On the Run

by Gordon R. Dickson

  He lifted his Key and pressed it into the cup. The door swung noiselessly back before him and he stepped into a small room, where a good-looking blonde girl sat behind a desk banked with coder keys. She smiled professionally at him.

  "Sit down," she said, waving him to a single chair facing the desk. "My job's to take down the details of your complaint and find out what officer you ought to be assigned to for action. Name?"

  "Bruner, Kil Alan," he answered.

  "Occupation?"

  "Engineer, Memnonics."

  "Stab?"

  "Class A."

  "Let's see your Key." She leaned over and inspected it, reading off Kil's individual number, the number under which Kil was known to the computer memory of Files. Kil watched her tap it out on her coder keys. He had not thought of it until now, but suddenly he realized that her keys must connect directly with Files itself, and that his case would be passed on and decided by Files. And, abruptly, at the thought of this living, human problem of his and Ellen's, going for decision before this great electronic monster, used to it as he was in all aspects of his life, he felt a sudden panic and a shrinking.

  But the girl was going on with her questions.

  "Last residence? Last job? Name of missing person? Stab rating of missing person? Her occupation? Last seen? Describe in detail . . ." The questions continued in the girl's low pitched, dispassionate voice, and her fingers danced remotely over the coder keys as if they were something as detached from the human equation as Files itself.

  Finally, the questions and answers came to an end. The girl pressed the decision button and sat back. On the flat desk screen before her, numbers began to click out, one by one, appearing at regular and emotionless intervals. When the screen was filled and the numbers had stopped, she sat reading them, for the first time showing a hint of puzzlement in her eyes. She looked curiously at Kil, then back at the screen and pushed a key down twice, two hard, quick jabs of her forefinger.

  The numbers flicked off the screen and flicked back on, unchanged.

  "What's wrong?" asked Kil. "There's no mistake, is there?"

  "Files doesn't make mistakes," she said. But it was a mechanical answer and the look of puzzlement remained until, with a conscious effort, she cleared the expression from her face.

  "You go from here to another office." She looked at Kil. "The man you'll talk to there will be a Mr. McElroy. I'll send a wand along to show you the route."

  She pressed a stud on her desk, a narrow slot opened in the wall of the cubicle, and one of the guiding devices she had mentioned rolled out. It was nothing more than a slender antenna sprouting from a small box-like receiver mounted on a floton—not a wheel, but a sort of underinfiated sausage-shaped bag which could manage to go almost anywhere, short of up the side of a vertical wall. The girl reached down and made a setting on the box.

  "Follow the wand," she said. Kil rose, then turned back to thank her, but she was looking at him with such a strange, curious expression in her eyes that he turned away again without a word and followed the wand into the hallway, for the first time since Ellen had gone, disturbed by something beyond the immediate problem of finding her again.

  The wand trundled ahead of him, leading him down the hallway, off a branching corridor to a disk elevator. It rolled onto the first descending disk to come level with the floor of the corridor. Kil stepped hurriedly on beside it, and they dropped down to the next level.

  Emerging into a new hallway, the wand went on, guiding him through a complicated route that ended eventually before a plain door, no different from many others they had passed. Kil faced his Key into the cup and the door opened to show a square, middle-sized room, whose only remarkable feature was a window opening on the lake, on a level less than a dozen feet above the surface of the water itself. This, a desk and a few chairs, broke up the monotony of the place.

  The room was empty and Kil, his gaze drawn irresistibly to the window, felt a sudden wild and powerful wave of feeling sweep through him, staggering him. The sight of the lake had at one sweep brought back his memory of the sea in the moment when Ellen had left him. He swayed, putting out a hand to the antenna of the wand, to steady himself, and at that second, the door of the room opened behind him and a man's voice spoke to him.

  "Mr. Bruner?"

  Kill took his hand from the. wand and turned to confront a short, dark, wiry-looking man perhaps a dozen years older than himself, in grey kilt and tunic with a small oval framing the Police emblem on each piece of clothing. The man did not wait to hear Kil acknowledge himself, but walked around Kil with a springy, athletic stride, to seat himself behind the desk.

  "Sit down," he said, waving Kil to a facing chair.

  Kil sat.

  "You're McElroy?" he asked.

  "That's right. Now—" McElroy leaned forward, putting both elbows on the desk. His thin, dark features were intense. "Suppose you run through it once more for me. Just what happened when your wife left you?"

  Kil told him. McElroy listened without interrupting, elbows on the desk, hands clasped, his head a little on one side and eyes noncommitally on Kil's face.

  When Kil had finished, McElroy nodded, straightened up and put his slim hands flat on the desk.

  "Yes," he said. He looked across at Kil with an expression in which curiosity and sympathy were somehow mixed. "You know," he said softly, "we can't help you."

  Kil stared at him, stunned.

  "Can't help me?" The words seemed to be perfectly nonsensical noises with no meaning whatsoever.

  "No." McElroy still regarded him.

  "But you know where she is! I mean—Files will know the next time she checks her Key. And you—"

  "Yes. We can get the information from Files." McElroy still spoke softly. "But we won't." He seemed to be walking on eggs, verbally, tiptoeing around some delicate subject.

  "It's that business of the stopping!" said Kil suddenly. He stared furiously at the other man. "You don't believe me."

  "No. Yes," said McElroy. "I mean it could have been true for you. You could have been hypnoed."

  "I'm a bad hypnotic subject!"

  "Still—with drugs? No, that's not the trouble. The trouble is, it's not our job."

  "Not your job! You're public servants. You're—"

  "No!" said McElroy, with such hard, sudden violence in his voice that it checked Kil. There was a small second of silence, then the Policeman went on in quieter tones. "We're set up to keep the peace. That's our job. To be the strong right arm of Files. That's why they started us, a hundred and fourteen years ago." He raised his eyes, suddenly, bumingly, to Kil. "What do you know about it? You're Class A."

  "What's Class A got to do with it?" demanded Kil, his ready anger flaring up to matching heat. A thought occurred to him. "Aren't you?"

  "Yes, but I know!" said McElroy. "I've been in this business since Files recommended me for training school at thirteen. You don't. No Class A does. They're the cream of the crop, with six full months before they have to move from one location to another. What if you were Class B and had to move every three months? What if you were Class C and had to move every month? What if you were Unstab?"

  "What's that got to do with it, I say?" snapped Kil. "I'm not Unstab."

  "No," said McElroy, settling back in his chair. "You're not Unstab. You live almost the way they did in the old days. You don't sneak glances at your Key every fifteen minutes to see how many hours—hours, not days, are left before you have to catch a rocket or a mag ship and move again. You don't lie awake nights hating the world, hating Files, hating us, hating everything until you end up dreaming, staring into the darkness and dreaming, of somehow getting your hands on a CH bomb just so you can blow us and the rest of the world, and even your own sick and tortured self to hell and end the whole damn sorry mess!"

  McElroy ended suddenly on a high note of violence. The silence after his words seemed to rock and swirl like torn-up water.

  "You sound like an Unstab yourself,"
said Kil, looking steadily at him.

  "I'm not. If I were I couldn't be in the Police, of course." McElroy ran a hand wearily through his hair. "I'm just trying to make you understand. You class A's live in a fool's paradise. Just because you've been able to adjust to the world, you forget the other nine-tenths of humanity who haven't. You forgot there ever was a Lucky War—"

  "I don't!" Kil cut sharply in on him. "I had it pounded into me when I was young, just like everybody else. I know about the fifty million dead in twenty-four hours; and how it was just by the smallest chance the cobalt fallout didn't finish off the whole race. I know. What of it? What's that got to do with what happened to Ellen?"

  "Your wife left of her own free will."

  Kil stared at him.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean," said McElroy, patiently, "that forgetting this idea about things stopping, as being unimportant one way or another, you've told us only that your wife stood up and walked out on you. If requested to do so, well interfere where crimes of violence are concerned. In the case of unexplained disappearances we'll investigate because these might have something to do with an attempt to break the peace. Neither applies in your case. A check on your wife would only be a violation of her privacy."

  "But she didn't want to go! I tell you she was crying when she left me!"

  "This old man—did he grab her, use any kind of physical force?"

  "No, but—" McElroy shrugged.

  "You see," he said. "All she's done is leave you of her own free will. She's perfectly within her rights as an individual to do that. No, there's no grounds for us to interfere, to divert trained time and energy from our more important job of keeping the world from blowing up. I couldn't recommend a check on your wife, and I wouldn't if I could."

  "Wait—" cried Kil, remembering suddenly. "The old man. He wasn't wearing a Key!"

  McElroy sat for a second, looking across the table at him. The policeman's eyes had hardened. They were even a little contemptuous.

  "That's impossible."

  "I saw it!"

  McElroy softened. He sighed.

  "And you saw everything stop while nobody else did." He stood up and walked around the desk. "No. If you don't mind my offering some advice, register a divorce. If you don't hear from her in six months, it'll be final and you can put her out of your mind. If you don't hear from her in six months, you should put her out of your mind. This is all new and a shock to you; but this sort of thing happens a lot nowadays. One partner gets tired of the other—"

  "No! She would have told me!" burst out Kil. "We didn't have anyone but each other, don't you understand? My parents are dead, and she was raised by grandparents who died before I met her." He glared at McElroy. "Don't think I'm stopping just because you tell me to. I'll appeal this to Files."

  "If you want. But," said McElroy, going toward the door, "you'll just get a reaffirmation of what I've told you. I'm just giving you Files decision now. You see," he laid his hand on the inner knob of the door and pulled it open. "That's why you were referred to me. That's my job—turning people down."

  And he went out. The wand rolled forward from its position in a corner of the room, up to Kil's chair, and stood waiting.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Policemen in charge of the gate passed Kil out with a nod, and he emerged into a little paved area occupied by some loungers and a rank of air-cabs. Gratefully, he went across to the first of the waiting line of cabs, stepped through its door and literally fell into the seat. On the panel before him a red light glowed suddenly into life; and the mechanical voice asked: "Destination?"

  "Nearest Class A hotel," answered Kil.

  The cab stirred, on the verge of rising; but before it could take off, a small hunchbacked man came darting out of the crowd around the gate and grabbed at the door handle. The cab's safety checks arrested it. It settled back on the ground.

  "Chief!" yelled the little man.

  Kil turned and looked into a narrow, pointed face under straight black hair, grimacing at him through the cab's window. He leaned over and pressed the button that slid the window aside.

  "What?" he asked.

  "Chief!" cried the small man. "Chief, you need a runny? I'm a good one for any need you got. Go anywhere; handle anything."

  "No!" growled Kil, stabbing the button and sending the window back again. "Take off!" he ordered the cab.

  The cab lit up its passenger's responsibility, unblocked its safety checks and rose skyward. Kil saw the pointed face draw away below him and the cries of "Chief! Chief!" dwindle in the distance. Kil leaned back against the cushions of the cab and closed his eyes.

  Exhaustion chilled him like a clammy hand, a giant's hand enclosing, and the world swam about him.

  Later, he hardly remembered getting out at the hotel and taking a room. Once he touched the bed, he sank into sleep like a man drowning in its dark waters. When he woke again, it was night, The automatics of the room had opaqued the window against the stars and the city lights; and the only illumination came from the faintest of glows in the ceiling corners, where the room's sunbeams maintained a night-light intensity. Kil sat up, thumbed the window to clear, and lighting a cigaret, sat smoking and staring out at the nightime city.

  The streets and buildings stretching away up the shoreline of the lake shone with their own lights. Only off to his right, in an area close to the traffic terminal, did the lighting falter and give way to patches of dimness and shadow. This would be the Slums—Slums of the World, as they were occasionally called—the area which, in any city, normally house the greater portion of the Unstabs currently in residence there. The buildings in the area were not, of course, shims in the old sense of the word. In construction and quality they were in every way the equal of the hotel Kil was in right at the moment (its class rating did not refer to the quality of a hotel, but the Stab rating of the majority of people using it). It was not the physical environment of these areas that caused them to be called Slums, but the mental. Full of psychological misfits and outcasts and downright criminals, their internal lawlessness winked at by World Police and local authorities as well, the Slums were a breeding place of vice and violence. Away in the opposite direction, in brilliant contrast, the clearly defined area of the World Police Headquarters was a blaze of light. It ran up the shoreline of the lake until it was lost in the distance, the public, unofficial areas of the city clustered inland from it and following along the outskirts.

  Kil finished his cigaret, punched it through the spring-lid of the bedside disposal, and got up. As he dressed, the hard purpose within him, melted temporarily by sleep, formed itself icily once again. The World Police had let him down. All right, there were private services.

  He looked them up in the city directory and took an aircab to the building that housed them. The watch built into his Key told him that it was already thirteen minutes after eight, but this did not disturb him. The services and business in all large cities worked clear around the clock, or else traded hours with other establishments in the same line, so that there was always someone on hand to handle whatever might come up. This had come about naturally where everything was, by necessity, more or less geared to the great worldwide transportation system, itself a twenty-four hour a day proposition.

  The detective services occupied two floors of the building; but on the wall directory near the building's entrance, only a cluster of numbers on the upper of these two floors was lit up, signifying the fact that they "were open for business. Kil went up in the disk elevator and tried them, one after another. Disappointingly, the first three had nothing but automation receptionists, adequate enough for taking down details and explaining services and rates, but not liable to provide the immediate action Kil wanted. The fourth door, however, into which he faced his Key, opened to reveal a thin, nervous, stooped man who bounced to his feet, and came hurrying around his desk to introduce himself as Cole Marsk, freelance operative.

  Marsk seated himself and listen
ed jerkily, but attentively, as Kil told his story. The detective was a man of small gestures; scratching his chin, twitching papers on his desk first out of, then back into, position before him. His face, however, lengthened; and he bit his lips as Kil finished.

  "Ah," he said. "Ah. That's too bad. Yes—" he swung about to look out of the office window, the pivot of his chair giving a ridiculous little squeak in the silent office as he did so, and another as he turned back again. "Yes, that's too bad."

  "How soon can you get going on it?" demanded Kil.

  "Well—now," answered Marsk, not looking at him, "that's it. One of these missing person cases. Of course I'd like your account; but there's really nothing I can do."

  "Nothing?" Kil stared at him. The detective fidgeted and squirmed under his gaze.

  "Nothing. I'm sorry—" Marsk hurried ahead, almost tripping over his own words, "—cases like this. What you need, you see, is a large organization. I'm Class C, myself—oh, not that I'm ashamed of it, but I can't afford an organization. Some of the big outfits might take your job. But no, they wouldn't. Risky."

  "What do you mean, risky?" exploded Kil.

  "You know, it might involve them in a civil suit for infringement of privacy, in a case where the individual didn't want to be located."

  "But that's senseless. She's my wife!"

  "Yes. Still—" Marsk coughed, and avoided Kil's eyes.

  "You mean to sit there," growled Kil, "and tell me I can't hire detectives to find my own wife?"

  "Well—not those with heavy investments in the business," said Marsk. "And those without assets like that can't afford the organization. I'm just one man, myself. That wouldn't do you much good. You've got to check a good large share of the big population centers simultaneously. Even then, it might take years, or your wife might never be found."

  Kil slammed his hand down furiously on the arm of his chair and, jumping to his feet, strode toward the door.

  "Wait—wait—" cried the detective, running after him. "Wait a minute. Maybe I can help you some other way."