What went into orbit, these days, from the United States, was the minimum necessary to preserve the nation
from the unceasing hostility of the rest of the world: That had been drilled into him ever since back in college, he had first become aware of the b,wReoning commitment within his mind, and realized he was going to find fulfilment only in working for the safety and salvation of his native land.
He raised his eyes to the one item he permitted to decorate his sanctum. It wasn't-as one might have expected-Old Gory. or even a photo of Prexy. He knew too much about the workings of modern American government to have chosen anything of that sort. No: He had fixed to the wall where he could see it any time he looked up something that reminded him of the penalities you had to pay for freedom: a newspaper cutting, glassed and framed from the Chinese official Paper Red Ranner. and it showed a North Vietnamese official press photo of a captured American plot being led on a rope halter through the streets of Hanoi. He couldn't read the caption but a friend of his had translated it for him. and a tvped summary had been pasted "nder the actual cutting. it said that because this man had committed the crime of bombing Angkor Wat he was plainly a hopeless case for re-education-quote/unquote-and hence had been condemned to public ignominy.
Shit! What good are a bunch of ancient ruins when men's minds are In chains?
Sight of that picture, as always. re-stimulated him to the ever-greater urgency of his task. He drew a deep breath and started to punch the various keyboards set into his desk First off: tnti-bilg checks.
All clear. No one had located any of the lines with any tapping device known to security force experts. He was as safe from eavesdropping here as at the SF headquarters.
Thank heaven . . .
Next. therefore: a summary of things that had occurred to him since leaving the reserved area. The forensic team, naturally would be there indefinitely, but another top SF executive had arrived half an hour ago and relieved him, and he had been permitted to depart. On the way back to Lakonia, though. his mind had whirled and whirled. like a turbine under power, and now he had to report his thoughts.
He recited, tonelessly, for about ten minutes into the
proper phone. summing up all his views concerning that notion of Turpin's-that the site might have been inactivated by an agent of some rival corporation caring more about profits than national security, or perhaps 'by Navy, who had of course had their noses out of joint for more than a decade. It was entirely too possible that Turpin was right; at least, nothing on his record, or that of any other EG board-member, indicated that there would be likelier suspects within the corporation.
However. he dutifully listed the various doubts he was entertaining.
That done. he switched his attention to other matters. What additional data might be relevant? To punch for records of shoe-sales that might have included the agent of thafootprint, so sharp and clear on the roadway leading into-the site-no. that was absurd. They sold millions of pairs of shoes every month, and as he'd told Turpin, the brand-name was one of he commonest. (Shit! A "clue" in classic form, and here I am helpless, staring at it in my memory!)
On the other hand, if someone had come to and gone away from the site on the morning in question .... He put his chin in his hand and stared at nothing. Well, there was so much traffic on the superways nowadays, a thorough sifting of every vehicle that passed within a few miles of any of the three thousand reserved areas would taken even computers a very long time . . . and that was assuming there were records to analyse.
Suppose, though, a patrolman had filed some sort of trivial report during the period immediately following the shut-down of the site? The auto-logs had stopped registering at about 0350; dawn had been-uh-between four and five . . .
He reached for the remote keyboard that connected him with the master forensic computer at his HQ. and punched into it an inquiry that seemed like a fair compromise: Had any patrolman in the vicinity reported anything, no matter how minor, during the appropriate period, that didn't appear in any of the regular traffic-offence categories? He wasn't certain quite what he was looking for, but-well, surely a saboteur must have come to the site, spent a short while in and around it, and then gone away. Something as simple as a car reported travelling in one direction, then in the opposite direction sooner than could be accounted
for by a stopover and turn-around at a nearby city: That would fit.
Sifting police records was inevitably slow, even for computers; so many matters nowadays were police business. Waiting, he decided he could legitimately take care of a personal problem that had been irking him since his return home. What about Fenella? What had she been up to?
Should have remained a bachelor . . .
But he hadn't, and since he had a wife, she must be like Caesar's, above reproach. It was not strictly permissible to adapt officially issued detection gear for purposes like suspected infidelity, but of course all the married executives in the security force did so, and the top brass turned a blind eye. He himself had Fenella so thoroughly bugged, she literally couldn't go to the bathroom-let alone make a phone-call or take a cab-ride--without his being able to find out afterwards.
It took him less than three minutes to locate, on the tapes, the argument she had had with the phone company to try and get them to release the unlisted number of Magda Hansen.
~J
"There are two ways you can go," Magda said suddenly, after a long period of near-silence during which the nightblack ribbon of the superway had unreeled like a tape punctuated with blasts of random noise, the glare of oncoming lights at the curves where suddenly they shone direct-for a mere fraction of a second-on to Sheklov's tortured retinae.
"What?" He glanced at her in surprise, thinking she must be giving him advice for their route back to Cowville. But there was no intersection sign ahead, and the last instructions he had read from the roadside had informed him it was twenty-three miles to the next exit.
'Two ways you can go," Magda repeated. "Into yourself-or out of the world that other people share. Apart from that, you can't go anywhere and still be a person."
Sheklov pondered that. He was driving, and terribly
aware that he probably was not doing it very well. He had
had a ready-made excuse for that when Lora had sug
gested it, and Magda had deferred, on their departure
from the restaurant where they had eaten dinner and
drunk a lot of wine and beer, he had produced the data
incorporated in his briefing, which explained that, like
many Canadians, he had never owned an American car,
but had stuck to Swedish and Italian imports.
Still, this thing of Lora's seemed to be designed for people who didn't drive well, and certainly the roads were . .
He rapidly reviewed everything that had happened or been talked about since they left Cowville on the outward leg of their trip. They had had to go a long way-north, of course-before finding a place where they would serve a mixed party with less than forced tolerance. One restaurant-owner had even offered the classic excuse: "It's not that 1 object, mind you, only that my other customers . . . 1"
Goodbyel
And then it had proved to be very pleasant, although the meal was incredibly expensive and the continuous
music grated on Sheklov's ears and the high voices of other diners uttering demonstrably false statements had made him now and then want to get up and beat a little common sense into their heads. Still, that wasn't his brief. He had to act as though he were what he pretended to be. Turpin's comment about being shot to death by an Army firing-squad rang continually in his brain.
So there had been no awkwardnesses until they were getting back into the car, and Lora had said outright that she intended to ride in back with Danty and not drive home. And held out the car-key for Sheklov to take.
Following which, on the dark road, occasional gasps and mutters had punctuated the music from the radio, and once, perfectly clearly, "Danty, you're terrific)"
It was reaching down through Sheklov's mental armour, and hitting him in the-well, the hormones, you might say. He had entertained the notion that when they arrived back in Cowville Magda might . . .
1 don't understdnd! 1 simply don't) Culture shock!
How on Earth (he consciously capitalised it) could this sort of promiscuous, casual behavior co-exist with all the billboards he kept seeing that advertised Koenig's? That brand-name, and its implications, had been explained to him in detail; lead-impregnated, Koenig's underwear was claimed to protect the gonads from accidental irradiation, and styles were offered for women as well as men.
While the cars that whizzed past-he had proof of this at his back-were marketed with rear seats that folded down to facilitate seduction)
It dawned on him, perhaps as much as two miles later at the speed they were travelling, that Magda was offering the explanation he yearned for . . . and then he recalled that she had claimed to possess more empathy than most people, to the extent of having a talent someone in trouble could call on her to exercise.
Me too?
It made him abruptly cold to think of what she might have-not guessed=.deduced about him. His briefing had never taken a person like her into account.
Yet he had learned to trust some of his own instinctual reactions, too, and nothing about Magda-Danty was a different matter-had made his nape prickle, his usual warning-sign. There was no hint of menace about her, just a curiosity that he found almost refreshing, as though she
put the most personal possible questions without a thought of giving offence.
He said, framing his words carefully, "I guess you must have noticed how hard this country has hit me. I mean, when I took on this job of mine, fixing that pulp-contract that brought me down here, I walked into it thinking what ;' I guess most people think north of the border: 'They're .` right next door, so they're probably no more different than
those people down the streetl' If you-uh-follow me."
"Well, Danty and Lora aren't a hundred per cent typical," Magda murmured, taking a cigarette from the dis-penser on the dash. The EMPTY light came on as she removed it; as though by reflex, she felt for her own pack and slipped a couple into the store to compensate. The light went out. There was almost nothing on the dash that related to the operation of the car-the speedometer and the ignition-on light were almost buried among the ancillaries, the radiation-counter, the rain-detector light, the controls for the radio, and the sir-conditioning instruments.
Clearly from the back: "Oh, Dan-ty-y-y . . !"
"You don't get it," Magda said, having drawn and let go the first puff of her cigarette.
"Frankly, no," Sheklov grunted, and twisted the wheel the few degrees necessary to carry them through a wide curve.
"It's like I was saying," Magda answered with a shrug. "When things become intolerable, the obvious way is out. In our case, you can't go out-not unless you're prepared never to come back. And Lora wasn't joking when she talked about the risk of being shot at the border. Except that treading on a mine is probably a bigger risk, and then of course the-uh-the private enterprise bit is unpredictable."
"The what?"
"Private enterprise. Lots of privately financed organisations patrol the borders, too. And mine them. Security doesn't approve, and sometimes they get hauled into court on the grounds that if they don't trust the official patrols they can't be loyal. But usually they get let off with a nominal fine and a warning, because patriotism with a capital P is the excuse for anything."
"I -I don't believe I ever heard about that," Sheklov admitted, wondering when the border in his mind was
going to be crossed, the one between Sheklov and Holtzer, who was fading moment by moment as he struggled with the problem that had troubled him since his arrival . . .
I'm on a fool's errand here! It's as though they'd sent me to an asylum three thousand miles wide! An idea that is brand-new could be new because it's insane, couldn't it?
Suppose 1'd walked into one of the "private enterprise" patrols when 1 came ashore?
Hell! Mavbe 1 did!
"Getting tired? Like me to spell you?" Magda said. He realized with a wrenching sense of panic that he had let his attention drift from the wheel, and crossed into another lane alreadv crammed with cars.
"Uh-no," he forced out. "No. I'm fine."
Providentially. in the lane just vacated, a car howled past with its governor cut out, doing far more than the legal maximum. and he was able to jerk his head at it.
"Saw him coming up-thought I'd better move over."
"Ah-yes " Magda said. and took another drag on her cigarette. A few heartbeats later, she continued with what she had been saying as though there had been no distraction.
"Yes! There are two ways to go, assuming you want to go somewhere and aren't just content to be forced into the official mould. You can go insane, and that's the easy one. You can buy Koenig's. and keep a gun on the dash" -there was one in this car and she tapped it with long, sharp nails-"and convince yourself you're taking the ordinary, reasonable precautions a human being has to take to protect himself. That's what I meant when I said you can go out of the world other people share."
"But surely," Sheklov hazarded, "other people do share that world."
"You miss my point. They share the idea that the world mustn't be shared. Tap a friend on the shoulder when you meet him on the street, he whirls around and pulls a gun, doesn't he? Likely a gas-gun. that onlv blinds and doesn't kill, but a gun nonetheless. And he fires before he looks to see whether you're known to him."