Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

  She took his hand. Her hand was warm and gentle. “Tell me, Shamar,” she said. “Tell me all about it.”

  So this is how easily spies are trapped in real life, Shamar told himself with numb disbelief.

  The story came out slowly and hesitantly at first. She said nothing until he had finished.

  “And that’s all? You really believe that, don’t you? And I guess your government does, too. That all we need is just some little idea or something.” She turned away from him. “But of course, that’s neither here nor there, is it? I never imagined an adventurer type would look like you. You have such a soft, honest voice. As a little girl, I pictured myself being carried off by a tanned desert sheik on a camel; and oh, he was lean and handsome! With dark flashing eyes and murderously heavy lips and hands like iron! Well, that’s life, I guess.” She stood and paced the room. “Let me think. We’ll pick up a flyer in Zelonip when we catch the bus next Tuesday. How much does the money weigh?”

  “Eighty pounds.”

  “I can carry about 10 pounds in my bag. You can take your field pack. How much is in it? Thirty pounds? That’ll leave about forty which we can ship through on extra charges. Then, when we get to Xxla, I can hide you out in an apartment over on the East side.”

  “Why would you run a risk like that for me?” he asked.

  She brushed the hair from her face. “Let’s say—what? I don’t really think you can make it, because it’s so hopeless. But maybe, just maybe, you might be one of the rare ones who, if he plays his cards right, can beat the system. I love to see them licked!

  “Well, I’m a clerk. That’s all. Just a lowly clerk in one of the Party offices. I met Von Stutsman a year ago. This is his cabin. He lets me use it.

  “He’s older than I am; but there’s worse husband material. But then again, he’s about to be transferred to one of the big agricultural combines way out in the boondocks where there’s no excitement at all. Just little old ladies and little old men and peasants having children.

  “I’m a city girl. I like Xxla. And if I marry him, all that goes up the flue. I’ll be marooned with him, God knows where, for years. Stuck, just stuck.

  “Still—he is Von Stutsman, and he’s on his way up. Everyone says that. Ten, twenty years, he’ll be back to Xxla, and he’ll come back on top.

  “Oh . . . I don’t know what I want to do! If I marry him, I can get all the things I’ve always wanted. Position, security. He’s older than I am, but he’s really a nice guy. It’s just that he’s dull. He can’t talk about anything but Party, Party, Party.

  “That’s what I came out to this cabin for. To think things over, to try to get things straightened out. And then you came along. Maybe it gives me a chance for something exciting before I ship off to the boondocks. Does that make sense to you?

  “I’ll get married and sit out there, and I’ll turn the pages of the Party magazine and smile sweetly to myself. Because, you see, I’ll always be able to lean forward and say, ‘Dear? Once upon a time, I helped hide an Earth spy in Xxla.’ And that’ll knock that silly and self-satisfied look off his face for once . . . Oh, I don’t know! Let me alone!” With that, she fled to the bedroom and slammed the door behind her.

  He could hear her sobbing helplessly.

  In the afternoon, she came out. He had fallen asleep. She shook him gently to waken him.

  “Eh? Oh! Huh?” He smiled foolishly.

  “Wash up in there,” she told him. “I’m sorry I blew up on you this morning. I’ll cook something.”

  When he came back, she was serving them their dinner on steaming platters.

  “Look, Ge-Ge,” he said over coffee. “You don’t like your government. We’ll help you out. There’s this Galactic Federation idea.” He explained to her the cross-fertilization of the two cultures.

  “Shamar, my friend,” she said, “did you see Earth’s proposal? There was nothing in it about giving us an interstellar drive. We were required to give Earth all transportation franchises. The organization you used to work for was to be given, as I remember it, an exclusive ninety-nine year right to carry all Earth-Itra commerce. It was all covered in the newspapers, didn’t you see it?”

  Shamar said, “Well, now, I’m not familiar with the details. I wasn’t keeping up with them. But I’m sure these things could be, you know, worked out. Maybe, for Security reasons, we didn’t want to give you the interstellar drive right off, but you can appreciate our logic there. Once we saw you were, well, like us, a peace-loving planet, once you’d changed your government to a democracy, you would see it our way and you’d have no complaints on that score.”

  “Let’s not talk politics,” she said wearily. “Maybe it’s what you say, and I’m just naturally suspicious. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Well, I was just trying to help—”

  The sentence was interrupted by a monstrous explosion.

  “Good God!” Shamar cried. “What was that?”

  “Oh, that,” Ge-Ge said, shaking off the effects. “They were probably testing one of their damned automated factories to see if it was explosion proof and it wasn’t.”

  IV

  During the week alone in the cabin, Ge-Ge fell in love with Shamar.

  “Oh, my God!” she cried. “What will I do when they catch you? I’ll die, Shamar! I couldn’t bear it. We’ll go to Xxla, we’ll hide away as quietly as two mice, somewhere. We won’t go out. The two of us, alone but together, behind closed doors and drawn shades. Nobody will ever know about us. We’ll be the invisible people.”

  Shamar protested. “I don’t see how we can ever be secure until something’s done about your government. As long as you don’t reach some kind of agreement with Earth, I’ll be an outlaw. I’ll be afraid any minute they’ll tap my shoulder and come and take me away. I don’t think we could hold up under that. We’d be at each other in no time.”

  She wept quietly.

  The last day in the cabin, they went out and dug up the rest of the money. The trip to Xxla took place without incident. Ge-Ge rented an apartment for him, and he safely checked in. She went shopping for food and clothing.

  Thereafter she came nearly every evening. They would eat and she would reveal the inconsequential details of the office regime to which she was daily exposed. After dinner, they would sit in the living room and practice Itraian and neck a little. Then she would go home.

  One day, after a month of this routine, she threw herself into his arms and sobbed, “I gave Von Stutsman back his earring today. It was the only fair thing to do. I’m afraid he knows about us. He’s had me watched. I know he has. I admitted it was another man.”

  Shamar held her tensely.

  She broke away. “You were born in Zuleb, you suffered amnesia, you woke up in a ditch one morning without papers. You’ve been an itinerant worker since. Things like that happen all the time. You hit a big lottery ticket a few months ago. I told him that. How can he check it?”

  “You told him I didn’t have any papers?”

  “Millions of people don’t have any papers—the drifters, people that do casual labor, the people that don’t work at all. The thing is, without papers he doesn’t have any way to check on you. Oh, you should have seen his face when I gave him back his earring. He was absolutely livid. I didn’t think he had it in him. I suppose I’ll have to quit my job now. Oh, if you only had papers so we could be married!”

  Ge-Ge’s mood, that evening, alternated between despair and optimism. In the end, she was morose and restless. She repeated several times, “I just don’t know what’s going to happen to us.”

  “Ge-Ge,” he said, “I can’t spend my life in this apartment I’ve got to get out.”

  “You’re mad.” She faced him from across the room. She stood with her legs apart, firmly set. “Well, I don’t care what happens any more. I can’t stand things to go on like they are. I’ll introduce you to some people I know, since you won’t be happy until I do. But God help us!”

  A
fter approving his accent, which had improved under her tutelage, Ge-Ge took him to a party the following Saturday.

  The party was held in an ill-lighted railroad flat. People congregated cross-legged on the bare floor.

  Shamar listened to a man complaining that citizens were being taxed beyond all endurance to support the enforced automation program. “They aren’t interested in building consumer goods. They’re interested in building factories to build consumer goods and blow them up testing them. Or the factories are always obsolete just as soon as they finish them, and they can’t phase into their new production setup and Hundred Year Plan.”

  Ge-Ge whispered a warning to him to beware of spies.

  “Spies?”

  “The Party,” she said, drawing him to one side.

  “But—but—you mean the Party just lets people talk like this?”

  “Whatever harm does it do?” she asked. “Everybody benefits from talking out their aggressions. Now, have another drink and relax, and Shamar, be careful! Nobody minds local crackpots, but nobody wants foreign crackpots!”

  She led him to another drink and left him standing with the host.

  “Nice party,” Shamar said.

  “Thank you,” the host said. “I find it very invigorating. As long as there’s still people that think and that criticize on this planet, I feel there’s hope, don’t you? This is your first time? I don’t recall your face. I have a study group that meets Wednesday nights. You’re welcome to come. We have very stimulating discussions about government and politics. Please do come, any time you can. Just drop in any time after eight. What was your name again?”

  “Shamar the Worker.”

  “Interesting name,” the host said. “Another drink?”

  Later, Shamar found himself in an intense conversation with a bearded youth of perhaps seventeen.

  “A guy’s responsible for his own conduct, right? Right! I’m responsible for their conduct? Each man goes to hell in his own way, right? Right! I don’t want anything to do with them. You can’t do anything about it, man, that’s what I’m telling you. I don’t seem to be getting through. Don’t you see, it’s a machine . . .”

  “But if everybody joined the Party,” Shamar suggested.

  “So everybody joins? So what’s new? Okay, you vote in the Party elections. What do you get? You get these two guys running for office: one is slightly left of center and one is slightly right of center. And both are four-square for the Automated Factory Program. Just suppose you did get a radical—suppose they accidentally let one slip through? He goes off and they argue him into line, and when he comes back, you say, ‘Like, man, what happened?’ And so he tells you, ‘Well, I couldn’t do anything about it.’ That’s just what I’m telling you.”

  “I can’t see that,” Shamar said. “I just don’t believe that.”

  At another time, Shamar tried to explain free elections to a female. He was informed, “Man, just give me a way to cast a vote against all those crumbs—and then I’ll think twice about all this guff you’re peddling.”

  A sober, scholarly man told him, “Join the Party? Whatever for? You join the Party and you’re expected to spend all your free evenings at rallies and meetings and speeches and in ceremonial parades in honor of the ground breaking for a new automated factory. No, thank you.”

  Another told him, “You need a lesson in economics, son. What do you mean by free society? The only way you can run an industrial society is to limit production. If you produce enough for everybody, the government would produce itself out of business. Look here. The Party has millions of tabulating machines of one kind or another clicking happily away day and night arranging production to fit income distribution. They’ve never been known to goof and produce a surplus of anything. Why, damn it, if every man, woman and child in the world went out to buy a pound of nails apiece, the shortage of nails would be fantastic. But would they produce more nails? You know they wouldn’t. ‘So you want more nails?’ they’d say. ‘Well, damn you, work for them!’ And the price would go up. See what I mean, son? They’d have another stick to beat us with.”

  Later, Shamar found himself seated on the floor across from an aesthetic in his late thirties. “You see, my friend, force and violence never accomplish their stated ends. We must stand firmly on the principle of non-violence.”

  “But that’s taking it laying down,” Shamar protested.

  “No! Sometimes I think it goes to the very core of human existence. Perhaps this is the central import of all philosophy: the way things are done is more important than the ends that are obtained.”

  At that point, Ge-Ge arrived breathlessly. “Shamar, quickly! We must go!”

  “Huh? I’m having this interesting little talk—”

  She tugged him from the floor. Baffled, he followed her. As he did so, the fighting broke out in the far corner of the room.

  “Quickly!” she said. “Let’s get out of here before the police come.”

  They fought their way, hand in hand, to the door. There they paused for a moment to look back.

  “It’s a couple of rival socialist parties fighting,” she explained breathlessly.

  “What about?”

  “God knows. Hurry.”

  They were in the street. “Don’t run, walk,” she cautioned. After a block, she said, “I didn’t even need to watch you at the end. Everybody got so drunk nobody noticed you much.”

  “Even the spies?”

  “Oh, they always get the drunkest.”

  The siren sounded.

  “Let’s hurry.”

  When they arrived at Shamar’s apartment, she asked, “Well, what did you think of the party?”

  “It was an education,” he said after a moment.

  V

  The following week Shamar spent many hours walking the streets of Xxla. He tried to convince himself that the people he had met at the party were not representative.

  They were.

  Friday night Ge-Ge announced “Shamar, I can’t stand much more of this! What’s going to happen? What is Von Stutsman going to do? He’s onto something. I sometimes wish—oh, God!—I sometimes wish something would happen so we’d know where we stand, so we’d know what to do!” He tried to put an arm around her, but she brushed it away. “Don’t! Let me alone!”

  She retired to the other side of the room. For a moment, and for no reason, the hostility in the air between them was like ice and fire.

  “I’m sorry,” Ge-Ge said curtly.

  “That’s all right,” Shamar said, his voice cold and distant.

  “Let’s talk about something else.”

  They were silent for a minute. Then he said, “I wanted to ask you. Of all the people I talked to, I couldn’t find anyone who seemed to give a damn, one way or the other, about Earth. Why is that? You’d think they’d be at least talking about Earth.”

  “Why should they be? We’ve got our own problems.”

  At that point, the police arrived and took Shamar the Worker away.

  They put him in a cell in which there were already three other prisoners.

  “What you in for, buddy?”

  Shamar studied the prisoner for a moment without answering. His companions looked up.

  “No visible means of support,” Shamar said.

  “I’m Long John Freed.”

  Shamar nodded.

  “They’re trying to hook you for evading the productivity tax, huh?”

  Shamar declined comment.

  Freed settled back on his bunk. “I say take them for all you can. Now, look, you’re a little guy. So they bleed us white. Take a factory manager or an important Black Market operator—you think they pay taxes? You can bet they don’t. It’s a racket. The poor pay and pay because they can’t hire fancy lawyers to lie for them; and the rich take and take. I don’t see why the Party puts up with it.”

  Freed shifted his position. “Say what you will about the Party—and I know it’s got it’s faults—still, there ar
e dedicated men in it. I may be a small-time crook, but I’m as patriotic as the next man. The Party’s done a lot of good.

  “First time for you? How old are you, twenty-seven or so? First time, they usually try to recruit you for the Factory Force.

  “It’s not such a bad racket. When you start out, they toss you in with lots of kids—usually the draftees. You get six weeks pick-and-shovel, and you’re really dragging when you finish that. Then comes specialist school.

  “Try to get in as an electrician or plumber. Plasterers or bricklayers have to work too hard. Carpentry’s not bad—I’d hold out for cabinet-making, rather than rough carpentry, if I had to go into that. Then there’s real specialties. Tile laying. You have to have a personality for that, or you’d go nuts. Demolition’s not too bad; you blow up obsolete factories. That would have been right down my alley.”

  Freed was silent a moment, then he resumed:

  “Sometimes I may talk like a radical, and maybe I am a little of a radical, I don’t know. You look at the overall picture, things ain’t too bad. I’ve known a lot of thieves and petty crooks in my time. As a class, for pure patriotism, I’ll stack them up against anybody you can name; and in a way, you know, I’m kind of proud of that . . . Well, let’s shut up and get some shut-eye.”

  When finally he slept, Shamar dreamed that the Party was a vast, invulnerable pyramid resting on the shifting base of the population. It was constructed to dampen out vibrations. The bottom quivered, and the quiver ran upward a few inches and was absorbed. The top of the pyramid remained stable, fixed and motionless, indifferent even to its own foundation. The pyramid was built like an earthquake-proof tower. It was built to last. The Party was built to govern. It need only devote itself to its own preservation. Any other issue was secondary.

  It was an organic machine. The gears were flesh and blood. The people on top were maintenance engineers. Their job was to go around with an oil can that they could squirt when necessary to keep friction to a minimum.