‘Damned if I know. Many did. It was always one of those things it was comfortable to believe if you could see any reason for believing. Even if you couldn’t.’
He realised that Colley was being polite within his limits to an elderly citizen from the temporal sticks and that he was relieved when the arrival of breakfast trays allowed the subject to wither. Then the Senior said, ‘Alice White disappeared during the night.’
‘Expected. She just about had to be the go-between.’
‘Yes, but Lindley went with her.’
Raft’s utensils clattered on the plate. ‘Christ!’
‘Must be a shock. But why Lindley?’
‘Willingly or kidnapped?’
‘Kidnapped, we think. Certainly drugged; the contact item was left behind in his room.’
‘Clumsy.’
‘Perhaps they didn’t care. Their actions have all stunk of confidence.’
‘Are the others all right?’
‘Your crew? I suppose so. With Lindley gone we decided that having them concentrated here was tantamount to endangering them, so we’ve shipped them back to their own areas. “Countries”, I suppose you’d say.’ Eyes on his plate, he did not see Raft’s expression. ‘In any case their governments were all claiming them; in fact Moscow asked for Kulayev as soon as the first newscast went out.’
Raft hadn’t known about the newscast but that was unimportant beside the immediate shock. ‘In the middle of the bloody night!’
Colley stared. ‘Why not? What difference, night or day? The thing was to get them away, so they’ve been airborne a few hours now.’
Raft was all at once completely, furiously alone, stripped of every familiar thing. ‘You could have let me know before they went! For God’s sake, man, we’ve been together for years!’
Colley complained like one who had breached an unfamiliar code, ‘But you can contact them whenever you want.’ His expression took on sudden inquisitiveness. ‘Or has so much propinquity magnified emotional attachments?’
Whatever he envisioned, he was honestly interested. Raft spluttered coffee and recovered. ‘Senior, have you any close friends?’
‘Of course. The Commissioner, for one; we entered Security together.’
‘And if he were seconded to the other side of the Earth you wouldn’t feel any interest in saying goodbye to him?’
‘ “Goodbye” implies for ever, doesn’t it? We don’t use it much. Where could anyone go that computercom couldn’t locate him in minutes?’
(But Colley had an uneasy inkling of what Raft meant. His face gave no unnecessary information – that was a lifetime’s practice – but his thought fluttered about the words Campion had pushed through bruised lips only minutes ago, when the Senior had reported to him the re-nationalisation of the starmen: ‘Hope hard they stay safe, Laurie; we should have kept them here.’ He had pandered to the Commissioner’s upset condition, pointing out that he could not have refused the national demands, little as he liked the systems of some of the areas involved. Non-interference … Campion’s mask had said, ‘Ah, the ethic!’ as though he spat. There was no need to report a sick man’s reaction. Nor would he tell Raft who, if he didn’t know, couldn’t talk out of turn.)
Raft gave up, appreciating the logic but wishing there were less of it. But we made a habit of sentiment instead of sense and look where it got us. Still, a little empathy would have been welcome even to his cool self-sufficiency; he had never before been beleaguered on a hostile planet.
Colley returned to essentials. ‘Lindley and Alice were picked up from an open square on the edge of the town centre, probably by the same dragonfly that covered the raid here. A dozen people saw them but there’s nothing unusual about a dragonfly pickup.’
‘No chance of tracking them?’
‘None; his suit’s defused. But what do they want of him? Who wants a used-up, out-of-date psychiatrist?’
So much for twentieth-century pride. ‘Heathcote does.’ He said it without thinking, then saw that it was true. ‘He wants the one psychiatrist who knows me backwards and forwards and who may be able to suggest how a rogue mind may occur in a clone.’
‘Reasonable, but why should he have you killed if he wants to investigate? Sounds like cross purposes somewhere.’ Raft had no suggestion; Colley passed on. ‘There’s another item. Some of the kids picked up last night were deep questioned before they were out of hypno. That’s a touchy technique but sometimes it brings up fringe stuff that might be missed. They have a saying in common, a sort of recognition phrase, perhaps – “Peace and love through The Lady”. Suggest anything?’
‘The Virgin Mary?’
Colley was contemptuous. ‘A religion of peace? By blood to the holy throne?’
‘You should read up on Christianity; it wouldn’t be the first time.’
‘Mass paranoia?’
‘Why not? A historical commonplace. Your reconstruction programme isn’t changing human nature, only keeping it busy.’
‘You really mean this?’
‘Really and deadly.’
Colley placed the idea on mental file, though doubtfully, and raised another aspect. ‘The thing turns on the hypno-drugs. They’re all on the Relegated List – unobtainable save by laboratory people and then checked to the last grain. How in hell did they get them?’
‘A criminal mind will find a way to get any damned thing.’
‘But where are the criminals?’
Raft said tiredly, ‘I refuse to believe you haven’t any.’
‘Very few. The criminal mentality is mostly detectable in adolescence, even infancy. Psychologists of your own period did the statistical work, correlating physical and mental traits, and ours took it from there. For twenty years we’ve been picking them up in their teens and re-directing the drives. It isn’t foolproof, but there’s little major crime.’
Raft’s stomach contracted as he extrapolated the statement. A mind loaded with incidental reading recalled Eysenck’s work on the criminal personality and wondered if that had been the genesis of this potentially murderous programme. The permissive, superficially easygoing world possessed every weapon needed to turn it into a concentration camp.
‘I suppose potentially criminal types don’t get into positions of trust.’
‘Generally not.’
‘But one touch of a hypno-drug …?’
‘That brings us full circle. Where does it come from?’
‘Honest fools can be manipulated by criminals and highly responsible IQs can be pathetically foolish outside their specialities. Surely you have manipulative psychologists?’
‘A criminal psych? The therapy system –’
‘Shit to the system. Somebody must get missed, if only by bureaucratic error – somebody kept in hiding, like the clone. Run a check on those located and see what your data banks know about them; the information system should have noted the existence of a unique group and it could be that no one has ever asked the question which would reveal it.’
Colley was on his way before Raft had finished.
The computers spanned the planet in superfast linkage, but the examination took a maddening hour of homing in on the most useful questions. The answers set Colley bellowing, ‘The clone doesn’t exist. It doesn’t bloody well exist!’
Raft said with pleasure, ‘You run such a tight club you think everybody must be a member. Now you know a few never joined in the first place; the clone never signed the register.’
‘Have you a criminal mind? Your ideas hit the nails.’
‘I wouldn’t know; try me.’
‘How could such a group exist without physical detection? Where, on an integrated planet?’
‘In dispersion almost anywhere; never causing comment by never being seen together. You don’t need me to think of that for you. But there would have to be group contacts, so how about uninhabited areas? There must be plenty aside from deserts, mountains, jungles and England.’
‘Movement in and out of t
he areas would be noticed and queried if no relocation permits had been filed.’
‘So they were filed; with suitable excuses. Give a computer system the right kind of pat on the head and it purrs as contentedly as any cat. The Ombudsmen created your problems because they were in a hurry. So they set up systems – good, workable systems, too. But any system is vulnerable at every seam and it inhibits the user from thinking outside it. After a generation of goodwill and cooperation you’ve forgotten dissent; the clone is your warning that peaceful brotherhood is on the way out. You’ll have to start thinking in terms of your own weaknesses.’
If Campion attacked foundations, Campion was a beau ideal and above criticism; Raft attacking them was little better than an enemy. Colley asked with controlled fury, ‘And where shall we look for our weaknesses?’
‘Gangoil, for a start.’ Rapport with Colley had vanished; Raft imagined the Senior repressed an urge to hit him. It was unfortunate but there was worse to come. ‘I mean it. It’s a lead of a sort and it can be followed, but I’ll need help.’
‘You will get it.’
What Raft wanted was insult and he knew it, but it was what he must have. ‘Not from Security but from the civil police. Crime isn’t your real business and it is theirs; if there is expertise available, they’ll have it.’
There was a malignant pause. Then Colley set about arranging liaison with the police, with set face and without the ritual touch of the heart.
6
Just before dawn the jet lifted from the airfield, and the plane held Kulayev’s interest nearly as much as the attitude – official, incurious, remote – of the Russian crew. He knew its lines, the complex calculus of its airfoils and the narrow-vent design of the double-rotored nacelles; it was a troop transport of a type introduced only a year or so before he left Earth. He was intrigued by the implication that some technological areas had stagnated while others flourished. To be expected, perhaps …
As to the crew members, he guessed that they did not know how they should react to him, any more than he did to them. Nevertheless, remembering old Russia, he was suitably wary.
When at last one of the crew came from the forward cabins to keep him company he was careful to contain surprise, for the man wore a clerical collar Kulayev was sure had not been about his neck minutes earlier. But the slightly Tatar face was friendly in its reserved fashion and the scientist broke silence on a neutral subject which could scarcely involve him in political traps.
‘Could I perhaps have a glass of water?’
The broad face turned full on him. ‘Before prayer?’ There followed a silent space of mutual, calculation. ‘But yours was a Godless era and you would be of no belief.’
This was true; Kulayev had not concerned himself greatly with religion, though belief had no longer been a matter for state suspicion as in his youth. But, like any man who had lived through periods of purge and permissiveness and witnessed bland and brutal reversals of power, he knew the smell of authoritarianism; old habits of adaptation returned with speed and force.
He said at once, avoiding the ingratiating tone which might invite suspicion, ‘You are mistaken; I am a believer. No doubt forms changed during the years of chaos, but I think the essence remains.’
The dark eyes did not relax. ‘Belief is all-powerful and waxes greater still. The State is belief.’ Kulayev relived the half-forgotten feeling of an intense scrutiny waiting for the most miniscule error, and he met it blandly. ‘Through the years and the light years, did you pray?’
‘Daily.’ If a reasonable God existed he would not record the lie.
‘In what form?’
‘The basic prayers, of course.’ Surely ‘basic’ must always be safe. ‘The Lord’s Prayer and the twenty-third psalm were my constant invocations.’ God alone could help him if he were required to recite the psalm. The Lord is my shepherd, and then what?
‘Primitive!’ It was contemptuous irritation. ‘So animals could pray, babbling memory. Prayer is the art of Russia.’ He dropped to his knees, dragging Kulayev in a grip of surprising strength. ‘We shall pray. I shall speak the prayer; you will listen. To the glory of God!’
After ten minutes on his knees, with the plane riding a shattering series of air pockets, Kulayev knew the meaning of prayer as an art form. The young man poured out a torrent of language whose magnificence sprang directly from Holy Writ and an appalling arrogance of brazen humility; for Kulayev it rang with the naked threat of a new and fanatically austere totalitarianism.
When at last he was permitted to rise he had to lever himself up with hands flat on the deck.
‘I think you are not accustomed to kneeling.’
‘It is full gravity to which I am not accustomed.’
‘Ah.’ It was the unsatisfied acceptance of the bigot. ‘I will get your water.’ He walked towards the rear of the plane but stopped to say, ‘And then I will question you about the clone,’ and Kulayev heard the voice of the police state interrogator.
He said, knowing already that he wasted breath, ‘I know practically nothing about the clone.’
The young man removed his collar with one hand and the man of God had no fount of prayer left in his expression. ‘After so long a time you must surely know a great deal. The Kremlin insists on information.’
In terror Kulayev thought, I am going to die for my ignorance.
Unfortunately for himself he was wrong about that.
At the airfield Doronin persisted in asking why he had been separated from Kulayev, then stopped as the bleak familiarity of uninterested expressions carried him back to a style of handling which in the Russia of the ageing century had begun to disappear. The lack of reaction meant ‘we are doing our job’, ‘we don’t know and dare not care’ and ‘you have ceased to be a person until certain requirements are satisfied’. If pity lurked there he could not be allowed to know it.
Only the two nurses, one male, one female, spoke to him and he noticed that their syntax halted occasionally, as though Russian was not their first language. Straining his ears when the pilot and navigator passed near him at the plane ramp he heard them speak Polish to each other.
In fear he swung about for aid, but the Security escort was gone into the darkness beyond the edge of the airfield. He turned back to the woman, to the man, and saw only the anonymity of wardens who guarded with indifference to person.
The man said suddenly, ‘Telepathy!’ and made it sound like an order.
‘I don’t understand. What about telepathy?’
‘Think about it.’
‘To what end?’
‘All the way to Warsaw you will talk about telepathy to recording instruments.’
Doronin shouted in terror and incomprehension, ‘But I must go to Moscow! My superiors—’
‘Are dust. And Moscow is not your home place. Think of telepathy.’
‘I know nothing of telepathy.’
The man thrust his face close and shouted, ‘Telepathy!’
On the other side the girl cried piercingly in his ear, ‘Telepathy!’
‘Telepathy!’ yelled the man and ‘Telepathy!’ the girl echoed.
The word bounced side to side across his skull, again and again. He flinched at the jab of a hypodermic and soon there was a short period of nausea while the senseless word still riddled his head. Nausea passed and with it his puzzlements and fears, superseded by a grey, muddy, walking sleep wherein his mind churned up all it knew about the word driven crudely but effectively into it.
He would not have been helped by knowing that the Security escort was disapprovingly aware of his probable treatment, though the references to telepathy would have meant nothing to them. He was not their affair; he was in the hands of his own people and the ethic of self-determination did not permit interference unless the person ill-treated demanded it.
If Doronin had screamed, that would have been another matter, prima facie evidence of rights invaded. But in Doronin’s day screaming at that juncture would not
have helped; it had not occurred to him.
Matthews may well have been the last of the homeward bound starmen to realise that four decades had brought about changes he might not have credited in four centuries.
His plane was no outdated military craft or modern version of the jet, but a silver bullet following a trajectory rather than a course in the outer wisps of atmosphere, up and over and round the swell of the world. He was quietly proud that in the shattered planet his country still created new technology, and if the country seemed to be called New York rather than the United States, that would sort itself out. Home was anywhere in those three million square miles between the oceans.
His company were young men with familiar accents and a tremendous interest in his voyaging. So much for Security and its contempt of space. They questioned him, fell over him like puppies, joshed and gagged and laughed and couldn’t fit in questions enough. And if it seemed a little self-conscious, well, they were doing their best to make him welcome back and he loved every minute of it.
And if much of what they said seemed to have meanings he didn’t catch, how much would a man of 1950 have understood on Broadway of 1990?
But the insistent questioning became irritating, and the air seemed to tighten a little when he cried off, ‘Later, fellers, later,’ with his grin beginning to strain. Then they would quieten, but soon it would begin again, as if curiosity was uncontainable.
They were over the eastern Pacific when the pieces he had failed to understand commenced to fall together into a pattern, and when they saw that he understood they watched him with the same curiosity which had infused their questioning. But they were silent now, avid for his reaction.
‘The States! Communist! I don’t … no!’
‘Yes,’ said one, and Matthews became aware of a sameness of attitude, as if it did not matter which one spoke; they would all say the same thing in much the same words. ‘Your group is the New York Soviet.’
None of them misread the outrage in his eyes; for the first time their possession of guns became obvious.
Matthews said with the extreme care of strain, ‘I believe I may choose my own country of residence.’
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