‘Believe me, Commander, you wouldn’t.’
That could be true; no man honestly wants his personal illusions stripped stark-naked. What ground against the grain was the implication that Sonny wasn’t old enough for really straight talk from his elders.
Still rankling, he visited Campion and unloosed ill-humour on him. Campion’s good-tempered resistance roused him to undignified yelling. ‘All right, Ian! I observe a fact and understand it but I don’t have to bloody well like it. I object to a psychiatric record being preserved in the public domain.’
‘The Personnel Section of Archives is not public domain.’
‘Then it’s Security domain. Preserved.’
‘Of course. No hospital or doctor destroys a patient’s records until he dies. And not always then.’
The equation of Security with healing organisations – quasi-medical-psychiatric-political – Raft did not pause over; he was becoming habituated to filing minor queries for later resolution. He said, ‘That’s worse. It means Security has purely private psychiatric and factual information on people which can be used to manipulate them or keep them in line.’
Campion seemed shocked. ‘That would be an extreme use; only exceptional circumstances could warrant it.’
‘Power corrupts. Who would decide on the exceptional nature of the circumstances?’
‘Whoever was in charge of the relevant project.’
‘Too much freedom of decision. That makes a large number of people with opportunity for blackmail or extortion.’
Campion’s temper barely took the strain. ‘I wish you’d forget your twentieth-century terrors. Self-seeking is no part of a Security man’s makeup; his indoctrination overrides it. Privacy of the individual is observed to the point where the individual himself forfeits the right.’
Raft was caught by Campion’s utter trust in his own words. Could it be possible that fallible humanity lived with and genuinely employed such moderation and selflessness? His whole life experience derided the idea as powerfully as Campion’s faith embraced it.
He said heavily and clumsily, ‘I hope you never learn that even a safety razor can cut you.’
Campion, brought up to the use of depilatories, fumbled for the meaning and, finding it, dismissed it as fuzzy metaphor.
Raft abandoned the subject.
5
Columbus carried no weapons. Raft had said, ‘A shuttle and a cutting torch and she’s anybody’s.’
Training and philosophy led Colley to think first in purely defensive terms. He saw an attack on the starship as an affair of hand-over-hand approach along tielines, of space-suited figures wielding cutting torches on the ship’s thin skin and of Security issuing forth to repel boarders.
Not until he fell to thinking how he himself might launch the attack did he begin to think realistically. The method was obvious and simple. He would fit magnetic tackle to his shuttle and clamp directly to the ship’s skin, laser a five-centimetre hole directly into the crew quarters, insert a flexible tube and pump in a litre or so of hypnoform III. With a rehearsed gang this would take about three minutes and Security in all its glory would need a miracle to prevent it happening.
So enemy transport must be stood off or put out of action. This might involve killing, and even defensive killing was not lightly authorised. Life might not be sacred but neither was it wantonly expendable, and the inevitable courts of enquiry might not easily excuse Security failure to attempt less drastic methods.
He could mount cannon on the hull but they would shatter on any attempt to fire them in space, though shielding and heating could be devised – if he had a few days to spare. So cannon were impracticable. Which was just as well; he might have been tempted to use them.
Lasers could be a possibility, but most were too small for the swift and powerful work required or too cumbersomely mounted and powered to be modified for the job in less than two or three days. What he had was several hours.
Finally he recalled that a few heavy-duty, flexibly mounted lasers did exist. The Melbourne Town Reclamation Authority used them in its programme for clearing the sites of tall buildings; the prestressed concrete in their lateral members exploded like bombs as stresses were released in demolition, and chopping from a distance was essential. Against a chorus of Town Council outrage he requisitioned them. Something else he would have to answer for later.
So it happened that a squad of quietly complaining Techs found themselves carrying out old-fashioned sentry duty in space suits, one to each of the four lasers mounted on the web of Columbus and sited to cover the bulge of the hull, and one lone wight contemplating Earth, Moon and stars from the dead ground of the tail vent.
Use of the lasers might entail deaths, but the decision was Colley’s and he was expected to make it without fuss. And possibly pay for it later. He must be stern for the immediate necessity. He noted grimly, I’m thinking like a soldier; all his life he had heard that word only in contempt.
When, on the morning of their fourth day as sentries, Columbus’s radar signalled the approach of three shuttles which ignored the ID request, the reaction of the Techs was unbelief settling only slowly into acceptance of aggression as a reality. Once they had accepted it there was nothing slow or undetermined about their operations.
If Colley had bludgeoned his preconceptions into an appreciation of elementary strategy, the Tech commanding Columbus had improved on his superior by devising simple but thoughtful tactics for dealing with an unprecedented situation.
If the shuttles had come in from several directions he would have been reduced to flailing at opportunity targets and somebody would surely have been hurt, but in his strategic simplicity he had imagined them converging in a group on the hull at a point near the entrance lock and out of vision of the blister porte. Since the raiders did not know of the lasers, and a few projections on the web would be meaningless to men gaining their first view of the starship, they had no reason to approach in any but this practical fashion. Being as inexperienced as the Techs, that is what they did.
The Techs, who knew the design of the shuttles as well as each other’s faces, used the lasers in their secondary capacity as welding torches to melt and distort the propulsion vents, immobilising them where they lay magnetically clutched to the hull. With swift touches they then sealed the airlocks and by radio pointed out that the crews could, if it suited them, stay inside until starved or asphyxiated; alternatively they could extrude their weapons through the waste disposal tubes, after which Security would bring them inboard as prisoners.
There were no weapons; if the plan had gone as intended there would have been no need of them.
And, as the Tech commander noted in a marginal addition to his report, ‘A clone-bunch of eighteen is an unnerving sight.’
Not so much unnerving as unreal, the display of an illusionist – eighteen striking physical specimens with eighteen strikingly ugly faces, alike as prints from a single negative.
A bizarre tableau, Campion conceded, himself not quite making the nineteenth now his head bandages had been removed. He was not sure what he hoped to gain from this confrontation, but any random eruption might be paydirt.
He had had Colley bring them all to the barrack and here they were in the main briefing hall, ringed by guards but unconcerned, unapprehensive of harm. Their love-in-a-mist philosophy, confounding in its confident impracticality, was an armour against truth.
He had placed himself in a corner; he could move his head freely but was otherwise immobile in the chair. The clone gave him a cursory glance and that was all; Commissioners held no terrors for their spiritual cohesion. As for his family resemblance, Campion supposed that an imperfect product was not worth comment. Oneness was all; you either were or you weren’t.
He had them facing him so that Albert should enter from the side, be unexpectedly among them. An unguarded exclamation might provide a clue questioners had missed by not knowing what questions to ask. They sat in silence, he waiting for Raf
t, they simply waiting.
Out of stillness a stir passed through them; it was barely definable but he felt that something had occurred. The clone-brother nearest him turned to look him fully in the face and said, ‘I speak for the clone.’
It was mind-shaking. In that tiny stir a voice had been selected and a communication decided upon. Telepathy, after all? He would not have it; it was not an inevitable deduction. A powerful empathy. Or perhaps the group sensitivity that made a flock of birds act in concert, wheel, scatter and reform without apparent leadership.
He said, ‘Go on.’
‘You – Security – have lied. Albert was not killed. We have known this almost from the moment of the lie. There is a brother, unaccounted for, in this building. He is Albert.’
Campion did not answer. He had been caught by an obvious capacity overlooked in the sheer unfamiliarity of the thing.
The clone-brother continued slowly, with great emphasis, purposefully declaiming. ‘Security claims to protect, but protects only the dream of Security. Security sometimes kills. Who then is safe? Security lies and lies and claims it lies for the general good. Is truth then evil? Security is a falsehood wrapped around the world. Albert’s death was not even a necessary lie; that someone thought it so is a measure of spiritual weakness. Albert knows. He is here. He will tell you so.’
And Raft was there, in the doorway, stone-faced, listening, quietly inimical in Security black, a founding-father disgusted by his posterity.
The eyes of the clone turned to him. Their identical faces smiled the welcome of utter understanding, embarrassing Campion with the naked emotion of the silent greeting; it resembled too much a public display of lovers.
Raft’s gaze slid along the mirror figures; his mouth relaxed in ungentle humour. ‘ “As others see us.” I’m not flattered.’ The mirror faces cleared of welcome, remained still. ‘But it’s the internal likeness that counts, and that’s not so good, is it? And there’s your problem.’
The nearest image of him rose to its feet, on the far side of the room from the one who had spoken to Campion. ‘I speak for the clone. Why hate your flesh? You are the father-flesh, the master-brother; why hate?’
The sense of ritual was overpowering, compacted in a mode of speech stripped down to insistent simplicity. Rejecting it, Raft schooled his words to flatness. ‘I don’t hate you. Once I did, in self-protection because you made me physically ill.’ He decided against further clarification of that; let them worry at it. ‘But I don’t like you and I won’t like you. Nor do I appreciate myself repeated in a gaggle of puppets. You are puppets. Manipulated.’
The spokesman smiled briefly. ‘So you feel and so say, but you are of us and in the end must come to us.’
‘Forget it. You’re John Heathcote’s stagnant spillage from a rack of bottles. Multiplication of a gene pattern is reversal of evolutionary requirement. You are only a biologist’s mistakes; repeated, you would become a bad habit. The race can’t progress down a hall of mirrors.’
A stir, a ripple, an instant of unrest fluttered and died. Only the spokesman moved appreciably, turning his head slightly to take in them all in a swift glance. The sense of communication was as inescapable as it was incomprehensible.
‘We are the fathers of the new race, but you are the real begetter of the new world.’
The spell broke upon the comic vision of himself spawning endlessly across the globe in a riot of reproduction. In a generation or two they’d be calling me God. With that the laughter vanished in a complex of feelings coming uncalled from depths simple consciousness could not visit, agglomerating unidentified about an irrelevant notion that to be God was a terrifying and ennobling responsibility.
Disoriented by the meaningless sequence, he had to return his mind forcibly to the point of departure, to lay about him with energetic contempt. ‘Rubbish! The sooner you recognise yourselves as an aborted effort the better. Nor do I think your revered Lady sees me as the universal father; she tried to kill me.’
It was as if a shadow passed over the clone; lips twitched and the spokesman made a tiny gesture of severing, breaking off. ‘Thereby she lost us. We are now John’s men only. The Lady is insane.’
A rift in the party? The rest was hardly news; mass leaders in nonsense tend to paranoia and hallucination. He asked, ‘Who is she, anyway?’
‘We do not know.’ That was of a piece with all the non-answers arrived at since the moment of homecoming. ‘Perhaps John knows. We think she may be from the old world.’
And why not? Conquest was a typically old-fashioned dream this day and age. ‘An old woman?’
‘Who can tell? Who commands Gangoil’s resources need not age.’
Some laboratory beauty surviving as an ageless virago? He asked, ‘Where is Gangoil?’
‘We do not know.’
It was laughable but undoubtedly true; who would lie when a touch of a needle would spill truth? He supposed them taken in and out under blindfold or hypnosis; it could be as simple as that.
The spokesman offered, as if he wished he could help, ‘It is a mountain.’
Tired laughter for that; the eastern coastal range is more than two thousand miles long.
Unexpectedly he was asked a question, ‘Why did you pretend death, Albert?’
The yearning, the lover’s complaint, had returned to the image’s voice; he was glad of Campion’s interruption.
‘That was my order. The first play against me failed. If your leaders felt the second had succeeded they might be tempted into further action. They were and you are here.’ He added to Raft, ‘You were right in thinking they wouldn’t need you to run the ship; they had blueprints and wiring diagrams.’ He smiled wryly. ‘And each of them has your intellectual capacity and presumably your engineering talent.’
‘If they’re no longer operating for this pestilential Lady, why want the ship at all?’
‘Well, spokesman, why?’
Campion got then more than he bargained for. ‘So that you and your kind might not possess the ultimate weapon. It is not The Lady who is the enemy of the world. She is a poor mad woman dreaming psychotic dreams; you are the enemy. Security is the disease which eats mankind.’
Campion managed an irritable laugh that sank in troubled contradictions. And Raft – adviser, grandfather, barbarian from the concrete jungles – was staring at him in cool challenge, as if he might advise: ‘They could be right, Commissioner.’ Down somewhere in darkness was the Raft-God calling him to judgement?
But if God were present he had concerns more pressing than purgation and celestial law. Raft asked, ‘What has happened to Doctor Lindley?’
‘Nothing. We understand he takes great interest in all he sees. He is not our concern.’
‘Why was he taken?’
‘I said it was not our business. We are not certain. John asked for him but we think it was David who really wanted him.’
A new name. ‘Who is David?’
‘Doctor David is a genetic surgeon. He controls the biolab section.’
‘Under John?’
‘Oh, yes! All Gangoil is John’s.’
Raft looked helplessly to Campion, who picked up his own lines of enquiry and in a frustrating hour obtained nothing that mattered. The clone was worse than ignorant of what took place around it; it was uninterested in anything but evangelical philosophy. Had he not known the begetter Campion might have written it off as a collection of saintly idiots.
The brothers did not know or care where the shuttles in which they had assailed Columbus had come from and were only mildly intrigued when Campion told them the machines had been pirated from repair docks. But they were suitably shocked and grieving when informed that the non-clone pilots were dead, post-hypnoed into suicide via pellets concealed in tooth cavities as soon as questioning commenced.
In Raft’s era it would not have happened; the pellets would have been found long before crisis. To Campion it seemed an unpleasant but original and effective idea, but C
ampion and Security were in their way as innocent as the clone.
6
The clone-brothers were quartered, under guard, in a travellers’ hostel. Gaol was out of the question; bizarrely dangerous they undoubtedly were in a narrowly defined area but not criminal in the eyes of Security. There was argument about the limits of self-determination of minorities and non-interference until Raft decided he no longer knew what a crime was.
Campion was severely shaken by the clone. Techniques of conditioning and persuasion were commonplaces on which much of the drive towards social stability was based; only by careful, selective use of them were the world’s educationists able to prune inessentials and channel the drives of the urgent, brilliant generations. He was alert to the possibilities of misuse, for there had been errors enough in refining the processes to their present accuracy, but he had never until this morning’s interview seen what monstrousness was achievable.
The clone was effectively mindless. Whatever intelligence resided in the individuals – it was not easy to remember that each of these parrots was another Albert – the corporate body was unthinking, robotic.
He badly needed historical information on mass indoctrination and manipulation but could not yet manage his fingers delicately enough to handle the chair’s button controls with certainty, though full recovery would be a matter of days only now that electro-stimulation had been initiated. So he made Hunter, his bored Tech attendant, push him to the Twentieth-Century Room of the Research Section.
Hunter spun catalogues on the index strip and flashed the selected items on display screens. When from the corner of his eye Campion saw Raft come in he said, ‘That’ll do for a while.’ Hunter blanked the screens and the index strip vanished smartly under a clicking cover. ‘I’ve been researching the information-gathering groups of your period, Albert; there seems to have been no end to them. The CIA, the KGB, the MIs and all their little imitators are understandable; among suspicious nations defensive catalogues must have been vital. But the others, the industrial data banks and the outright muckraking of the private information services are hard to credit.’
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