On the Run

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "Societies—" frowned Kil. "Now, it seems to me I heard something about a Society once."

  "There's thousands of them," said Dekko. "They're secret, most of them. Most harmless, but some aren't. People, you see, need something, with Files making them shift every few weeks or months. Files has set things up this last hundred years so no groups can get together and want to fight other groups. That's fine to keep the peace, but its lonely for the single ones. You never know anybody for long. Wife, maybe, and kids while they're growing up and living with you; but when you got to keep moving, you fall apart easy. You can't even get to liking the place you live, or your job, because in just a little while you're going to trade it all for a place and a job just like it—but different—maybe halfway around the world."

  "But look here—" began Kil.

  "Let me finish. So along comes a Society, any old Society, and you join up. You get accepted, you wear something that shows you're accepted, and you know what to look for on somebody else. You hit a new place and start looking around. You see somebody wearing the same gimmick you've got; you go up to him and you're in. You got a friend, maybe not a real close friend, but its not like being a stranger all the time, so much."

  "But why secret?" asked Kil, when Dekko stopped.

  "Makes it stronger. Usually you pledge yourself to all sorts of things: treat anyone else in the Society like a brother, whether you know him or not. Some go further. In some Societies, if a fellow member asks for anything you got, you got to give it to him, no questions asked."

  Kil shook his head.

  "I can't understand why I never heard of all this before," he said.

  "You're A. Stab.," repeated. Dekko. "A. Stabs. are the only ones that don't need all this stuff because they're the only ones that're adjusted. They fit this crazy world of Files."

  "Sometimes," said Kil, thinking of Ellen.

  "Yeah, sometimes," agreed Dekko. "Now listen, there's more to it than that. There's all kinds of different Societies, but there's "only one O.T.L. Now don't ask me what the letters stand for, because I don't know. Maybe even the O.T.L.'s themselves don't know. But O.T.L.'s about forty years old and it sits right at the head of all the other Societies. All the important ones got members who're members of O.T.L. O.T.L. can do anything, except find Files. They can probably find your wife." He paused, a little significantly. "Ever think she might be a member of something herself?"

  "A member?"

  "Of some Society."

  "No, of course—I don't think—" Kil dwindled off on a doubtful note.

  "It sounds like it. That old man coming up—"

  "Wait!" cried Kil. "I think I've got something. I mentioned it to that man McElroy at the Police Headquarters, but he didn't believe me. Is there any Society that doesn't wear Keys?" He stopped before something strange and brilliant and unfathomable in Dekko's eyes.

  "Society without Keys?" said Dekko. "Are you psycho, Kil? How could anyone live, Society or no Society, without a Key, even if the Police'd let them? You were—what makes you think there's something like that?"

  "The old man who took Ellen away hadn't any Key on his wrist."

  "You were looking at the wrong arm."

  "No," said Kil stubbornly. "No, I wasn't."

  "Then you hit a blind spot. Listen," Dekko leaned forward earnestly. "Everything in this world's got a door, right?"

  "Yes," admitted Kil, grudgingly.

  "And every door's got a cup? And you can't open that door without a Key to put in that cup. If you didn't have a Key, it'd be like being in a city when your time was up. You couldn't open anything. You couldn't get in to eat, or sleep, to get clothes, or draw money or anything. That's why Files was set up the way it was. Anyone who overstays their time in any one spot got to move or die. If there was any way around it, there wouldn't be any point to Files."

  "The transportation system's open. You don't need a Key to take a rocket, or a mag ship," said Kil.

  "What good's that to you? So you can go to another city. But that city's closed, too. Listen to me, Kil, if you don't have a Key, there's a billion doors closed against you. You're locked out; locked out of all the world!"

  Kil shook his head stubbornly.

  "I saw it," he said.

  "Sure, think that if you want," Dekko straightened up. "How about it? You want to try stringing a wire to the O.T.L.? Do you want to hire me?"

  Kil nodded.

  "You're hired," he said. "How do we start?"

  "Pasadena, California; then the Thieves Guild, first," said Dekko. "You got to join, you know. Then some other Society, one of the big ones. Then, if we can do it, the O.T.L."

  Kil got stiffly to his feet.

  "All right," he said. "I guess I'm good enough to travel." Dekko went off into another of his silent fits of laughter.

  "Why, Kil," he said, when he had sobered again, "you don't just walk out the door and out of riggertown like that. Don't you remember? Ace was having you shook out when I came along and shorted out a pocket sunbeam in the eyes of those two crims of his. The word's still out for you. We're going to have to change the way you look and a lot more about you if we want to make it to the Terminal without trouble."

  "We do?" said Kil. "Well, let's get busy at it, then."

  "Do me!" Dekko grinned at him. "You got a lot to learn."

  During the next three days Kil came around to admitting this himself. But first came the matter of changing his appearance. The primary change Dekko insisted upon was bleaching Kil's hair to a silvery white.

  "But you'll just make me that much more conspicuous," Kil protested.

  "You've got the wrong id§a," Dekko explained, patiently. "You want to look just like everyone else? You want to fade into the background? Sure, that's fine for people who aren't being looked for specially. But when you got someone who knows what you looked like to start off with, you want them to look at you now and then say, no, that couldn't possibly be the juby we're after."

  "I still think—"

  "No. Now listen. I got a hump on my back. One guess how people remember me? If I could get rid of that hump I could walk up to most of them tomorrow and they'd scratch their heads trying to remember what I remind them of. Now, you—you change your hair to white. You stand out in a crowd like a streetside sunbeam. But they take one look at you and that's all they see—they see a freak with white hair and a young face. The fact your face is like what they're looking for makes them all the more positive it's not you. Their mind works backward. It starts making excuses for the fact that you look like you. Ends up they're ready to swear you don't look like what you actually look like at all. It's like hiding something in plain sight. They say, that can't be it. It's not hidden."

  Kil gave in, with misgivings.

  The next part was more complicated. Dekko insisted on teaching him how to walk, talk and act like an Unstab.

  "Now, there's got to be something inside you," he instructed. "That part of it you should be able to do all right because you got something inside you; this business of your wife. But remember that—that's the difference between Unstab and Stab. An Unstab's got something inside him, chewing on him all the time. So just start thinking of your wife from the minute we step out the door and keep it up."

  Kil nodded.

  "That won't be hard," he said.

  "Now, about the way you act. Unstabs don't just wander through the area not looking at anything. They're out to make something, or keep what they already made. They watch all the time, everything. Keep your eyes going and act suspicious of anybody."

  "Right," said Kil.

  "You got one point in your favor. You can look at someone as if you want to cut their guts out. Now, that's good for the average rigger you'll bump into because it fits down here. But if you run across anyone who saw you before you saw Ace, watch your face, because they'll remember that expression as something special to you."

  Kil sighed.

  "I've been trying to control that all my life," he said.r />
  "Well, now it's important. Now, about the talk—the gabby .low. This area here is riggertown; and everybody in it's a rigger—or thinks he is. When one rigger takes another for something, that makes the second rigger a juby. Anybody who doesn't know riggertown or gets rigged is a juby. Anybody who's Stab. is Big S. . . ." and so on.

  Finally, the fifth day after Dekko had brought him back to the apartment, they were ready.

  "You go first," Dekko told him. "Now, you know the route to the Terminal. It's eight to one no one'll even look twice at you. But if there's trouble, just stall. I'll be about forty yards behind you and I'll come up and take care of it. I'll say that again. Wait for me. Clear?"

  "What about you?" asked Kil. "What if someone recognizes you?"

  Dekko laughed noiselessly.

  "Nobody's seen me. Those two Crims of Ace's were blind before they knew what hit them. Let's roll it."

  They went out. After all this, the trip to the Terminal was anti-climactic. No one so much as looked at Kil.

  CHAPTER SIX

  It was different travelling, Kil found, after his recent experience with the Unstabs. That and the training session Dekko had put him through had had the effect of rendering him suddenly and almost painfully aware of the Unstab point of view. For the first time he knew what it felt like to be conscious of accepted society as something apart from himself. He felt it and something deep and rebellious within him resented it. He looked around at his fellow passengers, once the rocket had reached peak altitude and started its long glide toward the west coast, with naked eyes. Each individual struck him, for the first time, as a living enigma, a walking puzzle box of thought and flesh. What would this man do, or that woman, if Kil were to walk up to them this minute and tell them what had happened to him? Which ones were Unstab? Which ones were members of some Society or other? Which ones were, perhaps, World Police out of uniform or on some secret duty? The normally homogeneous structure of society seemed to Kil suddenly broken, shattered into a million fragments—into four billion odd fragments—each one, one of the world's four billion odd population. And Ellen lost among them. Lost . . . lost . . . lost. . . .

  They came down at the foot of the mountains in Pasadena, in the Arroyo Seco, where there had once been a famous stadium. And he and Dekko took a cab to headquarters, of the Thieves Guild.

  This, it turned out, was a large, rambling, temporary structure made of twenty-year plastic, high up on the side of the mountains. Inside the front door was an anteroom and a surprisingly beautiful blonde woman in early middle age. She and Dekko spoke together for a moment in low tones beyond Kil's hearing. Then she rose from the desk where she had been sitting and walked across the room to a door which she opened with her own Key.

  "Go ahead," she said. "He's in." And she stood aside to let them pass. Following Dekko through the door Kil caught his breath and stopped dead with an exclamation.

  Sitting facing them in an oversized chair was a huge man with a completely bald head above a sad oriental face. He sat as if weary with the weight of his great body; and "all the furniture of the room about him, like the chair he sat on, was built oversize, outsize, larger than human. The effect was not so much to strike the stranger with surprise at something so bizarre and unusual, as to make him feel that these overlarge proportions were in fact the true ones, and that it was he who was diminished, reduced, brought down to childhood's size again. Like children, Kil and Dekko approached the giant; but if this was not without its profound effect on Kil, it appeared to affect Dekko not at all.

  "Kil," said Dekko, stopping before the chair. "This is Toy."

  The obsidian eyes in the wide yellow face turned to focus on Kil.

  "Yes, that woman's my wife," said Toy, without preamble, in a bass as heavy as himself. "I'll tell you that to satisfy your curiosity right from the start. She's my wife and she ioves me. I don't know why. Any normal woman would have left me long ago."

  Kil, startled and embarrassed by this unexpected attack, found himself suddenly wordless. He stared at the giant, caught too suddenly and unpreparedly to be angry. Dekko smiled.

  "Fishing, Toy?" he asked.

  "Only observing," replied Toy. "How many people do you think have come through that door or some similar door, and seen me, and not wondered about her?" His eyes went back to Kil. "Excuse me. It's my one bitterness. Like King Midas who turned everything he touched to gold. Everything I touch," his huge right hand curled around the end of his chairarm and the tough plastic bent like cardboard, "turns to fragments."

  He let go of the chair arm.

  "Excuse me again," he said. "You've come at a bad time. I've been pitying myself. What can I do for you?"

  Dekko nodded at Kil.

  "Him," he said, succinctly.

  "Him?" echoed Toy. The black eyes took in Kil for a long moment. "You look as if you had a problem, young man. How do you like it—this world, this ant-swarm, this mechanized midden heap, this modern age of ours? Does it suit you? Can you find accomplishment in our better mousetraps, art in our improved plumbing, glory in our conquest of bloodless mathematics, and adventure in our antiseptic, well-lighted and air-conditioned vice dens? What purposeful lives we lead in our inoculated trottings to and fro about the world. Don't you agree?"

  "It looks like you don't," said Kil.

  "Me?" said the giant. "I'm an anachronism. No, by God, I flatter myself. I'm a living fossil, a most excellent specimen of Tyrannosaurus Rex, claws clipped, teeth capped, and set to holding hanks of yarn for old ladies with knitting on their mind. I'm a superb body in an age when bodies have gone out of style. What a successful chieftan, what an outstanding hero I would have made at any time up to the last few hundred years, before the world became so cluttered up. What a Khan, what a Varanger, what a Viking. Just think, I could have been a Greek legend, like Hercules, or a Roman Emperor of the Legions like Maximilian. No, forget fame. Think just what a happy cave man I would have made. I can break the neck of a bull with one twist of my arms; what an excellent provider of meat for my tribe. I can handle a bow with a three hundred and fifty pound pull and send an arrow more than a mile. What a pillar of strength in time of trouble. And modesty forbids that I tell you about my capabilities with a stone axe. You may possibly find me a trifle bitter; and you're correct. In a world of future-happy people, my future is all in the past."

  Dekko shifted restlessly.

  "How about it?" he said.

  "Nothing. If she passed you, it's all right. What's your name, young man?"

  "Kil Bruner," said Kil.

  "Kil, there's only one requirement for entrance into the Guild. Once you're in, the Guild protects you and you're expected to help anyone in the Guild. None of this nonsense about what's mine is yours; and all you have is mine. But there's one condition. And that is, you have to think over the reasons for your entering for fifteen minutes, without speaking and without moving, while I watch you. If you still want to enter at the end of that time, you're in."

  "That's all right," said Kil.

  "Good. Come on, then." With astounding lightness, Toy rose to his feet; and now, standing, his great size was all the more apparent, for he was built thick and broad, with squat body and relatively short bow legs. His head towered more than a foot above Kil's. Kil looked at Dekko, but Dekko did not move, except to gesture in Toy's direction. Kil turned and followed the giant.

  Toy faced his Key into the cup of a further door that let them into a smaller room. It was not a bad size as rooms go, but Toy filled it. It was bare of furnishings except for two chairs, one built to Toy's outsize dimensions, another of normal proportions. The large chair sat off to one side; and the smaller faced a far wall on which was a large clock whose second hand crept slowly around the face.

  "Sit down," said Toy, taking the large chair. "And think."

  Kil settled himself. He was aware of the giant lolling back and regarding him, but Toy was not directly in his line of vision and Kil made no attempt to look at him. Instead,
he sat back and looked at the clock.

  The second hand was moving around the dial, with the inexorable slowness of all second hands. It made no sound, and there was no sound elsewhere in the room. Toy moved not at all, and even the sound of his breathing was inaudible to Kil's ears. Kil watched the clock.

  He had not really intended to think. He had accepted and dismissed this minor ordeal in the same moment. It was merely, he thought, a matter of sitting still for fifteen minutes, and that would be all. He found it was not that simple.

  Slowly, the seconds began to stretch out. Though he knew that in fact no such thing was happening, it seemed that the second hand was beginning to slow its crawl. His body, at first comfortable, began to protest against its forced inactivity. The sound of his own breathing, the sound of his heart beating, grew larger in the stillness until they seemed to thunder in his ears. Little itches and cramps came and went and multiplied in mounting protest until they threatened to force him to move in spite of all his will.

  He saw the danger now. Grimly, he set himself to combat it, and the clamoring hordes of the body, defeated, drew back and relapsed into silence. Before his fixed eyes, the hands of the clock had marked off only a little more than four minutes.

  And now, with the body out of the way, came a new assault upon his self-control. The mind, which had been lying quietly inactive during these first few minutes, now began to stir itself with little fears and doubts.

  Why was this test? What was he doing here? Was he actually taking the right way to solve his problem? The rising tide of his thoughts swept him inexorably to the heart of his troubles. He had not intended to think about it, but now his mind ran free like a hound unleashed; and he realized suddenly that this was the true test, that the will power that had gained him his victory over a rebel body could be no help with this. The doubts and fears came thick and fast. His vision seemed strangely blurred as if he were on the verge of passing into unconsciousness; and through it he could see, in contrast to his racing thoughts, a second hand on the wall clock that seemed almost to have stopped.