by Jerry
There was something very wrong, Huber realized. The man wasn’t stalking him. He was closing on someone to the left. Then Huber saw her: the girl who had been with the clown in the cafe. Her eyes were wide with fear and she was moving desperately through the crowd, her hands clutching at a small leather case at her side.
Another hunt? Or could she be a decoy, planted to lure him into the open? He couldn’t be sure.
He began to push toward them. He lost sight of them just as it seemed as if the man would draw abreast of the girl. He began to push violently against the crowd between them.
Then he saw her again for an instant, and in the next he was beside her. He saw eyes wide with fright, pale cheeks outlined by jet blue-black hair, a gracefully corded neck.
“Quick,” he yelled above the crowd noises, and grabbed her hand. She started to pull away.
“Hurry, before he spots you again,” he said.
He forced his way through the press, roughly elbowing people aside. Pressure gave way before him and he found himself near a railed beltway.
“On here—quick!”
Then they were on, and moving away from the packed crowds. They traveled for several blocks in silence. Finally she said, “How did you know?”
“I’ve been a quarry myself.”
“I don’t know how he spotted me.”
“Some of them are pretty resourceful,” he said, wondering if their escape had been successful.
WHEN THEY finally left the beltway, the crowds were much thinner. They walked along the street for a minute until Huber saw another of the ubiquitous open air cafes. “Come on,” he said, “you need a drink.”
They found a seat in the nearly deserted place and waited while another of the blue-skinned androids served them.
“Ugh,” the girl shivered, staring at the tall cylindrical glass the waiter had deposited before her. “Those androids give me the creeps.”
“No reason for them to,” Huber said. “After all, they’re not really intelligent. No ego awareness.”
A loosely ordered group of men in brilliant red uniforms weaved drunkenly past the front of the cafe. Several were beating loudly on gilded snare drums.
“Look,” Huber said, “how did you get mixed up in this?”
“The hunt? I don’t know. A desire for something different, something exciting.”
“But something like the hunt—”
“Have you ever been appalled at the utter uselessness of life?” she said. “Nothing to look forward to . . . not even death?”
He felt like a spy in disguise, suddenly called by his right name. He decided to lead her on as far as he could, without revealing anything about himself.
“By the old standards,” he said, “we’re living in a utopia. Everything for the asking . . .”
“Utopia?” she said, eying the thin tube lamp in the center of the table. She reached out her hand and watched as one of several May flies which had been circling the light landed on its back.
“This city was built by the Company almost a thousand years ago. Nothing has been added since. It represents the height of the technology of that time.”
“You sound like a child, disappointed because he can’t have a pretty new toy every day,” he said.
“There was a time,” she said, “when man lived for the moment when he could break the bonds that shackled him to this one little world. What happened to that? Have we developed such a psychopathic fear of death that we’re afraid to try now?”
“We don’t need the neurotic desire for expansion that we had then,” he said.
They sat silently, sipping their drinks. Funny, he thought. What was it Dykeman had once said when they talked about the same thing? About an immortal culture being damned to eternal changelessness?
A culture, the medic had said, is nothing more nor less than a social pattern being transmitted through time. And cultures change, grow or decay, because the transmission is never complete, because each succeeding generation thinks a bit differently, approaches the problems of living differently, than the one before it.
But in the immortal society of the Company, there was a perfect continuity of culture, a flawless transmission of the mores, art forms, ways of thinking; because the dominant members did not die. The damnation of too perfect communication of the pattern . . .
“Stability,” he said aloud. “Isn’t the stability of human culture worth something?”
He avoided her silent eyes and stared at the May flies circling the light. There were quite a number this time of year, breeding ceaselessly on the banks of the river and then flying into the city, pulled by the magnetism of the lights.
One of the flies found a precarious anchor on the side of the tube and arched its body gracefully, the long tendrils of its posterior waving lightly in the still air. The wings, he saw, were as transparent as glass, with thin veinings like lace. He reached for it and held its gauze wings between his thumb and forefinger. He was about to crush it to the table when her hand stopped him.
“Don’t,” she said. “It’ll be dead tomorrow anyway.”
“How so?” he asked.
“They only live for a day,” she said.
He opened his fingers and felt the powdery brush of beating wings as the insect gained the safety of the metal canopy above them.
“Come on,” he said suddenly.
“Where?”
He laughed. “Away from the hunt. I have a friend who’s a permanent complement in the city. He’s giving a party at his house.”
“The hunt?” she said. “I’d forgotten all about it.”
She followed him into the street. He headed for a deserted avenue on the left of the cafe. There was not a soul on the street, he saw, as they started to walk. The revelry seemed to have drifted away from the area as they talked.
“You know,” he said, “I’m in a hunt too. I was waiting to be killed.”
“Waiting?” she said, stopping in the street.
“I was,” he said, “but somehow I’ve suddenly changed my mind.”
She made an abrupt, awkward movement. Swiftly, he reached out and pulled her to him. Her body tensed and suddenly she was struggling against him. His hand ripped open the bag at her side, spilling the contents onto the street. The vibroknife made a loud clatter.
She lunged forward, trying for the knife, and he grabbed at her. Teeth fastened in his arm and he hit her with the back of his free hand.
She reached up, trying to claw his face. Then she went limp and began to cry. Without realizing why he did it, he lowered his head and pressed his lips brutally to hers.
Fireworks burst brilliantly overhead and involuntarily he looked up.
He heard her sharp intake of breath as she looked up also. Beyond the colored blaze of lights over the city, three bright orange specks traced brilliant lines across the sky. As he watched, one of the trails began to weave erratically. The bright mark fell like a meteor to the west of the city. A second trail swerved from its path and followed the first downward.
He didn’t see what happened to the third. The girl suddenly twisted in his arms and broke free. Her swift feet carried her into the darkness. He started to follow, and it happened.
The blinding flash of blue-white light, even at that distance, wiped all details from the sky as a sponge strips chalked letters from a blackboard.
Good Lord, he thought, someone’s tried to bomb the city.
An agony later the sound reached him. It was like the shrill crack of a monstrous rifle.
CHAPTER III
IT TOOK HIM over half an hour to make his way back into the city to a ’copter terminal. Masquers stood in the streets and thronged the beltways, talking of the detonation to the west. There was an undercurrent of unrest in the crowds where before there had been only the carnival gaiety.
He found the barn-like terminal empty, and had no difficulty in summoning a helicopter from the city garages. As soon as the light on the giant call board in the concourse
flashed his booth number, he took the induction shaft to the roof. He found his assigned craft, punched the coordinates of Dykeman’s house outside the city and settled into the deep foam rubber seat. The electric motor-driven blades bit the night air and then the ram-jets on their tips ignited with a soft whoosh as the ’copter became airborne.
The city from the air was a mottled checkerboard of blue lights with fainter yellow splotches tracing the course of the Mississippi. The river faded into the darkness of rank vegetation a mile before it joined the Missouri River. The glow from the low buildings of the city was quite dim, but he could distinguish individual colors and the cobalt haze of the street lights. Here and there the red lights of flat-topped terminal buildings punctuated the softer shades. In the geometrical center of the city, the Universal Building stabbed a brilliant finger into the sky.
Universal City; not the capital of the world. That was in the Great Smokies, near the ruins of atom-blasted Asheville, Tennessee. No, not the capital, but certainly the most important city in a very small world.
For after the war of extinction, the world had shrunk alarmingly. The forces unleashed in that last great conflict had seared the face of a once fertile earth. Clouds of poisonous isotopes rolling across the land; ravenous hordes of insects destroying crops and infecting lifestock and men with a thousand virulences; the massed toxic knowledge of a humanity gone insane, poisoning whole cities, turning the humus of the fields into a poisonous dirt that seared the skin from the bone at a touch; all these had wasted great stretches of the earth’s surface, making it forever unfit for man.
In that nightmare of killing, man himself had almost become extinct. The sheer destructiveness of the war had reduced man’s physical technology to the point where he could no longer wage war. That would have been the end of it—if horror hadn’t followed horror.
The Gasping Sickness. No one knew where it originated. Some said in the last of the laboratories in Camp Dietrich or in the Grovensworth Laboratories in Britain or in the Lubinov Plants in the Don Valley. Perhaps it was a wild mutation. But in a few short months it threatened to destroy what was left of humanity.
It was that fantastic recluse, that impossible buckshot biochemist, Meintrup, who found the answer. Not by any carefully planned work, but by the application of a complex series of peptides and near-proteins which he had been producing in unpredictable profusion throughout the war. It just happened that one of the protein fragments he’d learned to synthesize combined with the virus molecule, attached itself to the virulent molecule almost point for point like an enzyme, and split it into harmless fragments.
The Gasping Sickness was over—just like that.
The U.N. had fallen, of course, at the outset of the war, but there was a new organization, the World Federation of States. The WFS had come into being in an attempt to deal with the impossible quarantine problems, the outrageous sanitation problems, the thousand and one unsolvable problems that were the common heritage of the War of Extermination. It had power, given to it freely in panic, and this time the WFS held on to that power.
They didn’t treat Meintrup fairly, though. They said, “Thank you,” of course, “but your work is too sloppy. We have more competent men, who keep nice, neat notebooks, who can predict within a reasonable margin what will happen next.”
That was the basic philosophy of the new safe and sane age arising. After a nightmare of uncertainty came the worship of predictability, the distrust of pure chance.
Meintrup had modified the vaccine by this time. The original molecule, he found, would condense with itself, form a double chain with unusual properties.
So, he went to the people who still had money, the owners of the indestructible resources like oil, coal, iron, tin, bauxite. They formed the Universal Insurance Company.
There was an almost manic fear of death everywhere. The Company offered immortality on the installment plan, in exchange for the assignment of a certain percentage of the insured’s earnings. At first they had paid on accidental deaths, but these had decreased almost exponentially from year to year as the Company moved to remake the narrow world into a safe warm womb. Suicides went up for a while, but the invention of the heterodyne field solved that problem.
In half a decade, Universal Insurance was a monolithic financial power. Within a decade, the WFS was under the control of the Company.
The Compulsory Longevity Act came next. No one objected—at least not seriously. There was some abortive violence, but no one talked about that—not even the ones who were in Universal City when it was bombed. One could still see a few abandoned missile and anti-aircraft emplacements on the islands in the Mississippi, but few people remembered what they were for.
The Company literally owned the world.
It did not govern. That would have been contrary to the philosophy of the century which placed such value on human freedom. But the Company dealt more intimately with the daily lives of the world’s people than did the legislature of the WFS, assembled in the mountains of Asheville.
For the Company owned the most precious commodity in the world: everlasting life.
A GREEN LIGHT glowed suddenly on the dash of the ’copter, and Huber snapped from his reverie. The light was a signal that the ship’s auto-pilot had taken over from the central dispatch machines. He leaned forward with new decision and jabbed the canceling button, erasing the coordinates of Dyke’s house.
Then he dialed the coordinates of a spot twenty miles west. A spot near which the bright speck in the sky must have landed.
Mechanisms behind the dash muttered softly for a second, and then the commo screen in the dash glowed. The expressionless blue face of the android dispatcher resolved itself. Behind him, Huber saw the broad windows of the city’s master dispatch room and through them the sprawling android sheds on the western edge of the city.
“What coordinates, please?” the blue lips said.
Huber repeated the coordinates he had dialed.
“I’m sorry, sir. That area is restricted tonight.”
“Why?” he demanded.
“I don’t have that information. All traffic is to be rerouted around the area. Choose an alternate destination please.”
“Switch me to manual,” he ordered.
“I’m sorry,” the android said. A blue hand appeared briefly in the screen and punched a cryptic pattern on the control panel before it. There was something odd about the hand, but Huber couldn’t decide what it was.
“Manual control is temporarily suspended for all units. Choose an alternate destination, please.”
For a moment there was an expression on the blue face. Impatience? Of course not, Huber decided.
“That’s complete nonsense,” he said. “Do as you’re ordered.”
There was no doubt of the expression now.
“Manual is suspended on your unit. Let me have your Company policy number, please.”
“Damn it—”
“Give me your policy number, please.”
Huber gave it and said, “Switch me to your human supervisor.”
“Of course.”
A blue hand came forward, paused indecisively, then touched a switch on the complex console.
In the next instant, Huber smelled burning insulation.
Above his head the rotors began to vibrate screechingly. Huber felt the jolt as they flew apart and the ’copter bucked sickeningly.
It began its long plunge into the river far below.
CHAPTER IV
THE HELICOPTER hit the water with a shudder. The interior lights blinked out. For an instant, nothing happened; then water was pouring in upon Huber.
He beat his way to the door as the water reached his chest. He gulped air, felt the water close over his head, and then he was frantically clawing at the exit hatch.
He was drowning. He saw with sudden clarity that he would die. And he did not want to die.
A distant part of his mind laughed hysterically at his panic. The man who had tr
ied to kill himself, the man who had waited calmly for the death blow of a hunt, and now he didn’t want to die.
The latch gave then and he pushed out. He held the stale air in his lungs tightly, feeling the numbing pressure of the water as he shot up through the black depths. Something was happening to his viscera and he knew he was going to be violently ill.
His head broke water and he struggled to suck air into his paralyzed lungs. He couldn’t breath. Tight cramps lanced his abdomen. Somehow he had found the presence of mind to shed his shoes and now he tried to free himself from the sagging costume he wore. The seams parted at his touch and cold water touched bare skin.
Before he fully understood what he was doing he raised the costume from the water and brought it down again violently. The effort submerged his head and he came up coughing. But the sudden movement had inflated the wet cloth. He held tightly to the leg and sleeve openings, trapping the air inside the sodden fabric.
The current was carrying him along swiftly. He tried to kick against it, but his muscles were knotted. He knew he was going to be sick from the effect of the pressure and the food and liquor he’d consumed.
At first he didn’t hear the motor. The boat was almost upon him before he saw the light stabbing out over the water. He yelled, and filled his lungs to yell again.
Then he saw the heavy shape of a cruiser nosing toward him, and in the next instant rough hands were pulling him aboard.
A light flashed in his face and a familiar voice said, “Of all the damned fish to catch tonight!”
“Vic!” Huber gasped. “What the hell are you doing out here?”
“A good question, and one you can answer too. But let’s get you inside and into some dry clothes.”
While he dried himself in the small cabin and donned the set of work denims Vic Wortman gave him, Huber felt the boat change direction.
“Damnedest way for a hunt to end,” Wortman said.
“It wasn’t the hunt,” Huber said. “What are you doing out here? You haven’t told me.”
“Being a hunt master’s just a hobby, you know. My main job is with the Company.”