by Jerry
“Funny, aren’t they?” Alva McGee said, behind Jothen’s back.
“They scare me, Alva. What are we going to do with all these madmen?”
McGee looked shrewdly at Jothen, but had nothing more to say for the moment; and Jothen realized suddenly that McGee was as big a puzzle to him as the Joneses. Finding the man assigned to him as an “administrative assistant” for the evacuation of the Joneses had been a surprise, and not entirely a welcome one, particularly after Jothen discovered that McGee’s qualifications for the job included the title of Mayor but did not include any special knowledge of the water system or any of the rest of the fine structure of Gitler.
Even his title was baffling. No city had had a mayor or been otherwise independent of the over-riding ecology and economy of the over-ridden world, for nearly as many centuries as Jothen had fingers. Apparently, the presence of McGee represented only some last-minute notion of Biond Smith’s that the stand-by city’s crew would need help with their paper work.
It was a notion Jothen somewhat resented, if it was correct. And whatever the answer to this puzzle, Jothen did not judge McGee capable of much help. His specific technical ignorance simply added pedagogy to the press of Jothen’s other duties. That much, Jothen could manage to resent from scratch.
“They’re not as mad as all that,” McGee said equably. “They’re noisy, but why not?—they’re having a good time. These family conventions are the citizens’ one big chance in a lifetime to cut loose and behave almost as anti-socially as they could have every day, back in the Age of Waste.”
Jothen groaned inwardly. McGee’s occasional fits of history were already a cross to him. “It amazes me that Prime Center allows them at all—the Conventions, I mean,” he said.
“Therapy, my boy, therapy. Besides, they give Transcorp a golden opportunity to process vacationers in blocs of a million or more at once, instead of one at a time. All perfectly rational.”
Jothen pointed to the dolls and banners. “Those are rational?”
“No, but they’re helpful,” McGee said, “if you know what to look for. All those things are just rags and tags of quasi-religious traditions—a kind of Jungian-Gravesian substrate, decorated with vague memories of lesser cults. They imply all sorts of beliefs, not all of them quite extinct: reincarnation, racial memory, ancestor worship, telepathy, historical fatalism, traditional supematuralism, momism—”
“Whoa!” Jothen said desperately, quite unaware of the totem he was himself calling upon.
“—but the Joneses don’t know any of that. Lucky for us; if worse comes to worst, those things give us handles to manipulate them by.”
“Good. Go manipulate them, Alva. I’ve got to check the water, the food, the power supplies from top to bottom and help the rest of the city’s operating crew make Gitler ready for occupancy. In the meantime, I want the Joneses gotten out, by any form of transportation you think convenient—the tubes would probably be best, but check Transcorp for advice. If you need any help, you can always call me; I’ll be aloft. All clear?”
“As you command, effendi.” McGee made an exaggerated bow and started to leave. Then he thought better of it. He said, “Jothen, have you ever heard of a ward-heeler?”
“No. What is it? Another Jones totem?”
“Not precisely. See you later. I won’t call unless I have to.”
He slipped away, quietly for so tubby and talkative a man. Below, the torrent of faces poured along as noisily as ever. Jothen was relieved to be able to get away from them both.
Nevertheless, maybe McGee was going to have his uses after all. To do him justice, he had already eased Jothen’s worries a little, by reminding the harried engineer that some moderately large proportion of the Joneses—perhaps as many as twenty-five percent—probably did not need to be sent home at all. As members of a chiefly North American clan, that many probably lived within the areas due to be affected by the arrival of Fla via; and there would be no sense in shipping them back there. Since their specialties (those of them who were employed) would no longer be needed at home, a lot of them would simply be exported right back to Gitler. It would take a little paper-and computer-work to identify this sub-group; but that was precisely the kind of thing that McGee was supposed to be good at, while the very idea itself had not occurred to Jothen.
It had occurred, however, to one Fongavaro Jones.
II
It was, in fact, the main reason why Fongavaro was at the moment hiding in one of the deepest service tunnels of Gitler, feeling like a hunted man. He was not exactly hunted, yet, though he was looking forward to it. Instead, he was stalking a Rest Stop, just for the practice, since again he did not expect that there would be anyone in it. Not yet.
Fongavaro was classified by UNOC as a communications systems specialist and hence, like Jothen, was one of those most fortunate of all citizens, a man with a job. But there the resemblance ended. He looked rather more like an orangutan, a stocky, muscular man with long arms and large hands. In his native city—Tananarive, in Madagascar—he probably would have attracted no attention; but in these dim, empty corridors he was a startling, perhaps even a fearsome figure.
Of this he was well aware. Moreover, he was counting on it.
If the usual Jones was as crazy as Jothen took them all to be—which was doubtful—then in this too, Fongavaro was a specialist. A great part of his life had been spent in the labyrinthine service tunnels between the walls and under the floors of Tananarive, and he was thoroughly suited for it; in an earlier age, he might have been a spelunker. Beyond the average UNOC citizen’s natural mild case of agoraphobia, he actively enjoyed living at the bottom of a hole. The pleasure had been completely unconscious, simply because, until very recently, nothing had ever suggested any other way of living to him; he had been as adjusted as a mole.
Then had come the journey to the Jones Convention—his first venture outside his own city, his first sight of the whole blue void of the sky, his first projection into nothingness on a jet plane, his first direct encounter with the boundless expanses of the sea and of the World Forest. Until it happened, he had thought of the trip only as a sort of longer, duller version of a tubeways jaunt from one Madagascan village to another. He had of course known that he would have to fly part of the way to Gitler, but he had never dreamed that it would be like that.
He spent the whole air trip falling, falling helplessly out of his chair, desperately nauseated, struggling not to look out the window, feeling stifled and trapped by his harness, fighting against the pills and injections they tried (successfully once or twice) to give him and, above all, raging at how his own body, his own ignorance, his own gullibility, his own manhood had betrayed him.
The ordeal had been terrifying beyond belief—but worse than that, it had been humiliating . . . totally humiliating. He had no intention of ever facing it again.
The early recall of the Joneses startled him a little, but did not dismay him. He had already known precisely what he was going to do, as soon as he found that there was no official place in Gitler for him (which he had also expected). It was simplicity itself to hole up in the service tunnels of Gitler, in a sector that had never been occupied by the Joneses or anyone else. The system was not identical with that of Tananarive, but the similarities were close enough for his purposes.
The Rest Stops, here as at home, were located at strategic points throughout the network for the convenience of the maintenance staff, when they were on tours of inspection. Except that they had no windows, the Stops differed little from the average man’s apartment: eight rooms with complete living facilities, including autoservers, so that staffmen could remain on tour for days at a time without having to return to the home technie village under the flyport. In a mostly empty stand-by city, no keys to the Stops were needed.
As long as Fongavaro could stay clear of Gitler’s own crew, in short, he had it made. He could go underground and stay there.
With the second general announceme
nt, however—that Gitler was soon to be occupied by a still greater horde than the Joneses, this time of refugees—he was less pleased. As was usual procedure every day and around the clock in any working, occupied city, two-and three-man teams would now be fanning out through the tunnels to check the utilities, and the Rest Stops would be needed. From now on, Fongavaro knew, he would have a tough time remaining undiscovered.
All the same, he was never going to go back to Tananarive—not for Jothen Kent, nor for UNOC, not for White Mother Jones herself. To prevent that, any alternative was thinkable.
The next Rest Stop was before him at the end of the corridor, its closed iris door looking as cozy as the entrance to a burrow. He stopped just around the bend and listened. No, there was nobody inside—the little green telltales showed that—but nevertheless he thought he had heard a movement.
There it was again. Footsteps—one set of them.
Somebody was behind him. The steps were confident, unhurried and not at all furtive. Fongavaro did not think that he was being stalked. It was probably just a service man. But from here on, the corridor was a blind alley.
All right, let him come on. Fongavaro glided silently through the Rest Stop door, which irised shut as silently behind him. The telltale, of course, turned yellow; but that couldn’t be prevented—and besides, the newcomer would probably welcome the idea of company. He was going to get it.
Any alternative was thinkable.
Not much more than three million miles away, Biond Smith’s spoilage crew toiled clumsily in their vacuum suits, chewing steadily in Flavia’s vitals with prolapse drills. They had less than two weeks left to break up the asteroid, before the lasers would focus on her remaining mass and turn her into a lopsided sunlet; but thus far, even with the loss of three lives, they had not succeeded in doing much more to her than spoiling her shape.
An alarm sounded in their helmets, and the drilling stopped. It was time for another blast on the Earthward side of the planetoid. Inevitably, some of the resulting pieces would take off for Earth a good deal faster than Flavia herself was already travelling, but that would just have to be borne, since it would concomitantly slow as well as lighten the main mass.
There was a thudding jar deep in the rock, a soundless flash of yellow light, a slowly spreading cloud of dust in the eternal sunlight. The men went back to work. Somehow Flavia did not look a single inch smaller to them than she had before.
His honeycomb helmet unaccustomedly heavy on his head and shoulders, Jothen rode up a secondary utility stack toward Gitler’s main distribution center. The Joneses, once out of his sight, were also almost out of his mind except en masse, as an abstract complex of technical problems; but those were quite complex enough to suit him. He would let McGee deal with the Joneses as people, as long as possible.
He stopped at the next way station and phoned Piscetti, his chief of operations.
“Everything’s normal on the lines,” Piscetti reported. “But Jothen, we’ve had a killing. One of us—Guivrec Krantz.”
“My God. Who . . . where—”
“I don’t know who. Where, in Rest Stop BB-596, way down in the bottom levels, strictly non-residential and always were. He was strangled. It looks like he was taken by surprise, because there’s no sign of a struggle.”
“All the rest of our people accounted for, I hope?”
“Yes,” Piscetti said. “I checked that right away—none of them has been anywhere near that area in at least a year.
It has to have been one of those crazy Joneses, somehow or other.”
“Crazy is the word for it. See what else the computer can give you. The man may have given himself away in some way—a minor arrest, a lost ration-card, some other such bit of business. Anybody who’s got a special record of any sort.”
“I’ll try it,” Piscetti’s voice said dubiously.
“All right. I’d like to stop him fast if we can. We’ve got enough trouble as it is. I’m going on up to Distribution, and I’ll call you from there.”
Nearly in shock—for though Guivrec had not been a close friend, he had known the man casually, and the maintenance crew was jealous of its own—Jothen resumed his ride up the stack. It discharged him at last into the throbbing darkness of the distribution center, its gloom relieved only here and there by the little stars of telltales and safelights.
It was not a reassuring place to be under the circumstances, familiar though it was. He felt distinctly uneasy, and his eyes kept darting off into comers. Knotted across the far-away ceiling were the complexes of pipes which tapped shunts from the main overhead supply line. That colossal feeder—so large in diameter that it could accommodate a six-man personnel capsule and now and then actually did—served chiefly to bring in Gitler’s water supply direct from the water table up north, but that Was far from all that it carried. It also bore food, fuels, rock slurries and almost every other kind of supplies or semi-processed materials which could be moved in the form of self-contained peristaltic packages. Most of this material either originated with or had been routed through the Municipal Services Center in the Kansas City complex. The pipeline was Gitler’s jugular vein.
At the moment, there seemed to be something wrong with the sound that it was making.
Jothen doubted that he ought to be alarmed . . . at least as yet. Though he knew most of its moods as well as a creche-mother knows the noises of a nursery, it seemed logical to him that the master conduit might make a sound new to him, when it was approaching peak load—as in preparation for the refugee influx it was now doing for the first time in its history. After all, until the Joneses had arrived, it had effectively just been sitting there since Gitler was built, seventy years ago; the burden of the technie village alone was small.
Still, it was second nature in him, just as it would have been with a creche-mother, to check such matters. Climbing through the dimness to a cat-walk where there was a slave meter-board for the Traffic computer, he called for a read-out on pressures, rates of flow and what kinds of loads Kansas City said it was sending.
For an eternal fifteen seconds, he found it impossible to believe what he saw. Maybe it was not, after all, as bad as it seemed. As a last precaution, he asked for a Chicago manifest for the day.
Then he pushed every red button in sight.
The Joneses—all but one of them—heard nothing but the continued bawling of the public address system, directing them to the tubeways and, then, Jothen’s voice calling for McGee. But the work areas, the machinery decks, the utility stacks, the technician’s village and homes all jangled and squalled with leather-lunged alarm. After a while, lights on the slaw board showed that Jothen’s emergency staffmen were coming onto their posts; but it was several minutes more, before the phone rang to bring in McGee’s voice.
“What’s the matter, Jothen?
“Everything’s going swimmingly down here—or at least it was until now.”
“You may have to swim for it in earnest,” Jothen said grimly. “Where are you concentrating your people?”
“At the tubeway stations, just as you suggested.”
“Yes, but which ones? The main outgoing depots, in the sub-basement? . . . That’s what I was afraid of. The thing is, there’s a very good chance that our prime feeder line up here is going to show a major break in about ninety minutes.”
“How come? It’s hardly ever been used!”
“That’s probably the trouble,” Jothen said. “Evidently there was a small flaw to begin with, or else it crystalized out during disuse—and I suppose the first strains, after the Joneses came in, made it worse. Anyhow there’s a weak patch where a shunt goes off toward the flyport fuel tanks. I still think it’s nothing we couldn’t handle normally, but Chicago is shipping us a big bolus of pre-melted gallium as a moderator to start our main nuclear pile with, and when that hits that bend—”
“Why didn’t your computer show that shipment long ago?” McGee broke in irritably.
“It hasn’t come
onto the Kansas City block yet; I just picked it up off the dispatcher’s waybill from Chicago. Anyhow we’ll get nowhere arguing with it; it’s on the way.”
“All right, but it still seems like a sloppy way to run a pipeline. What do you want me to do?”
“Get everybody up to the roof,” Jothen said. “We’ll have to evacuate them from the flyport and from the terraces, too. Luckily there’s plenty of roof space and no air traffic to speak of.”
“Everybody? A million Joneses—in ninety minutes? Miracles aren’t my specialty, Jothen.”
“We won’t have to evacuate them in that time, just get them aloft. You may have ten extra minutes, even after the main breaks. It’ll probably be that long before the liquid parts of the load cascade down to you. I’m hoping some of the gallium will solidify fast enough to block off some of the semi-hard junk in the pipe, but I can’t count on it—its melting point is around eighty-five, and the temperature up here is only fifteen degrees below that right now. Better move fast—and good luck.”
“Thanks,” McGee said, with more than a hint of irony.
Jothen cut over to another line.
“Piscetti, Jothen here. Any chance of our moving a nugget-grade coal hopper into the shunt room in time to catch—? . . . Too bad. Okay, in that event the first thing I want is a fluted baffle over the shunt-room drain, so the gallium won’t plug it; check storage for something light enough to truck in here fast. Set it up so that it slants the stuff off into the utility stack . . . Yes, but I’d rather have to chip spray out of the stack than try to free metal chunks from a roomful of frozen valves . . .
“Damn it, I know we ought to drain the aero fuel, but we’ll need it up there for the incoming evacuation ferries—and besides, where’d you suggest draining it to? Do you want it stored under a jet of hot gallium? . . . Right. Now—I’m closing the living areas in ten minutes and putting all public stairs and walkways off limits to the crew, to give McGee queue space; we’ll use the stacks only. Also, there’ll be a gas alarm in thirty minutes for the work areas; whatever that stew from the pipes generates when it mixes, we don’t want to breathe it. Got all the Timing starts in fifteen seconds . . . Mark.”