Authors: Clifford D. Simak
“Don’t try to do it, Blaine; I like you. I like the way you operate. That Education angle is pure genius. You play along with us, and it’ll be worth your while. There’s nothing you
can
do but play along with us; you’re in it, clear up to your chin. As the head of Records, you have custody of all the evidence, and you can’t write off that fact … Go on, man; finish up that drink.”
“I’d forgotten it,” said Blaine.
He flicked the glass and the liquor splashed out, into Farris’ face. As if it were the same motion, Blaine’s fingers left the glass, let it drop, and reached for the liquor bottle.
Paul Farris came to his feet, blinded, hands clawing at his face. Blaine rose with him, bottle arcing, and his aim was good. The bottle crashed on the goon leader’s skull and the man went down upon the carpeting, with snakes of blood oozing through his hair.
For a second Norman Blaine stood there. The room and the man upon the floor suddenly were bright and sharp, each feature of the place and the shape upon the carpeting burning themselves into his consciousness. He lifted his hand and saw that he still grasped the bottle’s neck with its jagged, broken edges. He hurled it from him and ran, hunched against the expected bullet, straight toward the window. He leaped and rolled himself into a ball even as he leaped, arms wrapped around his face. He crashed into the glass, heard the faint
ping
of its explosion, and then was through and falling.
He lit on the gravel path and rolled until thick shrubbery stopped him, then crawled swiftly toward the wall. But the wall was smooth, he remembered—not one to be climbed. Smooth and high and with only one gate. They would hunt him down and kill him. They’d shake him out like a rabbit in a brushpile. He didn’t have a chance.
He didn’t have a gun and he’d not been trained to fight. All that he could do was hide and run; even so, he couldn’t get away, for there wasn’t much to hide in and there wasn’t far to run.
But I’m glad I did it,
he told himself
.
It was a blow against the shame of seven hundred years, a re-assertion of the old, dead dedication. The blow should have been struck long ago; it was useless now, except as a symbol that only Norman Blaine would know.
He wondered how much such symbolism might count in this world around him.
Blaine heard them running now, and shouting; he knew it would not be long. He huddled in the bushes and tried to plan what he should do, but everywhere he ran into blank walls and there was nothing he could do.
A voice hissed at him, a whisper from the wall. Blaine started, pressing himself further back into the clump of bushes.
“Psst, “ said the voice once again.
A trick,
he thought, wildly.
A trick to lure me out.
Then he saw the rope, dangling from the wall, where it was lighted by the broken window.
“Psst,” said the voice.
Blaine took the chance. He leaped from the bushes and across the path toward the wall. The rope was real and was anchored. Spurred by desperation, Blaine went up it like a monkey, flung out an arm across the top of the wall and hauled himself upward. A gun cracked angrily; a bullet hit the wall and ricocheted, wailing, out into the night.
Without thinking of the danger, he hurled himself off the wall. He struck hard ground that drove the breath from him and he doubled up with agony, retching, gasping to regain his breath, while stars wheeled with tortuous deliberation in the center of his brain.
He felt hands lifting him and carrying him and heard the slamming of a door, then the flow of speed as a car howled through the night.
XI
A face was talking to him and Norman Blaine tried to place it; he knew that he’d seen it once before. But he couldn’t recognize it; he shut his eyes, tried to find soft, cool blackness. The blackness was not soft, but harsh and painful; he opened his eyes again.
The face still was talking to him and it had shoved itself up close to him. He felt the fine spray of the other’s saliva fly against his face. Once before, when a man had talked to Blaine, this had happened. That morning at the parking lot a man had buttonholed him. And here he was again, with his face thrust close and the words pouring out of him.
“Cut it out, Joe,” said another voice. “He’s still half out. You hit him too hard; he can’t understand you.”
And Blaine knew that voice too. He put out his hand, pushed the face away, and hauled himself to a sitting position, with a rough wall against his back.
“Hello, Collins,” he said to the second voice. “How did you get here?”
“I was brought,” said Collins.
“So I heard.”
Blaine wondered where he was: An old cellar, apparently—a fit place for conspirators. “Friends of yours?” he asked.
“It turns out that they are.”
The face of the Buttonholer popped up once again.
“Keep him away from me,” said Blaine.
Another voice told Joe to get away. And he knew that voice, too.
Joe’s face left.
Blaine put up his arm and wiped his own face. “Next,” he said, “I’ll find Farris here.”
“Farris is dead,” said Collins.
“I didn’t think you had the guts,” said Lucinda Silone.
He turned his head against the roughness of the wall and he saw them now, standing to one side of him—Collins and Lucinda and Joe and two others that he did not know.
“He won’t laugh again,” said Blaine. “I smashed the laugh off him.”
“Dead men never laugh,” said Joe.
“I didn’t hit him very hard.”
“Hard enough.”
“How do you know?”
“We made sure,” said Lucinda.
He remembered her from the morning, sitting across the desk from him, and the calmness of her. She still was calm. She was one, Blaine thought, who could make sure—very sure—that a man was dead.
It would not have been too hard to do. Blaine had been seen going over the wall and there would have been a chase. While the guard poured out after him it would have been a fairly simple matter to slip into the house and make entirely certain that Farris was dead.
He reached up a hand and felt the lump on his head, back of the ear. They had made certain of him, too, he thought—certain that he would not wake too soon and that he’d make no trouble. He stumbled to his feet and stood shakily, putting out a hand against the wall to support himself.
He looked at Lucinda. “Education,” he said, and he looked at Collins and said, “You too.”
And he looked at the rest of them, from one to another. “And you?” he asked. “Every one of you?”
“Education has known It for a long time,” Lucinda told him. “For a century or more. We’ve been working on you; and this time, my friend, we have Dreams nailed down.”
“A conspiracy,” said Blaine, grim laughter in his throat. “A wonderful combination—Education and conspiracy. And the Buttonholers. Oh, God, don’t tell me the Buttonholers! “
She held her chin just a little tilted and her shoulders were straight. “Yes, the Buttonholers, too.”
“Now,” Blaine told her, “I’ve heard everything.” He flicked a questioning thumb at Collins.
“A man,” said the girl, “who took a Dream before we ever knew; who took you at the outward value that you give yourselves. We got to him …”
“Got to him!”
“Certainly. You don’t think that we’re without—well, you might call them representatives, at Center.”
“Spies.”
“All right; call them spies.”
“And I—where do I work in? Or did I just stumble in the way?”
“You in the way? Never! You were so conscientious, dear. So smug and self-satisfied, so idealistic.”
So he’d not been entirely wrong, then. It
had
been an Education plot—except that the plot had run headlong into a Center intrigue and he’d been caught squarely in the middle. And oh, the beauty of it, he thought—the utter, fouled-up beauty of it! You couldn’t have worked a tangled mass like this up intentionally if you’d spent a lifetime at it.
“I told you, pal,” said Collins, “that there was something wrong. That the dream was made to order for a certain purpose.”
Purpose, Blaine thought. The purpose of collecting data from hypothetical civilizations, from imaginary cultures, of having first-hand knowledge as to what would happen under many possible conditions; to collect and co-ordinate that data and pick from it the factors that could be grafted onto the present culture; to go about the construction of a culture in a cold-blooded, scientific manner, as a carpenter might set out to build a hen-coop. And the lumber and the nails used in that hen-coop culture would have been fabricated from the stuff of dreams dreamt by reluctant dreamers.
And the purpose of Education in exposing the plot? Politics, perhaps. For the union which could unmask such duplicity would gain much in the way of public admiration, would thus be strengthened for the coming showdown. Or perhaps the purpose might be more idealistic, honestly motivated by a desire to thwart a scheme which would most surely put one union in unquestioned domination of all the rest of them.
“Now what?” Blaine asked.
“They want me to bring a complaint,” said Collins.
“And you are going to do it.”
“I suppose I shall.”
“But why you? Why now? There were others with substituted dreams; you were not the first. Education must have sleepers planted by the hundreds.”
He looked at the girl. “You applied,” he said; “you tried to plant yourself.”
“Did I?” she asked.
And had she? Or had her application been aimed at him—for now it was clear that he had been selected as one weak link in Dreams. How many other weak links, now and in the past, had Education used? Had her application been a way to contact him, a means of applying some oblique pressure to make him do a thing that Education might want someone like him to do?
“We are using Collins,” said Lucinda, “because he is the first independent grade A specimen we have found, who is untainted with the brush of Education espionage. We used our own sleepers to build up the evidence, but we could not produce in court evidence collected by admitted spies. But Collins is clean; he took the sleep before we even suspected what was going on.”
“He is not the first; there have been others. Why haven’t you used them?”
“They were not available.”
“Not …”
“Dreams could tell what happened. Perhaps you might know what happened to them, Mr. Blaine.”
He shook his head. “But why am I here? You certainly don’t expect me to testify. What made you grab me off?”
“We saved your neck,” said Collins; “you keep forgetting that.”
“You may leave,” Lucinda told him, “any time you wish.”
“Except,” Joe said, “you are a hunted man. The goons are looking for you.”
“If I were you,” said Collins, “I do believe I’d stay.”
They thought they had him. He could see they thought so—had him tied and haltered, had him in a corner where he would have to do anything they said. A cold, hard anger grew inside of him—that anyone should think so easily to trap a man of Dreams and bend him to their will.
Norman Blaine took a slow step forward, away from the wall, and stood unsupported in the dim-lit cellar. “Which way out?” he asked.
“Up those steps,” said Collins.
“Can you make it?” Lucinda asked.
“I can make it.”
He walked unsteadily toward the stairs, but each step seemed to be a little surer and he knew he’d make it, up the stairs and out into the coolness of the night. Suddenly he yearned for the first breath of the cool, night air, to be out of this dank hole that smelled of dark conspiracy.
He turned and faced them, where they stood like big-eyed ghosts against the cellar wall. “Thanks for everything,” he said.
He stood there for another instant, looking back at them. “For
everything,”
he repeated.
Then he turned and climbed the stairs.
XII
The night was dark, though dawn could not be far off. The moon had set, but the stars burned like steady lamps and a furtive dawn-wind had come up to skitter down the street.
He was in a little village, Blaine saw—one of the many shopping centers scattered across the countryside, with its myriad shop fronts and their glowing night lights.
He walked away from the cellar opening, lilting his head so the wind could blow against it. The air was clean and fresh after the dankness of the cellar; he gulped in great breaths of it, and it seemed to clear his head of fog and put new strength into his legs.
The street was empty; he trudged along it, wondering what he should do next. Obviously, he had to do something. The move was up to him. He couldn’t be found, come morning, still wandering the streets of this shopping center.
He must find some place to hide from the hunting goons!
But there was no way in which he could hide from them. They’d be relentless in their search for Blaine. He had killed their leader—or had seemed to kill him—and that was a precedent they could not allow to go unpunished.
There’d be no public hue or outcry, for the Farris killing could not be advertised; but that would not mean the search would be carried on with any less ferocity. Even now they would be hunting for him, even now they would have covered all his likely haunts and contacts. He could not go home, or to Harriet’s home, or to any of the other places—
Harriet’s home!
Harriet was not home; she was off somewhere, tracking down a story that he must somehow stop. There was a greater factor here than his personal safety. There was the honor and the integrity of the Dream guild; if any of its honor and integrity were left.
But there was, Norman Blaine told himself. It still was left in the thousands of workers, and in the departmental heads who had never heard of substituted dreams. The basic purpose of the guild still remained what it had been for a thousand years, so far as the great majority of its members were concerned. To them the flame of service, the pride and comfort of that service, and the dedication to it burned as bright and clear as it ever had.
But not for long; not for many hours. The first headline in a paper, the first breath of whispered scandal, and the bright, clear light of purpose would be a smoky flare, glaring redly in the murk of shame.