by Irving Cox
She led him into a front room which, Ann had once told him, had been called a living room. A peculiar name, surely, for the room appeared to have been designed solely as a place to sit while watching Tri-D—or flat-screen television, as it had been called in its early developmental stage when the house was new—or to hear someone play the bulky instrument known as a piano.
The room was an example of the appalling waste of space so common to the twentieth century. It was extremely spacious, but neither food tubes nor bed drawers were concealed in the walls.
Hunter had always been curious about the piano. It amazed him that it had been operated entirely by hand. There was no electric scanner to read the mood of the player and interpret it in melody. Driven to contrive his own harmonics, how could the twentieth century man have derived any satisfaction at all from music? His sensibilities had been immature, of course. But even so, an instrument which demanded so much individual creativeness must have been an enormous frustration.
Since so many surviving twentieth century machines made the same demand on the individual—their automobiles, for example, had been individually directed, without any sort of electronic safety control—it had puzzled both Hunter and Ann that the incidence of maladjustment in the past had been so low.
The captain dropped into a comfortable, chintz-covered rocking chair—one relic in this island of time that he really enjoyed. "Will you tell Mrs. Ames I'm here?" he asked the stranger.
"I'm Mrs. Ames."
"I mean Mrs. Janice Ames—the owner of the house."
The woman smiled woodenly. "You're speaking to her, Captain, though I must say I don't remember ever having met you before."
"You don't remember—"
Fear clutched at his heart. He sprang up, moving toward her with clenched fists. "An hour ago I called Mrs. Ames from the spaceport. I saw her. Here—in this room."
"I've owned this house all my life, Captain." Her expression was more than good acting. She spoke with utter conviction, and seemed completely sure of herself. "You must be—" She hesitated and looked at him sharply. "Have you checked your adjustment index recently?"
"I haven't lost my mind, if that's what you're getting at," he said. "Where's Ann Saymer?"
"Believe me, please. The name is totally unfamiliar to me." The woman was painfully sympathetic—and frankly scared. She backed away from him. "You need help from the clinic, Captain. Will you let me call them for you?"
Suddenly the light fell full on her face, and Hunter saw the tiny, still-unhealed scalpel wounds on both sides of her skull. The light glowed on the microscopic filament of platinum wire clumsily left projecting through the incision.
He understood, then. This woman was wearing one of Ann's patented grids, sealed into her cerebral cortex. It made her into a robot, responding with unquestioning obedience to the direction of Ann's transmitter. And Hunter had no doubt that United manipulated the transmission.
Simultaneously he realized something else. If the cartel went to this extreme to forestall his search for Ann, she must still be alive. For some reason they still needed her. Possibly her patent drawings had been submitted for government registry in such a way that only Ann understood them.
Ann had been through the general school, and knew what the score was. She would have protected her invention—and incidentally insured her own survival—if she could have possibly done so, even at a fearful risk to herself.
Hunter swung toward the door. It did not occur to him to call the police, since they were all cartel mercenaries. Whatever he did to help Ann, he would have to do on his own. Until he found her, he could count on help from Consolidated. After that—nothing.
He jerked open the front door—and froze. Three men were waiting on the porch with drawn blasters. Hunter had no time to recognize facial features which it might have been to his advantage to remember later, no time to find any identifying insignia on their tunics. With a barely visible flickering fire arced from one of the weapons, and pain exploded in his body, unconsciousness washed into his brain.
His first sensation when the paralysis began to wear off was the dull ache of visceral nausea. He opened his eyes, and saw, bleakly shadowed, the living room of the Ames house. It was after dark, which could only mean that he had lain there nearly four hours. To knock him out for that period of time, they must have given him a nearly lethal charge from the blaster calculated just under the limit of physical endurance.
His motor control and his sense of touch returned more slowly. For a quarter of an hour he lay helpless in the chintz-covered rocker, feeling nothing but a tingling, like pin-pricks of fire, in his arms and legs.
He looked down and saw that he held a blaster in his hand—his own blaster, which he had left in his room in the Roost. He did not yet have the neural control to release his fingers from the firing dial.
As his sense of hearing was restored, he became aware that the Tri D had been left on. The screen pictured the swirling confusion of a mob. An announcer was describing the sudden outburst of labor violence which had occurred in the industrial district that afternoon. Eric Young's U.F.W. had gone on strike against a dozen separate plants.
Essential plants, naturally. Everything was always essential, and government spokesmen always made pretty speeches deploring the situation. It was a pattern familiar to Hunter for years. One of the cartels would pay Young to strike factories belonging to the other. Then a second bribe, paid by the struck cartel, bought off the strike. Occasionally a sop of bonus credits had to be dished out to the faithful.
It was not a maneuver either Consolidated or United used frequently, because the advantage was transitory, and the only long-term winner was Eric Young.
This time there was a slight variation in the formula. Young had struck plants of both cartels. That puzzled Hunter, but any curiosity he felt was subordinate to his disgust. How much longer would this farce go on before it dawned on the rank and file of the U.F.W. that Eric Young was playing them all for suckers? Hunter tried to get up to snap off the telecast. He managed only to throw himself awkwardly over the arm of the chair.
And then he saw the body on the floor—the body of the genuine Mrs. Ames, charred by a ragged blaster wound seared through her breast. They had murdered her—naturally with his blaster—and left him at the scene, neatly framed for the crime.
Hunter heard—right on cue—the whine of a police siren outside. Everything timed to trap him just as the motor paralysis wore off! With an effort that brought beads of sweat to his forehead, he dropped his blaster and pushed himself out of the chair. His feet were numb. He moved a few steps and banged into the piano. Clawing for support, his hands crashed in jangling discord on the keys.
The siren swelled loud in front of the house. Hunter heard the drum-beat of boots on the porch. He stumbled toward the kitchen—and fell into the arms of two police officers who had entered from the rear of the house.
He swung his fist; the fingers felt like clods of wet clay. One of the mercenaries caught his wrist and held it easily. In the gloom Hunter saw the Consolidated insignia on the man's jacket, and the guard whispered quickly, "This deal was a set-up, Hunter—packaged evidence, dropped at headquarters ten minutes ago."
Hunter stared. "Accusing me by name? Get this straight! Four hours ago they put me under with a blaster and—"
"It's a United frame," the guard said. "They want you out for good. The top brass of Consolidated is giving you the green right down the line. The fastest out Jake and I could figure—" He jerked his head toward his companion. "—was to give the United boys on our team the front of the house, and let you make a break for it from the back. We'll fake enough here to protect ourselves."
They pushed a blaster into Hunter's hands. He stumbled through the kitchen as the front door gave and two United mercenaries burst into the house. Hunter ran awkwardly, without full control of his legs.
He saw, looming black against the night shadows, the oval silhouette of the autojet on the Ames fl
at, still held under his twenty-four hour charter. It offered a tempting means of escape, but a public car was too easily traced and brought down by police tracers. However, it could perform a miracle as a diversion.
VI
Hunter slid into the car, punched out a destination blindly, and engaged the flight gear. With the customary roar of power, the car shot up from the flat. Hunter leaped free. His feet struck the cement. The lingering trace of paralysis, destroying his normal co-ordination, made the fall very painful.
Hunter flung himself flat in the shadow of the ornamental shrubs along the edge of the parking flat. The four police mercenaries sprinted out of the house and leaped into the police jet. With sirens screaming, it soared up in pursuit of the empty autojet.
Hunter estimated that he had perhaps thirty minutes before they sent out a general alarm. A painfully small margin of safety. Where could he hide that the machines of detection—the skilled, emotionless, one-track, electronic brains—would not eventually find him? And what of Ann Saymer? What could he do as a fugitive to save her?
United had planned it all down to the smallest detail. But that was the way the cartels operated. It was the system Hunter was accustomed to. He felt neither anger not resentment, simply a determination to out-plan and out-play the enemy.
If he accepted defeat he would admit frustration, and for Captain Max Hunter that was impossible. Hadn't he survived a decade of frontier conflict with an adjustment index of zero-zero? Instead of hopelessly weighing the odds stacked against him, he counted the advantage which a single man held in maneuverability and rapid change of pace.
He walked along the museum street, the blaster in his hand. A block away rose the bulk of a factory building and behind it towered the monster of center-city, transformed into a fairyland by the glow of lights on the many levels. Hunter's eye followed the pattern up toward the top, hidden above the blanket of haze.
The top! Luxury casinos and the castles of the cartels. Werner von Rausch and his empire of United Researchers. Werner von Rausch, who gave orders and Ann Saymer disappeared. Werner von Rausch, who gave new orders and Mrs. Ames lay murdered in her living room.
But behind the façade of his spacefleet and his private army, behind his police mercenaries, Werner von Rausch was one man—an old man, Hunter had been told—and a vulnerable target. Hunter weighed his changes, and the margin of success seemed to be balanced in his favor.
It was not what they would expect him to do. They had framed him for murder and he should now be running for his life. The hunted turned hunter. Hunter grinned savagely, enjoying his pun.
He slipped the blaster under his belt, leaving the scarlet jacket open to his navel so that the loose folds would conceal the outline of the weapon. He would have no trouble reaching the top level.
The resort casinos, like the mid-city amusement area, were open to any citizen. Special autojets, with destinations pre-set for the casino flat, were available in every monorail terminal. Hunter could by-pass a probe inspection at a regular metro-entry. The nearest terminal, from the north-coast line, was less than a quarter of a mile away.
As Hunter entered the industrial district he heard the turmoil of an angry crowd. He came upon them suddenly, swarming at the gates of a factory close to the terminal.
Eric Young's trouble-makers, he thought with a worried frown, jumping obediently when the big boss spoke the word. In less than five years Eric Young had turned the union into a third cartel, more powerful than Consolidated or United because the commodity Young controlled—human labor—was essential to the other two.
A third cartel! Suddenly Max Hunter understood why the cartels had to have Ann's patent at any cost. The absolute control of the human mind! It was the only weapon which Consolidated or United could use to break Young's power.
Hunter shouldered his way through the strikers toward the terminal. Though he wore no U.F.W. disc, he felt no alarm. Eric Young's strike riots were always well-managed. None of the violence was real and no one was ever seriously hurt.
But these trouble-makers seemed absurdly well-disciplined. They stood in drill-team ranks, moving and shouting abuse in perfect unison. Then Hunter saw their faces, as blank as death masks—and in all their skulls the still unhealed scalpel wound, as well as an occasional projecting platinum strand which sometimes caught the reflected light.
Max Hunter felt a chill of terror. He was walking in a human graveyard of living automatons, responding to the transmission from Ann's machine. United had lost no time in putting the thing to work. This was no ordinary strike, but the opening skirmish in the conflict that would wreck both Consolidated and the Union of Free Workers.
Hunter entered the monorail terminal. It was deserted except for a woman who stood by the window looking out at the crowd. She was wearing a demure, pink dress. Her face was plain, and she had used no cosmetic plasti-skin to make it more striking. Her brown hair, streaked with a gray which she took no trouble to hide, was pulled into a bun at the back of her neck.
Surprisingly, Hunter thought she was pretty, perhaps because she was so different from the eternal, baby-faced adolescent who thronged the city in a million identical duplications.
Hunter knew he had seen her before. He couldn't remember where. She shifted her position slightly and the light cast a sharp, angular shadow on her face. Then he knew.
"Dawn!" he cried.
Startled, she turned to face him with a strange look in her eyes.
"I was hoping you wouldn't recognize me, Captain Hunter," she said.
"What are you doing here—dressed like some dowdy just in from a farm sector?" he asked, his gaze incredulous.
"We're all of us a mixture of different personalities," she replied. "I work for an entertainment house, yes. But I also have some of the qualities of your Ann Saymer. Don't take offense, please. Ann and I are both interested in the maladjusted. She wants a quick cure. I'm looking for the cause."
"Here?"
"Wherever there are people who face an emotional crisis—the men who come to Number thirty-four, or a mob of strikers. I want to know why we react in the way we do, and what makes up the frustration pattern that crowds us across the borderline into insanity."
"You sound like a psychiatrist," he said.
"I hold a First, Captain Hunter."
"And you work in an entertainment house?"
"Tell me about yourself, Captain. Have you found Ann yet?"
He looked away quickly.
"No," he said, his face hardening.
"And you still haven't had a chance to use your blaster?"
He directed an appraising glance at her. The question might imply a great deal. Did she somehow know what had happened at Mrs. Ames'? Did she know he was a fugitive?
A dozen police mercenaries appeared abruptly at the end of the street. Since the police had never been used to break a strike, Hunter guessed that this was Consolidated's answer to Werner von Rausch's new weapon.
The mercenaries drew their blasters and ordered the mob to disperse. The automatons turned to face them. And as they turned they fell silent—the cloying, choking silence of the tomb. Like marching puppets, the mob moved toward the police. Clearly Hunter could hear a shrill voice ordering them to halt.
Hunter felt a sickening inner horror. How could the mob obey when they heard nothing but the enslaving grid, and responded to neither fear nor reason? Still they moved forward, in a robot death march. Whatever happened, it was a situation Young could turn to his advantage. If the mercenaries killed unarmed workers, it could be turned into superb propaganda. And ultimately, by sheer weight of numbers, the defenseless mob could overwhelm the mercenaries.
White fire leaped from the blasters. The first rank fell, but the mob marched blindly across the smoking corpses. The mercenaries fired again. It was slaughter—brutal and pointless—of slaves unaware of their danger, unable to save themselves.
Without understanding his own motivation—and without caring—Max Hunter leaped into
the sill of the terminal window. There he was in a position to fire over the heads of the mob. The blast from his weapon arrowed into the line of police mercenaries.
Three fell in the agony of the flames. The rest, glad for an excuse to stop the slaughter, turned and fled. Like clockwork things, the mob turned back and resumed its precision demonstration in front of the factory.
Hunter slipped white-faced into a terminal bench. His hand trembled as he jammed the blaster back beneath his belt.
"Why did you do it, Captain?" Dawn asked.
How could he answer her, without saying he had seen the grids in their skulls? And he wasn't ready to trust Dawn to that extent.
"The people couldn't help themselves," he said ambiguously.
"Because they're in the U.F.W. and Eric Young cracks the whip. Is that what you mean?"
"They weren't aware of their own danger."
"Miscalculating the risks then? But that's part of the system, Captain. If you can't fight your way up to the top—"
"Then the system is utterly vicious."
"You don't mean that," she said.
"Why not? We're living in a jungle society. It's nothing but conflict—conflict on the frontier and conflict here from the time they put you in the general school."
"Only the children who have the intelligence—"
"But why?" he interrupted fiercely. "Where does it get us?"
"We have a stable society," she told him. "Peace of a sort. Law enforcement, too, and a chance to build something better when we learn how."
"Something better?" He laughed as he stood up. "We'll get that when we pull this hell apart, and not before."
She put her hand on his arm. "No, Captain. It's not realistic to say that. Over and over again in the past we wrecked civilization because good-hearted and conscientious people thought there was no other way to create a finer world. It didn't work, because violence is madness. This time we have to begin where we are and build rationally. We can, you know, when we understand what we have to build with."