by Bob Shaw
"How in hell did I get into this situation?" Mathieu said to his empty office, then dismissed the question, trying to push irrelevancies aside as he picked up the gun and released the safety catch behind the trigger. The whole assemblage was solid and heavy in his hand, evidence of close-packed circuitry within, and a certain angularity and lack of cosmetic finish showed it to be the product of an underground workshop.
Aware that he was in danger of hesitating too long, Mathieu slipped the gun into the side pocket of his loose-fitting jacket and turned to check his appearance in a wall-mounted mirror. He had reached the rank of deputy mayor at the exceptionally early age of thirty-two, and he took a secret pleasure in seeming even younger by virtue of his fair-skinned athleticism. He also had a reputation for the casual perfection of his dress, and it was important that nothing about him should look out of place during the next few minutes. At this time of the morning his chances of encountering others on his way to Sublevel Three were slight, but the risk was always there and if a meeting occurred he wanted it to be unmemorable, something which would quickly be lost in City Hall's humdrum routine.
Satisfied that he had made himself ready, Mathieu went into the corridor and walked quickly towards the emergency stair on the building's north side. The transparent wall ahead of him provided panoramic views of the city of Madison. Its suburbs shone placidly in the distance, colours muted and outlines blurred in the humid air streams swirling inland from the Gulf. Mathieu, with a final glance back along the empty corridor, opened the door to the stairwell and went downwards. He had chosen to wear soft-soled shoes and his progress was both swift and silent, like the effortless sinking spiral of a gull.
Be careful, he thought, quelling a sudden exhilaration. He had omitted his pre-breakfast shot of felicitin, knowing he would need a clear head for the morning's desperate venture, but the drug was bound to be lingering in his system, subtly persuading him that he was invincible. And a fall at this stage could turn the threat of disaster into hard actuality.
The discovery some weeks earlier that Sublevel Three housed an independent Department of Supply computer had, in spite of the chemical shields around his mind, numbed Mathieu with dread. It had been installed decades ago at the instigation of some forgotten Metagovernment official, back in the days when Orbitsville was more actively concerned with the affairs of Earth, and since then had—unknown to Mathieu—been monitoring the distribution of certain categories of imports.
The computer's specification had apparently been drawn up by a bureaucratic supersnoop with a tendency to paranoia. It had an internal power supply which was good for at least a century, and it obtained its entire data input by direct sensing of product identity tags within a radius of fifty kilometres. The single feature of the system which had operated in Mathieu's favour was that the computer did not interact with Madison City's general information network. It sat in the building's deserted lower levels, like a spider interpreting every vibration of its web, acquiring and storing detailed knowledge of the movement of Metagov supplies throughout the region. The information was jealously guarded, locked inside an armoured data bank—but it would be yielded on receipt of the correct command.
And even a cursory glance at the print-out would show that Mathieu had privately disposed of public property worth some half-a-million monits. The consequences of such a revelation were something that Mathieu could not bear to think about. He had resolved to destroy the evidence, regardless of the additional risk.
On reaching Sublevel Three he turned right and went through a ballroom-sized area which had once been used as a computer centre and now was a maze of movable partitions and discarded crates. He found the door he was seeking, one he would never have noticed under normal circumstances, and went through it into a short corridor which had three more doors on each side. The most distant bore the initials N.R.R.D. in stencilled lettering, a combination which meant nothing to Mathieu, and again he wondered how Solly Hume had chanced upon the troublesome computer in the first place. A junior architect in the City Surveyor's office, Hume was a self-styled "electronic archaeologist" in his spare time and was currently trying to have the machine declared obsolete and redundant so that he could buy it on behalf of some like-minded enthusiasts. It had been pure coincidence that Ezzati, the salvage officer, had mentioned the subject to Mathieu during a meeting, thus alerting him to the imminence of disaster.
Mathieu used his master key to open the door and quietly stepped into the fusty little room. The ceiling globe pinged faintly as it came on, throwing an arctic light over a plain metal table which supported the Department of Supply computer. It looked more like a strongbox than a complex electronic monitor, with only a place engraved with chains of serial numbers to indicate its true nature. In a volume not much greater than that of a shoebox were sensors which could track the incredibly faint signals emitted by product identity tags, plus a computer which converted the signal variations into geographic locations and stored them in its memory. Millions of freight movements had been recorded, going back to before Mathieu's birth, but he was solely concerned with those of the last three years—the evidence of his grand larceny.
He stared at the box for a moment with resentment and grudging respect, and then—feeling oddly guilty—drew the Luddite Special out of his pocket.
He aimed its bell-shaped muzzle at the machine and squeezed the trigger.
Cona Dallen switched off her voice recorder, forced to acknowledge the fact that she was too hot and uncomfortable to do any serious work. She had chosen a seat beneath one of the mature dogwood trees in the City Hall grounds, but the shade meant little in the pervasive humid warmth. It was almost four months since she and Mikel had arrived from Orbitsville, and apparently she was no nearer to adapting to the climate of the area which had once been known as Georgia.
And being seven or eight kilos overweight doesn't help, she reminded herself, resolving to have nothing but green salad for the rest of the day. A glance at her watch showed there was more than an hour until the luncheon appointment with Garry. It seemed a pity not to do as planned and outline the next chapter of her book, but on top of the unsuitable working conditions she had a problem in that her subject was becoming increasingly remote.
With its working title of The Second Diaspora, the book should have been a genuine personal statement about the history of Judaism on Orbitsville, but—somewhat to her surprise—the work had gone slowly and badly after Garry's transfer to Earth. That fact had contributed to her agreeing to join him earlier than she had planned. Also, she had been touched when, trying to conceal his nervousness over venturing into academic realms, he had put forward the idea that distance would improve historical perspective. The prospect of ending a year of separation had helped persuade her he was right, that what she really needed was an overview, but now the two-century adventure that had been the founding of New Israel seemed oddly perfunctory, oddly passionless, when observed from a distance of hundreds of light years.
Was her new perspective valid? Was the fate of a single nation a truly insignificant fleck in the vast mosaic of history, or—as had been the case with other writers—had the very act of voyaging from one star to another leached some vital essence from her mind?
It was a mistake to come to Garry, she thought, and immediately regretted having allowed the thought to form. After four years of one-to-one marriage, it seemed that her relationship with Garry might turn out to be the durable armature around which she ought to build the rest of her life.
"Mum!" Mikel picked up the miniature toy truck he had been trundling through the grass and walked backwards until he was pressed against her knees.
"What's wrong, Mikel?"
He pointed apprehensively at a grey-and-white gull which had landed nearby. "A bee!"
"That's a bird, and it won't hurt you." Cona smiled as she clapped her hands and caused the incurious gull to retreat by several metres. To Mikel, every creature which flew was a bee and all four-legged animals
were cats, and yet he had a vocabulary of at least a dozen nouns which he applied accurately to forms of mechanical transport. Cona wondered if & child could show engineering aptitude so early.
"Don't like," Mikel said. He continued to press against her and she detected the pure smell of baby perspiration in his coppery hair.
"It's too hot out here—-let's go into Daddy's office and get a cold drink." She stood up, easily gathering Mikel into her arms, and walked towards the north side entrance of the City Hall. Garry's office would be empty till noon and, provided that Mikel was prepared to amuse himself unaided, offered a better environment for working.
The silvered glass doors parted automatically as she reached them, attracting Mikel's interest, and she walked into the air-conditioned coolness of the north lobby. Cona hesitated. The correct procedure would have been to go quarter-way round the building and report at the main entrance before taking an elevator to Garry's second-floor office, but her clothes were sticking to her skin, Mikel seemed heavier with each passing second, and there were no officials around to enforce the rules. Late morning stillness pervaded the lobby.
She opened the door to the emergency stair, a route favoured by Garry when he was in a hurry to get to work, and began the brief climb to the next floor, unconsciously making her footsteps as light as possible. There was a square landing midway between floors, and Cona had barely reached it when the air was filled with the shrill bleat of an alarm signal.
Shocked, filled with irrational guilt, she clutched her son closer to her and froze against the wall, momentarily unable to decide whether to turn back or go on.
The sound of the alarm caused Mathieu to moan aloud in panic.
He backed away from the Department of Supply monitor, knowing that the hail of radiation he had sent blasting through it would have erased programmes and memory alike. For an instant he thought the machine had retained the ability to warn of sabotage, then it dawned on him that there was a still-functioning alarm system somewhere in Sublevel Three, a relic of the days when it had housed a computer centre. This was something he had not even considered, yet another proof that it was foolhardy to plan anything important while under the influence of felicitin…
Why are you standing around? The words reverberated between his temples. Run! RUN!
He dragged open the door of the room and sprinted back the way he had come, moving so fast under adrenalin boost that he could actually hear the rush of air past his ears. His sponge-soled shoes made virtually no sound as he zigzagged through the huge outer room at dangerous speed. The continuing screech of the alarm lent super-human power to his legs as he reached the foot of the emergency stair and hurled himself up it in time-dilated dream-flight, taking four and five steps at each stride, his mouth agape and down-curved, scooping air.
I'm going to be all right, he thought as the floor markers appeared and dropped behind with impossible rapidity. I'm going to get away with…
The woman with the child in her arms appeared before him as in a vision. Time had now almost ceased for Mathieu. In an altered state of consciousness he recognised Cona Dallen, understood that she could and would destroy him, that she had no option but to destroy him, and in that protracted, tortured instant the weapon he was hardly aware of carrying came up level and his finger worked the trigger. A conical storm of radiation, noiseless and invisible, engulfed the woman and child.
Even before they had time to collapse, Mathieu had passed them, silently flitting upwards like a great bat, and the incident was part of his past. He reached the fourth floor landing, opened the door and saw that the length of corridor separating him from the sanctuary of his office was empty. Concealing the gun in a fold of his jacket, he forced himself to walk at normal speed until the blue trapezoid of the office door loomed large enough to receive him, then he turned the handle and went inside.
"It's not like murder," he whispered to the uncomprehending walls, again seeing Cona Dallen and her son go down before him, knowing with a bleak certainty that the scene would play itself behind his eyes forever in an endless loop of recrimination. "It's not a bit like murder."
Chapter 3
"I hate to tell you this, Garry, but it looks like we got a bandit in 1990 Street."
The voice from the transceiver in Dallen's ear came as an urgent, intimate whisper which shook him out of a reverie. Back on Orbitsville the idea of a three-year tour of duty on Earth had seemed valid, and not only because of the benefits to his promotion schedule. Earth, the home planet, had always had a romantic fascination for him, and working there was bound to give him a better opportunity to see it than any number of package tours. But the job was far from what he had expected, his wife was refusing to prolong her visit, and he had a yearning to be home again in Garamond City, breathing the diamond-pure air which roiled in from Orbitsville's endless savannahs. He was disconcerted by and ashamed of his homesickness, regarding it as an immature emotion, but it was with him all the time, only abating when something happened to break the daily routine…
"Are you sure about this?" he said, taking the half-smoked pips from his mouth and tapping it out on his heel. He was standing beside his car on Scottish Hill, a city park which gave extensive view's of Madison's southern and western suburbs. A brief rain shower had just passed over and he had been savouring the cleansed air. The museum section, which included 1990 Street, was less than four kilometres away and with unaided vision he could see the movement of traffic at some of its intersections, vapour-fuzzed glints of morning sun.
"Pretty sure," replied Jim Mellor, his senior deputy, who was on duty in the downtown operations centre. "Two of the new detectors picked up the remnants of a signal from a Lakes Arsenal product identity tag. Somebody has done his damndest to erase it, but enhancement of what's left indicates a TL37 fuze."
"That means a small bomb."
"Small enough to fit in your pocket-—big enough to zap twenty or thirty people." Mellor quoted the figures without relish. "I don't like this, Garry. We've called in all patrols, but they're way out in the sticks and it's going to be twenty minutes before anybody shows."
"Tell them to come in low and quiet, and to land at least a kilometre away from the Street—if our visitor sees any fliers he's likely to pop his cork." Dallen was getting into his car as he spoke. "Can you tell which way he's heading?"
"He was sniffed out on the corner of Ninth, and then on Eighth. My guess is he'd heading for the Exhibition Centre itself. Going for the biggest number of casualties."
"Naturally." Cursing the scant Metagov funding which forced him to monitor the region with inadequate resources, Dallen switched on the car's pulse-magnet engine and drove down the hill towards 1990 Street. Rumours that a show-piece terrorist attack was imminent had been circulating for weeks, ever since he had intercepted a group coming up from Cordele and two of its members had died in the subsequent chase. He had given little regard to the stories, and even less to the refined versions which predicted an attempt on his own life, mainly because there was no special action he could take. His field force of sixteen officers was permanently overstretched, and now it looked as though a price might have to be paid.
Speaking without moving his lips, purely for the benefit of the transceiver in his ear, Dallen said, "Are there many tourists in the museum sector?"
"Not too many," Mellor replied. "Four or five hundred, and maybe a quarter of those are in the Exhibition Centre. Do you want me to start pulling them out?"
"No! That could trigger the crazy bastard off quicker than anything. Can you get a new fix on his position?"
"Sorry. There's practically no signal left in that fuze. It must have been a freak condition that let us pick it up on Eighth and Ninth, and I don't know if it'll happen anywhere else,"
"Okay, but keep me posted—I'm going to walk up 1990 Street from the Centre and see if I can spot him."
There was a brief silence. "That's not part of your job, Garry."
"I'll give myself a reprimand
later." The car's engine whined in protest as Dallen angled it down the hill in a series of high-speed swerves, cleaving occasional puddles into silver spray, using the full width of each street and jolting over sidewalk comers where necessary. His knowledge that there was little risk of colliding with another vehicle and none at all of harming pedestrians gave him licence to drive in a manner which would have been unthinkably reckless in normal surroundings. From the air, the Scottish Hill district looked like an ordinary suburb, but all its houses and stores had been empty for decades, sealed by near-invisible plastic skins which proofed their structures against decay. Most of Madison City was similarly deserted, similarly preserved, with time switches bringing on the street and house lights at dusk for the benefit of families who had long since emigrated to the Big O.
Reaching the edge of the museum district, Dallen turned the car into a cross-street and slowed down. He was less than a block away from 1990 Street itself and was entering the "living" sector of the permanent display. Solid images of cars and other vehicles—all of late 20th Century design—moved purposefully ahead of him, and seemingly real people in the costume of the period thronged the sidewalks and went in and out of stores.
The images had been closely packed to create an impression of overcrowded city life on Earth three centuries earlier, before the discovery of Orbitsville. Stationary cars formed a continuous line on each side of the street, apparently leaving no room for Dallen to park, but he knew the illusion was the least of his problems. He drove directly into a resplendent white Cadillac, unable to prevent himself flinching in the instant when the front of his own car burrowed into the convincingly real bodywork of the larger vehicle, and braked sharply. Sounds and smells of Madison circa 1990, accurately reproduced by hidden machines, enveloped him as he got out of the car and began walking north towards the next intersection.
