DUE PROCESS

by Algis Budrys

  Traven picked up the check, studied it fascinatedly for a moment, and put it in his billfold. “Er… thank you, Frank.”

  “Think nothing of it, Thad,” Hertzog said, standing up. He left the two five dollar bills on the table and motioned to the waiter. “I’ll see you at the polls,” he said to Traven.

  “Ah… Frank… suppose Phillips challenges me on my assertions?”

  “Well, if it worries you, they’re perfectly safe. Matter of public record. Study the Standard & Poore and the Dun & Bradstreet reports for the last thirty years. It’s all in there.” He waved a hand in farewell and left the cocktail lounge.

  Frank Hertzog lived in a blister apartment, two rooms anchored to the side of one of the ITI building’s pylons, four hundred feet below sea level. It was quiet down there, and hard to get to. He stood in his kitchenette, carefully heating a pan of cocoa until it was just warmed. He poured the cocoa into a stone mug with half an inch of scotch in its bottom and went out into his living room, biting the corner out of a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich spread with mustard. “How’d it go today?” he said to Hoke Bannister, who was standing in the middle of the rug and trying his hand with the dart board.

  “Well, ol’ Thad Traven’s got the Conservatives in a fit, and the city in an uproar. Can’t turn around without being hit by a Traven ad. Sonny Weams is telling jokes on Phillips, ‘Are You Smarter Than Your Wife?’ is full of questions about freight tonnages, and. Hashknife Al is racing Cactus in the Dakota land rush.”

  “The Dakota land rush!” Hertzog shook his head. “Those were the days, Hoke! When a man wanted to travel somewhere, he climbed on his trusty old paint and hunkered off into the sunset. That reminds me—sign this, will you?” He pulled a wrinkled sheaf of paper out of his hip pocket and handed it over.

  “What is it?” Bannister asked.

  “A messenger bond. An officer of the company has to sign it.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “I’m the messenger. I’m leaving for Basle in twenty minutes with thirty thousand dollars. It’s a little before Keller’s deadline, but I imagine they won’t mind getting it a few days ahead of time.”

  Bannister scrawled his name in the space indicated and put the bond away. “Got a plane waiting?”

  “No. You don’t get any sensation of travel, going that fast. I’ve got a few hours’ time. I’m going to take the tube.”

  “Don’t forget to come back before the polls close tomorrow. Every vote counts, you know.”

  “Yes. What am I running for?”

  “District assemblyman. That’s almost as good as dogcatcher.”

  “I was afraid of that.” He picked up his overnight bag and pushed the buzzer for the pylon elevator, which hissed to a stop and appeared behind a sliding door in the living room wall. “Mind the store,” he said.

  “Woof,” Bannister answered.

  The tube terminal was a hundred yards square and a hundred feet high, with two circular doors, massive, twenty yards in diameter, dripping with condensation across their bolt-studded faces, side by side like a pair of shut eyes in the far wall. Two railed cradles rested on girdered feet, extending the tubes’ profile into the vault, and threw their complex shadows upon the worn concrete flooring, where the maintenance crew swarmed. There was a passenger platform built out from the wall, its forward edge curved in and under to fit flush against the nearside cradle. Hertzog waited patiently, along with a small group of other people carrying suitcases.

  In the cradle, the train was being made up. It consisted of three cars, two of them freight capsules and the third with a skimpy passenger compartment at one end, and at the moment all the freight holds were open, clamshell doors ajar like rudimentary wings held aloft down the train’s length. Loading cranes dropped down from the roof, lowering pre-packaged bundles of freight into calculated spaces in the holds, so that the interior of the train gradually built up into a solid mass much like one of those key-chain puzzles in which odd-shaped pieces of plastic interlock to form pistols, airplanes, and other charms. Shaped like a chrysalis jointed at two points, the train lay waiting to slide into the air lock, blind except for the three grimy portholes of the passenger compartment. The chamber echoed to every dropped tool and every scramble of a maintenance man’s shoes up or down the cradle’s latticework. The crane cables whined through their sheaves, and the stevedores bellowed at each other over the racket.

  Each of the cranes seemed to bring down its last load at the same moment. A siren wound its way up to maximum audible pitch, and the clamshell doors first banged themselves shut and then pulled their retracting arms in after them. The passenger door spat open, and Hertzog boarded with his fellow passengers. As soon as the last of them was inside, the door thudded home. They found seats and the train started without preamble, inching laboriously through the raised air lock hatch.

  The hatch closed behind them, and they waited in darkness. The pumps evacuated the lock, and then the tubeway door dilated, the sound of metal scraping over metal transmitted through the train with uncompromising clarity.

  “A couple of bucks a week extra for oil wouldn’t do the city any harm,” Hertzog muttered to himself. The warning hooter made him drop his feet into the stirrups. The train slid forward, seemed to find its footing and shot ahead, motors singing, building up acceleration with considerable speed as it dropped down the initial incline, then, when it hit the long level stretch, settling down to a steady two hundred miles per hour, down the evacuated tube under the sea, toward the long, bleak, deadly coastal plain over which the tube ran within its massive concrete shield, toward the mountains which were the western frontier of life in Europe.

  The line was single-tracked except where it paired at the terminals. And just before the tube broke the surface at the shore of France, there was a siding into which Hertzog’s train was switched while an outbound train rumbled by. Hertzog peered curiously out through the portholes at the emergency platform along the siding. There were, supposedly, elaborate automatic provisions for shunting off trains with internal malfunctions and holding them here, just as there were safety blocks which kept two trains from meeting head-on in the tube proper. They seemed to work—either because everything was so efficiently designed or because there was a high esprit de corps among the air-suited trackwalkers who maintained the right of way.

  Here on the shunt track, idling beside the wall of the main tube, the train was once more in an air lock, so that the passengers could, if need be, escape from a disaster to the dubious shelter of a substation which did not communicate with the surface. Hertzog got out of his chair and pulled the switch on the compartment door. It hissed back with an explosion of compressed air, opening on a bleak concrete platform with rust stains washed over its surface and grime everywhere.

  “Please,” a recorded voice said over the train’s automatic public address system, “Do not exit except in genuine emergency. Please close the door.”

  Hertzog shrugged and reclosed the door. He went back to his seat. “Just wondered if it could be done,” he said innocently to no one in particular.

  Basle was disquieting for Frank Hertzog. For one thing, the buildings straggled every which way up hill and down dale. For another, everybody wore drab, soberly cut clothing. “Look like a bunch of bankers,” Hertzog muttered to himself, getting on an elevator in the liquor distributor’s office building.

  “I beg your pardon, sir?” the elevator operator said unctuously, with a repressed sniff for Hertzog’s clothing.

  “Fourteen, Charlie,” Hertzog said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You in somebody’s army, Charlie?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You forgot to say ‘Sir.’”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “Horsefeathers!”

  “I beg—”

  “Stop it, Charlie. I couldn’t stand it. Why don’t you come on out to Atlantis and get yourself a decent job?”

  “Atlantis, sir?”


  There was no mistaking the connotation in the operator’s voice.

  “Y’know, we only eat babies on ritual occasions, any more. Most of us have lost our taste for ‘em entirely, and have to sort of force ourselves. Personally, for instance, I don’t think they’re any good at all, boiled, the way they serve ‘em. Roast, now, that’s a different story, but you hardly ever get ‘em that way, any m—”

  “Fourteen, sir,” the operator said stiffly.

  “Thank you, Charlie,” Hertzog said, and stepped out facing the hall door of the liquor house. “Don’t take any wooden propaganda, now.”

  The president of the liquor wholesalers was a man named Mott, with a receding chin and prominent teeth. “Mr. Hertzog,” he said, fluttering his hands, “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Well, then, say it,” Hertzog drawled, leaning back in his chair.

  “Ah… it’s not usual for the customer’s Chairman of the Board to personally deliver so much cash.”

  “Ahead of time,” Hertzog added.

  “Ah… yes. Now, well, frankly, Mr. Hertzog, I don’t know—”

  “Weren’t you expecting it?”

  “Expecting it? Oh, yes, yes, we certainly were, but not until—”

  “You can’t ship until the 15th, even with the cash on hand today, is that it?”

  “Well, yes,” Mott said gratefully. “I’m gratified that you understand.”

  “Yes,” Hertzog said. “So am I. We could have gone around in circles forever, couldn’t we?” He stood up and shook Mott’s hand. “Have to be pushing along now. Pleasure to’ve met you, Mott.” He strolled out, caught a taxi to the tube terminal, and went home, whistling a song which began with: “If all little girls were like Mercedes Benzes—”

  It was well over a week, now, since he had been elected assemblyman for his district, and Frank Hertzog had gotten accustomed to the idea. It was nine o’clock on the night of July 14th, and he was riding down the pylon elevator with Hoke Bannister.

  “So it’s pretty well settled down all around,” he said. “With a new administration in Atlantis, the Mainland governments are holding off on any ideas they might have had about embargoing freight through the tube. There are three American shippers who are going to route their hard goods through here, and if that works out as well as it ought to, there’ll be more. The transatlantic airfreighters don’t care one way or the other, so long as we don’t try to build a fleet of cargo airplanes of our own, and why should we? Our forte’s quantity, not luxury.”

  “So Atlantis hasn’t got a competitor left in the world, that it can’t stand off on a fair basis, right?” Bannister said.

  “Well… yeah,” Hertzog said.

  “Here’s your place.”

  “Let’s keep going on down. I want to drop in on the terminal for a minute.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, anyway, it looks like Atlantis isn’t going to go bust for some time. That’s nice. I plan to stay in this town. The Mainland’s all right to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. They take money too seriously over there. You wouldn’t believe how greedy they can get, sometimes—they’d rather risk losing out on something really good than let thirty thousand bucks go by.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Uh-huh.” The elevator sighed open at the terminal level. Hertzog strolled casually toward a train that was making up. “But I don’t want you thinking every Mainlander’s a penny-snatcher with no real drive. Take those boys with their zeppelin line from Capetown. That took a little something to dream up. Their rates could come to within shouting distance of the tube. And what if there wasn’t any tube… ah, there, Mr. Keller!” he sang out, slapping the liquor salesman on the shoulder.

  The prim little man threw a startled glance backward. “Mr. Hertzog!” he gasped. “Are you taking this train?”

  “Thinking of it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Nothing like a trip abroad to widen the range of a man’s interests, I always say,” Hertzog murmured, ushering Keller and Bannister aboard the train. He guided the little man to a seat, pressed him gently down into it, and fastened his seat belt for him, talking all the while. “Actually, I’m much more impressed with tube travel than I am by aircraft. You can pretty much see what’s going on, from an airplane or, say, a zeppelin, but a tube train’s different. Here are all these mysterious rushing noises, and machinery and things, going on all around you in the dark, and all you can do is sit there and trust to it that everybody’s done their job right and nothing’s going to go wrong. That’s the kind of thing that really puts a strain on your credentials as a Twenty-first Century man—the implicit faith in mechanisms you yourself don’t control. Isn’t that so, Mr. Keller? Sit down, Hoke, we’re about to start, I think.”

  The train hunched into the air lock, and then slid out. Bannister was grinning at Hertzog. Keller was pale and silent, a satchel between his feet.

  “But, you know, Mr. Keller, when you come right down to it, it’s the little things that really classify a culture’s technology. We tend to be impressed by big, obvious mechanisms that clank and groan and tell you they’re working, but the really efficient machine shouldn’t intrude itself on civilized activities like conversation or high-level business, and shouldn’t require elaborate installations that advertise its presence. For example, Mr. Keller, we have photostat machines now that can progressively work their way through a bundle of documents, or the contents of a brief case, and photograph each side of each sheet of paper, in turn, without anyone’s knowing it. Right through the brief case, if need be. You can build that kind of machine into a wall, or a picture on that wall, or into almost anything, with the photographic head built into the ring on a man’s finger.” He reached into his breast pocket and took out the photostat Paulette had put on top of the stack. “Yours, Mr. Keller?”

  Keller took it in shaky fingers and looked at it. “This is really too bad,” he whispered. “Really too bad.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Hertzog said. He turned to Bannister. “That’s an escrow agreement between Mr. Keller as a private party and the zeppelin freighting company. I wondered whether he’d dare trust it to a safe deposit box, and it turned out he didn’t. It calls for a payment of one hundred thousand dollars—and here I’m quoting exactly—‘upon the occasion of interruption in Atlantis-Mainland tube service for a period beginning midnight, July 14th.’ It’s in the nature of a bet. Mr. Keller has wagered that such an interruption will occur, and the zeppelin company has wagered that it won’t.”

  Bannister said: “Oh?”

  “Quite. Hoke, if you’ll be good enough to peep into Mr. Keller’s satchel, there, I’m confident you’ll find what we might call an infernal machine.”

  “Sorry,” Keller whispered, shrunken into his seat, his blue lips barely moving. “I’m sorry.”

  “Cheer up, Mr. Keller,” Hertzog said. He stood up and unscrewed the bulb of the lamp over their three chairs, and replaced it with a socket adaptor. From another pocket, he took a personal intercom and plugged the antenna into the socket. He dialed a telephone number. “Mr. Traven please. Frank Hertzog calling. Wake him up.” He waited, grinning at the other passengers in the compartment, while Bannister, with respectfully raised eyebrows, dismantled Mr. Keller’s time bomb.

  “Traven? I want the tubes shut down for repairs. That’s right. Twenty-four hours from this midnight. Service and repair. Uh-huh. Vitally necessary. Results will be improved service. Yes, siree. And while you’re ordering that service, have ‘em put in a platform watchman at the siding station, and draft plans for doubletracking and eliminating the siding as soon as they can. Yeah. We’ll chip in, sure. Thank you. G’night, Traven.”

  He unplugged the intercom and replaced the bulb. Handing the intercom and adaptor to Keller, he said: “All ITI employees carry these. Here’s yours. Good for anywhere in the world, out in the open, and any electrical connection to Atlantis underground or under water.”

 
; “You… you’re not going to—”

  “Take revenge? On you? You were only the zep company’s tool. You can make the agreement stand up in court. Collect your hundred thousand from them. They’re the guys I want to jolt.”

  “Oh.”

  “Time bomb, all right,” Bannister said. “Set to go off at midnight.”

  “Uh-huh. You know what this means, Hoke, with the tube shut down for the next day?”

  “What?”

  “It means we’re going to have to fly back.”

  “Very simple business,” Hertzog explained, his feet up on one end of his living room couch. “The zep boys had to use a man who knew the tube and habitually rode it Keller filled their bill. But he was a company man, so he told his bosses. The bosses (A) didn’t like Atlantis or Atlanteans any more than any other Mainland business did, before we changed city governments, and (B) were greedy to get me to pay for one more shipment, which they knew they couldn’t deliver because the tube would be blown up. With the tube gone, Atlantis wouldn’t have swung any weight with Mainland courts. I could have tried to sue for my money and never gotten within a mile of it.

  “Now, Keller was figuring on the long view. He had his hundred thousand in escrow, which looked like a sure thing to his fussy mind, and he probably would have gotten a little more for delivering his company’s business to the zeppelin line. Then there was his commission on the liquor sale, and his extra commission for making a sale on which there wouldn’t have to be a delivery. A little bit from everybody, you might say.

  “But—he came up here and told me that cock and bull story, and told me too much. He even told me when the bomb would go off—just safely after the last night train from Atlantis pulled into Basle. Well, that was a little too much. He tried to get too many things out of too many people, and he fell on his face. We were able to scrag him. Greed, Hoke, is not a useful emotion in a man who wants to make money.”