by Timothy Zahn
Lanthrop had a reasonable capacity, but with his head start he was roaring drunk before anyone else was even close, and by the time someone suggested it was time to return upstairs he was sprawled in his chair, slumbering peacefully. Assuring the others he would take care of the boss, Charley waited until they had staggered out, and then set to work. Setting Lanthrop into a more comfortable position, he relieved the field boss of his master keys, replacing them with his own public-area set to keep the loss from being too obvious. His next task took him to the main file room, where the employment records and resumes of every worker in the nation were stored on huge reels of holo-magnetic tape. This was the riskiest part of his plan—the file room connected directly to the main computer room, and the dozen or so operators on duty had a fair chance of knowing that Charley wasn't authorized in there. Fortunately, the reels he wanted were "low-use" ones stored in the racks farthest from the computer itself, and he was able to pull the three he wanted without being seen. Back out in the hall, he hid the tapes in the bottom of the garbage container on his wheeled cleaning-supplies cart and, heart pounding painfully, pushed it down the hall as casually as his shaking knees would permit.
Now came the waiting. From conversations with others, he knew that Director Pines invariably arrived early on Monday mornings, usually before the night shift was due to check out. If Charley's luck held, this would be one of those mornings.
—
It was.
Pines was four steps into his office before he noticed Charley sitting quietly by the wall. "Who are you?" he asked, stopping abruptly, apparently too startled for the moment to be angry.
Charley remained seated. "I'm Charles Addison. We met a couple of weeks ago."
The mental wheels visibly clicked into place. "Why, you—you—" he sputtered. "Get the hell out of my office—you hear me? Now!" He stepped forward menacingly.
"Before you do anything drastic," Charley suggested, "you ought to take a look over there in the corner."
Pines came to an abrupt halt. "My tapes!" he exclaimed, the first hint of uneasiness creeping through his anger. "What are you doing with them?"
"Engaging in an old custom called blackmail," Charley told him, glancing at the pile. It was an unusual sight, he had to admit: three tape reels—minus their protective casings—stacked neatly beneath the old floor buffer. "Magnetic tapes have come a long way in fifty years, especially in storage density, but they still have an unavoidable weakness: they're susceptible to strong electromagnetic fields. That thing on top is an old electric floor buffer. It packs a huge electric motor."
Pines understood, all right. Already his eyes were flickering between the tapes and Charley, clearly wondering whether he could beat Charley to the buffer's switch. He was bracing himself to charge when Charley raised his hand, showing the director that he held the machine's plug. "The buffer's switched on already," he explained. "All I have to do is plug it in. You can't possibly reach either the tapes or me before they're ruined, so you might as well sit down and relax."
"You're insane," Pines muttered as he sank into a nearby chair. "You can get twenty years for sabotaging government property like this."
"So far nothing's been damaged," Charley assured him. "You're right, of course, I'll be in big trouble if I plug this in. But have you considered what'll happen to you?"
"What do you mean?"
"Your security's gotten pretty lax. I got into the file room without any trouble, picked up these tapes, and just walked out with them. That's going to make your department look pretty bad."
"You couldn't have taken them out of the building, though—there's an alarm- trigger built into each of the reels."
"Oh? I didn't know that. But that hasn't prevented me from threatening them here in the building itself. I wonder what your bosses at the Labor Department are going to say."
Pines was beginning to look worried, but he still had plenty of fight left in him. "They won't say much. The tapes you've got can be reconstructed, surely. No security system is perfect—they know that. You're the one in trouble, not me."
"I'm sure most tapes would be easy to reconstruct," Charley nodded. "With the job market shifting so often, I imagine ninety percent of your master tapes are duplicated at any given time in the thousands of temporary bubble storages you've got in the local offices around the country. But I'll bet that some of the files on these three aren't. Don't you want to know which tapes I've got here?"
Pines's eyes flickered to the pile. "All right—tell me."
"They're the complete records of some people who haven't gone through the lottery for a few years now: the President, Cabinet, Supreme Court, most of Congress, and the top people in the Foreign Service, military, and federal judiciary. If I plug this in, you'll have to go to every single one of those people and ask for access to their Secure Personal Files to get the information back. Still think your bosses won't say anything?"
Pines went white. "No!" he hissed. "You wouldn't!"
"That's entirely up to you. You get me my job back at Key Data Services and no one will ever hear about this from me. I'll walk out that door and you'll never see me again."
"At least until you start demanding money," Pines said bitterly.
"With a twenty-year jail sentence hanging over my head? Don't be absurd. Besides, what would I blackmail you with—the use of your legitimate authority to correct an error?" Charley shook his head.
"But the rules—"
"—aren't in charge here: you are. And you're here because the rules don't adapt to these unexpected changes, to things that shouldn't have happened but did anyway. If they could—if computers could balance justice and mercy—you wouldn't be needed. As it is, a system like the National Employment Office couldn't exist without you—it would have been torn apart years ago."
For a moment Pines gazed into space. Then, with just a glance at the tapes, he stepped over to his desk terminal. "What was the name of that company again?"
And Charley knew he'd won.
—
"Frankly, Charley, I never expected to see you at this desk again—but I'm damn glad I was wrong," Will Whitney said, smiling like his face was going to split.
"Me, neither," Charley agreed, savoring the feel of his old chair as he gazed at the piles of work on his desk. "I'm glad to see you can still use me. I was half afraid Sanders would've completely taken over by now."
"You kidding? He's happier to have you back than I am." Whitney shook his head. "I'd never realized before how indispensable you are to KDS. I'm glad you found someone in Washington who agreed." Charley grinned. "That's the whole secret of success, Will. You can accomplish a lot when someone thinks you're irreplaceable." And even more, he thought wryly, when he thinks that of himself.
Afterword
This was my first real foray into the world of business and finance; and as far as I'm concerned, those already in the field can have it. I'll take wading through lunar maps and the physics of black holes any day.
The job lottery idea itself came out of a long discussion of such matters with a friend, after which I sat down and hammered at the logic, cash flow, and loopholes until I got to the system you've just read about.
Would it work? I don't know. Though I don't see any flaws, of course (or I would have corrected them before sending the story out in the first place), I've never had an expert in such arcana take it apart for me. Even if it would work, I suspect it would be impossible to actually get there from here.
For which—I'm sure—we can all bow our heads in silent thanks.
Teamwork
The hospital bed was uncomfortably hard, with a lump that poked into his lower back no matter how much he squirmed. Not that he could squirm far, of course; the straps across his chest and legs were quite adequate to their task. Staring at the ceiling, tracing imaginary patterns among the holes in the acoustic tile there, he tried to shut out the gurgling sounds from the next bed. The gurgling he hated even more than the crying and laughin
g.
"Mr. Charles Bissey?"
New voices weren't common here. Lowering his gaze, he focused on the two men at the foot of his bed. One was Dr. Housman, who often appeared in his nightmares these days. The other, standing rather stiffly, was a stranger in a military-type uniform. "Yes," he acknowledged. "Who are you?"
"My name is Colonel Lee, Charles," the stranger said. "We need your help."
Charles glanced at Dr. Housman and sighed. "Sure you do. What is this, Doctor, another of your tests?" "It's no test, Charles," Housman shook his head. "Please listen to the colonel. This is deadly serious."
"Charles," Lee said, "have you ever heard of the San Bernadino Dome?"
"I'm allowed to read newspapers," Charles told him mildly. "It showed up one night a week ago in a shopping center parking lot. The newspapers think it may be the start of a space invasion."
"Right, although the invasion angle is pure speculation at this point." Lee seemed to be relaxing a bit now. Doubtless he was relieved to find Charles wasn't a raving madman. "But we believe the dome to be a threat in other ways. We'd like you to help us destroy it."
"Suicide mission?" Charles asked. Not that it really mattered.
Lee shook his head. "We hope not. But it will be dangerous."
"Why should I help you? What do I get out of this?"
He was prepared for a lecture on patriotism, and Housman's words were therefore a surprise. "Perhaps," the doctor said quietly, "you'll have your dream."
Charles stared hard at him. So many times he'd hoped... so many times had watched it all crumble. But he had little else to live for. "I accept," he said.
—
The preliminary psychomedical work took two days. Charles was in hypnotic sleep a good portion of that time, but it was a strangely exhausting sleep, and he hoped he'd have a chance to rest after it was over. But Colonel Lee was apparently in a hurry, and within an hour he had called a mission orientation meeting.
"Good day to you all," Lee nodded as he strode into the room. "I know you're tired, so I'll make this brief." He touched a switch on the console next to his chair and a picture of a huge gray hemisphere appeared on the room's screen. Behind it could be seen a long building with several different business signs, as well as a section of a city street, all looking like it had been in a war. No people were in sight anywhere.
"The San Bernadino Dome," Lee said. "Thirty meters high at the center, ninety meters across at the base. Completely impervious to everything we've tried against it. Even the best antitank missiles don't do so much as scratch the surface."
"How about atomic weapons?" Arthur asked.
"We haven't tried anything that drastic yet, but all the extrapolations indicate that even that wouldn't do any good from the outside. From the inside, though... possibly." "Wait a minute," Frank growled. "You're not gonna send us into that thing, are ya?"
"We could get hurt!" Dennis piped up.
"Hold it, hold it," Lee said, raising a hand for order. "Getting into the dome shouldn't be physically dangerous. There are already nearly a hundred people inside, by our estimates."
"What do you mean, not physically dangerous?" Susan asked in her prim alto. "What kind of dangerous is it?"
Lee took a deep breath. "Well... it seems that the dome is surrounded by a sort of... effect, I guess you could call it. Everyone who's gone inside a certain distance drops whatever else he's doing and heads straight for this door." He indicated a black triangle on the dome. "We've tried sending people just over the edge of the effect and then hauling them back with ropes, and once they're back outside they're okay again. They report a tremendous compulsion to get into the dome, but no idea why they were wanted. Our experts say the effect resembles a strong hypnosis, but they have no idea how the order was implanted. What happens inside is anyone's guess; all we know is that the agents we sent in with bombs apparently never triggered them. Yes, Charles?"
Charles spoke up hesitantly, still shy in the presence of the others. He'd met them barely three hours earlier, and his natural bashfulness with strangers made his tongue feel awkward. "I take it, Colonel, that you think we can get past this conditioning?"
"Of course he thinks that, dummy," Arthur snapped. "Why else would we be here?"
"Actually, we don't expect all of you to get through untouched," Lee said quickly, perhaps seeing Charles's blush. "Frankly, we'll be happy if any one of you can get in with enough control left to carry out the mission. We really don't know what will happen to you since—well—"
"Since everyone else who's gone in has been perfectly sane?" Charles suggested.
"Now, Charles, don't pick on the colonel," Susan admonished.
Lee spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. "I know it sounds cruel and manipulative, but yes, that's precisely why we recruited you. The hypnosis isn't perfect; it has limitations—"
"How do you know?" Arthur spoke up quickly.
"Because on that first morning people were dribbling into the dome in ones and twos until we set off the sirens; after that there was a general rush. From that we gather the hypnosis wasn't strong enough to wake people up or make them walk in their sleep. People like you, we hope, will also be outside the thing's capabilities. The experimental technique that set you up with your new pseudotelepathic intercommunication may help, too—spread the effect around or something."
"Or maybe it won't," Frank said. "If y'ask me, this is a whole lotta work for nothin'. The door to the thing's open, right? So toss in a nuke and get it over with."
"Frank!" Susan was aghast. "There are a hundred people in there. Not to mention whoever was there to begin with."
"So what?"
"Actually," Lee said, "we couldn't do that even if the dome were empty. There's an airlock sort of arrangement that seems to be made of the same material as the dome. As an absolute last resort, we might try sending in a volunteer with an activated time bomb. But even if that worked—which isn't at all certain—it would mean sacrificing anybody who may still be alive in there." He shrugged, looking uncomfortable. "Anyway, the high-level decision was made to give you a chance first."
"That's all well and good, Colonel," Susan said, "but I, for one, want to know why you want so badly to destroy this artifact. It doesn't seem to be doing anything threatening, so as long as you keep people away from it, what's the trouble? Death and destruction are easy, I suppose, but they're so final."
"The trouble," Lee answered, "is that, whatever the owners of the dome want with the people they've grabbed, they've decided they want more... and since we've evacuated the whole area they can't get them. So they're expanding their compulsion-effect field. The thing's pushed another hundred meters out in the past four days and shows no signs of stopping."
There was a long moment of silence. "Well," Lee said at last, "if there are no more questions or comments, I'll let you get some rest. You'll start a couple of days of saboteur training tomorrow morning. Good-bye for now."
The next two days were frantic, filled with intensive studies. Charles had always envied people who could assimilate knowledge quickly, and was more than a little surprised that he was actually able to keep up. He became adept at putting together the tiny nuclear bomb the team would be taking into the dome, and discovered that he had a distinct aptitude for solving logic problems. Though little time had been specifically set aside for the members of the team to get to know each other, Charles found himself becoming more relaxed in their company as they worked and learned together. He didn't consider them friends, of course—true friendships had been few and far between for him—but he no longer feared them as enemies, either. On the whole, that was already more than he'd hoped for.
All too soon, it was time. A midnight plane ride—with Dennis gurgling excitedly at the stars overhead—and a short drive brought the team to a line of grim-faced soldiers patrolling the deserted San Bernadino streets. A major pointed the way and offered good luck.
The first twenty steps were the hardest, at lea
st for Charles. He felt as if he were walking through a mine field: never knowing when it would happen; wondering if it would hurt or not; almost hurrying so as to get it over with. Compulsively, he found himself counting the steps: nineteen, twenty, twenty- one—
And with the suddenness of a light switch a red haze seemed to drop over his vision, and all thoughts fled before the overpowering desire to get into the dome. He broke into a run, dimly aware of the others but incapable of taking the slightest interest in them. The buildings around him were gray fog; but as he rounded one last corner a burst of color assaulted his senses. It was the dome, as bright and eye- catching as the finest sunset he'd ever seen and utterly irresistible. The triangular entrance beckoned; lowering his head he increased his speed. Ninety seconds later, he was inside.
—
"Well," Arthur said aloud, his words coming in short bursts as his wind slowly returned, "that was... quite a race. Everyone... okay?"
"Yeah," Frank said.
"I feel fine," Susan replied. "Dennis?"
"Wow! These roofs are really high," Dennis chirped, oblivious to the others' conversation. "Can we go up there?"
"Ceilings, kid, not roofs," Frank growled. "Let's get movin' before someone comes along, huh?"
"Can we go up there?" Dennis repeated, more insistent this time.
"Not just now," Arthur said. The catwalks twenty feet above them were far too high for his taste. "Maybe later." He looked back down quickly and glanced around the room they'd wound up in. The walls were lined with pipes and strangely shaped machinery, but he could see what looked like a pair of doors in the far wall. "Looks like that's the way deeper in," he said.
"Wait a minute," Susan cut in. "Charles? Charles, are you okay?"