What would happen now, if in his texts about Estel he suggested that the presumed stasis vaults outside the Hospital were not what they seemed? If even a few people investigated and managed to publicize what they found, it might bring down the government. He had already planted the seeds of revolt on one world; why not another? Why not this one, that had tyrannized the founders of Maclairn? It would be fitting. They’d have been happy to know that their indirect influence would bring about its downfall. . . .
Yet they had not tried to overthrow Undine’s government. They had believed that because it was democratically elected, they had no right to do so by any means other than the manifestly-impossible task of persuading the voters to demand change. And that was all he’d aimed to do on Ciencia. It would be a different matter here; the people had been not merely suppressed, but deceived; and they would be angry. A revolution here would be a violent one. Very likely there would be a great many deaths besides the natural ones that could no longer be hidden.
Terry’s mind whirled. It was frightening to realize how much power he had, how much he was purposely seeking to gain as the mysterious Captain of Estel. His goal was to set people free from false beliefs about human nature—that was the point of telling them about the capabilities inherently theirs. It had been the reason for giving the Ciencians access to literature they weren’t allowed to read. It was what the mentors were doing on Earth, and the Elders had told him the future of civilization depended on the mentors’ work. So shouldn’t the people of Undine be made aware that mind was life’s essence and that it didn’t reside in dead flesh? That might put them in danger, but he’d been warned that he might have put the Ciencians in danger, too, and hadn’t Jon said that if spreading truth was worth risk to him, it was worth risk to everyone who cared?
“The ship Estel travels from star to star spreading knowledge,” he wrote, “knowledge that will someday be possessed by everyone—knowledge of the powers of the human mind, which are greater than most of you have ever guessed. With these powers we can defeat sickness and pain and misunderstanding. But such powers belong only to the living. If you think the bodies in the Vaults can ever attain them, you are deceived, for those bodies are not living, but dead; and what powers the dead have, no one knows. Death is a mystery that the Captain of Estel himself cannot unravel, but he knows a living body from a dead one. And he knows that the difference has nothing to do with whether or not it contains a beating heart.”
Terry thought for a moment, and went on writing, “Some of you think a heartbeat defines life, and that is because you know too little of mind; but when people gain more mind faculties, they will see that making hearts beat in dead bodies is foolish. It is not even possible for very long. Your government has told you that your hearts will beat forever, that the hearts of your ancestors still beat, and that is not true. Go to the Isle of Sleep and tear down the walls, and you’ll see that it’s not. Those interred there are not asleep. Many of them may be mere bones by now. What then was the good in keeping their bodies warm in the Hospital for so long? The government knows, but it will not tell you. If you became aware that there was no benefit except to the bureaucrats, you might question the exorbitant taxes you have been paying and the outrageous laws you have been tolerating in the hope of eternal life. Those who questioned in the past had no proof of deception, but now you can find proof on the Isle of Sleep.”
Not everyone would be swayed by this, of course. Most people would go on believing that death could be permanently avoided. But if rumors about Estel went viral, some would follow through. The tombs on the island weren’t guarded; there had been no need for that. The government wouldn’t take the rumors seriously. So a few walls would be torn down, and then. . . .
Then the conflict would begin. Some people would be angry at the government; others would be angry at the doubters—and it wouldn’t be a matter of mere debate. His hand on the Enter key to post the message, Terry drew back. He had asked himself what difference there would be between encouraging such a revolt and what he had done on Ciencia. But there was a difference. For one thing, he wouldn’t be around to lead this one. More than that, it would involve the same sort of resistance to new ideas that was being exploited on Earth. Fear of death was as deeply emotional, if not more so, as fear of unsettling facts about the paranormal. To foster beliefs that would make people vulnerable to persecution by evildoers was one thing; but to set them up for violence against each other was something else.
Reluctantly, he erased the second paragraph and posted only the first one, plus similar statements elsewhere on the Net. It was not his job to tell the people of Undine that they would someday die. Hopefully, by the time new mind faculties were widespread they would have figured that out for themselves.
Late that evening he returned to the café as arranged and found the proprietor with a young man dressed as a hospital lab technician. “This is Brad,” the proprietor said. “I’ve told him what you want.”
“I’ll be glad to help you out,” Brad said with enthusiasm. “Any way to put one over on the bastards, I’m willing to try. They’ve been ripping off the taxpayers and they’ve got it coming to them.”
Terry described the helmets. “They’ll be in the neurology department,” he said, “and I’ll be surprised if there’s not a spare or two, though they’re not used often.”
“All that stuff is used,” Brad told him. “They do full brain exams on everyone who acts eccentric. But they won’t be doing one late at night, and anyway they’ve got plenty of duplicate equipment.”
“You won’t have trouble getting into that lab?”
“Hell, no—I’m on the graveyard shift, and nobody checks where I go on my breaks. The thing is, though, I’ll have to stash them till I get off work—I can’t carry them around with me. They’ll be too big.”
“They’re foldable, the layer with the nanoelectronics is thin.” That would make no difference, unfortunately; Brad wore a short-sleeved lab coat and its pockets weren’t large. He couldn’t hide helmets under it while working.
“Don’t sweat it,” Brad told him with assurance. “I’ve got a safe place to put stuff.” It was likely that this wasn’t his first theft of hospital property, Terry realized. He apparently had no scruples about it, which was no more due to lack of morality than the Maclairn group’s circumvention of hospital rules had been. A bureaucratic institution that tyrannized people was fair game.
Once they’d finalized the plan, Terry went back to his room. He slept because his mind training gave him control over sleep, but not for long. He was back at the café well before Brad’s shift was due to end, waiting impatiently and barely tasting the free meal with which the proprietor provided him. Time passed; Brad was late. At long last he appeared—but without what he’d promised to deliver.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I stashed them, but I couldn’t get back to pick them up. Some of the guys came by my lab and wanted me to go for breakfast, and I couldn’t make an excuse to detour—they’d have tagged along with me. Don’t worry, I’ll bring them tomorrow morning.”
“Can’t you go back for them?” Terry protested.
“God, no! I’d run into people who know my shift’s over, and they’d ask questions. You’ll have to wait till tomorrow.”
He wouldn’t be here tomorrow. The last shuttle would leave this afternoon and if he wasn’t on it he’d be stuck on Undine permanently, with Alison and the others stuck in space. Sick with dismay, Terry didn’t reply. To have come so close to acquiring the gear he needed and then leave without it! He couldn’t bring himself to do that.
There was only one solution. He would have to walk into the hospital and retrieve the helmets himself.
~ 31 ~
“I have to have them today,” he declared firmly, “Tell me where they are and I’ll go and get them.”
Brad stared at him. “You’re crazy, man. You’d never get away with that.”
“The public can go in and out, can’t they?”
“Sure, but if you don’t know the layout you couldn’t find your way around. And it’s not in an area where visitors belong.”
“Let me borrow your lab coat. I’ll stay under the radar.”
“Well, okay, but I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes if they catch you—no matter how current your physical, they’ll do a full invasive exam once you’re an inpatient.” Brad took off the lab jacket and handed it over.
You’d be sentenced to the psych ward, the café owner had said . . . the police and the hospital authorities were one and the same. He was indeed crazy, Terry admitted to himself. It was too big a risk, with too much at stake; the sensible thing would be to forget the helmets and head for the spaceport right now. He’d already done what he could to offer hope to the people of Undine—and giving more mind training to his crew was not really essential, disappointed though they would be.
But he had never backed off from a challenge before, and it wasn’t in him to refuse this one.
“Where did you hide the helmets?” he asked.
“In my gym locker—the ninth floor gym, for low-level employees only. They’re in the top row of Aisle C, number 9C-1067.”
That might be a problem. “Will they scan my ID on the way in?”
“Not unless you present it to log your time. They don’t check—people aren’t likely to forget, and some don’t bother about recording extra hours.”
Terry recalled that all citizens were required to exercise for an hour per day unless away from the city, in a public gym or, evidently, one provided at their workplace. To remain inconspicuous, he would have to work out like everyone else there.
“There’s a sweatshirt in the locker you can wear instead of the lab coat when you leave,” Brad said. “That’s what I was going to do.”
After getting detailed instructions from Brad on how to reach the right area and find the locker, Terry headed for the door. “Hold on,” the café owner said. “You’re forgetting something. I haven’t got my sugar.”
“It has to be picked up from a warehouse. If I haven’t enough time left to do it, I’ll give you the claim code when I get back with Brad’s shirt.”
“If you’re caught you won’t be coming back. Give it to me now.”
That was a reasonable demand; the man had done his part, and Brad had done as much as he could under the circumstances. Terry took the phone handed to him and keyed in the address and code that Captain Garick had provided.
“Hey,” said the man, “that’s my regular supplier’s place! If I go there Paco’s going to get wind of it.”
Terry paused, nonplused. He couldn’t afford the delay of collecting the sugar himself, yet if these men didn’t get what they’d been promised they could prevent him from leaving. In desperation he said, “Tell Paco I’m a friend of Zach Dyllon.” He did not give the password.
“Will he know the guy?”
“A lot of people do, on a lot of worlds. And they know he doesn’t like to hear that friends of his friends have been hassled.” Zach would not have included a protection racketeer in his network so his name might not mean anything, but the mere suggestion of a connection with an interstellar underworld would make Paco think twice before starting trouble.
On leaving the café, Terry went into one of the adjacent stores and bought a roll of tape. Then he walked rapidly toward the canal, beyond which rose the massive hospital. This had to be gotten over with fast. Crossing the bridge, he joined the stream of people heading for the doors and, drawing a deep breath, he passed through.
There was a vast, white-walled lobby with moving walkways branching off in various directions. Most of these people had appointments for treatment or exams, he realized; every day was busy here when the entire population had to report for checkups at regular intervals. Then too, some came to the city’s administrative offices—tax assessment, issuing of permits, and all the other red tape handled by bureaucrats on any world. There were too many reasons for citizens to be present for him to be noticed in areas open to the public.
He strode purposefully toward the bank of elevators. The ninth floor, Brad had said. It consisted of offices and labs, reached by a succession of cross-corridors. With luck, the lab coat he wore would identify him as an employee on the way in. Several others emerged from the elevator at the same time he did, paying no attention to him. He followed them down the long main corridor to the gym at its far end.
This being the morning rush hour, it was crowded, and he passed the desk without attracting scrutiny. There were many aisles of stacked lockers; he scanned them quickly, hoping to spot 9C-1067 before anyone observed that he was searching. It was on the top row. Terry punched in the keypad code he’d been given and beneath the folded gym clothes inside, he saw, to his relief, the stolen helmets.
It was all he could do to keep from touching them. But he couldn’t take them yet; if anyone was watching, it wouldn’t look natural to remove something from the locker and leave immediately. Resolutely, he put the lab coat over them and changed into Brad’s gym clothes. Then he proceeded to the nearest free treadmill and spent one of the longest hours of his life pushing himself close to exhaustion in the effort to avoid worrisome thoughts.
A terrifying possibility had occurred to him when it was too late to change his strategy—what if the treadmill was linked to the implanted heart monitor he did not have? What if it triggered an alarm when it got no normal signal from it? Since this did not happen—at least nobody came to check on him—he judged that the badge he wore under his shirt sent some sort of “all clear” to every device programmed to detect a citizen’s heart status. But he was careful to keep his heart rate within the range that might reasonably be expected.
When the hour was up he returned to the locker room and got back into his own clothes, but left the lab coat in the locker, covering the helmets, while he put on Brad’s sweatshirt. Apparently workers often left the gym so dressed; it must be assumed they worked out after their shifts ended—he’d been too absorbed in getting there undetected to notice people on the way out of the building.
Now for the hard part, Terry thought. He stood close to the locker and carefully reached inside, pulling the folded helmets out from under the gym clothes and—when he was sure nobody was looking his way—dropping them into the neck of the sweatshirt. They would not stay there, of course; they would slide down as he walked and eventually fall out. But he should be able to get as far as the men’s room, where he’d have enough privacy to reposition them.
The men’s room, too, was crowded; there were men in line for stalls. Terry joined them, growing more and more nervous at the wait. He could feel the helmets slipping beneath his shirt. Once behind a locked door, he retrieved them just in time and spread them out, securing them to his torso with the tape he had bought.
When he reached the ground floor he drew a deep breath of relief and headed jubilantly for the main exit. He’d gotten away with it! Nobody would know or care what he was carrying outside the hospital. He had left his duffel at the café, since Harris, who’d been sleeping, had planned to check out of their hotel room during the morning. Now he just had to collect it and wait in the park for the bus—the sooner he was off this planet, the better. . . .
Abruptly, with shock, he saw what was happening at the hospital exit. They were scanning IDs.
He had noticed when he arrived that the exit was screened from the entrance by a barrier he’d thought merely decorative. It hadn’t occurred to him that they were actually separated. Now he realized that there was a force field of some kind to prevent people from going in the opposite direction. People could enter freely, but not leave.
It should have been obvious, Terry thought in despair. He had known the hospital detained people it did not choose to release. It was a prison both for unwilling patients and anyone accused of a crime. Naturally there was a security checkpoint—the IDs of people to be held were flagged by the system, while everyone else was let through.
; But he would not be let through. His ID was not in the system at all; when examined by the security officer it would reveal that he was not a Fleet officer and was therefore on Undine illegally. Whether or not the helmets were found at the time he was detained, he would be imprisoned.
He had not told either the café owner or Brad that he was an offworlder, so they’d had no reason to warn him. He’d been trapped the moment he came into the building, Terry thought despairingly; the checkpoint was not visible from outside. How could he have been such a fool? What he knew of the hospital should have told him what to expect.
He broke away from the line moving forward, aware that he must head somewhere purposefully to avoid looking nervous. It would do no good to search for another exit, though considering the number of people employed in the building there were surely many—they would be guarded and the same software would control them all. He couldn’t tell what he might meet in the ground floor corridors; he no longer had the lab coat and a sweatshirt would undoubtedly be out of place there. So he returned to the elevators and held back when one opened, at a loss for what to do.
There must be fire exits. He could in fact see one on the opposite side of the lobby. But of course he couldn’t just push it open; he’d be observed, and in any case it would have an alarm. His only chance was to use one on another floor and hope he could get down the stairs before being pursued. It was a slim hope; if getting out were as simple as that, prisoners could escape easily. Yet he had no choice but to try.
He went up just one floor to minimize the distance he’d have to run. He couldn’t move quickly—the precarious taping of the helmets under his sweatshirt wouldn’t withstand that. It was no real problem; speed now wasn’t necessary and after the alarm went off he’d get out before they loosened, or he’d be caught and it wouldn’t matter. Whether he was held for theft or merely for being on the planet wouldn’t make much difference; either way, he’d be unable to reach Estel.
The Rising Flame: Box Set: Defender of the Flame + Herald of the Flame Page 64