“Probably,” he echoed.
“This our man can do,” Freya continued, “while you manage, if you can, to obtain the final components of the deep-sleep equipment. But I doubt if you’ll obtain those components, Rachmael. There’s an additional memo here to that effect, too. You’re correct: Theodoric Ferry sits on its board of directors, too, and this is all legal, this monopoly which the firm possesses.” Her smile was bitter. “UN sanctioned.”
He was silent. Obviously it was hopeless; no matter how long the Lies Incorporated professional and ultra-veteran space pilot kept the huge liner the Omphalos lost between planets, the components would be “held up unavoidably,” as the invoices, marked back-order, would read.
“I think,” Freya said presently, “that your problem is not the mere obtaining of deep-sleep components. That can be handled; there are ways . . . we, for instance, can—although this will cost you a good deal of money eventually—pick them up on the black market. Your problem, Rachmael—”
“I know,” he said. His problem was not how to get to the Fomalhaut system, to its ninth planet, Whale’s Mouth which—
Again the furred body phased in, the superimposition.
“There it lies,” Abba said. “Lies . . . lies . . . lies.”
Damn double exposure of reality, Rachmael said to himself; he blinked. What is this, a reality dysfunction of some kind? Or something coming from his right hemisphere to his left, some vital information available to the right which it now urged on the left?
—which was Terra’s sole thriving colony world. In fact his problem was not the eighteen-year voyage at all.
His problem was—
“Why go at all?” Abba intoned, the vast animal figure to whom they all looked for the dispensation of wisdom. “When Dr. von Einem’s Telpor construct, available at a nominal cost through any of Trails of Hoffman’s many retail outlets on Terra—”
Yes, yes, Rachmael thought irritably.
“—makes the trip a mere fifteen-minute minor journey, and within financial reach of even the most modest, income-wise speaking, Terran family?” Abba smiled his tender smile. “Consider that, dear son.”
Aloud, Rachmael said, “Freya, the trip by Telpor to Whale’s Mouth—it sounds fine.” And forty million Terran citizens had taken advantage of it. And the aud and vid reports returning—via the Telpor construct—all told glowingly of a world not overcrowded, of tall grass, of odd but benign animals, of new and lovely cities built by robot-assists taken across at UN-expense to Whale’s Mouth. “But—”
“But,” Freya said, who was now combined with Abba into one tender and wise entity, huge and furry and pretty, “the peculiar fact is that it’s a one-way trip.”
Instantly he nodded. “Yes, that’s it.”
“Sure it is,” Freya-Abba said as with a single voice.
“No one can come back,” Rachmael said.
The double entity smiled in a cunning way, a sly way. “That is easily explained, my son. The Sol system is located at the axis of the universe.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Rachmael said.
“The recession of the extra-galactic nebulae demonstrate von Einem’s Theorem One that—” The voice turned into garbled noise, and the double impositions blurred, as if a locking control had gotten twisted; the entire image became warped and deformed, and then, suddenly, the double figure facing him was upside down.
“There must,” Rachmael continued, as best he could, considering that he was now talking to a dual entity which was upside down, “out of those forty million people, be a few who want to return. But the TV and ’pape reports say they’re all actually totally ecstatically happy. You’ve seen the endless TV shows, life at Newcolonizedland. It’s—”
The upside-down figure belched. “Lies,” it said.
“What?” Rachmael said.
“Too perfect, Rachmael?” The figure slowly rotated until it became right-side up, and then Abba faded out; only the girl remained.
“Statistically, malcontents must exist. Why do we never hear of them? And we can’t go and take a look.” Because, if you went by Telpor to Whale’s Mouth and saw, you were there, as they were, to stay. So if you did find malcontents—what could you do for them? Because you could not take them back; you could only join them. And he had the intuition that somehow this just wouldn’t be of much use. Even the UN left Newcolonizedland alone, the countless UN welfare agencies, the personnel and bureaus newly set up by the present Secretary General Horst Bertold, from New Whole Germany: the largest political entity in Europe—even they stopped at the Telpor gates. Neues Einige Deutschland . . . NED. Far more powerful than the mangy, dwindling French Empire or the UK— they were pale remnants of the past.
And New Whole Germany—as the election to UN Secretary General of Horst Bertold showed—was the Wave of the Future . . . as the Germans themselves liked to phrase it.
“So in other words,” Freya said, “you’d take an empty passenger liner to the Fomalhaut system, spend eighteen years in transit, you, the sole unteleported man, among the seven billion citizens of Terra, with the idea—or should I say, the hope?—that when you arrive finally at Whale’s Mouth, in the year 2032, you’ll find a passenger complement, five hundred or so unhappy souls who want out? And so you then can resume commercial operations . . . von Einem takes them there in fifteen minutes and then eighteen years later you return them to Terra, back home to the Sol system.”
“Yes,” he said fiercely.
“Plus another eighteen years—for them—too—for the flight back. For you thirty-six years in all. You’d return to Terra in the year—” She calculated. “2050 AD. I’d be sixty-one years old; Theodoric Ferry, even Horst Bertold, would be dead; perhaps Trails of Hoffman Limited wouldn’t even exist, any more . . . certainly Dr. Sepp von Einem would be dead years ago; let’s see: he’s in his eighties now. No, he’d never live to see you reach Whale’s Mouth, let alone return. So if all this is to make him feel bad—”
“Is it insane?” Rachmael said. “To believe, first, that some unhappy persons must be stuck at Whale’s Mouth . . . and yet we’re not hearing, via THL’s monopoly of all info media, all energy, passing back this way. And second—”
“And second,” Freya said, “to want to spend eighteen years of your life in getting there to rescue them.” Professional, intent, she eyed him. “Is this idealism? Or is this vengeance against Dr. von Einem because of his Telpor construct that made your family’s liners and commercial carriers obsolete for inter-system travel? After all, if you do manage to leave in the Omphalos, it’ll be big news, a novelty; it’ll be fully covered on TV and in the ’papes, here on Terra; even the UN won’t be able to squelch the story—the first, sole, manned vessel to go to Fomalhaut, not just one of those old-time instrument packages. Why, you’d be a time capsule; we’d all be waiting for you to arrive first there and then, in 2050, back here.”
“A time capsule,” he said, “like the one fired off at Whale’s Mouth. Which never arrived here on Terra.”
She shrugged. “Passed Terra by, was attracted by the sun’s gravitational field; was swallowed up unnoticed.”
“Unnoticed by any tracking station? Out of over six thousand separate monitoring devices in orbit in the Sol system none detected the time capsule when it arrived?”
Frowning, Freya said, “What do you mean to imply, Rachmael?”
“This time capsule,” Rachmael said, “from Whale’s Mouth, the launching of which we watched years ago on TV—it wasn’t detected by our tracking stations because it never arrived. And it never arrived, Miss Holm, because despite those crowd scenes it was never sent.”
“You mean what we saw on TV—”
“The vid signals, via Telpor,” Rachmael said, “which showed the happy masses at Whale’s Mouth cheering at the vast public launching ceremony of the time capsule—were fakes. I’ve run and rerun recordings of them; the crowd noise is spurious.” Reaching into his cloak he brought out a seven-inch r
eel of iron oxide Ampex and tape; he tossed it onto her desk. “Play it back. Carefully. There were no people cheering. And for a good reason. Because no time capsule, containing quaint artifacts from the Fomalhaut ancient civilizations, was launched from Whale’s Mouth.”
“But—” She stared at him in disbelief, then picked up the aud tape, held the reel uncertainly. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Rachmael said. “But when the Omphalos reaches the Fomalhaut system and Whale’s Mouth and I see Newcolonizedland, I’ll know.” And, he thought, I don’t think I’ll find ten or sixty malcontents out of forty million . . . by that time, of course, it’ll be something like a billion colonists. I’ll find—
He ended the thought abruptly. He did not know.
But eventually he would know. In the little matter of eighteen years.
THREE
In the sybaritic living room of his villa, on his satellite as it orbited Terra, the owner of Lies, Incorporated, Matson Glazer-Holliday, sat in his human-made dressing gown smoking a prize, rare Antonio y Cleopatra cigar and listening to the aud tape of the crowd noises.
And, directly before him he watched the oscilloscope as it transformed the audio signal into a visual one.
To Freya Holm he said, “Yes, there is a cycle. You can see it, even though you can’t hear it. This aud-track is continuous, running over and over again. Hence the man’s right; it’s a fake.”
“Could Rachmael ben Applebaum have—”
“No,” Matson said. “I’ve sequestered an aud copy from the UN info archives; it agrees. Rachmael didn’t tamper with the tape; it’s exactly what he claims it to be.” He sat back, pondering.
Strange, he thought, that von Einem’s Telpor gadget works only one way, radiating matter out . . . with no return of that matter, at least by teleportation, possible. So, rather conveniently for Trails of Hoffman, all we get via Telpor as a feedback from Whale’s Mouth is an electronic signal, energy alone . . . and this one now exposed as a fake; as a research agency I should have discovered this long ago—Rachmael, with all his creditors hounding him jet-balloonwise, keeping him awake night and day, hammering at him with countless technological assists, impeding him in the normal course of conducting routine business, has detected this spuriousness, and I— damn it. Matson thought; I missed, here. He felt gloomy.
“Cutty Sark Scotch and water?” Freya asked.
He nodded absently as Fredya, who was his mistress, disappeared into the liquor antechamber of the villa to see if the 1985 bottle—worth a fortune—were empty yet.
But, on the credit side, he had been suspicious.
From the start he had doubted the so-called “Theorem One” of Dr. von Einem; it sounded too much like a cover, this one-way transmission by the technicians of THL’s multitude of retail outlets. Write home from Whale’s Mouth, son, when you get there, he thought acidly; tell your old mom how it is on the colony world with its fresh air, sunshine, all those cute little animals, those wondrous buildings THL robots are constructing . . . and the report-back, the letter, as electronic signal, had duly arrived. But the beloved son; he could not personally, directly report. Could not return to tell his story, and, as in the ancient story of the lion’s den, all the footprints of guileless creatures led in to the den, yet none led out. It was the fable all over again—with something even more sinister added. That of what appeared more and more to be a thoroughly phony trail of outgoing tracks: the electronic message-units. By someone who is versed in sophisticated hardware, Matson thought; someone is tinkering around, and is there any reason to look beyond the figure of Dr. Sepp von Einem himself, the inventor of the Telpor, plus Neues Einige Deutschland’s very efficient technicians who ran Ferry’s retail machinery?
There was something he did not like about those German technicians who manned the Telpors. So business-like. As their ancestors must have been, Matson mused. Back in the twentieth century when those ancestors, with the same affectless calm, fed bodies into ovens or living humans into ersatz shower baths which turned out to be Zyklon B hydrogen cyanide gas chambers. And financed by reputable big Third Reich business, by Herr Krupp u. Söhne. Just as von Einem is financed by Trails of Hoffman, with its vast central offices in Grosser Berlinstadt—the new capital of New Whole Germany, the city in fact from which our distinguished UN Secretary General emanates.
“Get me,” Matson said to Freya, “instead of Scotch and water, the file on Horst Bertold.”
In the other room Freya rang up the autonomic research equipment wired into the walls of the villa . . . electronic hardware, minned—miniaturized—for the most part, of a data-sorting and receiving nature, plus the file-banks, and—
Certain useful artifacts which did not involve data but which involved high-velocity A-warhead darts that, were the satellite to be attacked by any of the UN’s repertory of offensive weapons, would take up the fight and abolish the missiles before they reached their target.
At his villa on his Brocard ellipse satellite Matson was safe. And, as a precaution, he conducted as much business as possible from this spot; below, in New New York City, at Lies, Incorporated’s offices, he always felt naked. Felt, in fact, the nearby presence of the UN and Horst Bertold’s legions of “Peace Workers,” whose armed, gray-faced men and women who, in the name of Pax Terrae, roamed the world, even into the pathetic moonies, the sad, failure-but-still-extant early “colony” satellites which had come before von Einem’s breakthrough and the discovery by George Hoffman of Fomalhaut IX, now called Whale’s Mouth and now the colony.
Too bad, Matson thought archly, that George Hoffman didn’t discover more planets in more star systems habitable by us, the frail needs of living, sentient, mentating biochemical upright bipeds which we humans are. Hundreds and hundreds of planets, but—
Instead, temperature which melted thermo-fuses. No air. No soil. No water.
One could hardly say of such worlds—Venus had proved a typical example—that the “living was easy.” The living, in fact, on such worlds was confined to homeostatic domes with their own at, wa, and self-regu temp.
Housing, per dome, perhaps three hundred somatic souls. Rather a small number, considering that as of this year Terra’s population stood at seven billion.
“Here,” Freya said, sliding down to seat herself, legs tucked under her, on the deep-pile wool carpet near Matson. “The file on H.B.” She opened it at random; Lies, Incorporated field reps had done a thorough job: many data existed here that, via the UN’s carefully watchdogged info media, never had reached the public, even the so-called “critical” analysts and columnists. They could, by law, criticize to their hearts’ content, the character, habits, abilities and shaving-customs of Herr Bertold . . . except, however, the basic facts were denied them.
Not so, however, to Lies Incorporated—an ironic sobriquet, in view of the absolutely verified nature of the data now before its owner.
It was harsh reading. Even for him.
The year of Horst Bertold’s birth: 1954. Slightly before the Space Age had begun; like Matson Glazer-Holliday, Horst was a remnant of the old world when all that had been glimpsed in the sky were “flying saucers,” a misnomer for a US Air Force anti-missile weapon which had, in the brief confrontation of 1982, proved ineffectual. Horst had been born to middle-class Berlin—West Berlin, it had then been called, because, and this was difficult to remember, Germany had in those days been divided—parents: his father had owned a meat market . . . rather fitting, Matson reflected, in that Horst’s father had been an SS officer and former member of an Einsatzgruppe which had murdered thousands of innocent persons of Slavic and Jewish ancestry . . . although this had not interfered with Johann Bertold’s meat market business in the 1950s and ’60s. And then, in 1972, at the age of eighteen, young Horst himself had entered the spotlight (needless to say, the statute of limitations had run out on his father, who had never been prosecuted by the West German legal apparatus for his crimes of the ’40s, and had, in addition, evaded the commando
squads from Israel who, by 1970, had closed up shop, giving up the task of tracking down the former mass-murderers). Horst, in 1972, had been a leader in the Reinholt Jugend.
Ernst Reinholt, from Hamburg, had headed a party which had striven to unify Germany once more; the deal would be that as a military and economic power she would be neutral between East and West. It had taken ten more years, but in the fracas of 1982 he had obtained from the US and the USSR what he wanted: a united, free Germany, called by its present name, and just chuck full of vim and Macht.
And, under Reinholt, Neues Einige Deutschland had played dirty pool from the start. But no one was really surprised; East and West were busy erecting tents where major popcens—population centers such as Chicago and Moscow—had existed, and hoping to god that the Sino-Cuban wing of the CP did not, taking advantage of the situation, move in and entrench . . .
It had been the secret protocol of Reinholt and his NWG that it would not be neutral after all. On the contrary.
New Whole Germany would take out China.
So this was the unsavory basis on which the Reich had reobtained unity. Its Waffen technicians had devised, as instructed, weapons which had, in 1987, dealt a terminal punch to People’s China. Matson, examining the folio, very rapidly scanned this part, because the Reich had come up with some show-stoppers, and even the abominable US nerve gas had seemed like a field of daisies in comparison—he did not wish to see any mention of what Krupp u. Söhne had devised as an answer to China’s thousands of millions who were spilling as far west as the Volga, and toward the US, were crossing from Siberia—taken in 1983—into Alaska. In any case the compact had been agreed on, and even Faust would have blanched at it; now the world had no People’s China but a New Whole Germany to contend with.
And what a quid pro quo that had proved to be. Because, correctly and legally, Neues Einige Deutschland had obtained control of the sole planet-wide and hence Sol system-wide governing structure, the UN. They held it now. And the former member of the Reinholt Jugend, Horst Bertold, was its Secretary General. And had faced squarely, as he had promised when compaigning for election—it had become, by 1985, an elective office—that he would deal with the colonization problem; he would find a Final Solution to the tormented condition that (one) Terra was as overpopulated throughout as Japan had been in 1960 and (two) both the alternate planets of the Sol system and the moonies and the domes et al. had failed wretchedly.