“How old are you?”
Kor thrust a gnarled finger at the paper.
“It tells…right there.”
She looked into his face with a bright, vacuous stare.
“How old are you, please?”
“Sixty-five.”
She checked the statement against the paper.
“Your birth date?”
Kor told her.
She went over every scrap of information on the paper, requiring him to give the information orally. Kor knew that out of sight, a silent recording machine was taking down his replies, timing his reaction. He gave everything smoothly, just tight.
“What is your question, please?”
Kor attempted to evade. “I—I am looking for someone.”
“The Extrapolator does not locate missing persons.”
“Uh no. I want to know If I will meet this person again.”
“That, is better. Enter cubicle 3-C as soon as the present occupant leaves. State your question clearly and completely. All questions are recorded. The machine will give you an answer immediately.”
She thrust his papers at him and turned her bright, vacant attention to a woman in a multi-hued cloak.
“Your name, please?”
Kor moved away. The door of cubicle 3-C opened and a Triszman came out. Kor entered quickly. There was a low bench in the cubicle, fronted by a table. Kor sat down, folded his arms on the table top.
A voice rasped at him, “Ten seconds! Formulate your questions in ten seconds, please!”
Ten seconds passed slowly. Kor stared impassively at the wall. There was no equipment in the cubicle. The metallic voice came from behind a hidden baffle somewhere in the room. The voice said, “State your question, please.”
“Under what circumstances will I meet Tasa Lanor again?” Kor voiced the question slowly, distinctly.
The machine was quiet a moment. Then the voice spoke again.
“Question rejected on the basis of insufficient directives. You have ten seconds in which to reformulate the question.”
Kor wrestled for a half hour with the machine’s obtuse noncomprehension of his affair. The Lady Soma had told him that all local information was fed to this machine. Therefore, he knew, the name of Tasa Lanor was a part of the machine’s knowledge. It could not tell him what it knew, only what it might predict from the basis of its knowledge. Sufficient directives had to be supplied to route the machine correctly toward making a proper prediction.
Finally, the voice from the machine spoke again, “Your prediction is ready. There is paper and pencil on the table. You may write it down.”
The machine uttered its singular pronouncement. Kor stared at what he had written.
“At the first hour of morn, when the Sun is born, an old man stumbles, ’twixt love and duty torn.”
Kor wondered if it were possible for a machine to be insane. He shrugged, tucked the slip of paper in his pocket and left the Prediction Center. What did it mean? He submitted the doggerel to semantic analysis, but failed to yield a result. The meaning depended upon whether the verse were uttered factually or metaphorically. He made a rational third-order analysis of the situation, and decided to accept the factual interpretation.
He would await Tasa Lanor in the park outside this building at the first hour of morn.
The sun lifted a swollen, bloody face over the sleeping city. Kor had held his post since the first break of dawn, watching the crowds of People entering and leaving the building as the working shift changed. Obviously, crews were on duty around the clock, and Soma’s shift began at sunrise.
Just as the Sun came up, Kor saw her walking swiftly through the park, in the guise of Tasa Lanor. She was alone. Kor moved quickly, made sure with special senses that it was she.
“Tasa Lanor,” he said, touching her arm.
The touch informed her. She looked at him, with wide, eyes. “Kor!”
Gladness touched her face, curved her lips. Her disguise began to drop away.
“Watch it!” he cautioned. “Take hold of yourself. It is I, Kor.”
She brought her hands to her face, stood shuddering and sobbing. At last she looked up at him; she had recovered her composure.
“It is truly you! I—I thought… I saw…”
“I know. You saw the broadcast of my execution. It is enough to say that I escaped. I had to see you.”
Her grip was firm on his arm, but her voice trembled.
“Kor—Kor, I’m so glad!”
He said, “We mustn’t talk too long. Quickly: How can I get to the Organization?”
She drew in her breath.
“I—I can’t tell you now. I have to check first.”
Exasperation seized him. He was hurried. He could not forget the prediction, “an old man stumbles.” He got a grip on himself.
“Look, Soma! I dare not return to the Institute except that they are prepared for my coming. And I have to leave here on foot. It is dangerous to use my powers even a little here in the city. You must get me to the Organization…”
“I know—and I will. Tomorrow. Meet me here.”
Heavy boots thudded on the pavement. Kor turned casually away.
A sharp voice cried, “Halt!”
Kor looked into the unsmiling face of an officer of the Trisz guard. He was blocked by a squad of armed, uniformed guardsmen.
“What is your name, please?”
Kor’s gray beard trembled with just the proper amount of agitation.
“Sam Kodel. I’m a stranger here. What is the meaning of this?”
The officer turned his cold attention to Soma.
“You are Tasa Lanor?”
She nodded.
“You are both under arrest, in the name of the Trisz. Please come with me.”
So this was the outcome, Kor thought. What a fool he had been to apply to the Trisz machine for information. He might have gotten it from Brother Set. But he trusted the Blue Brother even less than the machine. Of course, his questions last night had been scanned by the suspicious enemy. It is the virtue of a conqueror to be suspicious.
It has always been thus and will always be so. Suspicion is basic.
The guardsmen surrounded them, marched them off.
CHAPTER XIII
The Commander of the Guard at the precinct station was cool and pleasantly polite.
“You understand, of course,” he smiled, “that this is merely a security check. It is required for the records that a complete dossier be made, of the relationship between you two. Miss Lanor is a government employee, and you, Sir, are from the Outlands. If you will just answer a few questions…”
It was ridiculously easy—a simple exercise in advanced hypnosis. Kor took over the mind of the Triszman officer, impressed upon it a complete array of false information. He topped it off with a legitimate desire to permit this harmless couple to go their way. The two were released with the same smiling courtesy with which they had been received.
“I cannot now return to my job,” Soma told Kor afterward. “Whatever use I may have been to the Organization is ended. The Trisz have an intricate system of records, and you can be sure they are being scanned from every angle. Your own identity is being traced. We have perhaps half an hour before the entire Trisz guard will be ordered out to search for us.”
“Then let us go to the Organization at once.”
“Are you mad? We could not even leave the city!”
“I can manage that,” Kor said quietly.
She looked at him with sudden hope. Kor smiled wryly.
“I stumbled all right, when I made a public show of myself meeting you. But it is you who are ’twixt love and duty torn.’”
“What are you talking a
bout?”
Kor gave her the penciled prediction. She looked up at him again, eyes darkly brooding.
She shrugged, by-passing the innuendo of his remark. “I cannot take you directly to the Organization without authorization and directions. I may as well tell you, the Organization expected to receive you if you successfully avoided the Trisz kind of justice. But I have taken an Oath to suffer death before revealing the location of the Organization to anyone. And that includes unauthorized Saints, Sir Kor.”
“The Scarlet Saint is dead,” he assured her. “I am Kor—none other. The Scarlet Saint was executed yesterday at sunset by order of the Trisz. Have you forgotten? If the Organization expects to receive me, we had better hurry.”
“You are dead—and yet you live? How can I be sure that you are the Man Kor? I feel that you are, it is true. But what proof have I? If you are actually a Triszman, you would come armed with any knowledge Sir Kor may have had. If you live, you must have broken your Oath—and that I cannot believe of a Saint!”
“You misunderstand,” Kor tried to be patient. “I did not use my powers against the Trisz, nor could the field I set up be detected by them. The use of abstract mental powers causes a detectable strain in the sub-ether. Detectable to a Man, or to a mental organism such as the Trisz. Fortunately, an electrical discharge occasions a similar disturbance, something like static in radio or television. Under cover of the static generated by the converter, I escaped through subspace, to the Scarlet Chapel in Ka-si. From there I made my way here in search of you.”
Her glance darted at him.
“Did you see anyone at the Scarlet Chapel?”
“I saw Brother Set.”
“What did he say?” The question was abrupt, eager.
“He said,” Kor laughed, “‘I thought you would return here first.’”
She fell into his arms, hugged him, squeezing his arms with her fingers, laughing and crying.
“Kor—Kor! It truly is you!”
“Of course it is I. But what—?”
She looked up at him laughing. There were tears in her eyes.
“Don’t you see yet? Brother Set is one of us! He would have said what he did only to the real Kor; he was expecting you!… Now, if you can get us out of the city, I will take you to the Organization!”
Kor performed in a deserted section of the park fronting the Extrapolator. They sat side by side on a stone bench, in the shelter of some sparse shrubbery, and Kor put his mind to work. A few minutes later, two wholly different identities strolled casually out of the garden—an affectionate young couple, arm in arm, with eyes and thoughts for nothing in the world save each other. Only a Scarlet Saint who knew both would have recognized Kor and the Lady Soma in their transmutational disguises.
* * * *
Deep in the rocky core of the mountains near Den-ver a great cavern blazed with light and hummed with activity. This was a secret lair of the Organization—one of its lairs. There were others around the world, in isolated territories, each deeply buried in the earth and thoroughly shielded from the remotest chance of discovery.
There was no way into such a retreat as this, and no way out. No tunnels led to the surface, to betray its location with their open mouths. Only the Scarlet Saints attached to the Organization knew about the buried cities and knew how to operate the matter transporters that brought people and materials in, and rarely let them out.
The Organization, Kor learned from Soma, represented the “underground” activity of the Men. Those graduates who distinguished themselves in worldly service were transferred here after a pretense of dying and being buried. Not only Men, but men and women of the People were also spirited into the underground cities to work with the Men. In this manner, over the centuries, the populations of the buried cities had grown, until some, like Sub-den, to which Sonia led Kor, were enormous in extent.
The buried cities were each an individual world of its own, having no connection with the surface. The only ones who might leave, once they had entered, were those Scarlet Saints, dispatched to secret duty outside, or in the farthest depths of space.
Kor had hardly been aware of entering the cavern. He had stood with Soma in a dry gulch an hour’s ride into the desert from Ka-si. She had motioned with her hands a secret signal, and suddenly they stood in a rock-walled chamber miles away and under ground.
“Where I took you,” Soma told him, “is one of the ‘lifting places’ on which the matter transporters are constantly trained. I have been here many times, but never farther into the city than this reception room. Here I talked with the Commander of the Organization, and then I was sent back to the lifting place. That is all I can tell you. I learned of the Organization through Sir Ten Roga, who was a trusted and valuable member. He brought me here and I was initiated into the role of spy for the Men.” She shrugged. “There will be no more of that for me now. I cannot again appear as Tasa Lanor, and my father’s authority no longer exists. I was hoping that the Men will find a place for me here.”
A door opened in the rocky wall and a sleek-looking young woman came out. She was obviously a woman of the People, slim and lithe, her skin a deep bronze. Her eyes were dark brown, and sparkled in keeping with her smile.
“Come in, please. The Commander is waiting for you.” Kor ushered Soma ahead of him. Both had reestablished their own physical identities, but Kor still wore the coarse brown garments of an Outlander and Soma the colored draperies and the rich and glowing, saffron cloak of a proud Triszman.
The erect, Olympian figure behind the desk held out both hands. “Welcome, Sir Kor and Lady Soma!”
“Tor Shan!”
Kor strode happily forward, seized the Master’s hand.
Tor Shan smiled.
“You gave us rather a difficult time, Kor,” he reproved. “You moved too fast for us to keep pace with you!”
Kor grinned wryly.
“I was living fast, Sir!”
“Sit down, both of you,” Tor Shan invited cordially. “Kor, tell me about it. Speak with perfect frankness before Soma. She may as well start now her indoctrination as a future citizen of Sub-den.”
Kor launched into his story, sparing no details, but it was obvious that many of the explanatory terms, commonplace to himself and Tor Shan, were utterly foreign words to Soma’s cars. He concluded with the account of their arrest and escape.
Tor Shan’s thoughts seemed to be fixed a great distance away.
“Conduct befitting a Man, Kor,” he murmured at last.
Kor swelled with pride.
“Thank you, Sir!”
“However,” Tor Shan frowned, “I had hoped that affairs would take a slower pace. Your return has been a little too soon.”
“Too soon, Sir?”
Tor Shan waved his hand. “Never mind.” He peered at his interlaced fingers on the gleaming desk top. “Kor, I have a great deal to tell you, now that you are ‘dead’. Does it bother you that I use that term?… No? Well, I had hopes you might have gotten a little closer to the Trisz than you did. You might have cleared up, perhaps, a few points that are still beyond our present knowledge. But that is beside the point. We had extrapolated your adventure, of course, but something was awry with our equations. We obviously did not have enough directives. At any rate, our extrapolation didn’t come close to the actual events.”
He leaned back in his chair and faced them both squarely.
“From now on,” said he, “both of you must remain residents of Sub-den. Therefore, I am going to tell you what we are doing here, and why we are doing it. Obviously, Kor, we could not teach you at the Institute about the underground activities of the Men. Not all of the Men know about our Organization. Only those deemed most worthy and useful are finally let in on the secret and brought here to further the work Your own case was decided before y
ou left the Institute. There is a place here for your divisible mind. We want a chance to study it—and to let you use it.”
He paused, opened a drawer in the desk, drew out a gilded humidor of scented cigars. Kor refused. Tor Shan selected a cigar and momentarily focused his attention on its tip; it issued a tiny flame. He drew in a lungful of smoke.
“There is more to the work of the Men, of course, then merely following an idealistic principle of some day freeing Mankind from the yoke of the Trisz.” He paused, frowned into the wreathing whorls of cigar smoke, and continued. “If it were not for the Trisz, we men would be masters of the Universe. I mean that quite literally. And the rest of mankind, and the other intelligent species throughout the Universe would be a hundred thousand years advanced beyond their present state of civilization.
“Let us take a look at this Universe. What is its fundamental nature? In rough analogy, it is like a scales in a state of balance. Its equilibrium is determined as much by those forces which seek, to use a metaphorical expression, to lift it up, as to those which desire to tear it down. That which is in the Universe balances itself against that which is not. The positive arrays itself against the negative. Tomorrow asserts itself against today. In very ancient times, this continual, two-way struggle of the Universe was dimly recognized. Our ancestors saw in this constant effort toward balance a struggle between what they called Good and Evil.
“To couch our present situation in these ancient terms, we would say that the forces of Good—the Men—are confronted by the forces of Evil—the Trisz. Statements such as this once passed among men as rational, but we now recognize that such a statement is not even good semantics.
“The Men are not good, in any sense that the term might imply. Neither are the Trisz evil. In fact, from the viewpoint of the Trisz, the entire set of values would be reversed. Do you understand what I am getting at?”
The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister Page 37