by Chad Oliver
Quinton blew a smoke ring at his face. “You tell me, I’ll tell you,” he said. “What’ve you got?”
Siringo raised his absurdly thin eyebrows. “Talk to Wonder Boy,” he advised. “And after you tell us dummies what to do to save Beloved Terra, come on back and we’ll have a beer.”
“Try not to smash anything,” Quinton told the man who was probably the finest technician in the world. He left then, and didn’t hear, or want to hear, the pungent remark that filled the room behind him.
“Wonder Boy” was John Bordie, whose official title was Chief Correlator, and whose actual job it was to sort through the mass of data sparked off by Siringo and try to make some sort of sense out of it. Prolonged contact in the tiny UNBAC station had made him regard Siringo as something either more or less than human, and he welcomed Quinton with all the enthusiasm of a fellow tourist on a desert island.
“Meran must have been nice,” he said after they had exchanged greetings. “We’ll have to talk about it sometime, Bob.”
Quinton smiled. Nice? How did you translate stars into words? “Yes,” he said. “We’ll have to talk about it.”
Bordie got down to business. “Here’s what we’ve done, Bob,” he said. “We’ve put every available man on it, sparing just enough to fake the usual station activities and make the joint look respectable. We’ve arbitrarily divided the possible causes for the down-curve into five classifications, and worked them through the mad Genius and his computers.”
“Um-m-m. The usual five?”
“Generally speaking, yes. Extraterrestrial, embracing such star systems as we know, the planets on which we have colonies, Luna, and the space station; Cultural; Technological; Personal; and Unknown—the latter being anything not caught by the first four. We’ve been going full blast, cutting security precautions to a minimum. But the Snake dropped another point the last time we checked it; Lorraine doesn’t know that, and he won’t be happy.”
Quinton didn’t say anything.
“We’ve abstracted the essentials for you, and you can pick them up in Classified. Tentatively, I’d say we’d ruled out any non-earthly cause, but you’ll have to interpret for yourself. I don’t put any stock in that Unknown stuff—that’s Siringo’s baby. Aside from that, we know precious little. If we could only work out in the open—”
“But we can’t,” Quinton finished for him. “If anyone finds out what we’re up to, we won’t have to wait for any world to end. Our name won’t even be mud.”
John Bordie shrugged. It was too late to start worrying about that; that was something they all had to live with—or try to.
“Any concentration at all?” asked Quinton.
“Not much. There’s the usual stuff—the press yapping about the morals of the teen-agers, a couple of new religious cults, lots of good protest literature about inhuman scientists, some national incidents of a minor sort, some joker down in Mexico who says he’s the Aztec Cuauhtemoc and wants to change the name of Mexico City back to Tenochtitlan and start a holy war against Spain, a spurt in membership in the Anarchist Party, and Aunt Tillie back under a doctor’s care with a backache. You name it, we got it. What a planet.”
“There must be some concentration,” Quinton suggested, smiling.
“Well—maybe. I’d say the United States, but maybe that’s just national pride.”
“What does Siringo think?”
“God only knows, and I wouldn’t put any money on that.”
“Well, let’s start breaking the United States down into areas, John. It might turn up something, and at any rate it’ll give Siringo a chance to work off some of that nervous energy. You got an analyzer I can use, for what I don’t get done at home?”
“Sure—use Four. I’ll slap a restricted on it until you give me the clear wave.”
“Fine. I’ll go digest this stuff, and then we’ll start asking questions.” Quinton drummed his fingers absently on his knee. “Can you spare Conway? I’m going to need a bright boy.”
“Check. My best to Lynn, and tell Baby I’m waiting for her to get a little older.”
“You won’t have to wait long—and you’d better start loading the parcheesi dice; I hear the kid is getting pretty sharp.”
“Beginner’s luck,” Bordie said sourly.
Robert Quinton picked up the data abstracts at Classified, and left the Station for home. Even on viewer tape, the abstracts were bulky. He knew that he was in for a protracted siege of learning. A man couldn’t even keep up with his own planet any more, much less the universe. He had a momentary vision of an extensive interstellar civilization, and felt decidedly sorry for anyone mixed up in it.
It was early afternoon in New Mexico, and on the hot side. The land as seen from his copter looked sleepy and pleasant, with the green farmlands rolling along under him like eternal verities. They seemed to say that they had always been there, would always be there, and that he was a fool for not tossing the abstracts overboard and taking off for the nearest trout stream.
But Robert Quinton felt oddly cold in the hot sun. A century ago, that green farmland had been desert. It only seemed eternal, obvious. Once it had been obvious that the blazing sun above his head had gone around the Earth below him—you could see that that was true, and had always been true.
A century ago, desert. And a century hence—?
The long days passed, and they were good days. Robert Quinton worked, and worked hard. There were red streaks in his eyes and he was hard to live with. There was a terrible, driving urgency behind his every move, with rest when he could fit it in. But it wasn’t exciting work, and there was nothing dramatic about it. It was grinding, digging work—and it had to be done.
Just the same, it was good to be home.
Every man has a place he calls home, no matter how many places he may live in. In Quinton’s case, it was an old-fashioned Frank Lloyd Wright type of house that blended in with the soft browns and greens of the New Mexico hillside. It had a small, clean stream that bubbled through the living room and out into the patio, and the glass-and-rock walls were open and spacious. Quinton had often wondered why he was so conservative in his housing, but somehow he just didn’t care for the turret-and-gingerbread style of the modernists. And this was a good house, his house, made into a home by the years that he and Lynn had lived in it. It had his kind of soap, his kind of casualness, his kind of books, and it was his kind of house.
Then, too, there was the statue. It stood arrogantly on top of the piano, and it had originally been a whisky ad. It was the bust of an elderly, aristocratic gentleman with a monocle and a somewhat bemused expression. Into the base of it Quinton had carved a name: Cuthbert Pomeroy Gundelfinger. This was sort of a private deity, and a very useful one. Whenever someone came to visit him that he did not know, Quinton simply waited until he saw the statue. If he laughed, he offered him a drink. If he asked who Cuthbert Pomeroy Gundelfinger was, he made polite conversation and waited for the caller to leave.
At the moment, Lynn was picking fresh fruit out in the garden, and Baby was avidly watching the tri-di. It was a science-fiction story she was watching, and Quinton smiled to himself as he glanced at it. It was routine stuff about the Twenty-fifth Century, involving the usual space pirates, matter transmitters, a mad scientist who looked enough like Siringo to be his twin brother, and a clear-eyed hero in a blue and silver uniform who was dashingly engaged in saving the world. Why was it, he wondered, that all these stories envisaged technological marvels by the bushel, but seemed to assume that social structure and culture wouldn’t change in over four centuries? Why were they fighting all of today’s local issues in the Twenty-fifth Century? Why, it was less than a century ago that nations had still had colonies, and nobody had even heard of Charles Sirtillo or Intelism!
And why did they persist in imagining that saving the world was a popular pastime? It wasn’t, and never had been. Quinton lit a cigarette, no longer smiling. Saving the world was for crackpots, idealists, and impractica
l dreamers; everyone knew that. It was a standard joke, and world-savers were about as popular as plague carriers. The popular man, the practical man, was the guy who did the expected thing, the socially approved thing, and never questioned whether it was right or wrong. If everyone else was doing it, why then, naturally it was right.
They had a name for world-savers.
Suckers.
Quinton put it out of his mind. This was a battle that he had fought with himself long ago, and he had won. He worked on, sifting through the abstracts, getting the feel of the situation. The sun was warm outside, and there was a lazy insect hum in the air, but he stuck with it.
There was nothing else to do—for him.
The days raced by and became weeks.
Computers chattered and banged and clicked. Analyzers sorted, chewed, classified. Data flowed into New Mexico Station in daubs and tricklets and underground rivers. The UNBAC men sweated and argued and threw rocks at the trees.
It was all very dull, to an untrained eye. They discussed culture correlations and integrative principles, diffusion receptivity and Uncle Charlie’s beef against the tax collector. They sat up all night with a computer. They lost sleep and insulted each other with vast regularity and fineness of distinction. And they worked together on the toughest problem of all—putting two and two together to get four.
When it came, the setting was anything but impressive.
John Bordie leaned forward over the smoke-burned table and frowned at his parcheesi dice. Martin Lorraine, AWOL from his New York office, did his level best to look sloppy in a Y-shirt, but only succeeded in looking like the typical tri-di hero exhibiting Pose 7-X-4b, Casual Masculinity Without Pipe Or Dog. Bob Quinton slouched his long frame in a chair, his hands in his pockets, a cigarette glowing unhealthily from the corner of his mouth. Carr Siringo charged up and down the room like an impatient dragon; you could almost see the fire squirting out of his nostrils.
A young man hurried into the conference room with a microplate. He was terribly earnest and excited when he handed it to Lorraine, and probably didn’t even hear Siringo’s contemptuous snort.
“We’ve got it,” Lorraine announced briefly. “The curve took an upswing on M-97. It’s a man.”
Robert Quinton smiled broadly.
“Clean living,” suggested Siringo.
John Bordie fingered his dice. “We’ve got to be sure,” he said.
“This is as sure as we can get it until we try it for keeps,” Martin Lorraine told him slowly. “The hypothesis has been tested from every angle we can work, and the survival curve has indicated we’re on the right track.”
“And where do we go from here?” Bordie asked.
“Well, let’s see what we’ve got,” Quinton said. “We’ve established two facts: the factor that’s causing the Snake to drop is a personal one—that is, it’s a man we’re after—and the threat is located in the United States—according to Siringo, somewhere in Texas, Arizona, Louisiana, New Mexico, or California. The obvious procedure from here is to narrow that area down and then find him, whoever or whatever he is. And then—”
There was a short silence.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Lorraine said decisively. “As the man said when he stepped off into the chasm,” muttered Carr Siringo with an unpleasant grin.
Quinton turned, started to speak, and then held his tongue. Carr was irritating—but he had a habit of being right. As usual, Siringo had placed his stubby finger unerringly on a very knotty aspect of the problem.
Quinton replaced his infinitesimal fraction of a cigarette with a fresh one, feeling for all the world like an alcoholic on a prize binge. They were looking for a human being, that was definite. In a way, that made it easier. In another way, it spelled out trouble.
The catch was, of course, that the man—if it was a man, and not a woman—hadn’t done anything much yet. In all probability, he was not even a well-known personality. He might even be a child. He was certainly no wild-eyed schemer in a black coat making atom bombs in a secret lab high in the mysterious Ughflutz Mountains—or at least that wasn’t likely.
He might be anyone, anything.
It was not so much as who he was that made him important. It was when he was and where he was.
They were looking for Hitler—a man made dangerous by the conditions around him. They were looking for Hitler—while he was still a house painter or a corporal in the German army.
It was tough, of course. It was always tough. But it was far simpler, and a lot less bloody, than going after him when it was too late, when he was already a powerful dictator, when you had half a world to fight instead of just one man. Just one man? Quinton smiled. They were dealing with a human being, and that could be messy—and dangerous.
“O.K., Siringo,” Quinton said. “Let’s go into a huddle. We’ll see if we can’t narrow that area down to something we can work with; we can’t do anything until we do that. When we get the picture in focus, we’ll see about stepping off that chasm.”
Carr Siringo’s face was expressionless. “It’s your funeral,” he said.
The men got up from the table. John Bordie smiled a cold smile and tossed his dice on the table with a practiced hand. In spite of himself, Quinton watched the bouncing cubes of ivory with fascinated attention.
Snake eyes.
The mother spider spun her web across the land.
The slender invisible threads from UNBAC crept out across fields and towns, villages and county fairs, probing. At first they were widely spaced, resting on Louisiana, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and a part of California. The days slipped by.
The web grew tighter, stronger.
California dropped out, and then Arizona. Only fragile wisps clung to New Mexico and Louisiana, and then even these disappeared. The web contracted over Texas, seeking, hesitating. It grew smaller, smaller—
It tightened over Texas. It inched down from Fort Worth and Dallas, across from Laredo and San Antonio. The computers hummed and buzzed though a haze of cigarette smoke, testing, eliminating. What would happen if—? Supposing that he were here, what would—? If the X concentration is here, and the Y factor there, then—?
The web tightened. It gripped a tiny area bounded by Bay City, Houston, Beaumont, and the Gulf of Mexico. It shrunk still more, contracting like a shallow puddle in the sun. It flowed together, stopped. The web made a black dot on the map of the Texas coast.
“That does it,” said Martin Lorraine, his usually too-handsome face lean and ugly with strain.
“Galveston,” said Robert Quinton, sinking down into a chair. “Our man is in Galveston.”
“Chalk up another one for you, Carr,” John Bordie said. “Nice work.”
Carr Siringo stopped his pacing, shook his head impatiently, and walked swiftly out of the room. It was almost as if he had been caught off base by Bordie’s words; Siringo had lived so long in his private world apart from freely-expressed emotions that he foundered when he unexpectedly found himself being complimented. He was like a fish in air. Not for the first time, Quinton wondered what had happened, long ago, to make Siringo the kind of man he was—and also not for the first time, he decided that he did not want to know.
So their man was in Galveston, he thought. Now they would have to start a precise screening process of the city’s fifty thousand inhabitants. It would be a difficult job, and time-consuming, but it would not be essentially different from the techniques used to narrow the critical area down to one city. Without the computers, of course, the job would have been impossible. Even with the computers, there was going to be plenty of leg work involved.
But it could be done.
Who was he, this man set by chance into the fuse area of an explosive situation yet unborn? What was he doing now? Was he a genius of a sort, or just an ordinary guy who happened to be in the wrong place at the right time? He could be anything, Quinton realized. An idiot can change history as profoundly as a brilliant schemer—or e
ven a germ.
“Me for coffee,” said Martin Lorraine.
Quinton and Bordie nodded and followed him out of the Station into the New Mexico night. A half-moon slept in shadows. The stars twinkled as they had for the millions and billions of years of Earth’s existence, and seen so, on a summer night from Earth, they were only stars again. Robert Quinton smiled a curiously sad smile.
It was good to see them just as stars once more.
The three men walked through the cool night air to Harry’s, where a red neon sign still shone cheerily in the night. Harry’s stayed open late, catching straggling Station workers and occasional night-fliers on the road to Folsom. They walked in and perched on counter chairs, while Harry, unbidden, got the sausage and eggs and coffee working. The music box was still for once, and the men did not talk.
They were all thinking about one man. A man they had never met. A man whose very name they did not know. Quite possibly, he, too, was sitting in a late hash house, smoking and sipping coffee, thinking—
Robert Quinton sat very still, feeling the silver moon rays paint the hills outside. His thoughts turned, as they often did, to the little town of Folsom a few miles down the road, where long ago flint artifacts had been found with fossil bison, establishing positively the antiquity of man. Ancient man in a New World that Columbus had “discovered”—some twenty thousand years too late. Quinton looked down at the plastic floor. Under that floor was the land, and across that land men like himself had once hunted the mammoth with spears and sung strange songs beneath the same cold moon that still drifted through the night seas.
No man knew what had happened to the Folsom people—or to the later Pueblo groups who had walked off and left their homes to the desert winds long before the white man came. Quinton closed his eyes. Here in the southwest, men had built a civilization before—and had vanished into nowhere, leaving only ghost structures and a few mute pieces of chipped flint to mark their passing.