New Writings in SF 9 - [Anthology]

by Edited By John Carnell

  Harben loved to study the goings-on of nobodies, people who counted for nothing in the world. He found them fascinating, their lives full of unsuspected depths, and strange complications.

  Harben watched also the public figures, the great men. He saw how in private, when the mask was laid aside, they showed the same little weaknesses, the same pettiness, as lesser men. There was not so much difference, after all.

  Lovers he watched with a kind of clinical interest, tinged with prurience, and saw how their basic selfishness worked itself out. He saw the little cruelties and the big cruelties. The little infidelities and the big infidelities.

  This was why Harben was dedicated to his job, why it gave him so much joy and satisfaction. He found it hard to understand why some people were said to be opposed to the monitoring system, and the whole apparatus of the Records.

  Most citizens accepted the surveillance of the monitor cameras with a shrug of the shoulders. It was one more manifestation of modern society. It had to be taken in one’s stride, like the shortage of living space, the high rents and the crippling income-tax on couples who were unwise enough to produce children.

  It was not pleasant, of course, to know that every detail of one’s life was being watched and recorded. Apart from the lack of any real privacy, which was embarrassing, to say the least, there were the things one did or said in moments of thoughtlessness or anger which one would prefer to be forgotten, not immortalized for all time.

  There were compensations, for law-abiding citizens at least. And few citizens were not law-abiding. Crime had become almost unknown: it could not possibly pay. Who would attempt, for example, to rob a bank, when every detail of the planning, the crime itself and the “escape”, would be faithfully recorded on video-tape ? The police had only to look up the relevant Records and make their arrest. There was no question of looking for “clues”, when a complete colour tape was available for use by the prosecution.

  Equally, it was impossible to lose anything. One might mislay something temporarily, that was all. For example, a girl might leave her handbag on a park bench. No one would be so foolish as to attempt to pilfer the contents. As soon as the loss was discovered it was simply a question of tracing the girl’s movements back to the moment when she was last in possession of the handbag. No problem at all...

  * * * *

  He was busily engaged in his normal occupation of roving from level to level, when his eye was caught by a red light on one of the consoles.

  It showed that an emergency police check was being made on the Records. Alongside the red light there was a digital display which read 523-301-446. Out of curiosity Harben switched to the relevant channel and located the suspect on one of his screens.

  Citizen 523-301-446 was a middle-aged man who looked ordinary enough, a minor technician in the Electricity Supply Department. At the point of time where Harben joined the channel, he was going about his normal affairs in what seemed a harmless-enough manner. But Harben thought that there was a tense look about his brows, as though he were preoccupied with some secret problem.

  For some time he followed the man’s activities, without gaining any insight into his motives. It was necessary, of course, to skim rapidly through most of the Record at high speed. To follow it at normal speed was enormously time-consuming. Every day of the man’s activities would take twenty-four hours to survey in full.

  The police had developed a technique to overcome this problem. They would employ a team of a thousand Investigators (or more if the case demanded it), each of whom would be given a slice of the suspect’s Record to survey at normal speed. In this way they could get through almost three years of tape in twenty-four hours. Significant passages of the Record were then noted and played back to the Chief Investigator, who might have to spend a whole week going through them, if the case proved involved.

  Harben’s technique was different. He had no team of Investigators at his disposal, and his interest was strictly casual. So he simply ran forward through the Record at high speed, stopping to study any passage which looked interesting.

  He was skimming through a sequence in which Citizen 523-301-446 was leaving his apartment, alone. Harben had already gleaned, from some brief snatches of conversation he had listened to, that the man had the personal name of Ford.

  Harben switched to Autochase, a setting of the controls which automatically followed the movements of the designated person, cutting from camera to camera as necessary to get the best view. But he still kept the tape running at high speed.

  There was something ludicrous about the way the man rushed like a maniac up an escalator and into a Superway car, which moved off as a rapid blur. Harben saw Ford emerge at the other end and plunge into an elevator, the doors of which closed with guillotine speed.

  At the seventy-first level, Ford tore along the corridor and paused only the briefest fraction of a second to ring a doorbell.

  The door burst open, and a dark-haired attractive girl instantly appeared in the doorway. Ford gave her a lightning peck on the cheek and then plunged headlong past her into the tiny, neat apartment.

  After the briefest twitter of conversation, the man flung himself down on a chair, while the girl poured him a drink —or rather, seemed to slosh the sherry with lunatic suddenness, but unbelievable accuracy, into a glass, which she then jerked under the man’s nose without spilling a drop.

  The grotesque effect was to some extent lost on Harben, who had run through more recordings at high speed than he cared to remember.

  Their lips were fluttering again, and Harben turned up the sound. The result was a loud, shrill gibbering, like demented monkeys at play. More or less at random, to sample their conversation, Harben decided to switch over to normal speed. He seemed to have blundered on to, an interesting bit.

  “... you wouldn’t be such a fool!” The girl’s eyes flashed icily, and she made no attempt to conceal the note of disgust in her voice.

  She got up and walked a step or two away from the couch on which she had been sitting. There was a long silence in the softly lit room. Ford was sitting bent forward, gazing down at the floor, his head slumped between his shoulders.

  He glanced up suddenly. His face wore a look of strain, as though conflicting emotions were tugging at him.

  “I’m convinced it’s possible,” he muttered slowly, almost doubtfully.

  “Then why has no one ever succeeded in the past?” Her rejoinder was swift and rather biting.

  “Probably didn’t go about it the right way.”

  The girl made a little movement of impatience. “So you are so clever that you are going to succeed where everyone else has failed!”

  “There’s a chance.”

  “What possible chance is there, when you’re being watched all the time. You’re being watched now.” She gestured towards the recording camera.

  The man looked tired.

  “They can’t watch everybody all of the time. There are ten thousand million people in the City. It would take another ten thousand million people, working full time, to watch them. They can’t do that.”

  “But once they suspect... it’s all there in the Records.”

  “Exactly. But there won’t be any Records.”

  Harben tensed forward in his contoured chair with an almost convulsive movement.

  No Records!

  He turned the sound up louder, eager not to miss a word.

  The man, at this moment, seemed to have convinced himself by his own argument. He now wore a look of dedicated fervour, the look of the heretic about to go to the stake.

  Fantastic! thought Harben. Could Ford then be a member of S.A.D.A.R., the mysterious, almost legendary, underground movement, which was said to call itself the Society for the Abolition and Destruction of All Records? This secret society had never been proved to exist. Harben felt the thrill, electric and disturbing, yet gratifying, of stumbling upon the edge of the unknown.

  Ford was exactly the man to be a member of SA.
D.A.R.: inconspicuous, completely normal, a boring nonentity whom the police would never bother to watch.

  A moment later Harben was brought down to earth with a jolt.

  The girl was speaking again.

  “So you’d do all this just because of the baby coming? I’ve told you he’ll accept it as his. He knows nothing about our ... friendship.”

  Her voice trembled and almost broke on the last word. Quite clearly, the impending arrival of a baby had caused the “friendship” to turn somewhat sour.

  “When he finds he’s paying double tax, he’ll want to know the reason why. You know that every husband has the statutory right to consult his wife’s Records. Only a complete swine would invoke that right. But by your account, Trafford is just such a swine.”

  “I never said he was a swine.” The girl was almost in tears. “At least he’s sane, which is more than you seem to be.”

  “Sane!” Ford was clearly needled. “Look, I’ve explained the whole thing to you in detail. The magnetic bomb ...”

  “How do you know it will work?”

  “The thing is absolutely straightforward. Conversion of heat energy to magnetic energy. Any schoolboy could construct a device. In this case the heat energy is released by a thermal charge.”

  “All right. But how do you get it into position?”

  “Inside the Records Centre ? That’s the only part which is at all tricky. I shall simply pose as a technician working in the supply tunnel...”

  Harben relaxed. That old ploy ... ! Nobody had ever got into the Records Centre as easily as that. The guard on the perimeter was absolute. It was a well-kept secret that no human being could ever penetrate the Records Centre and live. There was a zone of destructive radiation which screened every approach, above, below, all round. Only mechanisms could ply to and fro, bringing in the necessary supplies. Harben was the only living thing to exist deep inside the lethal zone.

  “No, my friend,” thought Harben, as he casually switched off the channel, “you’ll have to do better than that.”

  It was evident, from the fact that the police were checking his Record, that Ford had not done better than that. By now he was, no doubt, the late unlamented Ford. The police were merely making sure that he had no fellow conspirators, that he was not in fact linked to the legendary S.A.D.A.R. network of saboteurs.

  Ford was nothing more than a clown, a clumsy bungling buffoon. But the thought of S.A.D.A.R. sent a shiver down Harben’s spine. The destruction of all Records!

  It was not so much that Harben himself would probably perish in a holocaust of the Records Centre. That was an abstract consideration which did not worry him unduly. What really hurt were the emotional implications: the fact that anyone could want to destroy the Records.

  To Harben the Records were sacred, the most beautiful and precious things in the world. His Records! He lived only for them. He was a mere human, with a life-span of two centuries at the most. But the Records were eternal.

  Harben felt a warm gush of almost religious emotion as he contemplated the ageless beauty of the Records. May they last for ever, their preciousness increasing from age to age.

  * * * *

  Where was he? That strange shifting of consciousness again.

  Whenever Harben became lost in contemplation of the transcendental beauty of the Records, he was liable to lose track of time. Did he go into some kind of trance, in which he lost normal consciousness ? He looked at the softly glowing face of the clock. Three hours unaccounted for.

  But why did he have the metal fuser in his hand? His knees and elbows felt sore, as though he had spent hours crawling along the narrow corridors which penetrated the Records Centre in all directions. The corridors were there mainly for the maintenance mechanisms to whirr along. But Harben also had the freedom of the corridors, supervising the activities of the robots. He could crawl along a maze of narrow tunnels for vast distances, right up to the fringes of the lethal perimeter zone itself.

  He had to check, at intervals, the work of the maintenance mechanisms. They were supposed, in theory, to keep all the equipment in tip-top condition, and they did just that. But there was always the faint possibility that someday, somewhere, an unforeseen failure would occur. It was almost a formality, but one couldn’t be too careful where the Records were concerned.

  So Harben made routine checks at intervals to see that everything was in order. It entailed several days of tedious crawling along the narrow tunnels, peering and squinting into the complex wiring system, searching for the faulty connection or unserviceable sub-assembly that was never there. Harben tended to feel as if he were looking for a nonexistent needle in an infinitely large haystack.

  This was not a job which Harben ever undertook eagerly. But his almost fanatical devotion to the safety of the Records drove him to perform it with agonizing thoroughness. Anyway, the next routine check was not due for another two months, so why the bruised knees and elbows ? The facts just didn’t add up, or make any kind of sense.

  While he was musing on this problem, a disagreeable interruption occurred.

  The large screen to the right of his chair flickered and glowed into life. An oversized three-dimensional image of the Sub-Assistant Overseer of Records looked squarely at Harben. His huge, oval, rather self-satisfied face appeared to be less than arms-length away.

  Harben flinched. He always resented these intrusions into what he considered the privacy of his recording cubicle. He himself preferred to use the impersonal medium of the message tape when he wanted to get in touch with Headquarters. The time-lag entailed was negligible.

  The Sub-Assistant cleared his throat portentously. If he was aware of Harben’s resentment at his using the visual channel, he gave no hint of it. His beefy face conveyed the unsquashable, bouncy good-humour of one who is accustomed to issuing orders and having them instantly obeyed. The synthetic friendliness of the Overseer’s manner made Harben recoil inwardly.

  “And how are we, Harben, old man?” he said breezily. “Ticking over smoothly, I trust.”

  “Thank you.” Harben’s voice was clipped, hovering only just on the verge of politeness. “You have read my report for the previous month?” He was getting breathless again.

  “Of course, of course. Admirable document. There was just one tiny point I wanted to raise. Very much a routine query.”

  The Overseer paused, expecting some sort of response, even if it were only a raised eyebrow. But Harben remained impassive, waiting.

  “A small matter of ten thousand metres of connecting wire.”

  Harben still remained silent.

  “It was delivered on your order 7259/87, but there’s no record of its having been used, nor is it held in your Maintenance store.”

  Harben blinked. His brain rapidly flickered backwards, groped for some explanation and found none. He was at a loss, acutely embarrassed at being caught on the wrong foot by H.Q. Normally, everything in the Records Centre functioned with the infallible accuracy of an auto-maintained computer. Anything less than that was a painful blow to Harben’s self-esteem.

  “The matter will be looked into, Overseer. A report will be made in due course.”

  “Thank you, Harben.” There was just a tiny edge of menace in the Overseer’s final remark. Prolonged confinement in refrigeration chambers ... ? Exile on an isolation satellite ... ? Naturally the Overseer would not wish to impose the full rigour of the law. But he had the authority, if it were needed. Harben got the message.

  The Overseer’s big face faded from the screen. Harben was left groping for an explanation. Ten thousand metres of cable? Why on earth would he...? Harben couldn’t recall any need for such an order.

  It was too absurd. And yet he couldn’t quite dismiss from his mind the nagging feeling that he knew something about it. The explanation, like a forgotten name, hovered just beyond the grasp of his mind.

  For some reason, Harben now found his eyes wandering towards the big clock, with its five dials and its number
patterns rippling and changing ceaselessly. He watched the flickering displays chopping the seconds into milliseconds, and tried to understand why he had suddenly become fascinated by this instrument.

  The clock had always been one of the most prominent objects in his little cubicle, but beyond consulting it when necessary he had never given it a second thought. Until now.

  The idea came strongly to Harben that if only he could understand its message, the clock had some connection with the missing lengths of wire. But what ? He wished he knew. He wrestled with his memory, but could get nothing coherent out of it. Whatever the link was, he felt that it was important. Very important. This much he sensed from the pressure which he now felt coming from some level of his mind which he could not quite bring into conscious awareness.

  “Twenty fifty-nine,” he thought.