Tomorrow Lies in Ambush

by Bob Shaw

  “What a shame,” it said. “Must you leave so soon?”

  “Mr. Parry,” Ripley yelped. “How nice to … I mean, I was just passing by …’

  “Of course, of course—and now that you’re here you must come in for a proper visit.”

  “Some other time, perhaps.” Ripley turned with the intention of walking away very quickly, but suddenly a thick forearm was clamped around his throat and his left arm was twisted up behind his back.

  “Don’t make me twist your arm,” Parminter whispered.

  “That’s a good one,” Ripley said, wondering how long his shoulder joint was going to hold out. “What do you think you’re doing? Look—I just happened to be in Red Deer for the day, and …’

  “And you spent it sitting outside my house.” Parminter forced Ripley to walk up the black tunnel of the driveway.

  “Oh. How did you catch on?”

  “I was expecting you. The Rockalta people rang my home to find out if I’d damaged their van, and there was only one person who could have given them that story about a hit-and-run accident. It was quite clever.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Yes—I misjudged you, Mr. Ripley. I wonder how much you’ve guessed.”

  “The lot, I think.” The pain in Ripley’s arm discouraged him from playing dumb.

  “Too bad—for you, I mean. I won’t be able to let you run around loose.”

  “Don’t try anything with me,” Ripley warned. He was striving for a convincing threat when they reached the entrance of the big house. The door was ajar. Parminter thrust Ripley through it and turned on a light to reveal a large, heavily furnished lobby.

  “As a matter of fact, you’ve arrived at quite a good time,” Parminter said with a kind of menacing geniality. “I haven’t switched the entire system on yet, and I’ll appreciate the opinion of someone more knowledgeable about computers than I.”

  “Go and …’ Ripley’s arm clicked audibly as the pressure on it was increased. “What do you want me to do?”

  “That’s better.” Parminter let Ripley go and dusted his hands. He was wearing a massive gold ring which—like his sign—was in the shape of an open book and engraved with symbols. “The door’s locked, so don’t try to run.”

  “Me run?” Ripley massaged his arm.

  “Jump up and down,” Parminter commanded. Ripley gave a half-hearted leap and felt the floor move slightly beneath him. “You’re standing on a weighbridge which reads your weight to within four ounces. And over here is the camera.” Parminter walked to an ornate mirror and tapped it. “One way, of course.”

  “I see. Where’s the Logicon itself?”

  ‘Back here.” Parminter opened a door on the right and led the way into a room in which the computer sat near one wall. Its slick styling looked shockingly unfamiliar against the old-fashioned embossed wallpaper. The faded carpet had been cut back from it and a slim bunch of cables ran up to the machine through a chiselled hole in the floorboards.

  “Looks all right, so far,” Ripley commented. “What’s this?” He pointed at a small camera positioned close to the computer’s print-out.

  “Closed-circuit television monitor. Follow me.” Parminter went back into the lobby and entered another room. It was large and high-ceilinged, the walls completely covered by dark green velvet drapes. A long pedestal table surrounded by chairs occupied the centre of the room. The chair at the head of the table was so heavy and intricately gilded as to be almost a throne. Directly in front of it a sphere of polished crystal sat on the table in an ebony cradle carved like a pair of cupped hands. Parminter sat down in the huge chair, touched something beneath the table and a glow of greenish light appeared in the crystal.

  “What do you think of it?” Parminter spoke with proprietary pride as he leaned back.

  Ripley peered into the depths of the polished sphere and saw a distorted image of the computer print-out. “Neat. Very neat.”

  I think so,” Parminter agreed. “There’s a fortune to be made in the spiritualist world if one goes about it the right way—but it’s a chancy business. There’s a ghastly story about one of my colleagues who told his audience he could draw on all the wisdom of the ages to answer any question, and was made to look a fool when some smart alec asked him to name the capital of North Dakota.

  “With the help of your little machine he could have answered the question, but that’s not the type of information a practising spiritualist needs. The point of the story is that nobody ever asks a medium something that could just as easily be looked up in a reference book.”

  “How long do you think you can keep me here?” Ripley’s fears for his own well-being were beginning to reassert themselves.

  “The data a professional medium needs are more personal, more individual. When a middle-aged widow walks in here I can try to do a cold reading on her and win her confidence, but people are becoming too materialistic and sceptical to be hooked easily.

  “From now on, when that widow walks in—knowing she has never seen me in her life, knowing she came only on the spur of the moment because a friend asked her—the computer gives me her name. More important, it gives me the name of her dear departed, his age, his former business, the names of other dead relatives, and so on. I look up at her, before she has a chance to speak, and I say ‘Hello, Mary—I have a message for you from Wilbur’. Can you imagine the impact?”

  “I’ve never heard anything so immoral in all my life. How long are you planning to keep me here?”

  “Nothing immoral about it! Ordinary mediums give people hope—I’ll be able to give them certainty.”

  “Sell them certainty, you mean.”

  “It’s impossible to set a price on the happiness I shall dispense to the old and the lonely and the bereaved. Besides, I’m a businessman. I’ve been working towards this for years, ploughing back the profits, denying myself the pleasure of spending all those surreptitiously folded bills the marks leave in my collecting box. Apart from the cost of the computer and other equipment, have you any idea how much it cost me to build a set of memory tapes? I’ve had dozens of people working for me coding the contents of directories, slaving in the public records offices, carrying out fake market surveys …’

  “I guess you’ll get your money back in the end,” Ripley said acidly. “Is spiritualism nothing but a complete confidence trick?”

  “What do you think? When you’re dead, you’re dead—and that’s the way it ought to be.” Parminter returned eagerly to his main theme. ‘But don’t class me as an ordinary confidence man, Mr. Ripley—I’m a pioneer. I’ve built something that never existed before—a computer model of the human relationships that give a city its corporate identity. Family ties, geographically created friendships and enmities, business connections … everybody in this area is part of a vast intangible matrix … and I have it right here on tape.” Parminter’s eyes were luminous. He reached below the table and there came a series of faint clicks which suggested he was activating the computer.

  Ripley was convinced of the deadly necessity to get away. He began backing off slowly, and at the same time tried to keep Parminter’s mind engrossed in his creation. “The crystal ball doesn’t quite fit in, does it? I thought that was a fortune-teller’s gimmick.”

  Parminter chuckled hoarsely. “Not only seers use them—the ball is supposed to be the focus for all kinds of special powers—besides, do you think Mary’s going to worry about that when I give her the message from Wilbur?”

  “It still doesn’t look right to me.” Ripley reached the door as he spoke and tension made his voice a nervous squawk which caused Parminter to turn his head. The big man launched himself from the chair with frightening speed. Ripley turned and ran, but had taken only one stride when two massive hands closed round his neck from behind and pulled him back into the room. He struggled vainly against the other man’s superior strength.

  “Im sorry about this,” Parminter said with incongruous gentleness, ‘but no miserable
little snoop is going to ruin my plans at this stage of the game.”

  “I won’t talk,” Ripley husked.

  “Or blackmail me either?” Parminter increased his pressure. He was not compressing Ripley’s windpipe, but his thick fingers had closed major bloodvessels. Black dots rimmed with prismatic colour began to march across Ripley’s vision. He looked around for something he might use as a weapon … nothing in sight … couldn’t even call for help … nobody to hear him anyway … nobody except those people sitting at the table…

  People at the table?

  Behind him Parminter gave a startled gasp and suddenly Ripley was free. He fell to his knees, breathing noisily while his eyes took in the group at the table. There were about a dozen men and women, some of them in distinctly antiquated dress, all of them looking slightly smeared and blurred round the edges, like images projected on to flurry cotton.

  “No! Oh, no!” Parminter sank to his knees beside Ripley. “It can’t be.” He pressed his knuckles to trembling lips and shook his head dogmatically.

  One of the men at the table pointed at Parminter. “Join us,” he said in a wintry voice, ‘there are things we wish to know.”

  “Go away,” Parminter moaned. “You don’t exist.”

  ‘But, my friend …’ The blurred man stood up, rippling like a figure in a three-dimensional plastic picture, and came towards Parminter and Ripley. His eyes were dark holes into another continuum. Parminter scrabbled away from him, got to his feet and ran. The front door of the house slammed behind him. Ripley and the insubstantial man faced each other.

  “You,” the man said. “You know how to operate the machine?”

  “I … yes.” Ripley formed the words by consciously directing his tongue and lips.

  “That is good. Please be seated at the head of the table.”

  Ripley stood up and walked mechanically to the big chair. A dozen vaporous faces regarded him as he sat down, and he noticed they were all expectant rather than menacing. He began to feel more at ease as the first dim understanding of the situation came to him.

  “This is a great moment,” the spokesman for the group said. “Communication between the two planes of existence has always been difficult and uncertain. The few genuine mediums still alive are so … inefficient that it is hardly worth one’s while bothering with them. It is impossible for us to materialise for more than a minute or two and,” a note of petulance crept into his voice, ‘you’ve no idea how frustrating it is to make the effort only to find oneself expected to deal with an elderly lady in some kind of fainting fit.”

  The blurry features became animated. ‘But now—at last—an effective system has been created, a pool of the kind of information about loved ones on the other side of the veil that we all crave. The information will be available quickly and easily, provided there is a human agent to operate the machine. You will continue to be available, won’t you?”

  “I …’ Ripley was unable to speak.

  “There’s good money in the spiritualism business,” the spokesman said anxiously. The other misty figures nodded emphatically. Looking around them, Ripley thought about his miserable existence as a salesman, and suddenly the decision was very easy to make, although he would still have to come to some arrangement with Parminter.

  “I’ll be here as long as you want me,” he said. There was a flutter of pleasure around the assembly.

  “That’s just wonderful,” the spokesman said. “And now, as I’ve been using up ectoplasm faster than the others, I claim the first question. My name is Jonathan Mercer and I used to live on the corner of Tenth and Third. I would like to know if my daughter Emily ever married that young accountant, and if cousin Jean finally got her divorce.”

  Ripley put his fingers on the keyboard beneath the edge of the table and—with the look of a man who has found fulfilment—began to address the computer.

  The Cosmic Cocktail Party

  A highball on the human reality vector:

  Urquhart, just returned from holiday, was staring nostalgically through the wall of his office at the silver of morning frost on rooftops. Beyond the grey rectangles of the administration complex he could see the brow of a wooded hill, its tints bleached by distance, and again he felt a curious sense of urgency.

  A literary acquaintance had once told him it was not uncommon for people to experience vague stirrings when they looked through a window at a far-off hillside, especially if it had trees and sunlit slopes. Read The Golden Bough, the writer had said, and you’ll understand that the part of you which still worships at lost altars in the Cambodian rain forest becomes uneasy when reminded of how far you’ve strayed from your true destiny. Urquhart had dismissed the idea as pretentious nonsense, yet on this morning it seemed almost valid. Back in his first week at Belhampton he had decided to go to the hill and explore it on foot, but that had been six years ago, and he had done nothing about it. I’m squandering time as if it were money, he thought in sudden alarm. Tenpence fugit….

  The mood of introspection faded as the silver bullet of the 9.00 monorail came sweeping along the spur line which connected Biosyn’s headquarters to the 1,000 kph London-Liverpool tubeway. A handful of passengers got out on to the elevated platform, among them a tall Negro in a flame-coloured tunic. Even at two hundred metres the powerful spread of the man’s shoulders was noticeable, and Urquhart felt a spasm of alarm as he half-identified the new arrival.

  “Theophilus,” he said, addressing the admin computer. “Is Martin M’tobo in this country?”

  There was a barely perceptible pause while Theophilus used a microwave link to interrogate the GPO computer in Greenwich. “Yes,” the terminal on the polished desk said.

  “How and when did he arrive?”

  “On the Meridian Thistledown flight from Losane, touching down at Chobham at 7.11 this morning.”

  “You’re a fat pig,” Urquhart said bitterly.

  “I’m a fat pig,” the computer agreed. “Go on—if this is one of your ridiculous test problems in two-valued logic I require to hear the other premises before printing out any Boolean truth tables.”

  Ignoring the sarcasm, Urquhart extended a freckled hand and pressed a button which connected him to Bryan Philp, who was his technical director and chief of the bionics staff. The image of Philp’s close-cropped head floated at the communicator’s projection focus.

  “Martin M’tobo is outside.” Urquhart kept his voice flat. “Were you aware of this?”

  “No.” Philp smiled immediately, showing unusually large and white teeth, and tilted his head back so that the lenses of his spectacles became two miniature suns. His bony face was suddenly impenetrable, inhuman. It was, Urquhart knew, a defensive move and it showed the other man felt he had been remiss in not keeping a check on M’tobo’s movements.

  “He arrived in England only two hours ago and must have come straight here. Unannounced. What does that suggest to you?”

  Philp’s face became serious. “Well, it doesn’t suggest he merely wants to talk to the founder and illustrious leader of his nation.”

  “I agree. But it does suggest he’s losing faith in Biosyn, growing suspicious.”

  Philp smiled and flashed his glasses on the instant, turning himself into a genial mechanical man. “We held Crowley as best we could, but with that personality structure he was disposed to drift. Very difficult.”

  “Have you an address for him now?”

  “An approximate one. We can’t locate him with much more accuracy than a decimetre or so on all three co-ordinates.”

  “Can you recall him before M’tobo gets through security, say within ten minutes?”

  Philp looked pained. “If we could do that there’d be no problem, would there?” The image of his head jiggled up and down slightly, and Urquhart guessed he was making violent and probably obscene gestures out of camera range, but this was no time to concern himself with trivial matters of discipline.

  “Mmmmph.” He drummed his fingers as he mad
e the decision. “I’m going to let M’tobo see the Tank.”

  “Is that wise?”

  ‘Better than letting him get the idea that Crowley’s dead. I’d like you to be there too.” Urquhart broke contact and the other man’s image dissolved into the air in swirling motes of brilliance, fugitive fireflies. He told Theophilus where he was going, then hurried out of his office and took the dropshaft to the ground floor. M’tobo’s theatrical figure was immediately discernible in the Arctic blue reception hall, his huge shoulders straining impatiently beneath the orange tunic as he headed towards the row of scanning booths which would judge his eligibility to enter the building proper. Approaching the booths from the inward side, Urquhart used his key and over-rode the security computer of one cubicle just as M’tobo was reaching it. The Negro looked mildly surprised as both doors quivered open and he saw Urquhart waiting for him with outstretched hand.