by Bob Shaw
Streets fallen silent, blowing dust,
Railways and bridges, growing rust,
Christmas is only untrodden snow,
Everyone's gone to Big 0…
The sounds of children at play startled him into alertness. He paused and listened to the feint but unmistakable pleasure cries which might have been drifting through a time warp from a previous century. There were seven blocks between him and his target, but he deduced he was reaching the edge of an enclave which possibly was guarded. He moved forward with greater caution, one hand gripping the sidearm concealed in his pocket, and reached an intersection where the pavement had been lifted and fragmented by trees and their roots. A stand of rank grass and weeds provided cover from which he was able to reconnoitre the street ahead.
Vegetation was much in evidence everywhere, obscuring the signs of habitation, but he saw at once that the houses had been deliberately thinned out and that the empty spaces were under cultivation. Although no people were directly visible, he could see a vehicle moving in the distance and from somewhere nearby there came the bleating of a sheep. Sensing that it would be pointless to try moving through such an area undetected, Dallen left the shade of the trees and walked openly along the street, his stride casual but long. A group of small children, shabbily dressed but healthy looking, came running out of nowhere chanting a play rhyme and as quickly disappeared behind hedges.
Their presence was somehow disturbing to Dallen, then he realised he had always unconsciously thought of the Independent communities as being entirely composed of mulish disgrunted adults. Over-simplification, he thought. An occupational disease of Deregistration Bureau workers.
Cordele had been depopulated in 2251 and kept empty for the statutory whole year, which meant that the people now living in it did not exist as far as Metagov was concerned. The convenient administrative fiction was that none of the small groups of dissidents who wandered in the spreading wilderness of the country would have been attracted to the deserted cities. But shelter and other necessities were to be had for the taking there, and the cities could again serve in their most basic role—places where those who needed to could band together for mutual support. In those circumstances children were bound to arrive, officially non-existent children, disenfranchised, not entitled to education or even the most rudimentary health care.
I'm getting out of the Bureau, Dallen told himself once again. As soon as I collect my back pay—as soon as I get what I'm owed for Cona and Mikel.
He made steady progress towards his destination, encountering more and more people as he got farther into the enclave. Some of the adults eyed him curiously as he passed, but showed no inclination to challenge him. Either the local population was large enough for a stranger to remain inconspicuous, or the people were less defensive and insular than he had supposed. At a comer of one block he saw an open-air produce market apparently running on the barter system, and the presence of several mud-spattered trucks indicated that somebody was farming on a comparatively large scale.
On reaching the seventh block inwards Dallen found that it was non-residential, the side he was nearest being occupied by a brick-built church, a bank and a three-storey hotel. The hotel was the only building of the three which .looked as though it had been kept in use. Making sure he was not being watched, Dallen took out the quarry finder—which was tuned to the signal from Beaumont's belt buckle—and looked at its circular screen. A crimson arrow glowed on its surface, pulsing rapidly, pointing to the hotel. Aware of the measured thudding of his heart, Dallen angled across the street. He entered the off-street parking area and had almost reached the building's entrance when a thick-set man materialised in the dense shade of the canopy. The man was youngish, prematurely grey, and had a pump-action shotgun slung on his shoulder.
"Where do you think you're goin', fella?" he said, sounding curious rather than hostile.
Dallen absorbed the fact that the hotel was serving as some kind of headquarters. "I've got to see the boss."
The man extended a hand, husking thumb and fingers together. "Papers."
"Sure thing." Dallen smiled, slipped his hand into his jacket pocket and fired tine sidearm without taking time to grip its handle. The wide-angle cone of radiation sleeted through the guard's body, turning him into an organic statue. Dallen closed with him before he could topple and, taking a chance on the small lobby being empty, waltzed the rigid form back into the hotel. A door beside the desk looked as though it led to staff washrooms. It was necessary to take another risk, but Dallen had begun to feel supercharged with confidence, like a man high on felicitin, and he bore the guard through the door without pause. The room beyond was empty. It took him only a few seconds to bundle the inert figure into a closet, then he was out in the lobby and running for the stairs.
On the second-floor landing he checked with the quarry finder and got a reading which told him to go left. Dallen hurried silently along the corridor, dragging the sidearm from his pocket, and halted at a door which was indicated by an abrupt swing of the bright arrow. Allowing no time for reflection, filled with a heady certitude, he twisted the handle and went through the door fast. The room contained one bed upon which was lying a black-haired woman of about twenty, naked except for a rumpled waist slip. She stared up at Dallen without moving. Items of her discarded clothing were draped on a chair, among them a durocord skirt and a man's belt with a metal buckle.
"It's Beaumont I want," Dallen said in a fierce whisper, unable to accept that something had gone disastrously wrong. "You'll be all right as long as you keep quiet. Do you understand that?"
The woman nodded, opened her mouth and screamed.
"You stupid…!" Dallen almost silenced her with his paralyser, then realised there would be no point. The scream seemed to have been amplified rather than damped by the building's partition walls and he could already hear startled male voices in an adjoining room. He turned back to the door, thoughts in turmoil, and was trying to choose between two unpromising courses—running for the street or locking himself in—when the woman pulled the trigger.
Harry Sanko, "mayor" of West Cordele, was wearing a full business suit, complete with traditional-style collar and tie, regardless of the moist heat. He was in his early forties and had regular features with a Latin cast which was emphasised by a neat pencil-line moustache. He was well-fed, articulate, forceful in his manner and smiled a lot in spite of having only one front tooth.
"What you did was stupid," he said to Dallen. "The only word for it is … well … stupid."
Dallen managed to nod in agreement. He had been dragged the length of the corridor to a conference room and had been pushed into one of the high-backed chairs which surrounded a circular table. Sanko was sitting opposite him and two burly young men armed with shotguns were standing at the door. The fact that Dallen was able to move his head meant that he had been zapped with a low-power personal defence weapon, but he derived scant comfort from the knowledge. He was very much aware of being totally helpless.
"Marion is a close friend of mine," Sanko went on. "She's a protegée, you might say … and if you had touched her … or if you had used this on her…" He tapped Dallen's sidearm, which was lying on the table in front of him, and shook his head, apparently awed by inner visions of his retribution.
"I told you I was only interested in Beaumont," Dallen replied. "I didn't know your so-called protegée had his belt."
Sanko leaned forward and showed his single tooth. "You are quite a stern character, aren't you, Dallen? You're sitting there, paralysed, helpless, not knowing whether I'm going to have you strung up or castrated with a blunt knife, yet you can't help referring to Marion as my so-called protegée. A man in your shoes should be more diplomatic. I mean, how do you know I'm not sensitive?"
"People who plant bombs usually aren't."
"So that's it!" Sanko stood up, walked quickly around the table and sat down again, hard enough to make his chair creak. "I've got news for you, Mister Metago
v—-this is a civilised community here in West Cordele. We've got laws, and we enforce them. We don't have electricity or clean water or any amenities like that, but we're not savages. We don't go in for terrorism."
"Beaumont does."
"Beaumont was a brainless punk."
"Was?" Dallen's fingers twitched, first sign of returning mobility. "Does that mean…?"
"It means he's dead. He was tried and executed yesterday along with two of his buddies—for stealing community property. Does that seem a trifle harsh to you?"
"No—just barbaric."
Sanko gave a barely visible shrug. "You've got to understand that in any Independent community almost the worst crime anybody can commit is the crime of waste. We have a small cash reserve for buying black market medical supplies, and Beaumont and his brother cretins blew some of it on bomb kits.
A few months back two of them wrecked one of our last working automobiles, and if they hadn't totalled themselves along with it we'd have had to…" Sanko broke off and gazed solemnly at Dallen, his tooth digging into his lower lip.
"I don't get this," he finally said. "Why are you here? What was Beaumont in your soft little life?"
"The day I pinched him in Madison be said his friends were going after my family." Dallen spoke slowly and carefully, his mind laboring to assimilate the news of Beaumont's death and the wider implications of what he had just heard. "About the time he was saying that somebody went into the City Hail and used a Luddite Special on my wife and son … but…"
"But what, Mister Metagov? Brain beginning to stir? How much cash does it take to buy one of those fancy toys?"
A corrosive acid was seeping through Dallen's mind, burning away one world-picture, disclosing another. "Somebody in Madison … Probably somebody in City Hall itself…"
"What were you saying about barbarism a minute ago?"
"But I can't see why," Dallen went on. "There was no reason for it."
"Maybe a slug of this will get your head working." Sanko took a silver flask from his pocket, came round the table and poured some of its contents into Dallen's mouth. "A Luddite Special is its own reason, man. It only does one job."
"There can't…" Dallen gagged as warm neat liquor reached his throat, but the spasms seemed to accelerate the return of sensation to his limbs. He became aware of a twitching in his calf muscles.
"Your wife and kid must have known something. They must have seen something." Sanko drained the flask and tossed it to one of the armed men who caught it and left the room unbidden. "You're no Sherlock Holmes, are you?"
Dallen wasted no time in speculating who Sherlock Holmes was. He was appalled at his own lack of perception, at the weeks he had wasted, at his unconscious arrogance in assuming that he and his futile, insignificant, Earth-limited activities had been the root cause for what had happened to Cona and Mikel. The alternative theory was that there was a monster roaming loose in Madison City, enjoying the immunity that Dallen had personally gifted to it—but what had been the original crime? What could have been sufficiently serious to justify the erasure of two personalities? Had k been a murder? The circumstances did not fit—nobody had been found dead or reported missing.
"It still doesn't make sense," Dallen said. "We don't have any serious crime in Madison."
"I love it!" Sanko laughed aloud, his mouth and the solitary tooth forming a notched dark circle. "Graft doesn't bother anybody in Madison and that means it isn't serious."
"There might be some petty…
"Listen to me—Madison City is a kind of general store for all the big Independent communities in this part of the world. They come from as far away as Savannah and Jacksonville, any place that can scrape up big money, and it's from Madison they buy their generators, water purifiers, truck engines, whatever. Didn't you know?"
"I know my wife and son weren't involved."
"You're starting to bore me, Dallen. How did you get to Cordele? By car?"
"I flew."
"That's a pity—if you'd come by car we'd have taken it and let you walk back. A flier is no use to us though, so I guess you can take it away as soon as you've thawed out."
It was only then that Dallen realised he had been expecting imprisonment or worse. "You're letting me go?"
Sanko looked exasperated. "Maybe you expected to be cooked and eaten."
"No, but with what I know about Beaumont…" Dallen paused, deciding not to make a case for his detention.
"Try a little experiment," Sanko said, taking Dallen's sidearm and dropping it into his own pocket. "When you get back to Madison make out a report saying you heard some non-existent people claiming to have ended the non-existence of some other non-existent people. I'd like to hear what sort of reaction you get."
It was late afternoon when Dallen reached the city. He circled in low over the south-western districts, over Scottish Hill and the immaculate, hermetically sealed suburbs which would later begin to glow in a simulation of life as the lights came on in a thousand empty streets. The tall buildings of the city centre, projecting above vivid toyland greenery, were washed with sunlight and looked impossibly clean, idyllic. A visitor winging down from space might have con-eluded that here was a community of contented, rational beings leading well-regulated lives—but Dallen's mood was one of disaffection as he picked out the pastel geometries of the City Hall.
His reckless dash to Cordele had, as well as providing vital information, jolted him out of grief-dominated patterns of behaviour, freed him from the emotional conviction that a craving for justice and revenge would, if strongly enough felt, bring about its own ends. He had been reminded that there was no even-handed arbiter, and that the most successful hunters were those who stalked their prey with coldness and calculation.
His ship hovered for a moment, then began its purposeful descent, its shadow a drifting prismatic blur which advanced and retreated according to the lie of the land beneath.
Chapter 9
Gerald Mathieu stood at the window of his office and watched the Bureau patrol ship slant down across the sky for a landing at Madison's inner field. The notion that Garry Dallen might be at the flying controls entered his mind, but he dismissed it and walked back to his desk. Dallen's prolonged absence from the City Hall had been welcome to Mathieu as a breathing space, but it was making him obsessive, giving his subconscious mind too much time to elaborate on the image of a dark superhuman Nemesis.
He had survived his encounter with Dallen immediately after the incident … woman and child, crumpling, failing, idiot eyes shining … but the circumstances had been exceptional and had not quite dispelled his fear of the other man's intuitive power. Since then that fear had been growing, week by week, and now the prospect of eventually having to face Dallen again ranked with all the other great phobias of his life. There was the dread of venturing into infinite black space, of living in a wafer-thin shell of alien metal, of being exposed as a criminal, of ever having—even once—to exist for a full day without felicitin. And now there was the next meeting with Garry Dallen…
Mathieu sat down at his desk and tried to concentrate on the backlog of work. The job of mayor or deputy in an artificial city bore little resemblance to that traditionally associated with the titles. It was more akin to being executive officer for a very large theme park, and Mathieu's responsibilities ranged from public relations and tourist information to recruitment and purchasing. Even with extensive electronic assistance the job was demanding, especially as the city's annual revenue was in a steady decline. Mathieu had deferred for several days decisions about reducing engineering budgets, but on his way to the office that morning had promised himself good progress. It would be a sign that he was still functioning well, that a single unlucky accident… woman and child, crumpling, going down before him, minds blown away… was not going to ruin his entire career.
He called up a set of cost analysis graphs on the desk's main screen and strove to link the varicoloured blocks and lines to external reality. Silent m
inutes went by. The graphs shimmered on the surface of his eyes, tantalising him by refusing to be drawn into his head. He was beginning to feel a mild panic when the internal communicator chimed and Mayor Bryceland's features appeared at the projection focus, eyes blindly questing. Taking only a second to smooth down his jacket, Mathieu accepted the call, making himself visible at the caller's terminal.
"Let's have a talk about the conference," Bryceland said at once. "What have you got so far in the way of a programme?"
Mathieu was baffled for a moment, then it dawned on him that Bryceland was referring to a conference of museum city managers which Madison was scheduled to host in the coming November. "I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, Frank," he said. "Perhaps next week…"
"Next week!" Bryceland's puffy countenance registered dismay. "I suppose you're aware how important this conference is?"
"Yes. I'm also aware it's five months away."
"Five months is no time at all," Bryceland grumbled. "Specially the way you're working these days."
"Meaning?"
"Try to figure it out for yourself." Bryceland's image dissolved into transient specks of light, ending the conversation.
"Jesus Christ!" Mathieu leaped to his feet, fists clenched, angry and afraid at the same time. He walked around the office and paused at his full-length mirror for reassurance. The blond-haired figure gazing at him from the safety of that other office, the one in the looking-glass world, appeared exactly as it should—tail, young, athletic, successful, immaculate. But were the eyes beginning to show signs of strain? Was there a slight hunching of the shoulders which indicated harmful tensions?