“Maybe not, Van, but you know I’ve got to try. Besides,” he went on, “why can’t I win? You said yourself that I could call on the whole United States Army.”
Van Kleeck grinned triumphantly. “You see that?” He held up a pear-shaped electric push button, attached to a long cord. “If I push that, it will blow a path right straight across the ways—blow it to Kingdom Come. And just for good measure I’ll take an ax, and wreck this control station before I leave.”
Gaines wished wholeheartedly that he knew more about psychiatry. Well, he’d just have to do his best, and trust to horse sense to give him the right answers. “That’s pretty drastic, Van, but I don’t see how we can give up.”
“No? You’d better have another think. If you force me to blow up the road, how about all the people that will be blown up along with it?”
Gaines thought furiously. He did not doubt that Van Kleeck would carry out his threat; his very phraseology, the childish petulance of “If you force me to do this—” betrayed the dangerous irrationality of his mental processes. And such an explosion anywhere in the thickly populated Sacramento Sector would be likely to wreck one, or more, apartment houses, and would be certain to kill shopkeepers on the included segment of strip twenty, as well as chance bystanders. Van was absolutely right; he dare not risk the lives of bystanders who were not aware of the issue and had not consented to the hazard—even if the road never rolled again.
For that matter, he did not relish chancing major damage to the road itself, but it was the danger to innocent life that left him helpless.
A tune ran through his head, “Hear them hum; watch them run. Oh, our work is never done—” What to do? What to do? “While you ride; while you glide; we are—”
This wasn’t getting anyplace.
He turned back to the screen. “Look, Van, you don’t want to blow up the road unless you have to, I’m sure. Neither do I. Suppose I come up to your headquarters, and we talk this thing over. Two reasonable men ought to be able to make a settlement.”
Van Kleeck was suspicious. “Is this some sort of a trick?”
“How can it be? I’ll come alone, and unarmed, just as fast as my car can get there.”
“How about your men?”
“They will sit where they are until I’m back. You can put out observers to make sure of it.”
Van Kleeck stalled for a moment, caught between the fear of a trap, and the pleasure of having his erstwhile superior come to him to sue for terms. At last he grudgingly consented.
Gaines left his instructions and told Davidson what he intended to do. “If I’m not back within an hour, you’re on your own, Dave.”
“Be careful, Chief.”
“I will.”
He evicted the cadet driver from the reconnaissance car and ran it down the ramp into the causeway, then headed north and gave it the gun. Now he would have a chance to collect his thoughts, even at two hundred miles per hour. Suppose he pulled off this trick—there would still have to be some changes made. Two lessons stood out like sore thumbs: First, the strips must be cross-connected with safety interlocks so that adjacent strips would slow down, or stop, if a strip’s speed became dangerously different from those adjacent. No repetition of what happened on twenty!
But that was elementary, a mere mechanical detail. The real failure had been in men, Well, the psychological classification tests must be improved to insure that the roads employed only conscientious, reliable men. But hell’s bells, that was just exactly what the present classification tests were supposed to insure beyond question. To the best of his knowledge there had never been a failure from the improved Hunim-Wadsworth-Burton method—not until today in the Sacramento Sector. How had Van Kleeck gotten one whole sector of temperament-classified men to revolt?
It didn’t make sense.
Personnel did not behave erratically without a reason. One man might be unpredictable, but in large numbers, they were as dependable as machines, or figures. They could be measured, examined, classified. His inner eye automatically pictured the personnel office, with its rows of filing cabinets, its clerks—He’d got it! He’d got it! Van Kleeck, as Chief Deputy, was ex officio personnel officer for the entire road!
It was the only solution that covered all the facts. The personnel officer alone had the perfect opportunity to pick out all the bad apples and concentrate them in one barrel. Gaines was convinced beyond any reasonable doubt that there had been skullduggery, perhaps for years, with the temperament classification tests, and that Van Kleeck had deliberately transferred the kind of men he needed to one sector, after falsifying their records.
And that taught another lesson, tighter tests for officers, and no officer to be trusted with classification and assignment without close supervision and inspection. Even he, Gaines, should be watched in that respect. Qui custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard those selfsame guardians? Latin might be obsolete, but those old Romans weren’t dummies.
He at last knew wherein he had failed, and he derived melancholy pleasure from the knowledge. Supervision and inspection, check and re-check, was the answer. It would be cumbersome and inefficient, but it seemed that adequate safeguards always involved some loss of efficiency.
He should not have entrusted so much authority to Van Kleeck without knowing more about him. He still should know more about him. He touched the emergency-stop button, and brought the car to a dizzying halt. “Relay station! See if you can raise my office.”
Dolores’ face looked out from the screen. “You’re still there—good!” he told her. “I was afraid you’d gone home.”
“I came back, Mr. Gaines.”
“Good girl. Get me Van Kleeck’s personal file jacket. I want to see his classification record.”
She was back with it in exceptionally short order and read from it the symbols and percentages. He nodded repeatedly as the data checked his hunches—masked introvert-inferiority complex. It checked.
“ ‘Comment of the Board:’ ” she read, “ ‘In spite of the potential instability shown by maxima A, and D on the consolidated profile curve, the Board is convinced that this officer is, nevertheless, fitted for duty. He has an exceptionally fine record, and is especially adept in handling men. He is therefore recommended for retention and promotion.”
“That’s all, Dolores. Thanks.”
“Yes, Mr. Gaines!”
“I’m off for a showdown. Keep your fingers crossed.”
“But Mr. Gaines—” Back in Fresno, Dolores stared wide-eyed at an empty screen.
“Take me to Mr. Van Kleeck!”
The man addressed took his gun out of Gaines’ ribs—reluctantly, Gaines thought—and indicated that the Chief Engineer should precede him up the stairs. Gaines climbed out of the car, and complied.
Van Kleeck had set himself up in the sector control room proper, rather than the administrative office. With him were half a dozen men, all armed.
“Good evening, Director Van Kleeck.” The little man swelled visibly at Gaines’ acknowledgment of his assumed rank.
“We don’t go in much around here for titles,” he said, with ostentatious casualness. “Just call me Van. Sit down, Gaines.”
Gaines did so. It was necessary to get those other men out. He looked at them with an expression of bored amusement. “Can’t you handle one unarmed man by yourself, Van? Or don’t the functionalists trust each other?”
Van Kleeck’s face showed his annoyance, but Gaines’ smile was undaunted. Finally the smaller man picked up a pistol from his desk, and motioned toward the door. “Get out, you guys!”
“But Van—”
“Get out, I said!”
When they were alone, Van Kleeck picked up the electric push button which Gaines had seen in the visor screen, and pointed his pistol at his former chief. “O.K.,” he growled, “try any funny stuff, and off it goes! What’s your proposition?”
; Gaines’ irritating smile grew broader. Van Kleeck scowled. “What’s so damn funny?” he said.
Gaines granted him an answer. “You are, Van—honest, this is rich. You start a functionalist revolution, and the only function you can think of to perform is to blow up the road that justifies your title. Tell me,” he went on, “what is it you are so scared of?”
“I am not afraid!”
“Not afraid? You? Sifting there, ready to commit hara-kiri with that toy push button, and you tell me that you aren’t afraid. If your buddies knew how near you are to throwing away what they’ve fought for, they’d shoot you in a second. You’re afraid of them, too, aren’t you?”
Van Kleek thrust the push button away from him, and stood up; “I am not afraid!” he screamed, and came around the desk toward Gaines.
Gaines sat where he was, and laughed. “But you are! You’re afraid of me, this minute. You’re afraid I’ll have you on the carpet for the way you do your job. You’re afraid the cadets won’t salute you. You’re afraid they are laughing behind your back. You’re afraid of using the wrong fork at dinner. You’re afraid people are looking at you—and you are afraid that they won’t notice you.”
“I am not!” he protested. “You—You dirty, stuck-up snob! Just because you went to a high-hat school you think you’re better than anybody.” He choked, and became incoherent, fighting to keep back tears of rage. “You, and your nasty little cadets—”
Gaines eyed him cautiously. The weakness in the man’s character was evident now—he wondered why he had not seen it before. He recalled how ungracious Van Kleeck had been one time when he had offered to help him with an intricate piece of figuring.
The problem now was to play on his weakness, to keep him so preoccupied that he would not remember the peril-laden push button. He must be caused to center the venom of his twisted outlook on Gaines, to the exclusion of every other thought.
But he must not goad him too carelessly, or a shot from across the room might put an end to Gaines, and to any chance of avoiding a bloody, wasteful struggle for control of the road.
Gaines chuckled. “Van,” he said, “you are a pathetic little shrimp. That was a dead give-away. I understand you perfectly; you’re a third-rater, Van, and all your life you’ve been afraid that someone would see through you, and send you back to the foot of the class. Director—pfui! If you are the best the functionalists can offer, we can afford to ignore them—they’ll fold up from their own rotten inefficiency.” He swung around in his chair, deliberately turning his back on Van Kleeck and his gun.
Van Kleeck advanced on his tormentor, halted a few feet away, and shouted, “You—I’ll show you. I’ll put a bullet in you; that’s what I’ll do!”
Gaines swung back around, got up, and walked steadily toward him. “Put that popgun down before you hurt yourself.”
Van Kleeck retreated a step. “Don’t you come near me!” he screamed. “Don’t you come near me—or I’ll shoot you—see if I don’t!”
This is it, thought Gaines, and dived.
The pistol went off alongside his ear. Well, that one didn’t get him. They were on the floor. Van Kleeck was hard to hold, for a little man. Where was the gun? There! He had it. He broke away.
Van Kleeck did not get up. He lay sprawled on the floor, tears streaming out of his closed eyes, blubbering like a frustrated child.
Gaines looked at him with something like compassion in his eyes, and hit him carefully behind the ear with the butt of the pistol. He walked over to the door, and listened for a moment, then locked it cautiously.
The cord from the push button led to the control board. He examined the hookup, and disconnected it carefully. That done, he turned to the televisor at the control desk, and called Fresno.
“Okay, Dave,” he said, “Let ’em attack now—and for the love of Pete, hurry!” Then he cleared the screen, not wishing his watch officer to see how he was shaking.
Back in Fresno the next morning Gaines paced around the Main Control Room with a fair degree of contentment in his heart. The roads were rolling—before long they would be up to speed again. It had been a long night. Every engineer, every available cadet, had been needed to, make the inch-by-inch inspection of Sacramento Sector which he had required. Then they had to cross-connect around two wrecked subsector control boards. But the roads were rolling—he could feel their rhythm up through the floor. He stopped beside a haggard, stubbly-bearded man. “Why don’t you go home, Dave?” be asked. “McPherson can carry on from here.”
“How about yourself, Chief? You don’t look like a June bride.”
“Oh, I’ll catch a nap in my office after a bit. I called my wife, and told her I couldn’t make it. She’s coming down here to meet me.”
“Was she sore?”
“Not very. You know how women are.” He turned back to the instrument board, and watched the clicking ‘busy-bodies’ assembling the data from six sectors. San Diego Circle, Angeles Sector, Bakersfield Sector, Fresno Sector, Stockton—Stockton? Stockton! Good grief! Blekinsop! He had left a cabinet minister of Australia cooling his heels in the Stockton office all night long!
He started for the door, while calling over his shoulder, “Dave, will you order a car for me? Make it a fast one!” He was across the hail, and had his head inside his private office before Davidson could acknowledge the order.
“Dolores!”
“Yes, Mr. Gaines.”
“Call my wife, and tell her I had to go to Stockton. If she’s already left home, just have her wait here. And Dolores—”
“Yes, Mr. Gaines?”
“Calm her down.”
She bit her lip, but her face was impassive. “Yes, Mr. Gaines.”
“That’s a good girl.” He was out and started down the stairway. When he reached road level, the sight of the rolling strips warmed him inside and made him feel almost cheerful.
He strode briskly away toward a door marked ACCESS DOWN, whistling softly to himself. He opened the door, and the rumbling, roaring rhythm from ‘down inside’ seemed to pick up the tune even as it drowned out the sound of his whistling.
Hie! Hie! Hee!
The rotor men are we—
Check off your sectors loud and strong!
One! Two! Three!
Anywhere you go
You are bound to know
That your roadways are rolling along!
ASYLUM
A. E. Van Vogt
Asylum contributes a fresh idea to the literature of vampirism, something that hasn’t happened since Dracula was written! Further, Mr. Van Vogt brings forth the unpleasant and revolutionary idea that the status of intellectual eminence is determined only by comparative environment. He accepts the hypothesis that man is very low on the universal scale of evolved intelligence. Further, he postulates man as being in the care of beings who, while possessing an I.Q. of at least 300, are, in their own worlds, regarded as morons!
* * *
1
Indecision was dark in the man’s thoughts as he walked across the spaceship control room to the cot where the woman lay so taut and so still. He bent over her; he said in his deep voice:
“We’re slowing down, Merla.”
No answer, no movement, not a quiver in her delicate, abnormally blanched cheeks. Her fine nostrils dilated ever so slightly with each measured breath. That was all.
The Dreegh lifted her arm, then let it go. It dropped to her lap like a piece of lifeless wood, and her body remained rigid and unnatural. Carefully, he put his fingers to one eye, raised the lid, peered into it. It stared back at him, a clouded, sightless blue.
He straightened, and stood very still there in the utter silence of the hurtling ship. For a moment, then, in the intensity of his posture and in the dark ruthlessness of his lean, hard features, he seemed the veritable embodiment of grim, icy calculation.
He thought grayly: “If I revived
her now, she’d have more time to attack me, and more strength. If I waited, she’d be weaker — “
Slowly, he relaxed. Some of the weariness of the years he and this woman had spent together in the dark vastness of space came to shatter his abnormal logic. Bleak sympathy touched him — and the decision was made.
He prepared an injection, and fed it into her arm. His gray eyes held a steely brightness as he put his lips near the woman’s ear; in a ringing, resonant voice he said:
“We’re near a star system. There’ll be blood, Merla! And life!”
The woman stirred; momentarily, she seemed like a golden-haired doll come alive. No color touched her perfectly formed cheeks, but alertness crept into her eyes. She stared up at him with a hardening hostility, half questioning.
“I’ve been chemical,” she said — and abruptly the doll-like effect was gone. Her gaze tightened on him, and some of the prettiness vanished from her face. Her lips twisted into words.
“It’s damned funny, Jeel, that you’re still O.K. If I thought — “
He was cold, watchful. “Forget it,” he said curtly. “You’re an energy waster, and you know it. Anyway, we’re going to land.”
The flamelike tenseness of her faded. She sat up painfully, but there was a thoughtful look on her face as she said:
“I’m interested in the risks. This is not a Galactic planet, is it?”
“There are no Galactics out here. But there is an Observer. I’ve been catching the secret ultra signals for the last two hours” — a sardonic note entered his voice — “warning all ships to stay clear because the system isn’t ready for any kind of contact with Galactic planets.”
Some of the diabolic glee that was in his thoughts must have communicated through his tone. The woman stared at him, and slowly her eyes widened. She half whispered:
“You mean — “
Adventures in Time and Space Page 76