The Boosted Man

by Tully Zetford

  Ryder Hook had never considered himself a safe person though, even when not boosted.

  He looked about. In such a decrepit building there were many cracks and crevices. He shoved the Tonota down beside the steps. If a search was carried out here a metal-detector would pick it up at once; he did not think that likely. How many other Boosted Men there might be here in the city he didn't know and how they would explain away the disappearance of the novir he likewise didn't know — and didn't care. By the time they got around to that he intended to be well on the way to doing something drastic about the situation.

  But there were other things he must do first, before he started in on these black bastards of Boosted Men.

  He walked back slowly yet forcefully towards the hotel.

  As he had expected, the man who thought he was a happily-fuddled drunk was dead, thin and exhausted and worn to death, lying abandoned in the gutter,

  Chapter Eight

  Ryder Hook had never considered himself a very clever man, although there were those in the galaxy — both human and alien — who called him the slipperiest bastard in space. Next day on shift as he looked all about himself and saw the reality of working conditions, the sights and sounds that would distress even a tin robot, he knew he was the galaxy's greatest idiot.

  For — had he not sent an urgent message to Shaeel, asking the Hermaphrodite to come to this goddam planet and rescue him?

  If Shaeel walked into this little lot ...

  Ryder Hook cursed himself for a fool. Of course, Shaeel was a monster of perversity, and infuriating, and Hook couldn't care twopek about ves — but yet, obstinately, he wasn't going to have the double-barrelled idiot killed. Ve'd come roaring in from space expecting to pick Hook up from an alienly hostile environment at the last stages of exhaustion and ve'd pick up that treacherous homing beacon for the Novamen's local ships and walk right into it. Shaeel was no Boosted Man, not even a half a Boosted Man. Shaeel would slave away down here until ve dropped dead.

  That, despite all his rules about self-first, Ryder Hook could not allow.

  So that meant a prime objective must be the spaceport.

  The very first target, though, must be information.

  Left to his own devices, Hook would simply have blasted his way into the spaceport, snatched the nearest suitable ship, and lifted off. This planet of Locus could go hang.

  But there was unfinished business, down here .

  For a start he began to collate information on just what the Boosted Men were doing down here. They had built an industrial complex that, for all its size, was a ramshackle affair at best. Its monolithic and imposing aspects had impressed themselves on the workers through this damned hypnotic power. Now he could see without being subject to false signals being fed into his brain he could see the towers scattered about the project, latticework constructions with dish radar-like antennae mounted at their summits. From them, surmised Hook, flooded the hypnotic signals.

  He saw no further Boosted Men and did not receive any resonances to tell him that a Novaman had passed by.

  The orange and blue clad guards and overseers carried out their masters' bidding. Even these people looked drawn and thin and Hook guessed they would not survive the project any better than the workers. The Boosted Men would do what they required and then space out and the installations would rot and the people who were not already dead would die, inevitably.

  Off shift he met Anthea outside the tumble-down old apartment block he knew she saw as a luxury hotel.

  She wore her bedraggled orange coverall and the chemical and oil stains formed a dismal pattern of servitude across the cheap material. Glimpses of golden flesh gleamed through the rents. For all that, she looked alluringly lovely and desirable; and Hook knew he would have to watch himself far more carefully now she presented a pathetic picture than he had when she was merely a lavishly-gowned and sexy fun-girl of the galaxy. That she had never been did not enter into it. She'd been a simple girl working for her living and out for a holiday with her friend Myza. She was involved in biochemistry, so Hook understood, and he set himself to pry more information from her.

  `How do you like my new dress?' she greeted him.

  Ryder Hook was not nonplussed.

  `Cheeky,' he said, forcing a lightness he did not feel into his words. 'You'll have me leaping on you in the street.'

  That hurdled that problem.

  By cross-reference with Myza and Rafflans later in the rusty old shed they saw as the first-quality restaurant, he checked out that everyone, including Anthea, thought she was wearing an off-the-shoulder silver-slink gown with scarlet gemstones stitched in the seams. The off-the-shoulder bit was explained by the two massive rips in the orange cloth where she'd evidently caught her coverall on a projecting ledge or sharp-angled piece of machinery. He put a hand on her shoulder. He could feel the silky softness of the golden skin under his own skin — but also he could feel the frightening fleshlessness, the hard angularity of bone underneath.

  However maudlin it sounded for tough Ryder Hook, who couldn't-care-less about other people so long as he was all right, he made up his mind these black bastards of Novamen weren't going to destroy Fraulein Anthea Elterich. He knew that all the workers who had been here when he had arrived would be doomed. They were too far gone. If he could get his party of survivors away they might be saved; he knew he could do nothing for the others. Some subtle radiation, some poison in the inefficiently-filtered air-supply, something tainted this dome and slowly but remorselessly destroyed human life.

  And all life was human — be it in the familiar form of Homo sapiens, or the equally familiar form of the alien peoples about them now. Rafflans, a Krifman, was just as human as an Earthman. It was simply that people tended to call themselves human and other races alien.

  He wondered about the Reakers, though. Were they fully human as a man would understand it?

  Anyway, here they worked as willing tools of the Boosted Men and their overseers. The Reakers must fit into the equation as intelligent life, valuable because of that, but humanity not-proven.

  One fact was undeniable.

  The Boosted Men were no longer human.

  When he and these stranded souls whom he must try to think of as friends solemnly sat in a draughty old barn with sagging doors and collapsing roof and stared hypnotically at a blank wall, he had to join in with the chorus of applause and bravos every now and then as the ghostly, invisible, non-existent orchestra played symphonies and concertos — three whole hours of it.

  He excused himself a couple of times, when he thought the moment was propitious, and went outside and looked up at the dome and wondered, and fretted, and went back inside and took up that alert listening pose of complete absorption in phantom music.

  Going for a sail aboard a yacht on the lake was nothing short of pathetic.

  People in their filthy orange coveralls sat or stood on flat planks of plastic mounted on rubber-tyred universally-swivelled wheels, and trundled around the empty stretch of concrete. A wind was blowing, at least; but Hook found the most profound and strange sensations attacking him as he watched these people laughing and enjoying themselves in this ludicrous and tragic situation.

  He was glad to get back into the old shed. They kept on pressing him to drink scummy water from a cracked mug and he kept on trying to drink the nauseous gunk, and eat the slop from the plastic dish, and gagging, until, at last, Anthea said: `You are sickening for something, Alf? We don't allow disease at all, not where I come from.'

  'No. Just out of sorts. Look, Anthea, let's get out of here.'

  `You randy old devil,' said Rafflans leering over his mug of scum-water.

  `Sure,' said Hook, and then to keep in fashion, added somewhat jerkily: 'You and me both.'

  Even Rafflans looked quizzical at that.

  Outside under the starlight striking through the dome Hook looked helplessly at Anthea.

  If he took the ladybird out of his ear and inserted it in
hers so that she could see the reality, he would lapse into the hypnotic illusion spun about them. He'd have to arrange for Anthea to give the ladybird back. That would be cruelty, exquisite cruelty, to her. She would give it back, of that he felt no doubt. But to show her this reality without being able to help her or prevent its recurrence!

  No.

  He couldn't do that.

  Anyway, it would be of more use to open Rafflans' eyes. The big Krifman would be handy in a fight.

  Come to that, the idiot Krifman gonil would no doubt at once offer to rip his arms off and wrap them around his neck. That would be Rafflans' style.

  Hook's style was far more subtle.

  Either that, or far more stupid.

  'You look a real mess, Alf!'

  Anthea started in on him. She pulled his coverall straight and brushed away at it, not even removing the top surface of oil and chemical stains. The place where a shorting wire had burned a hole — not helped at all by his careful dash in Boosted time — she tut-tutted over and fussed with and, not altering it in the slightest, at last stepped back and said that, well, Alf was reasonably presentable; but only just and at that not in respectable company.

  Hook glanced up at the eternally vigilant dishes spewing out their hypnotic commands.

  One function of the control exercised over the workers had been made clear. The more you fancied you were in good health and wearing fine clothes, the more other people saw what you expected them to see. That was subtle and cunning and it appealed to Hook. He could understand that kind of neatly precise programming.

  Because he knew what he wore and looked like, so some of the effect was cancelled out and Anthea was troubled and saw his smart tunic and trousers as, somehow, not quite smart enough.

  But Ryder Hook wasn't fool enough to imagine that by a logical extension of this process he could make the workers see the scene around them in reality.

  They were not, after all, Boosted.

  He took Anthea off to the ramshackle old apartment block and he made love to her very gently and with tenderness and her own passion kindled in an even more fiery way.

  This was the last night he would lie about like a no-good curd, shrinking from the inevitable action he must take.

  Tomorrow, as ever was, he'd kick these Boosted Men right where it hurt the most.

  On the morrow, as good as his promise, he did not report on shift but took himself along to Central Records.

  During the daylight hours robots manned the desk and Hook saw overseers passing in and out checking quotas and rotas and daily orders. The place was a hive of activity.

  He was not Boosted ...

  `What do you want here, friend?' demanded the guard at the door.

  Hook wasn't sure just what it was he was expected to see. The guard looked mean and hungry, with a gaunt face and a stubble of hair on his chin where his depilatories had either failed him or had run through their allotted time-span of hair-growth suppressant. His hand rested on his gun butt. The gun was a Tonota Forty. He wore a blue crash-helmet and face mask, and he was impatient with the pose he had to take up.

  Hook guessed he was supposed to see a fat kindly cop with a gun firmly latched into its holster and almost rusty from disuse.

  `Ordered to report here,' said Hook. 'I dunno what it's all about. Electronics bay.'

  'Get over to the desk, friend.' The friend stuck in the goon's mouth. 'They'll sort you out.'

  'Thanks, officer.'

  Still no thrilling tingling of the Boosting effect ..

  Hook walked across to the desk.

  The robot said: 'Your business?'

  `I've been posted to the Main Building,' said Hook. 'I want fresh clothing and equipment.'

  `Door ninety down the hall.'

  Hook marched off.

  He was said to be utterly ruthless. Well, ruthless he was. He acknowledged that, even as he regretted it. But down here on Locus that ruthlessness had been eroded. He was going to tremendous trouble to save the skins of a group of people who had meant nothing to him before they'd stepped off that shuttle together.

  Shaeel — well, ve was somewhat different.

  Room ninety offered up robotically-proferred garments. Hook took them, for form's sake, and the tool-kit that came with them. He went out.

  Still no Boosting ...

  He went outside and headed for the Main Building.

  Here was where all the differing productions of the shops were assembled. Here was where he would find out what it was all about.

  The absence of Novamen worried him, though ...

  He had to walk smartly and keep a bright vacuous smile on his face. In the fifty hour day and night cycle of Locus people were exhausted as the shifts wore remorselessly on; but they never fretted or complained. They just went loyally on, smiling away, enjoying themselves, until they fell down dead. Then the Novamen would assign a new body to replace the one carted away. People in the galaxy were always anxious to take good jobs offering high wages, and expected to end up on strange planets. That was all a part of the magic of the whirlpool of stars. This time, though, they'd signed up on a dead end.

  He said to the first overseer he met in the foyer of the Main Building: 'I'm assigned here, electronics.'

  The overseer looked down his clipboard. He was haggard and yet nowhere as exhausted as the workers. He was a mal, with the tubular ears twisting and turning, and he rolled one of those ears between his fingers and thumb, a gesture characteristic of mals. 'No one told me,' he said.

  'Wouldn't you know it,' said Hook. 'It's the same wherever you go in this galaxy.'

  The mal looked at him sharply.

  No one complained down on Locus,

  Hook smiled the wide vacuous smile of the happily hypnotised.

  `I'm an electronics man,' he said. He gestured expansively. `I'll fit in.'

  'I suppose it's all IQ. Report to Overman Baynes. I'll check your details out later, Alf.'

  `Fine. Let me have my docket back later.'

  Hook marched smartly off as though going to work for Overman Baynes was the greatest thing since arch-supports.

  He was directed to Overman Baynes by robots and other workers and penetrated into the Main Building. The place was a warren. Hook got the impression these multi-faceted cells concealed and surrounded a massive inner hall. Target priority, then . . .

  When Central Records got his docket from the overseer and fed it into central computing they'd come up without a match for electronics-robot-supervisor Alf to report to the Main Building. That might take a long time if the overseer didn't bother to send it across until he came off shift. If he winged it across straight away — oh, well, said Hook to himself as he marched smiling like an idiot up to Baynes, that might not happen. If it did he would be ready.

  `Nobody told me,' said Overman Baynes.

  Hook smiled. 'I'm here and ready for work, Overman.'

  Baynes was big and heavily-built; but he'd lost a lot of fat recently, and his eyes were sunken. He was not Homo sapiens, although very close to that, being Homo siriansis — which had nothing to do with the star Sirius — and only his fleshy crest and the flaps lobed from his ears differentiated him from a sapiens. His hands and arms, built on the usual system rife in the galaxy of a single bone from shoulder to elbow, two bones to give rotation and flexibility, from elbow to wrist, and then a number of smaller bones arranged in a variety of efficient ways according to race, were a trifle on the short side. Apart from tentacles, this skeletal structure was found universally in the galaxy among races who had developed a bony structure and a pair of arms with hands attached. There were other systems; but they were generally less efficient. Nature approximated to a norm even with alien DNA in solving ecological-niche problems.

  `And keep up to the quotas,' called Baynes as Hook moved off. 'We're doing highly important work here and if we fall down on it we'll be betraying the econorg.'

  Too true,' said Ryder Hook, loner in the galaxy. 'You can't let your econorg
down.'

  Directly ahead of him beyond an oval-shaped door of clear crystal which valved as he approached lay a long high-ceilinged chamber. He could see men and women and aliens moving about and every one intent upon their tasks. He checked his work-sheet Baynes had given him. He was to supervise the coupling in of the neural-suppressors. He reached the door and let it hang valved open for a moment.

  For that moment he was out of sight of Baynes, who had in any case turned to answer a query from a dishevelled-looking woman carrying a smashed assembly. He looked into the chamber. Down the centre and arranged in a neatly-precise row, stood a line of a hundred tall and narrow boxes. Ryder Hook could estimate beyond guesswork when it came to numbers as low as a hundred, and he knew with a single glance there were exactly a hundred boxes there without the need to count each one.

  He knew that intuition which he attempted to deny had brought him to the heart of the problem.

  He had to know what he was supposed to see.

  But this time he must so programme the command he gave himself that nothing he could forsee could break it.

  He stood looking into the room and swiftly detached the ladybird from his ear.

  Not instantly; but with bewildering speed, the scene subtly changed focus. The room remained the same, clean and functional. The people now wore smart white clothing, a kind of uniform coverall with shiny buttons which, he discovered on looking down at himself, he also wore. These were the Main Building clothes, then. The boxes showed transparent lids, with pipes running to and from them, pipes which were bundled and colour-taped into outlets in the ceiling. Then his conditioning took over and the ladybird went back with a thud that sounded like an airlock closing on green.

  The scene changed again; but Hook saw with intense pleasure that in all important respects it remained the same. Only the people wore clothes that were not at all white or smart. The boxes with their transparent lids, the colour-coded pipes, the banks of instruments. He must be near, now, he must!

  He walked on into the chamber and the crystal door at last could valve itself shut.