“Why in hell didn’t you tell me what’s going on? We were very worried. In fact, Donna and Barry were in a panic. I was getting close to one, too.”
“I doubt that,” Duncan said.
“Well, I was worried, anyway.”
“I couldn’t call you safely until now,” Duncan said. “Anyway, it’s all going well—so far. I’ll explain when I get there.”
Donna Cloyd, now standing by Snick, said, “Is everything natty O.K.?”
“Yes. About seven tonight, destone all the OMC people in the apartment. Tell them what’s been happening. I’ll fill in the details. The situation has greatly changed—for the better. Relax. I’ll be there about eight.”
“I missed out on the excitement, didn’t I?” Snick said.
“What I did required that only one person do it,” Duncan said. “Two might’ve been too much. Fade-out now.”
After the call, he put in his shoulderbag the ampoules containing the ASF and anti-TM, enough for every OMC member in the Cloyds’ apartment. He also had printouts of the formulae for both. At seven that evening, Diszno left for a place the location of which he did not tell Duncan. Duncan did not argue with him about being given the address of the place. Diszno was probably right in insisting that security demanded that only he know about it. At 7:31, Diszno returned and handed to Duncan a small sack. It contained two flesh-colored slip-ons for Duncan’s and Snick’s thumbs. When—or if—they had to validate credit transactions with their ID cards, they would press their thumbs on the recording plate. The outer surface of Duncan’s slip-on bore the prints of a bloney named Makro who lived on the same level as the Cloyds. The other matched the print of Julep Chu Hart, a bloney who lived with Makro. Having spent some time during the day studying Makro’s biodata, Duncan was by now familiar with it. When Snick got the slip-on, she would memorize Hart’s biodata.
“You’re lucky,” Diszno said. “Makro and Hart apparently panicked when your override messages came over the screens. They must have thought that all was up and they were going to be swept up by the ganks. They just disappeared. I think they took off for the wilderness, the fools. However, they were being considered as too unstable, and so…”
Diszno bit his lip. Duncan said, “You were going to get rid of them, weren’t you? Just like you got rid of Ibrahim Azimoff, the agent who operated that candy and drug store. Just like you tried to get rid of Snick and me.”
“It was necessary for security reasons,” Diszno said. “You understand that.”
“I don’t hold it against you,” Duncan said. “But, from now on, if anybody is thought to be a security risk, I want to be told about it. I want to be sure that the suspect is indeed a danger to us. And there are other ways to handle them. They don’t have to be killed.”
“You’re soft.”
“Try me, and find out,” Duncan said.
“If the rank and file know that they won’t be killed if they try to betray us, they’ll not be deterred,” Diszno said. His face was red, and he looked indignant.
“They don’t have to know they won’t be killed,” Duncan said. “Let them think they will. But they can be stoned and buried some place.”
“What’s the difference between that and being killed?” Diszno said. He made no effort to stifle his sneering expression.
“They have a chance of being found and destoned some day.”
“What if that day is soon? Then they tell all to the ganks.”
Diszno had a good point, but Duncan was not going to kill except in self-defense. What he did not say, of course, was that Diszno might be one of those whom Duncan would have to get rid of. He did not trust the man. He was sure that Diszno resented his taking over and that, if he had a good opportunity, he would dispose of him.
The history of revolutionaries was heavily threaded with internecine power struggles. Diszno was just repeating history, that is, the pattern of human behavior.
He thought, How do I know that? I don’t remember what Caird knew or, indeed, what any of my personae except the one I now have knew. But, sometimes, memories I should not have do come through. Leak through. So, I am not entirely walled off from the previous personae.
That face, his face as a child of five, drifted across the screen of his mind. At the same time—and it had never happened before—a big hand seemed to reach inside him, grab his intestines, and yank them upward. It was so localized and so painful that it reminded him of that show in the Paul Bunyan series he had seen a few weeks ago. The gigantic lumberjack, confronted by an elephant-sized bear, had thrust his hand down the bear’s gullet, seized its guts, and pulled the bear inside out.
“What’s wrong?” Diszno said.
He straightened up, his face smoothing out as the pain faded.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing!” Diszno said. “You looked as if someone had kicked you in the belly.”
“O.K., something,” he said. “It was just a spasm. It couldn’t be something I ate. I haven’t eaten for a long time. Forget it.”
Diszno frowned but did not say anything. He was probably hoping that he could take advantage of this weakness—whatever it was—in Duncan. Probably? Undoubtedly! He would like to see Duncan drop dead.
The face was gone—for a while. He did not know what its popping up now and then meant. Perhaps it was the forerunner of another mental breakdown. If it was, he was not going to worry about it. To become obsessed with it was to hasten the breakdown, if there was in actuality going to be one. The reoccurring face might just be a symptom of an incomplete severing of his present self from the previous selves. A symptom of a minor mental malady, a slight malfunctioning.
Or was this kind of thinking just whistling in the dark?
He did not think about this the rest of the evening. He was too busy working with Diszno and the other three. By eight o’clock that evening, he was ringing the doorbell of the Cloyds’ apartment. A moment later, he was talking to Snick, the Cloyds, and Wednesday’s tenants.
14
Thursday, Duncan and Snick worked hard, stopping only to eat and exercise and use the bathroom. With the information gotten from Diszno, they made contact with forty-eight chiefs of allied subversive groups in many parts of the world. Diszno would, as Snick said, be having a fit if he knew how many hidden routes of communication they were using. He had told them how to set them up, but he had advised that they should not be activated except in cases of extreme urgency. He did not see that there were any such at present.
“You don’t know if the organics are watching those on the other end and are monitoring them,” he said, “One slip, and we’re all doomed.”
The first thing Duncan did after verifying his ID was to send the ASF and -TM formulae. Then he told the receivers what their use was. Some of the receivers knew all about the age-slowing factor, but only one had been given the anti-TM.
Duncan told them that he was now the overall chief, the supreme head of all the underground organizations. He ordered them to disseminate both the ASF and the A-TM throughout their membership. Moreover, they were to use any reasonably safe means to leave printouts of the formulae where they would be found by the public. He left the means up to their ingenuity.
“That way, we can get the people themselves to spread this data and cause trouble for the government,” he said.
Not everybody personally answered his call at first. Many did call him back and talk to him. A few never replied. All he talked to were shocked when told that he was Caird alias Duncan.
He did not spend much time with each person. Having established his ID and having outlined briefly his plans, he then sent a long printed message.
“How do you know they’ll take action on them?” Snick said.
“I don’t, and I have no way to enforce their being carried out. Enough of them will do something.”
Snick was all for what he was doing. But like him, she knew that sooner or later someone was going to be caught. That person could lie because he had
anti-TM. But there were other ways to find the truth, even if they were illegal, and the ganks knew all of them.
Friday’s tenants were non-OMC, so Duncan and Snick spent that day in the stoners. They jammed themselves into the Cloyds’ cylinders and squeezed themselves against the other occupant until they were in a fetal position. Then the power turned them to a hard substance. Saturday, they came out of the cylinders with that day’s tenants and with the Cloyds. Donna and Barry stayed unstoned most of the day because they were so delighted with daybreaking. Duncan, however, used them to help him in his message transmissions, Lemuel Ziko Shurber and Sarah-John Pangolin Tan, Saturday’s people, were gone to work most of the day.
The doorlock on the apartment had been replaced on Friday. According to the news, the entire population would have locks by the end of next Monday.
The Cloyds did their work for Duncan in separate rooms, she in the kitchen, and he in the bedroom. Donna, being an Original Buddhist, insisted on taking an hour off to chant for a half-hour before the Primal Circle. This was a twelve-angled rim of mahogany, twelve inches across, set upright on a dresser. Embedded inside the rim was a series of electronic devices which transmitted a hologram of Buddha in the lotus position in the center of a black field. As Donna chanted the Fire Sermon in the ancient long-dead Pali language, the Buddha slowly became smaller, seeming to recede. After fifteen minutes, it disappeared. She continued chanting into the Nothingness, as she called it, until the Buddha reappeared in the seeming distance and then became large.
Barry Cloyd was a Disciple of the Fine-Tuners of God cult. This believed that the worshipper could fine-tune himself until he resonated with the basic vibration of the universe—whatever that meant. To attain this state he combined his prayers with the operation of a theremin. This was an electronic instrument with two antennas. When Barry’s hands moved within the electrical capacitance field emitted by the antennas, a musical humming, they controlled the tone and pitch. By doing this, Barry became one with the cosmic vibrations and worked his way through them until he was in tune with the universe and God.
Duncan would have been alarmed about having such irrational people in the OMC if he had not known his now-dead colleague, Padre Cabtab. The bush-priest had believed in a religion even wilder than those of the Cloyds. Yet he had been quite rational and competent in all other respects.
Saturday’s tenants, Shurber and Tan, came home from work at 4:30. Shurber, looking around at the many glowing wallscreen sections, said “You only have one news channel on?”
“Yes, and I haven’t been paying much attention to it,” Duncan said. He waved his hand to indicate the sections, each with its separate secret channel. “I’ve been talking to our colleagues all over the world.”
Shurber shook his head. “I just can’t get used to the idea. I expect the ganks to come storming in at any moment.”
Duncan shrugged and said, “Could be. But if they do detect these transmissions, they’ll do it only by accident.”
“Which could happen,” Shurber said. “Or one of those persons you’re talking to could be an infiltrator.”
Duncan did not think that this was very likely. All members of the subversive groups had been interrogated before the anti-TM had been introduced.
“Anyway,” Shurber said, “Sarah-John and I are furious. About 3:30 we saw on the news that the government is suspending the results of the referendum until the current emergency is over. I knew they’d find some excuse for overturning it!”
Duncan did not have to ask him what referendum he was referring to. Several obweeks ago, the citizens of selected cities had been permitted to vote for a referendum asking for less surveillance of the people by the government. A slight majority favoring this had won. Thus, it was mandatory by law that the issue be put to the vote on a world-wide basis. Even if the majority were for less monitoring, the details of this would have to be worked out by the representatives of the winners. Then the program would have to be submitted to another global vote.
Duncan knew that a victory by the citizens would be a small one. The government would have logic and common sense on its side when it refused to turn off satellite surveillance. The eyes-in-the-sky were absolutely necessary to regulate the flow of commercial traffic, observe weather conditions, and notify the authorities of accidents or criminal activities. All this was for the public good. There was no way that the satellites could do this and also not record what every citizen in the open was doing.
However, tower cities were a different situation from the horizontal cities. Many citizens did not see why almost every square foot of the streets in a tower should be in view of a monitor. It might be for their good, but they resented it. These irked citizens proposed that the monitors be turned off and only used when a report of an accident or a crime or of domestic strife brought the organics or medical personnel to the particular area.
This would be a small concession for the government. Especially when it could claim that the street monitors were not operating but could keep them on anyway. When the citizens’ supervisory committees toured the organic stations to ensure that the law was being kept, they would find that the monitors were not on. When the committee left, the monitors would resume their watching.
However, the search for Duncan and Snick and the recent out-of-hand demonstrations and minor riots reported on the news channels justified complete surveillance. From the government’s viewpoint, anyway, and it was this that would determine policy.
“The word is there’s going to be a demonstration tonight in various parts of the city,” Shurber said. “The nearest one will start at the Blue Moon Plaza. Sarah-John and I’d like to be there. But the ganks…”
Snick cut in. “…will be there, and you don’t want to chance being picked up by them.”
The Cloyds had entered the room in time to hear the last of the conversation. Barry said, “We sure can’t go.”
Snick looked at Duncan. “I’m so tired of being shut in.”
“No,” he said. “You’d be taking too big a chance if you went.”
“Hey,” Donna said, “you two must be telepathic. You seem to be able to read each other’s minds. Is that because you’ve been together so long?”
“In some respects, especially in taking action, we think alike,” Snick said. “But there are plenty of times when I don’t know what the hell he’s thinking. He acts like an extrovert, but, basically, he’s an introvert.”
Duncan shrugged and spoke to a screen section. This was transmitting the final work for today. At the other end, a house in Singapore, the head of the local subversives would be getting a printout of the program of changes the revolutionaries would demand. The biggest and most radical item was the call to abandon the New Era dayworld system of living. It was no longer vital that the population be divided into seven days. There were only two billion citizens, not ten billion as the government falsely claimed. It was past time for mankind to return to the day-by-day living it once had. But the manifesto stated that what was good about the New Era would be kept. There must be no reversion to what was bad in the pre-New Era.
Lemuel Shurber waited until Duncan had turned off the last instruction-transmission. He said, “Sarah-John and I have to shop for groceries. We won’t be long.”
“Don’t go near the Blue Moon Plaza,” Duncan said.
“Never intended to,” Shurber said. A moment later, he and his wife left. The door slid shut behind them.
“I think,” Donna said, “that we should go back into the stoners. Dinner with all of you would be nice, but feeding all of us is a financial strain on them. We’ll see you on Tuesday.”
Duncan did not try to detain them, though he would miss their merry conversation. He watched them go hand in hand down the hall. Then he turned to Snick and said, “At least, we can watch the demonstrations tonight. We’ll see if the trouble we’ve stirred up results in more than just a parade.”
“You mean if the young people have the guts to use
those spraycans on the monitors? And maybe even the ganks?”
Saturday’s chief had sent a message telling them that a small number of youths had stolen these cans from a warehouse. They were talking big about covering the screens of the street monitors with the black spray. Until the screens were replaced, the monitors would be blind. The chief had said that one of the OMC was a member of the group and had suggested the idea. The juveniles were all for it, but it might turn out that they would be content with just boasting.
On the other hand, if they did back up their bragging, they might inspire other people in L.A. to imitate them. They would be arrested, if caught, and would be punished. Being young, they were not as likely to consider the consequences as the older and more conservative people.
The doorbell rang. Duncan and Snick froze for a fraction of a second. The Cloyds, just about to enter the stoner room door, stopped. The wallscreens throughout the apartment were flashing orange letters: DOORBELL ACT. The ringing was loud and steady and, hence, not being done by Shurber and Tan. One of them would have followed proper procedure and inserted his ID card into the slot outside. This would have unlocked the door, but they would also have waited for those inside to look at the doorway monitor screen. Duncan activated this. A short man and a tall woman, Mutt and Jeff, were looking up at the monitor. Both wore scarlet-slashed purple jumpsuits, the work-uniforms of the Sanitary and Disposal Department of the State of Los Angeles. Their epaulets bore the golden brooms of the Household Engineers Section. The dustpan-shaped badges symbolized that they were inspectors.
Duncan spoke sharply to the Cloyds, who were coming back down the hall from the stoner room. “You’ll have to take over. Pretend you’re today’s tenants.”