Gaul said, “So? What’s so bad? Can’t you wait to get your ear to the ground?”
Something in Shultz’s eye showed the effort he was making to keep emotional levels below the signal threshold. Looking more animated, he said, “That’s what you think. You sit there telling me where I get off, because I don’t organize your ersatz nosh-up with an ersatz, ear-to-ear grin. Don’t ride me, Engineer, or you’ll get this table wrapped round your head.”
For a good half minute, Gaul Kalmar sat perfectly still. He was surprised by the first honest reaction he had heard from an adult for as long as he could remember. When he moved, it was in a spirit of pure inquiry, without any sense of grievance. He wanted to see how far Shultz would go. Tania’s restraining hand on his arm was completely unnoticed as he got up in a smooth flow of movement which carried him to Shultz.
They were almost the same height, with matching shoulder width. Shultz said, “Oh to hell,” and stopped bothering about whether they were being monitored or not. He went for a hold which should have put the older man face down in the remnants of the feast. Swift as he was, he found it countered and had to give ground a pace to try a new tack. When he found himself sliding in a pulp of fruit and crushed, disposable tableware his expression was basically one of disbelief.
Even the pseudo privacy of The Staring Fish was not proof against this kind of demonstration. An elderly, gray-haired man in the blue-violet drill tunic of the civil guard materialized at the open end of the trapezoid.
Gaul was helping Shultz to his feet and using a table knife to scrape a well-mashed mango from his white mess jacket. When the guard arrived, Shultz was saying, “I must apologize most sincerely, Mr. Kalmar. It was very clumsy of me. I hope you will stay and let me bring some fresh dessert.” Then he brought in the newcomer with, “I fell over my feet and dropped forward onto the table. It could have been very dangerous for these people.”
Whatever the man thought, he inclined his head and said, “Accidents will happen. I was just passing. I thought someone was ill.”
His eyes had taken in everything about the group. He was not completely satisfied; but the rank of the two diners was high enough to make a report a matter of some seriousness and Shultz was known as a cadet for his own branch of service. It could be as they said. The record would show, in any case, if their mental rhythms had been unduly disturbed. No one could leave the city. There was no urgency. He went on his way.
Gaul said, “What time do you finish this chore?”
“Eighteen-fifteen.”
“Come and have a chat. There’s the address. We’ll be there until nineteen-hundred.”
“What about?” Although he was looking more cheerful, Shultz was still no babbling brook.
“Does it matter?”
“I suppose not. All right, I’ll see you then. Good-bye for now, Mrs. Kalmar.”
“I’m not Mrs. Kalmar. Clermont. Tania Clermont.”
When he finally disappeared with a tray of debris, he was looking even more cheerful.
“You’ve made another hit.”
“Another.”
“There’s at least one other. I think you even look like a mind healer. You could reconcile me to Carthage.”
Her silence was as good as a direct reminder to be careful. If they were being monitored, he was getting dangerously near “classified” material. But he went on with it as they went farther below ground to strike the subway direct to Megara.
“What percentage of the population come to your clinic?”
She was evasive. “Not very high.”
“How high.”
“Eight, perhaps nine percent. That’s not bad, you know. Very small, from a historic point of view. In the past, only a small proportion of people needing psychological help ever got it.”
“They might not have needed it. There would be some self-regulating factors in a natural environment. Neurosis would cure itself in a few years. It’s your subject and I take your opinion, but I’m sure I heard that therapy took as long as a natural cure.”
“That’s misleading; for one thing there’s no guarantee that the therapy cases would have been natural cures. They were probably the most serious disturbances anyway. And there’s another thing.”
“What’s that?” He took her arm and guided her, unnecessarily, through the reduction bays onto the fast track. The supple movement of her waist against his arm was a contact she rarely allowed for long. She was sensitive enough to know that it meant more to him than she was prepared to concede and feminist enough to resent it as an invasion of privacy. As they took a clear bay on the almost empty, moving ribbon, she pulled away and went on, “If you think there was some Golden Age when there were no stress-making forces at work on human beings, you’re way out. There’s been stress all along the line. It’s a condition of life. Almost a necessity for life.”
“I see that. But surely there’s what you could call productive stress and simple repressive stress.”
“I doubt whether your subconscious would know the difference.”
“But is there no condition of living which would allow conscious and subconscious drives to be integrated and satisfied?”
“Satisfying the subconscious would let loose more violence and cruelty than was ever yet. With all the limitations, if ever there was a Golden Age, this is it.”
Gaul Kalmar’s apartment was in one of the tallest blocks in Megara. The four-cipher combination tabulator lock was reading HOME which meant that Lee Wayne had already arrived. When the iris eye door sliced open, Wanda Mardin’s unmistakable penetrating treble voice was saying, “After standing all afternoon at a lab bench, I must say I don’t expect to be walked round the city all night. Have you no imagination?”
“Imagination I’ve got. Time to work it out, I have not got.”
Gaul came to his friend’s support sententiously, with, “Remember, Wanda, a pleasure deferred is a pleasure doubled. It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.”
Wanda Mardin recognized defeat and simply closed her eyes. She was lying at a therapeutic angle, with platinum-blond hair in a neat, vivid fan on the broad, gray, upholstered seat of a long divan beside a panoramic window. Against the severe skyline of the city’s carefully planned buildings, she made a welcome statement of some of the most pleasing curves in nature. As a medical lab worker she came under the same basic color identification scheme as Tania, but she had introduced enough minor modifications to the blue-violet leotard to make it almost a different garment.
Lee Wayne walking past her, with great casualness, pressed the elevation control and set the couch to a fast rise to vertical—a gambit normally used when the house-cleaning robot was busy with its furbishing chore. She maintained complete inertia, until gravity beat friction and then walked away from the near perpendicular surface as if she had meant to do that all the time. Only a very early riser caught her at a disadvantage and even then it could be argued she held a good hand.
This was the time when the state’s ceaseless vigilance hit hardest. The price of the millennia of social stability was the sacrifice of freedom to be unstable. During the working hours it was possible to forget it. Dedicated hobbyists settled down again in a preoccupation which kept them from too much original thought. But from 1700 hours to 1900 there was a gap in the defenses and thought had to be consciously controlled.
Lee Wayne, square built, mesomorphic, with very dark brown hair and eyes which could be expressionlessly black when he chose, had a hobby which seemed pointless in a society which had long ago invented every labor-saving device which could be, even marginally, worth using. He was a gadget man. Anything from a miniature music box to an express walkway interested him.
Wanda spent a lot of time waiting for him to finish elaborate working models. She had even developed a kind of enthusiasm herself. As an assistant, she was inclined to be unreliable and pass the wrong thing; but, after trying the experiment of introducing herself inside a spring-loaded storage chest, she gave
up opposition and acknowledged that a man could have two main occupations. When she had emerged au naturel like the Parthenogenesis of Venus, he said, “Well, that tension’s too fierce for a start. Anything under seventy kilograms would come shooting out like a jack-in-the-box. Just pass me that instrument tray.”
When they were ready to go, Shultz had not appeared. The elevator dropped them to static level and they walked across the busy walkways on a fly-over. As they crossed the incoming lanes from Central Square, Tania recognized a figure standing alone in a four bay.
“He’s down there.”
They watched him move into the reduction bays and appear again on the sidewalk. He was checking the address.
Gaul said, “I’ll go and intercept him.”
Shultz did not appear unduly surprised when the elevator made an unscheduled stop on the second floor. His first question made his interest clear and also made a point about why he was coming from the wrong direction. He had been taking a look at the records.
“Where’s the svelte psychologist?”
“Waiting for you with her hair in a braid. What else? Come along this way.”
Shultz was back with a defensive, noncommittal gloom, but Wanda took it as a personal challenge and fell back to walk with him on the narrow way.
From memories of long ago, someone had built into the air-conditioning set-up a progression, which simulated that of a temperate climate day. The evening atmosphere was several degrees cooler. Light dimmed. There was expectancy in the air. Gaul liked this part of the day. It gave a hint of change, as though anything was possible, as though something completely brand-new could be waiting nearby only to be found.
When they reached the central square, light levels had dropped, until the white marble fountains appeared to be suspended in mid-air. The sky had darkened into a deeper blue and although he was responsible for the mechanics of it, he could still enjoy it. As if without premeditation, he led the way to the elevator for the far fly-over and they walked out of the square into the Esmun quarter.
Below them, most buildings were closed. A few evening walkers in small groups were moving about the stationary ways. Lights were going up in hospitals and some research labs where continuity on an investigation kept the staff on a twenty-four-hour watch. The lower stories of the Medical Building were brilliantly lit.
Gaul said, “Since we’re so near, let’s look in your witch doctor’s cell, Tania.”
Shultz was unable to conceal a momentary look of surprise when she said, “This way then,” and led them through a staff entrance, which yielded to some rapid tabulator setting that nobody but himself tried to follow.
Off a circular reception hall, a number of closed doors led to consulting rooms. One bore the legend T. Clermont. Again, she keyed a signal and the durplast shutters sliced back. Her consulting room was an ellipse, with a desk and a couch and a chair. In silence she moved across to the wall above the couch and pulled down a stubby gray lever to the mark Screen. It was the ocular proof of an effect which everyone consciously experienced at some deep level of personality. They were all discrete, private, intact individuals again. There was no probing eye here.
Tania said, “I cannot leave it long. Even with a patient, there is a query if it stays longer than ten minutes at any one time. At night it will be noticed more quickly. Say what you want to say and don’t waste a second.”
Gaul Kalmar said, “There’s not much to be said. This feeling, as of now, is its own argument. This is how a human being should live. For better or worse, out on a limb, working it out for himself. I believe we should leave Carthage and go north. Set up a colony in an uncontrolled environment and have another go at a social scheme without the paternal eye that prevents change either for good or ill. Society here is preserved in a perspex block.”
Lee Wayne said, “I agree with that. We should set a date and prepare for it. From what you have said before, it’s going to be cold outside. We need to take equipment with that in mind.”
“Designing clothes with functional use against cold would be very interesting. It would take time though. A minimum of several weeks.” Wanda Mardin’s voice had almost lost its normal languor.
Kalmar had been watching Shultz. From the moment the screen had come in, there had been a change in him. He looked as though he had found what he was looking for in a search which he had not expected to end. Bringing him into the group had its dangers, but Kalmar would not have gone ahead if he had been in doubt.
Kalmar said, “We can’t take too long. Statistically we can’t beat the eye for a long period. Someone is bound to bring the plan into conscious thought with the monitor on a personal check. Make it two weeks from today. I’d like to increase the group to eight. Clothing and food for eight, Tania and Wanda. Equipment for a long journey, Lee and myself. Frank can think about how and where we get out. Another brief meeting here at this time next week.”
Frank Shultz said, “I’m sorry to strike a jarring note in this agape, but it’s just as well I came along. One of the first pieces of classified information you get in the civil guard is about the city’s antihostility screen. Nothing with a human heart can live in a band of three or four miles depth round the dome. It uses a lot of power to keep it in being. We can’t just walk out.”
Kalmar said, “You’ve well paid for your invitation. Okay. That’s something else for you to think about. After all, that’s basically meant to keep people out. Every citadel is weakest from inside.”
Tania said, “That’s it for now,” and knocked up the SCREEN lever with a casual flick born of familiarity.
Shultz looked as though there was something he did not quite understand, but he was prepared to wait for the answer.
Two
With two days to go before the next group meeting, Gaul Kalmar was no nearer an addition to his nominal roll for New Troy. In small parcels, bulky clothing had accumulated in the flat. No storage cupboard could be slid open without spewing some incongruous, quilted nouvelle vogue item out onto the mat. Lee Wayne had come up with a heater, which he claimed would work on pulped organic matter. Running trials with Chicken Provençale and Rhubarb Crumble provided by Wanda from the nearest restaurant was expensive but reasonably successful. Whether nature herself would be as obliging as the pure products of the stimulator was another question.
Towards the end of his afternoon stint at the power desk, Kalmar felt he could reasonably make another visual inspection of sky-lighting installations and dropped the indicator slot on his console to show the honorable intention. Incoming callers would get a golden-voiced robot answer, telling all.
The column above the E.S. block was a luminous pale blue shaft on a twenty-foot diameter and the elevator cage moved up the center, a dark X-ray shadow, passing an empty counterweight moving down. From the small circular landing, two storerooms led off to house emergency spares and a third gave access to the inner space and the concealed observatory.
Kalmar had his moves down to a time-cheating drill, and went through into the upper cupola in under a minute. It was just after 1600 hours and the first crack of the opening shutters sent a glare of light onto his hands and face which turned them blood red. It was a startling light, a light which the environment engineers in the city would never have imagined could be created, in spite of the great range of their equipment.
When the roof was open, the small cell was flooded with the most fantastic crimson glow. Outside, the sun was huge, ominous, magnified by some freak combination of atmospheric conditions. The black promontory was ringed in a lake of fire. How long he would have been mesmerized into staring at the unreal, theatrical seascape was anybody’s guess, but a noise from below his feet made him suddenly aware of his vulnerability. He cursed himself for failing in vigilance and dropped down to the floor, where he had loosely replaced the ceiling plate.
A centimeter at a time, he moved the disk aside, until a thin crescent moon gave vision of the room below. Three feet down, a head of shining auburn h
air was stationary, as its owner stood still and worked out the message of the unfamiliar control panel of the opening onto the interdome space. It needed no crystal ball to work out what would happen then. She must have followed him up almost at once. If she failed to find him, she would report in that some accident must have happened to him. He was sufficiently important to be a matter of concern.
Acting on an intuition, he slid the plate aside and dropped down in one swift succession of movements, which presented him before her very eyes, even before her brain had registered that there was a hole in the roof. It was like an Indian rope trick in reverse and he was very impressed by her reception of it.
Jane Welland said, “Oh, there you are, Mr. Kalmar. There’s a power demand from Byrsa which is at least ten percent above schedule for this time and I think you ought to talk to them about it. I was just coming to tell you when you went out. But I thought it was something you should know right away.”
It was a long and well-delivered speech in the circumstances and even while he was able to make a very close analysis of the way her mouth moved when she talked and register the high-powered impact of that amalgam of perfume and curving surfaces which put Jane Welland in a very special bracket, he was also thinking that here perhaps was another recruit.
He said, “Thank you. That was very thoughtful. Just wait a moment and I’ll be down.” That would record in a noncommittal kind of way. Then without speech he mimed that she should follow him above and heaved himself back through his bolt hole.
She stretched up her arms to be helped through and he could only admire the foreshortened view of her face in the unusual elevation and the taut lines of her figure, in long symmetrical arabesques from raised forearms to the small curves of knee and ankle. Her eyes were not simply brown; the pupils had contracted as she looked up into the light and the iris rings were a warm translucent, liquid gold. Instead of a one-way filter, masking thought, they were eyes which were candid and two ways open. When her hair came into the light it absorbed the lurid color and seemed to glow like a primary source itself. If art was a harmony parallel with nature, he was a privileged observer at a small infinity out of space and time where the two had momentarily met.
Eight Against Utopia Page 2