Meanwhile the printout station of the computer terminal was humming and a rapid paper tongue was emerging from it.
From the same drawer as the ID cards he extracted a neopolaroid color camera, which he set to self-portrait delay and placed on a handy table. Sitting down to face the camera, he waited the requisite few seconds, retrieved the film, placed his picture on the card and sealed it over with a device which, as the computers had promised, was also kept in the drawer. Finally, he typed in his borrowed name and the rank of major in the U.S. Army Medical Corps.
By then the computer had printed out what it was required to furnish: a requisition, in duplicate, for the custody of Kate Grierson Lilleberg. Having been prepared with a light-writer, which unlike old-fashioned mechanical printers was not limited to any one type style—or indeed to any one alphabet, since every single character was inscribed with a laser beam at minimum power—only examination under a microscope could have revealed that it was not a U.S. Army Form RQH-4479, the standard form of authority to transfer a prisoner from civil to military custody.
Suitably armed now, he replaced everything he had disturbed, tapped the computer board one more time to activate the final part of the program he had left in store, and left the room. Dutifully, the machines remote-locked the cabinet again, and the door of the office, and then undertook such other tasks as deleting their record of either having been unlocked during the night, and making a note of the “fact” that a temporary ID card had been accidentally spoiled so the stock in hand was one fewer than could be accounted for by recent visitors.
The door at the extreme end of the corridor gave into the open air, at the head of a flight of stairs leading to a dark concrete parking bay where an electric ambulance was standing. Its driver, who wore army uniform with Pfc’s badges, gave an uncertain salute, saying, “Major … ?”
“At ease,” the newcomer said briskly, displaying his ID card and duplicate forms. “Sorry to have kept you. Any trouble with the girl?”
The driver said with a shrug, “She’s out, sir. Like a busted light-tube oh-you-tee.”
“That’s how it should be. They gave you your route card?”
“Sure, they brought it when they delivered the girl. Oh, and this as well. Feels like her code card, I guess.” The soldier proffered a small flat package.
Peeling off the cover proved him half right. Not one code card, but two.
“Thanks. Not that she’ll have much use for it where she’s going.”
“I guess not.” With a sour grin.
“You already changed your batteries, did you? Fine—let’s get under way.”
Dark roads thrummed into the past to the accompaniment of a rattling of numbers, not spoken. He had memorized both codes before starting his veephone-mediated sabotage, but there was a lot more to this escape than simply two personal codes. He wanted everything down pat before the ambulance first had to stop for electricity, and the range of this model was only about two hundred miles.
Best if the driver didn’t have to get hurt. Though having been fool enough to volunteer for army service, of course, and worse still, having been fool enough to accept orders unquestioningly from a machine …
But everybody did that. Everybody, all the time. Otherwise none of this would have been possible.
Similarly, none of it would have had to happen.
FOR PURPOSES OF DISORIENTATION
At present and with luck from now on and forever regardless of what code I wear I am being Nicholas Kenton Haflinger. And whoever doesn’t like it will have to lump it.
PRESIDING AT AWAKE
“What the—? Who—? Why, Sandy!”
“Quiet. Listen carefully. You’re in an army ambulance. We’re about two hundred miles east of Tarnover supposedly on the way to Washington. The driver believes I’m a Medical Corps major escorting you. There was no convincing story I could invent to justify clothing fit for you to cross a public street in. All you have is that issue cotton gown. What’s more they shaved your head. Do you remember anything about this, or did they keep you all the time in regressed mode?”
She swallowed hard. “I’ve had what seem like dreams since they—they kidnaped me. I don’t know what’s true and what isn’t.”
“We’ll sort that out later. We’re laying over to change batteries. I sent the driver for coffee. He’ll be back any moment. I’ll find some other excuse to make him hang around, because I’ve seen an automat where I can buy you a dress, shoes and a wig. At the next stop be ready to put them on and vanish.”
“What—what are we going to do? Even if it comes off?”
Cynically he curled his lip. “The same as I’ve been doing all my adult life. Run the net. Only this time in more than one sense. And believe you me, they aren’t going to like it.”
Shutting the ambulance’s rear door again, he said loudly to the returning driver, “Damn monitors up front! Showed the sedative control had quit. But she’s lying like a log. Say, did you spot a men’s room? I guess before we get back on the road I ought to take a leak.”
Over the hum of the many steam and electric vehicles crowding the service area the driver answered, “Right next to the automat, sir. And—uh—if we’re not pulling out at once, I see they got Delphi boards and I’d kinda like to check out a nervous ticket.”
“Sure, go ahead. But keep it down to—let’s say five minutes, hm?”
TEMBLOR
“What do you mean, he can’t be reached? Listen again and make sure you know who I’m asking for. Paul—T-for-Tommy—Freeman! Want I should spell it?
“His new code? What about his—? Are you certain?
“But they don’t have any goddamn right to snatch him out from—Oh, shit. Sometimes I wonder who’s in charge around this country, us or the machines. Give me the new code, then.
“I don’t care what it says in back of its head listing. Just read it over to me. If you can, that is!
“Now you listen to me, you obstructive dimwit. When I give an order I expect it to be obeyed, and I won’t be talked back to by a self-appointed shithouse lawyer. You’re addressing the Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Data Processing Services, and—That’s more like it. Come on.
“It begins with what group? No, don’t bother to repeat it. I heard you. Oh my God. Oh my God.”
SPELLED “WEEKEND” BUT PRONOUNCED “WEAKENED”
A highway line drawn from Tarnover to Washington: a line to connect tomorrow with yesterday, via today. …
The most mobile population in all of history, the only one so totally addicted to going for the sake of going that it had deeveed excessive cost, energy crises, the disappearance of oil, every kind of obstacle in order to keep up the habit, was as ever on the move, even though half the continent was overlaid by end-of-fall weather, strong winds, low temperatures, rain turning to sleet. It was notoriously the sort of season that urged people to stop looking for and start finding.
He thought about that a lot during the journey.
Why move?
To choose a place right for sinking roots.
Go faster in order to drop back to a lower orbit? Doesn’t work. Drop back to a lower orbit; you go faster!
Even Freeman had had to have that pointed out to him. He knew obscurely he wouldn’t have to explain it to Kate. And she couldn’t be the only person who understood the truth by instinct.
Washington: yesterday. The exercise of personal power; the privileges of office; the individualization of the consensus into a single spokesman’s mouth, echo of an age when communities did indeed concur because they weren’t assailed with a hundred irreconcilable versions of events. (These days the typical elected representative is returned with fewer than forty percent of the votes cast; not infrequently he’s detested by four-fifths of those he purports to speak for, because the population of the state or district has turned over. They’ll surple him at the next opportunity, chafe until it arrives. Meanwhile his old supporters have scattered to upset another apple
cart. Voting registers are maintained by computers nowadays; all it takes to enter you on the roll at your new address is one, count it one, veephone call.)
Tarnover: tomorrow, sure. But hopefully the wrong tomorrow. Because it’s planned and controlled by people who were born the day before yesterday.
How do you cope with tomorrow when (a) it may not be like the real tomorrow but (b) it’s arrived when you weren’t ready for it?
One approach is offered by the old all-purpose beatitude: “blessed are they who expect the worst …” Hence reactions like Anti-Trauma Inc. Nothing worse can happen in later life than what was done to you as a child.
(Wrong tomorrow.)
Another is inherent in the concept of the plug-in life-style: no matter where you go, there are people like the ones you left behind, furniture and clothes and food like the ones you left behind, the same drinks available across any bar: “Say, settle a bet for us, willya? Is this the Paris Hilton or the Istanbul Hilton?”
(Wrong tomorrow. It offers the delusive hope that tomorrow will be pretty much like today, but it got here and it isn’t.)
Yet another lies in preparing for it: using public Delphi boards, for example, to monitor what people are ready to adapt to, yearn to adapt to, and won’t adapt to at any price.
(Wrong tomorrow. They decided to let traditional market forces flywheel the weight of decision. The favorite who started at odds-on broke his leg at the first fence and the race is far from over.)
Yet another lies in the paid-avoidance areas: you trade in your right to the latest-and-greatest against an allowance of unearned credit, enough to keep body and soul together.
(Wrong tomorrow. It’s going to overtake you anyway, and city-smashing quakes are part of it.)
While still another consists in getting good and clutched by some heavy brand of dope, so things that happen can’t really hurt.
(Wrong tomorrow. Ash longer, vita brevis.)
And so forth.
Religion?
Change cities, by order. Last place it was a Catholic framework; here it’s Ecumenical Pentecostal and the minister is kind of into the Tao.
Chemicals?
Almost everybody is high like troops on the way to battle. Shaking! You hear tension sing in the air you breathe. The only way you want awareness shifted is back to normal.
Trust in authority?
But it’s your right as a free and equal individual to be as authoritative as anybody else.
Model yourself on a celebrity?
But you were celebrated last week, you had a record-breaking Delphi ticket or your kid was on three-vee defying ’gators or you notched up one full year in the same house and the reporter called in from the local station. For ten whole minutes you’ve been famous too.
Collapse into overload?
That’s already happened, nearly as often as you’ve been to bed with a head cold.
And patiently, from every single one of these possible pathways, they’ve turned you back to where you were with a smile of encouragement and a pat on the shoulder and a bright illuminated certificate that reads no exit.
Therefore the world keeps turning, the ads keep changing, there are always programs to watch when you switch on the three-vee, there’s always food in the supermarket and power at the socket and water at the sink. Well, not quite always. But near as dammit.
And there’s nearly always a friend to answer the phone.
And there’s nearly always credit behind your code.
And there’s nearly always some other place you can go.
And when the night sky happens to be clear, there are invariably more stars in it, moving faster, than were put there at the Creation. So that’s okay.
Pretty well.
More or less.
HELP!
For these and sundry other reasons, at their next battery stop he gave the driver the slip and Kate her dress and shoes and wig and melted into the mass of people boarding a shuttle bus bound for the nearest veetol port. For the driver, who was sure to be puzzled, he left a note saying:
Thanks, soldier. You were very helpful. If you want to know how helpful, punch this code into the nearest phone.
The code, naturally, being his own new acquisition.
PRECEPT DINNED INTO TRAFFIC PATROL OFFICERS DURING TRAINING
Someone is apt to swoop on you from a great height if you ticket a vehicle with a heavy federal code behind the wheel.
MOUSING AROUND UNDER THE FEET OF ELEPHANTS
“Where are we going?” Kate whispered.
“I finally located my place to stand.”
“Precipice?” she suggested, half hopefully, half anxiously. “Surely that’s where they’ll head for straight away.”
“Mm-hm. Sorry, I don’t mean place. I mean places. I should have figured this out long ago. No one place could ever be big enough. I have to be in a hundred of them, all at the same time, and a thousand if I can manage it. It’s bound to take a while to put my insight into practice, but—oh, maybe in a couple of months we shall be able to sit back and enjoy the fireworks.”
“I always did like fireworks,” she said with the ghost of a smile, and took his hand.
FOUR-WAY INTERSECTION WITH STOP SIGNS
These days it was easy to lose track of what features belonged with what names. Therefore there were captions under each of the faces on the four-station secure link, names and offices. Hartz gazed at the split-screen array before him, reading from left to right.
From Tarnover, its chancellor: Admiral Bertrand Snyder, ascetic, gray-haired, short-spoken, who had been famous under the sobriquet of “Singleminded Snyder” during the Hawaiian Insurrection of 2002 … but that was before he entered the Civil Service and a cloud of secrecy.
From the Southern White House, the president’s special adviser on security, plump and bespectacled Dr. Guglielmo Dorsi, no longer known even to his intimates (though it had not proved possible to eradicate the nickname entirely from his dossiers) as Billy the Shiv.
And from another floor of this same building, his own superior, the Full Director of the Bureau, Mr. Aylwin Sullivan, tall, beak-nosed, shock-haired, and deliberately shabby. It had been the style for those working with computers when he launched out on his rocket-like career. Nonetheless it was odd to look at his open-neck shirt, pocketful of old pens, five-o’week shadow, black-rimmed nails.
As though the past had stepped into the present.
All three of the faces on the screen frowned at Hartz: Snyder with annoyance, Dorsi with suspicion, Sullivan with impatience. They let pecking order decide who should speak. Highest in the hierarchy Sullivan said, “Are you insane? Only a few days ago you insisted we deevee all the 4GH codes assigned to FBI, CIA, Secret Service—and now here you are claiming that the U-group codes must be junked too! You couldn’t cause more trouble if you were a paid subversive.”
Dorsi said, “Let me remind you of this, too. Upon my asking what to use when we replaced the 4GH, you personally advised me that there was no known means of leeching any code from the reserve and assigning it to U-group status without that fact being revealed in your own bureau’s computers. No record of such action can be found, can it? I can just see the president’s face if I were to go to him with such a crazy story.”
“But when I said that I didn’t know—” Hartz began. Snyder cut him short.
“What’s more, you’ve made a direct attack on my integrity and administrative efficiency. You’ve said in so many words that the person you claim to have carried out this act of sabotage is a graduate of Weychopee who moved to Tarnover at my special request and who was cleared by me in person for essential work here. I wholly agree with Mr. Sullivan. You must have taken leave of your senses.”
“Therefore,” Sullivan said, “I’m requiring you to take leave of absence as well. Preferably indefinite. Are we through with this conference? Good. I have other business to attend to.”
FOR PURPOSES OF OBFUSCATION
I know dam
n well I am Paul Thomas Freeman, aged thirty-nine, a government employee with scholars’ degrees in cybernetics, psychology and political science plus a master’s in data processing. Similarly I know that if as a kid I hadn’t been recruited much as Haflinger was, I’d probably have wound up as a petty criminal, into smuggling or dope or maybe running an illegal Delphi pool. Maybe I might not have been as smart as I imagine. Maybe I’d be dead.
And I also know I’ve been brilliantly maneuvered into a corner where I sacrificed everything I’ve gained in life on a spur-of-the-moment impulse, threw away my career, let myself in—quite possibly—for a treason trial … and with no better excuse than that I like Haflinger better than Hartz and the buggers at his back. A corner? More like a deep dark hole!
So why the hell do I feel so goddamn happy?
FULCRUM
When he finished explaining how he had contrived their escape, Kate said incredulously, “Was that all?”
“Not quite. I also made a call to the ten nines.”
“Ah. I should have guessed.”
A MATTER OF HYSTERICAL RECORD
When the short-lived Allende government was elected to power in Chile and needed a means of balancing that unfortunate country’s precarious economy, Allende appealed to the British cybernetics expert Stafford Beer.
Who announced that as few as ten significant quantities, reported from a handful of key locations where adequate communications facilities existed, would enable the state of the economy to be reviewed and adjusted on a day-to-day basis.
Judging by what happened subsequently, his claim infuriated nearly as many people as did the news that there are only four elements in the human genetic code.