“Let’s have color … holographic depth … yes, that’s better … good … we can abstract from that and blend it with Mayor Black and let’s see now … American location and b.g., better have some macoots … Ah, that’s not bad for a start, is it?”
This was the part of his job which was genuinely creative, and he always enjoyed it very much: the adaptation of the most unpromising raw materials to generate a full-color, three-dimensional construct so convincing that only a person who had actually been on the scene of the event could point to inaccuracies.
“Christ, it’s like magic,” Diablo muttered, making no attempt to appear blasé. The screened image had evolved through a period of chaotic confusion into a fixed picture of Uys at a laboratory bench—unquestionably in America, not Africa, though it was the total impression and not any specific detail which made that plain—turning to speak to Mayor Black as the latter walked in accompanied by a pair of armed macoots.
“Nothing magical about it,” Flamen said offhandedly. “I just had the right data to draw on—typical genetic lab design, the proper computer printouts, the proper material in jars and dishes lying around, that kind of thing. The scenes are automatically weighted for weather conditions; clothing, angle of sunlight, and so on, and all we have to do now is add the sound.” He struck codes on the keyboard. “Voices—we’re bound to have something on tape, I guess, even for Uys, and even if we haven’t the machines will fake a South African accent. Characteristic phrase-weighting—let’s spice it with a few choice Afrikaner slogans … And here we go.”
The fixed image moved. Voices emerged from a concealed speaker. Mayor Black said, “An’ how you gettin’ on with cleanin’house for us?”
Uys flinched, colored a little, controlled himself and answered in a dead voice that no one could have failed to assign to an Afrikaner, “If you mean how is the campaign developing to purify the melanist heredity of this city, I have located several impure lines which need to be discontinued. In particular there’s a mongrel called Pedro Diablo who—”
Flamen flicked a control and the sound faded, though the images continued. “How does that strike you?” he inquired.
Diablo passed his hand over his forehead, looking dazed. “It’s fantastic,” he admitted. “The detail, I mean. Like Uys’s reaction to the suggestion that he’d been hired like a Bantu houseboy, to clean house for a kneeblank … it’s in character, damn it! Christ, if I’d been allowed this kind of equipment instead of studio sets and actors—!”
“Allowed?”
“I mean if the budget had run to it.” Diablo overcame his excitement with an effort. “So what sort of answer are you going to propose for the question you started with—why is Uys in Blackbury?”
Flamen turned back to the keyboard he had used first. “That’s still being comped,” he said when the screen lit. “The little arrow—see it?—indicates the rating is still going up as fresh data are assessed. I’ll leave that to cook for a moment and get the special item out of the way. That’s some tape I made yesterday at the Ginsberg Hospital; there was a pythoness performing and I recorded her trance. It’ll make a nice ground-softener for something which may eventually turn out to be rather big.”
“One of the items you screened earlier?” Diablo inquired.
“No, something new which is only at the tentative stage. We have this offer of free Federal computer time, as you know, and one of the things I want to do with it is have … Well, have someone packled—it doesn’t matter who.” Flamen had almost forgotten that Prior was in the room; he gave him an uneasy glance.
“You see, I suspect that the treatment patients in the Ginsberg are getting may sometimes make them worse instead of better, but the director is Elias Mogshack, and he’s got such a planetary reputation I’d need absolutely unquestionable authority to back a challenge to him. Let’s just ask what would happen if my suspicions were well-founded, though.” He stretched one arm out and struck a code again. The figure which appeared on the screen provoked an exclamation of approval.
“Ninety-plus! I can’t recall when I last had such a high reading!”
“In favor of what?” Diablo asked.
“Of his being tossed on the garbage pile. In which case I literally don’t dare not soften the ground—let’s allot that pythoness’s trance the most we can give a single subject according to our contract with Holocosmic. That’s four minutes. There! Are we ready for anything else yet? Still not? You picked a good day, Diablo—we seem to have tapped a gang of very deep subjects. Never mind, there’s one other point I’d like comped before I start compiling the tape for the show and we still have about ninety minutes in hand. Let’s see what our chances are of curing the sabotage trouble I told you about, given unlimited free Federal computer time. Of course, faced with that Holocosmic is bound to cave in right away, but I believe in doublechecking.”
He leaned over the board and carefully composed the question. At his shoulder, watching every move, Diablo said, “This sabotage thing—have your employers given way to pressure from someone you offended?”
“I wish people did get sufficiently offended to react like that,” Flamen muttered. “But it’s been two years since an advertiser tried to have me taken off the beams because I said something he didn’t like. Out here people just don’t seem to care very much any more. Most likely, Holocosmic themselves want to move me over for another all-advertising slot …”
The words died. On the screen, in response to his coded inquiry, there was a single large digit: an incontrovertible, inexplicable, incomprehensible zero.
FIFTY-NINE
REPRINTED FROM THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN OF 2ND MARCH 1968
US looks to a long, violent summer
From Richard Scott, Washington
It is generally accepted as inevitable that the racial riots in American cities this summer will exceed in violence and number even those of last year.
And because their causes, as analysed in the National Advisory Committee’s report, are so basic, so deep-rooted, so much a product of the pattern of American life, they will be eradicated only after a major national effort and over a long period of time.
Meanwhile the national Government, the State and city police forces, and the ordinary citizens, both black and white, are already preparing themselves for what may well be the most riotous summer in the nation’s history.
Forces standing by
Although Federal troops have been used to suppress civil riots only twice since 1923, a force of 15,000 men is reported to have been earmarked by the Pentagon for such use should State and city forces prove inadequate. They have been formed into seven task forces and housed near the cities most likely to experience major rioting. The Government has also been stockpiling anti-riot equipment in key sites.
But riot control devolves in all but the last resort on city or State law enforcement officers. And throughout the country there are reports of considerable efforts to increase and modernise their equipment for riot control.
In some cities the police are being issued with a controversial new high-powered rifle, with ammunition with some of the characteristics of the dum-dum bullet. Others are acquiring armed helicopters or armoured cars which can fire either tear gas or machine-gun bullets …
Volunteer deputies
Detailed planning is already being undertaken by city authorities. In some cities the police are reported to be improving their intelligence machinery so that they may obtain earlier and more accurate information of impending riots. In one Chicago county, the sheriff is trying to organise a force of a thousand volunteer deputies who would provide their own arms and receive 40 to 60 hours of special riot-control training. This seems to be approaching perilously close to the groups of vigilantes of past ill fame.
On the other side of the coin are the private preparations of American citizens for the long, hot summer ahead. Both whites and Negroes are arming themselves. There have been recent reports of a steep rise in the purchases of firearms—and it is a fa
irly rare American family which has no pistol or shotgun in the house. Housewives are reported to be attending police courses of instruction in the firing of revolvers.
SIXTY
ASSUMPTION CONCERNING THE FOREGOING MADE FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS STORY
It was done but it didn’t work.
SIXTY-ONE
A RIDDLE IS A KIND OF SIEVE
Looking tired and irritable—they had had to work through the normal noon recess, classifying the mentally disturbed arrestees from the riot, arranging for those who were under regular care already to be sent back to their own therapists, revising the schedules and opening up fresh retreats for those who were not provided for elsewhere—Ariadne appeared on the screen of Reedeth’s internal comweb while he was talking on an outside circuit.
“Just a second,” he threw over his shoulder, and ended his other conversation with a curt, “It’s got to be done and it’s up to you to find a way! And you’d better hurry!”
Cutting that connection, he swiveled his rotachair to face Ariadne. “Yes?”
“I thought you said something about Lyla Clay having been committed this morning. Well, I’m supposed to have had all the female arrestees’ data through my office and hers weren’t among them. What happened?”
“Oh. Oh yes.” Reedeth passed a weary hand through his hair, then leaned back and extracted a pack of joints from his desketary drawer. Smoking was theoretically forbidden in the hospital, but at times of exceptional stress everyone on the staff bent the rule a trifle. He went on as he hunted for a means of lighting it, “I managed to siphon her out of the main stream. It was a hunch. Turned out to be right.”
“How, right?”
“Shouldn’t have been here at all.”
“But I thought you said she was in a bad way. Foetal position, shocked—”
“All of that and a lot more. Wouldn’t you expect to be if you’d had your boyfriend die in front of you?”
Ariadne put her hand to her mouth in horror. “He got caught in the riot?”
“Correct. Someone chopped his belly open with an axe. He managed to get home, with the assistance of the block Gottschalk, and—I’ll give you three guesses what the bastard did.”
Ariadne gave a mute headshake.
“Tried to sell her a gun across her mackero’s corpse, while it was still warm.”
There was a pause. At length Ariadne said, “Worse than a bastard. A ghoul. But then they all are, aren’t they? Otherwise they wouldn’t have chosen that line of business.”
“This is about the nastiest thing I’ve heard of one of them doing, though. And apparently when Miss Clay ordered him off the premises—with the gun they kept in the apt—he went to the comweb and swore a complaint against her, charging assault with a deadly weapon.”
Diligent searching had unearthed him a battered old disposable catalytic lighter, with a faint final glow left in the hot mesh on which he managed to ignite his joint.
Ariadne said, “Is this true, or did she—?”
“Make it up? No, it’s true. I was just talking to a precinct captain a moment ago, telling him what I thought of busies who act like his teamsmen do. You see, they were too occupied to answer the call right away, and they finally got around to it at six or so this morning. Broke down the door and stormed in. By which time she’d spent the night lying beside a dead body, too scared to go out of the apt even as far as the comweb because the Gottschalk took her only gun with him.”
“And they committed her?”
“They were going to arrest her, for Christ’s sake! Suspicion of murder! Until it occurred to one of the thickheads to look for a weapon she could have cut him open with, and found that the trail of blood led back into the corridor. By that time, though, she must have been out of her skull, pretty well, so they shipped her here. I just told the captain he’d be better off charging the Gottschalk with stealing her gun, and to have the commitment order withdrawn fast. But it was just shouting to relieve my feelings, I’m afraid.”
Ariadne gave a depressed nod. “You wouldn’t catch any police force in the country offending a Gottschalk, would you? They’re too scared of being stuck with out-of-fashion weaponry. … So what did you do with her?”
“Oh, I gave orders that she wasn’t to be enrolled as a patient, just given emergency therapy at the dispensary and allowed to rest a while. Then I said to send her up here and have a word with me before she leaves—if she can leave. I’m not sure yet whether the commitment order hadn’t been processed, even though it was one of the very late ones this morning, and if it has, of course, we’ll have to find a guardian for her.”
“Is she under twenty-one?”
“By about three months.”
“Well … she has parents, probably, or relatives of some kind?”
“Kids that age sometimes don’t care to have their family brought into a mess like this one,” Reedeth pointed out. He checked his watch. “Anyhow, she should be here in another few minutes, and I can ask her. Do you want to drop by yourself?”
“Hmmm …” Ariadne glanced at something out of sight. “I guess I ought to, but I don’t see that I can spare the time. We ate into our overload capacity this morning, with all these arrestees, and Dr. Mogshack asked me to nominate fifty green patients for early discharge and give us a bit of leeway.”
“Well! I never thought I’d see the day when he was letting patients go before he had to!”
Ariadne’s face turned into a stony mask. “That’s not funny, Jim,” she said.
“No. No, I guess not. Pot on an empty stomach talking. I’m sorry. But you will bear Harry Madison in mind for that discharge list, won’t you?”
“Yes, of course—I earmarked him right away. But the computations are still unfavorable. I wish to God we could discharge him direct to one of the knee enclaves—Newark, say. But that’s over a state line, and …” She shrugged. “Anyhow,” she added, brightening a little, “it does offer a very handy solution to the Celia Flamen problem.”
“Does it?”
She looked at him blankly. “Well, naturally!”
“Penalty for premature discharge?”
“I’m going to try and persuade him to waive it, of course. After all, he did say yesterday that he wanted his wife out of the Ginsberg as soon as possible.”
“Oh. Yes, that’s quite neat.” Reedeth nodded approval. “And is he going to play?”
“I don’t know yet. I left messages for him at home, at his office and in care of Holocosmic, but I haven’t had an answer. Come to think of it, I might as well try again while the discharge list is being comped. Anything else?”
“Apart from saying how about tonight?”
“I’m going to be too tired at this rate,” she sighed, and cut the connection.
SIXTY-TWO
THE PROXIMATE CAUSE OF A FEDERAL DIRECTIVE IN PURSUANCE OF WHICH THIRTY-THREE INTERNAL SECURITY MAINTENANCE OPERATIVES WERE DOWNGRADED OR DISHONORABLY DISMISSED
Sometime during the night Morton Lenigo managed to elude the ISM operatives assigned to tail him and when things had calmed down enough for such matters to come to the attention of their headquarters he had already had almost five hours to lose himself.
SIXTY-THREE
LONGER HOURS AND LOWER PAY
“Assuming Voigt kept his promise,” Flamen said, punching the appropriate code into his comweb board with a series of crackling clicks, “this line ought to plug straight through to the Federal computer he’s reserved to sort out our interference problem. … Yes, there we are. Now we’ll feed it the show as canned and let it compare that with the version received by the public, and draw the—ah—logical conclusion. There was something wrong with the reading we got earlier, that’s definite. Zero’s impossible.” He wondered if his conviction sounded forced. “I’ll get IBM to check, see if the digit selector slipped its gears. Probably it ought to have shown 100.”
Prior was plucking at his lower lip. “Yes, I guess there isn’t any other explanation
,” he muttered.
“So that’s it.” Flamen pushed back his rotachair and started to rise.
“You mean …?” Diablo hesitated. “You mean you’re finished for the day?”
“Well—yes, of course. We only do the one slot, Monday through Friday.”
“But you hardly seem to have done anything,” Diablo said. “I mean … Well, I have this feeling I must have missed something.”
“I tried to explain everything as I went along,” Flamen said. “But if there was something I overlooked—”
“No, I guess it’s just that I’m not used to working with your kind of equipment.” Diablo shook his head, an expression of wonderment on his dark face. “Let me see if I got it right. All you needed to do was select the subjects, right? And make up the reconstructions from the stock tape you found on file, and speak the commentary so it could be recorded. Then everything else was automatic?”
“Sure.” Flamen was looking vaguely puzzled. “We always have exactly fifteen minutes—or to be strictly accurate, fourteen and forty-five seconds to allow for station ID at either end. And the commercials are prerecorded, naturally, and the new material is automatically adjusted so that it fits into the available time. The last computer on the row sort of weaves the various strands together and provided Holocosmic’s own computers don’t raise any objections we have the tape.”
“Are there many objections?”
“Oh … I guess we have to change something about once a week, on the average. It’s a lot too often, at that.”
Diablo thought about it for a while. Suddenly he laughed. “I must sound like a real country mouse,” he said. “It is kind of a shock, though. You see, I’ve been accustomed to working a nine-till-nine schedule five and often six days a week, with a couple of half-hour meal-breaks if I was lucky. This has live-action studio work beat to a faretheewell. Why, that snippet with Uys and Mayor Black alone would have had to be planned a week ahead for me to get such detail into it. Never mind casting and rehearsing the actors.” He paused, speculatively eying Flamen. “Would you mind if I asked a hell of a personal question?”