
The living room of David Lantano’s house was furnished in exquisite taste. Priceless late nineteenth century Blue Willow dishes lined the walls in a rack of wrought iron. At his antique yellow plastic and chrome table, David Lantano was eating dinner, and the spread of food amazed Beam even more than the house.
Lantano was in good humor and he ate with enthusiasm. His linen napkin was tucked under his chin and once, as he sipped coffee, he dribbled and belched. His brief period of confinement was over; he ate to make up for the ordeal.
He had been informed, first by his own apparatus and now by Beam, that banishment had successfully carried Tirol past the point of return. Tirol would not be coming back and for that Lantano was thankful. He felt expansive toward Beam; he wished Beam would have something to eat.
Moodily, Beam said: “It’s nice here.”
“You could have something like this,” Lantano said.
On the wall hung a framed folio of ancient paper protected by helium-filled glass. It was the first printing of a poem of Ogden Nash, a collector’s item that should have been in a museum. It aroused in Beam a mixed feeling of longing and aversion.
“Yes,” Beam said. “I could have this.” This, he thought, or Ellen Ackers or the job at Interior or perhaps all three at once. Edward Ackers had been retired on pension and he had given his wife a divorce. Lantano was out of jeopardy. Tirol had been banished. He wondered what he did want.
“You could go a long way,” Lantano said sleepily.
“As far as Paul Tirol?”
Lantano chuckled and yawned.
“I wonder if he left any family,” Beam said. “Any children.” He was thinking about Heimie.
Lantano reached across the table toward the bowl of fruit. He selected a peach and carefully brushed it against the sleeve of his robe. “Try a peach,” he said.
“No thanks,” Beam said irritably.
Lantano examined the peach but he did not eat it. The peach was made of wax; the fruit in the bowl was imitation. He was not really as rich as he pretended, and many of the artifacts about the living room were fakes. Each time he offered fruit to a visitor he took a calculated risk. Returning the peach to the bowl he leaned back in his chair and sipped his coffee.
If Beam did not have plans, at least he had, and with Tirol gone the plans had a better than even chance of working out. He felt peaceful. Someday, he thought, and not too far off, the fruit in the bowl would be real.
Explorers We
“Golly,” Parkhurst gasped, his red face tingling with excitement. “Come here, you guys. Look!”
They crowded around the viewscreen.
“There she is,” Barton said. His heart beat strangely. “She sure looks good.”
“Damn right she looks good,” Leon agreed. He trembled. “Say—I can make out New York.”
“The hell you can.”
“I can! The gray. By the water.”
“That’s not even the United States. We’re looking at it upside down. That’s Siam.”
The ship hur
tled through space, meteoroid shields shrieking. Below it, the blue-green globe swelled. Clouds drifted around it, hiding the continents and oceans.
“I never expected to see her again,” Merriweather said. “I thought sure as hell we were stuck up there.” His face twisted. “Mars. That damned red waste. Sun and flies and ruins.”
“Barton knows how to repair jets,” Captain Stone said. “You can thank him.”
“You know what I’m going to do, first thing I’m back?” Parkhurst yelled.
“What?”
“Go to Coney Island.”
“Why?”
“People. I want to see people again. Lots of them. Dumb, sweaty, noisy. Ice cream and water. The ocean. Beer bottles, milk cartons, paper napkins—”
“And gals,” Vecchi said, eyes shining. “Long time, six months. I’ll go with you. We’ll sit on the beach and watch the gals.”
“I wonder what kind of bathing suits they got now,” Barton said.
“Maybe they don’t wear any!” Parkhurst cried.
“Hey!” Merriweather shouted. “I’m going to see my wife again.” He was suddenly dazed. His voice sank to a whisper. “My wife.”
“I got a wife, too,” Stone said. He grinned. “But I been married a long time.” Then he thought of Pat and Jean. A stabbing ache choked his windpipe. “I bet they have grown.”
“Grown?”
“My kids,” Stone said huskily.
They looked at each other, six men, ragged, bearded, eyes bright and feverish.
“How long?” Vecchi whispered.
“An hour,” Stone said. “We’ll be down in an hour.”
The ship struck with a crash that threw them on their faces. It leaped and bucked, brake jets screaming, tearing through rocks and soil. It came to rest, nose buried in a hillside.
Silence.
The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories tcsopkd-4 Page 21
