The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  He had hung around.

  “Sam, you see this? Melted through, like with a little thermite bomb. How in the hell did a thing like that happen?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t here. Let’s get it fixed kid.”

  “Okay…you think we ought to report this to somebody?”

  “If you want to. I’ll mention it to Larry. But I don’t see what he can do about it. Must’ve been some kids. You gotta put it down as fair wear and tear. But boys will be boys.”

  Remembering, he did grind his teeth. But they were at Columbus Square.

  * * * *

  Professor Speiser lived in one of the old plastic brick faculty houses. Her horsy face, under a curling net, looked out of the annunciator plate. “Yes? What is it?”

  “Professor Speiser, I believe you know my daughter, Miss Freeman. She asked me to look you up while I was in New York. Have I come much too late?”

  “Oh, dear. Why, no. I suppose not. Come in, Mr.—Mr. Freeman.”

  In her parlor, she faced him apprehensively. When she spoke she rolled out her sentences like the lecturer she was. “Mr. Freeman—as I suppose you’d prefer me to call you—you asked a moment ago whether you’d come too late. I realize that the question was window-dressing, but my answer is quite serious. You have come too late. I have decided to dissociate myself from—let us say, from your daughter, Miss Freeman.”

  The Commander asked only: “Is that irrevocable?”

  “Quite. It wouldn’t be fair of me to ask you to leave without an explanation. I am perfectly willing to give one. I realize now that my friendship with Miss Freeman and the work I did for her stemmed from, let us say a certain vacancy in my life.”

  He looked at a picture on her desk of a bald, pleasant-faced fellow with a pipe.

  She followed his eyes and said with a sort of shy pride: “That is Dr. Mordecai, of the University’s Faculty of Dentistry. Like myself, a long-time celibate. We plan to marry.”

  The Commander said: “Do you feel that Dr. Mordecai might like to meet my daughter?”

  “No. I do not. We expect to have very little time for outside activities, between our professional careers and our personal lives. Please don’t misunderstand, Mr. Freeman. I am still your daughter’s friend. I always shall be. But somehow I no longer find in myself an urgency to express the friendship. It seems like a beautiful dream—and a quite futile one. I have come to realize that one can live a full life without Miss Freeman. Now, it’s getting quite late—”

  He smiled ruefully and rose. “May I wish you every happiness, Professor Speiser?” he said, extending his hand.

  She beamed with relief. “I was so afraid you’d—”

  Her face went limp and she stood swaying drunkenly as the needle in the ring popped her skin.

  The Commander, his face as dead as hers, disconnected his hand and sheathed the needle carefully again. He drew one of his guns, shot her through the heart and walked out of the apartment.

  Old fool! She should have known better.

  * * * *

  Max Wyman stumbled through the tangle of Riveredge, his head a pot of molten lead and his legs twitching under him as he fled from his shame.

  Dimly, as if with new eyes, he saw that he was not alone. Riveredge was technically uninhabited. Then what voices called guardedly to him from the shadows: “Buddy—buddy—wait up a minute, buddy—did you score? Did you score?”

  He lurched on and the voices became bolder. The snaking conveyors and ramps sliced out sectors of space. Storage tanks merged with inflow mains to form sheltered spots where they met. No spot was without its whining, appealing voice. He stood at last, quivering, leaning against a gigantic I-beam that supported a heavy-casting freightway. A scrap sheet of corrugated iron rested against the bay of the I-beam, and the sheet quivered and fell outward. An old man’s voice said: “You’re beat, son. Come on in.”

  He staggered a step forward and collapsed on a pallet of rags as somebody carefully leaned the sheet back into place again.

  VI

  Max Wyman woke raving with the chuck horrors. There was somebody there to hand him candy bars, sweet lemonade, lump sugar. There was somebody to shove him easily back into the pallet of rags when he tried to stumble forth in a hunt for booze. On the second day he realized that it was an old man whose face looked gray and paralyzed. His name was T. G. Pendelton, he said.

  After a week, he let Max Wyman take little walks about their part of Riverside—but not by night. “We’ve got some savage people here,” he said. “They’d murder you for a pint. The women are worse. If one calls to you, don’t go. You’ll wind up dumped through a manhole into the Hudson. Poor folk.”

  “You’re sorry for them?” Wyman asked, startled. It was a new idea to him. Since Buffalo, he had never been sorry for anybody. Something awful had happened there, some terrible betrayal…he passed his bony hand across his forehead. He didn’t want to think about it.

  “Would I live here if I weren’t?” T. G. asked him. “Sometimes I can help them. There’s nobody else to help them. They’re old and sick and they don’t fit anywhere. That’s why they’re savage. You’re young—the only young man I’ve ever seen in Riveredge. There’s so much outside for the young. But when you get old it sometimes throws you.”

  “The Goddammed Syndic,” Wyman snarled, full of hate.

  T. G. shrugged. “Maybe it’s too easy for sick old people to get booze. They lose somebody they spent a life with and it throws them. People harden into a pattern. They always had fun, they think they always will. Then half of the pattern’s gone and they can’t stand it, some of them. You got it early. What was the ringing bell?”

  Wyman collapsed into the bay of the I-beam as if he’d been kicked in the stomach. A wave of intolerable memory swept over him. A ringing bell, a wobbling pendulum, a flashing light, the fair face of his betrayer, the hateful one of Hogan, stirred together in a hell brew. “Nothing,” he said hoarsely, thinking that he’d give his life for enough booze to black him out. “Nothing.”

  “You kept talking about it,” T. G. said. “Was it real?”

  “It couldn’t have been,” Wyman muttered. “There aren’t such things. No. There was her and that Syndic and that louse Hogan. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  He did talk about it later, curiously clouded though it was. The years in Buffalo. The violent love affair with Inge. The catastrophic scene when he found her with Regan, king-pin mobster. The way he felt turned inside-out, the lifetime of faith in the Syndic behind him and the lifetime of a faith in Inge ahead of him, both wrecked, the booze, the flight from Buffalo to Erie, to Pittsburgh, to Tampa, to New York. And somehow, insistently, the ringing bell, the wobbling pendulum and the flashing light that kept intruding between episodes of reality.

  T. G. listened patiently, fed him, hid him when infrequent patrols went by. T. G. never told him his own story, but a bloated woman who lived with a yellow-toothed man in an abandoned storage tank did one day, her voice echoing from the curving, windowless walls of corrugated plastic. She said T. G. had been an alky chemist, reasonably prosperous, reasonably happy, reasonably married. His wife was the faithful kind and he was not. With unbelievable slyness she had dulled the pain for years with booze and he had never suspected. They say she had killed herself after one frightful week-long debauche in Riveredge. T. G. came down to Riveredge for the body and returned after giving it burial and drawing his savings from the bank. He had never left Riveredge since.

  “Worsh’p the grun’ that man walks on,” the bloated woman mumbled. “Nev’ gets mad, nev’ calls you hard names. Give y’a bottle if y’ need it. Talk to y’ if y’ blue. Worsh’p that man.”

  Max Wyman walked from the storage tank, sickened. T. G.’s charity covered that creature and him.

  It was the day he told T. G.: “I’m getting out of here.”

  The gray, paralyzed-looking face almost smiled. “See a man first?”

 
“Friend of yours?”

  “Somebody who heard about you. Maybe he can do something for you. He feels the way you do about the Syndic.”

  Wyman clenched his teeth. The pain still came at the thought. Syndic, Hogan, Inge and betrayal. God, to be able to hit back at them!

  The red ride ebbed. Suddenly he stared at T. G. and demanded: “Why? Why should you put me in touch? What is this?”

  T. G. shrugged. “I don’t worry about the Syndic. I worry about people. I’ve been worrying about you. You’re a little insane, Max, like all of us here.”

  “God damn you!”

  “He has.…”

  Max Wyman paused a long time and said: “Go on, will you?” He realized that anybody else would have apologized. But he couldn’t and he knew that T. G. knew he couldn’t.

  The old man said: “A little insane. Bottled-up hatred. It’s better out of you than in. It’s better to sock the man you hate and stand a chance of having him sock you back than it is just to hate him and let the hate gnaw you like a grave-worm.”

  “What’ve you got against the Syndic?”

  “Nothing, Max. Nothing against it and nothing for it. What I’m for is people. The Syndic is people. You’re people. Slug ‘em if you want and they’ll have a chance to slug you back. Maybe you’ll pull down the Syndic like Samson in the temple; more likely it’ll crush you. But you’ll be doing something about it. That’s the great thing. That’s the thing people have to learn—or they wind up in Riveredge.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I told you I was, or I wouldn’t be here.”

  The man came at sunset. He was short and pudgy, with a halo of wispy hair and the coldest, grimmest eyes that Wyman had ever seen. He shook hands with Wyman, and the young man noted simultaneously a sharp pain in his finger and that the stranger wore an elaborate gold ring. Then the world got hazy and confused. He had a sense that he was being asked questions, that he was answering them, that it went on for hours and hours.

  When things quite suddenly came into focus again, the pudgy man was saying: “I can introduce myself now. Commander Grinnel, of the North American Navy. My assignment is recruiting. The preliminary examination has satisfied me that you are no plant and would be a desirable citizen of the N. A. Government. I invite you to join us.”

  “What would I do?” Wyman asked steadily.

  “That depends on your aptitudes. What do you think you would like to do?”

  Wyman said: “Kill me some Syndics.”

  The commander stared at him with those cold eyes. He said at last: “It can probably be arranged. Come with me.”

  * * * *

  They went by train to Cape Cod. At midnight on January 15th, the commander and Wyman left their hotel room and strolled about the streets. The commander taped small packets to the four legs of the microwave relay tower that connected Cape Cod with the Continental Press common carrier circuits and taped other packets to the police station’s motor pool gate.

  At 1:00 A.M., the tower exploded and the motor pool gate fused into an impassible puddle of blue-hot molten metal. Simultaneously, fifty men in turtle-neck sweaters and caps appeared from nowhere on Center Street. Half of them barricaded the street, firing on citizens and cops who came too close. The others systematically looted every store between the barricade and the beach.

  Blinking a flashlight in code, the commander approached the deadline unmolested and was let through with Wyman at his heels. The goods, the raiders, the commander and Wyman were aboard a submarine by 2:35 and under way ten minutes later.

  After Commander Grinnel had exchanged congratulations with the sub commander, he presented Wyman.

  “A recruit. Normally I wouldn’t have bothered, but he had a rather special motivation. He could be very useful.”

  The sub commander studied Wyman impersonally. “If he’s not a plant.”

  “I’ve used my ring. If you want to get it over with, we can test him and swear him in now.”

  They strapped him into a device that recorded pulse, perspiration, respiration, muscle-tension and brainwaves. A sweatered specialist came and mildly asked Wyman matter-of-fact questions about his surroundings while he calibrated the polygraph.

  Then came the pay-off. Wyman did not fail to note that the sub commander loosened his gun in his holster when the questioning began.

  “Name, age and origin?”

  “Max Wyman. Twenty-two. Buffalo Syndic Territory.”

  “Do you like the Syndic?”

  “I hate them.”

  “What are your feelings toward the North American Government?”

  “If it’s against the Syndic, I’m for it.”

  “Would you rob for the North American Government?”

  “I would.”

  “Would you kill for it?”

  “I would.”

  “Have you any reservations yet unstated in your answers?”

  “No.”

  It went on for an hour. The questions were re-phrased continuously; after each of Wyman’s firm answers, the sweatered technician gave a satisfied little nod. At last it ended and he was unstrapped from the device.

  Max was tired.

  The sub commander seemed a little awed as he got a small book and read from it: “Do you, Max Wyman, solemnly renounce all allegiances previously held by you and pledge your allegiance to the North American Government?”

  “I do,” the young man said fiercely.

  In a remote corner of his mind, for the first time in months, the bell ceased to ring, the pendulum to beat and the light to flash.

  Charles Orsino knew again who he was and what was his mission.

  VII

  It had begun when the girl led him through the conference room door. Naturally one had misgivings; naturally one didn’t speak up. But the vault-like door far downstairs was terrifying when it yawned before you and even more so when it closed behind you.

  “What is this place?” he demanded at last. “Who are you?”

  She said: “Psychology lab.”

  It produced on him the same effect that “alchemy section” or “Division of astrology” would have on a well-informed young man in 1950. He repeated flatly: “Psychology lab. If you don’t want to tell me, very well. I volunteered without strings.” Which should remind her that he was a sort of hero and should be treated with a certain amount of dignity and that she could save her corny jokes.

  “I meant it,” she said, fiddling busily with the locks of yet another vault-like door. “I’m a psychologist. I’m also by the way, Lee Falcaro—since you asked.”

  “The old man—Edward Falcaro’s line?” he asked.

  “Simon pure. He’s my father’s brother. Father’s down in Miami, handling the tracks and gaming in general.”

  The second big door opened on a brain-gray room whose air had a curiously dead feel to it. “Sit down,” she said, indicating a very unorthodox chair. He did, and found that the chair was the most comfortable piece of furniture he had ever known. Its contact with his body was so complete that it pressed nowhere, it poked nowhere. The girl studied dials in its back nevertheless and muttered something about adjusting it. He protested.

  “Nonsense,” she said decisively. She sat down herself in an ordinary seat. Charles shifted uneasily in his chair to find that it moved with him. Still no pressure, still no poking.

  “You’re wondering,” she began, “about the word ‘psychology’. It has a bad history and people have given it up as a bad job. It’s true that there isn’t pressure nowadays to study the human mind. People get along. In general what they want they get, without crippling effort. In your uncle Frank Taylor’s language, the Syndic is an appropriately-structured organization of high morale and wide public acceptance. In my language the Syndic is a father-image which does a good job of fathering. In good times, people aren’t introspective.

  “There is, literally, no reason why my line of the family should have kept up a tradition of experimental psychology. Way, way
back, old Amadeo Falcaro often consulted Professor Oscar Sternweiss of the Columbia University psychology faculty—he wasn’t as much of a dashing improvisor as the history books make him out to be. Eventually one of his daughters married one of Sternweiss’ sons and inherited the Sternweiss notebooks and library and apparatus. It became an irrational custom to keep it alive. When each academic school of psychology managed to prove that every other school of psychology was dead wrong and psychology collapsed as a science, the family tradition was unaffected; it stood outside the wrangling.

  “Now, you’re wondering what this has to do with trying to slip you into the Government.”

  “I am,” Charles said fervently. If she’d been a doll outside the Syndic, he would minutes ago have protested that all this was foolish and walked out. Since she was not only in the Syndic, but in the Falcaro line, he had no choice except to hear her babble and then walk out. It was all rot, psychology. Id, oversoul, mind-vectors, counseling, psychosomatics—rot from sick-minded old men. Everybody knew—

  “The Government, we know, uses deinhibiting drugs as a first screening of its recruits. As an infallible second screening, they use a physiological lie-detector based on the fact that telling a lie causes tensions in the liar’s body. We shall get around this by slipping you in as a young man who hates the Syndic for some valid reason—”

  “Confound it, you were just telling me that they can’t be fooled!”

  “We won’t fool them. You’ll be a young man who hates the Syndic. We’ll tear down your present personality a gray cell at a time. We’ll pump you full of Seconal every day for a quarter of a year.… We’ll obliterate your personality under a new one. We’ll bury Charles Orsino under a mountain of suggestions, compulsions and obsessions shoveled at you sixteen hours a day while you’re too groggy to resist. Naturally the supplanting personality will be neurotic, but that works in with the mission.”

  He struggled with a metaphysical concept, for the first time in his life. “But—but—how will I know I’m me?”