The Shockwave Rider

BOOK 3

SPLICING THE BRAIN RACEMAN PROPOSES

“Now the way I see it—”

“Who the hell do you think you are?”

THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT

This is a basic place, a farm. Listen to it.

Land. House. Barn. Sun. Rain. Snow. Field. Fence. Pond. Corn. Wheat. Hay. Plow. Sow. Reap. Horse. Pig. Cow.

This is an abstract place, a concert hall. Listen to it.

Conductor. Orchestra. Audience. Overture. Concerto. Symphony. Podium. Harmony. Instrument. Oratorio. Variations. Arrangement. Violin. Clarinet. Piccolo. Tympani. Pianoforte. Auditorium.

But consider also:

Harp. Horn. Drum. Song. Pipe.

And similarly:

Alfalfa. Rutabaga. Fertilizer. Combine harvester.

Assign the following (no credit) to one or other of the categories implied by the foregoing parameters:*

Bit. Record. Memory. Switch. Program. Transistor. Tape. Data. Electricity. On-line. Down-time. Printout. Read. Process. Cybernetics.

A CASE OF ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

For the first time since the arrival on her threshold of the—late?—Sandy Locke, Kate’s annunciator sounded when she wasn’t expecting anybody.

* Do not on any account give the same answer tomorrow as you give today.

These days, you simply did not go call on somebody without advance warning. It wasn’t worth it. For one thing, people were spending less time in their homes, statistics said, than ever before in history—despite the arrival of the world in full color and mock solidity thanks to three-vee in the corner of the living room. And for another, perhaps more important, calling without notice was liable to get you webbed in a net of unbreakable plastic, possibly even gassed, at any home above the poverty level.

So you used the veephone first.

In the middle of her largest room, whose walls she was redecorating with enormous photo-enlargements of microscopic circuit elements—eventually, touched in with metallic paint, they would be quite an efficient private computer—Kate stopped dead and pondered.

Well, no harm in looking at whoever it is.

Sighing, she switched on the camera and found herself staring at a man she didn’t know: young, fair, untidy, in casual clothes.

“You’re Kate!” he said brightly.

“And you are—?”

“Name of Sid. Sid Fessier. Been spending summer vac in the paid-avoidance zones. Ran into a poker name of Sandy, said to greet you when I bounced off KC, and when it turned out I’d picked a hotel just one block distant … Guess I should have called ahead, but hell—one block on a fine day like today!”

“Well, great. Come on up.”

He whistled as he climbed the stairs: a reel or jig. And when she opened the door, hit her with a webber that tied her into an instant package.

“Bagheera!” she screamed, falling sidelong as the strands of plastic tangled around her legs.

Pop.

Still gathering himself for a pounce which could have carried him the full length of the hallway, straight to the intruder’s head, the mountain lion flinched, moaned, made as though to scrabble at an irritation on his chest—and collapsed.

He was good, this man, and very fast. Even as he returned the gun to his pocket he was slapping a patch of adhesive plastic over Kate’s mouth to silence her.

“Anesthetic dart,” he murmured. “No need to worry about him. He’ll be taken care of. Right as rain in two or three hours. But I had to give him the maximum dose, you know. Not my favorite pastime, messing with a beast like him.”

Having eased the door softly shut, he now produced a communicator and spoke to it. “Okay, come and pick her up. But best be quiet. This looks like a neighborhood where folk still take an interest in other people’s business.”

“You got the lion?”

“Think I’d be talking to you if I hadn’t?”

Tucking the communicator away again, he added over her furious futile grunts and snorts, “Save your breath, slittie. I don’t know what you’ve done, but it’s serious. I have a warrant for your arrest and detention without bail signed by the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Data Processing, who’s kind of high on the Washington totem pole. Anyhow, I’m not the shivver to argue with. Just an errand boy, me.”

DIFFERENTIATED

Things had changed. Not merely on the surface, although his situation was radically altered. Instead of being switched on and off by drugs and cortical stimulation, he had been allowed to sleep naturally last night: moreover, in a real room, hotel-stark but comfortable and well equipped, with actual windows through which he had been able to confirm that he really was at Tarnover. During his interrogation he had been kept in a sort of compartment, a man-sized pigeonhole, where machines maintained his muscle tone for want of walking.

Aside from that, though, something subtler, more significant had occurred.

What?

The door of his room opened with a click of locks. A man appeared—commonplace, clad in white, armed. He had expected that if he was taken anywhere away from the room it would be under escort. Rising, he obeyed an order to go into the corridor and turn left.

It was a long walk, and there were many turns. Also there was a descending flight of steps, thirteen of them. Eventually there was a lost corner. Rounding it, he found himself in a passage of which one side was composed of one-way armor glass.

Gazing through it into a dimly lighted room beyond was Freeman.

He accorded the newcomer a nod, then tapped the glass with one soft fingertip.

Beyond, a very thin girl lay naked and unconscious on a padded table while a nurse shaved her head down to the scalp.

There was a long silence. Then, at last:

“Mm-hm. I expected that. But, knowing you as well as I do, I’m prepared to believe it wasn’t your idea.”

After which there was another silence, broken this time by Freeman. When he spoke, his voice was full of weariness.

“Take him back to his quarters. Let him think it over for a while.”

YES, MR. KELLY! WAS IT ABOUT ANYTHING?

“It should never be forgotten that during all the time we were studying bats, bats had a unique opportunity to study us.”

I AM

What he had said to Freeman was quite true. Ever since, with the conclusion of the intensive phase of his interrogation, he had been able to reason clearly again, he had been expecting to be told that Kate also had been dragged here for “examination.”

Not that that made any difference, any more than reciting “nine-eighty-one-see-em-second-squared” makes one better able to survive a fall off a cliff.

He sat in the room assigned to him, which doubtless was monitored the clock around, as though on a stage before a vast audience alert to criticize any departure from the role he was meant to be playing.

The one factor operating in his favor was this: that after years of playing roles, he was finally playing himself instead.

All the data they have, he told himself, relate to others than myself: Reverend Lazarus, Sandy Locke—yes, even Nickie Haflinger. Whoever I am now, and I’m none too sure of my identity at this stage, I definitely am not Nickie Haflinger!

He started to list the ways in which he wasn’t the person he was named after, and found the latest was the most important.

I can love.

A chill tremored down his spine as he considered that. There had been little love given or received in Nickie’s early life. His father? Resentful of the burden his son imposed, intolerant of the demands of parenthood. His mother? Tried, for a while at least, but lacked an honest basis of affection to support her; hence her collapse into alcoholic psychosis. His temporary surrogate parents? To them one rent-a-boy was like another, so many dollars per week high by so many problems wide.

His friends during his teens, while he was here at Tarnover?

But love was not part of the curriculum. It was parts. It was split up. It was “intense emotional involvement” and “excessive interdependence” and “typical inflated adolescent libido” …

Now, on the other hand, when this new strange person he was evolving into thought of Kate, he clenched his fists and gritted his teeth and shut his eyes and dissolved into pure raw hate, unresisting.

All his life he had had to control his deep reactions: as a pre-teen kid, because if you didn’t you could be the one sanded on the way home tonight; as a teener, because every moment of the day and night students here were liable for reassessment to make sure they were worthy of staying, and the first five years he had wanted to stay more than anything else in the world and the second five he had wanted to use Tarnover instead of being used by it; thereafter because the data-net now ramified into so many areas of private life that his slightest error could bring hunters closing in for the kill.

It followed that yielding to emotion, whether positive or negative, had always seemed dangerous. It was bad to let himself like another person too much; if a child, he or she would run tomorrow with a different gang, mercurial, and whoop and holler after you to your hour of blood and tears; if an adult, he or she would depart for some other job and leave behind merely a memory and a memento. Equally it was bad to let yourself fear or detest somebody too much; it led into areas where you couldn’t predict your own behavior or that of others. “Here be tygers!”

But the capacity for emotion was in his mind, though he’d been unaware of the fact. He recalled with a trace of irony how he had looked over the detensing machine in G2S’s transient accommodation block and pitied those with the ability to form strong attachments.

I was pitying myself, I guess. Well, pity was the most that I deserved.

Now he was being forced to recognize just how intensely he could feel, and there was a sound logical reason for encouraging the process.

The data Freeman and those behind him had in store were derived from a coldly calculating person—call him Mister X Minus E. Substitute throughout Mister X Plus E.

And what you’re going to wind up with, you sons of bitches, is what you fear above all. A unique solution in irrationals!

A little rain started to smear the west-facing window of his room. He rose and walked over to stare out at the clouds, tinted with red because the sun was setting and the rain was approaching from the east.

I am in approximately the position of someone attempting to filch enough plutonium from a nuclear research plant to build a bomb. I must sneak the stuff out without either causing a noticeable stock-loss, or triggering the perimeter detectors, or incurring radiation burns. Quite a three-pipe problem, Watson. It may take as long as a week, or even ten days.

MIRROR, MIRROR

You are in circular orbit around a planet. You are being overtaken by another object, also in circular orbit, moving several km./sec. faster. You accelerate to try and catch up.

See you later, accelerator.

Much later.

HARTZ AND FLAWS

In the interrogation room the three-vee screen had been replaced by a stretch mirror. Not wanting to seem to look too hard or long at the naked body of the girl stretched out in the steel chair, Hartz glanced at his reflection instead. Catching sight of a smear of perspiration on his forehead, he pulled out a large handkerchief, and inadvertently dislodged his visitor’s authorization card, which he was not quick enough to catch before it fluttered to the floor.

Freeman courteously picked it up and handed it back.

Muttering thanks, Hartz replaced it, harrumphed loudly into his handkerchief and then said, “Your reports have been meager, to say the least.”

“I would naturally have informed you at once had there been any significant developments.”

“Oh, there have been! That’s why I’m here!” Hartz snapped, and decided there was no point after all in pretending not to look at the girl. Scrawny as she was, bald, childishly bare-bodied, she scarcely resembled a human being: more, a laboratory animal, some oversize strain of mutant hairless rat.

“What developments?” Freeman stiffened almost imperceptibly, and the tone of his voice hinted at harshness, but only hinted.

“You don’t know, hm?” was Hartz’s scathing retort. “But you met her mother, so you should! At least you must realize how much weight she swings thanks to her post with G2S!”

“Her mother,” Freeman returned with strained politeness, “has been extensively profiled. There’s no untoward emotional involvement between the pair of them.”

“Her profile,” Hartz repeated heavily. “I see. What can you tell me about her from her profile?”

“That Ina Grierson is not unhappy at her daughter’s departure from KC. This releases her to accept the kind of post she has been looking for elsewhere.”

“My God. Haven’t you gone beyond this profile thing? Didn’t you check out the real world lately?”

“I’ve done precisely as I was instructed!” Freeman flared. “And what is more, instructed by you!”

“I expect people to use their wits when I give them orders, not leave a continental mess for others to clear away!”

For a long moment the men locked eyes. At last Freeman said placatingly, “What appears to be the trouble?”

“Appears? Oh, not appears. This is only too real.” Hartz mopped his face again. “This girl has been here a week now—”

“Five days.”

“It’s a full week since her arrest. Don’t interrupt.” Hartz thrust his handkerchief back in his pocket. “If we didn’t have a. strong ex-Tarnover faction to vote our way on the UMKC board of administration, we’d—Oh, hell, I shouldn’t have to tell you this. You should know it already.”

“If there was something you wanted me to know, you could perhaps have taken steps to pipe the data to me,” Freeman said in a tight voice. “Since you didn’t, tell me now.”

Hartz’s face reddened, but he bit back the angry reply which clearly had been trembling on his lips. Achieving calm with an effort, he said, “Outside the P-A zones, hardly anybody goes twenty-four hours without using his or her code for credit purposes. Consequently the location of anybody on the continent can be determined near as dammit at any time. Kate Lilleberg is an adult, sure, but she’s also in statu pupillari and has never filed a don’t-talk order in respect of her mother, her only near relative. So ever since she was whipped out of KC there have been fifty or sixty people with an interest in tracing her, most of whom are on the faculty at UMKC but one of whom, the most troublesome, is a head-of-dept at G2S. How much more do I have to spell out before you realize what a hornets’ nest you’ve wished on me?”

“I’ve done what?” Freeman said slowly.

“Didn’t it cross your mind that if a week passed without her using her code, that would arouse suspicions?”

“What didn’t cross my mind,” Freeman retorted, “was that you’d expect me to make myself responsible for all the fiddling details! Since you insist, I’ll take time out and construct some convincing fiction: have her code reported in, for example, from a town in the P-A zones where it can easily take a week for a credit entry to reach the net. The rest, however, I’m afraid I must leave to—”

“Forget it. We already tried that. The moment we realized you hadn’t seen to it. Have you forgotten the pose Haflinger adopted at G2S?”

Freeman looked blank. “How is that relevant?”

“Heaven send me patience. He took a job as a systems rash, didn’t he? That position gave him damned near as much access to the net as I can get, cheating on G2S’s max-nat-ad rating. In fact he moused around so much it started to interfere with his regular work, so he wrote a program into the G2S computers to take care of the routine stuff by itself. You didn’t stress that in your interrogation report, did you?”

Freeman’s mouth worked. No sound emerged.

“And the program is still functional,” Hartz blasted, “and Ina Grierson has got to it! And worst of all, it’s so simple she knows damned well the entries we filed behind her daughter’s code are faked!”

“What? How?”

“How the hell do you think? What did Haflinger want to find out, using stolen G2S codes? Whether his own 4GH was still valid, right? And how could he have done that without being able to strip away an ex-post-facto cover label from a federal-authorized implant? Data concerning 4GH codes are not meant to be accessible to the public. They’re routinely disguised, aren’t they? Well, what Haflinger did was to peel them naked automatically, and in a way our top experts never thought of!”

Clenching his fists, he concluded, “Now maybe you see what a fix you dumped me in!”

His face like a stone image, Freeman said, “Oh, I think the credit belongs to Haflinger, not me. And I’m sure he’ll be delighted with this news.”

“What the hell do you mean?”

“Among the other data you neglected to supply to me was the fact that you came here to make wild accusations. On the reasonable assumption that you only intended to witness Kate’s routine interrogation, I didn’t cancel my usual instructions to have Haflinger brought here to watch in the hope it might erode his self-control. Your suggestion, I beg to remind you.”

Checking his watch, he added, “So for the past four, four and a half minutes Haflinger has been behind that stretch one-way mirror, seeing and hearing everything in this room. As I say, he must be very pleased.”

EXCERPT FROM A NEWS BULLETIN

“… a blow dealt to the hopes of those who were confidently forecasting this academic year would be relatively free of student unrest. Convinced that one of their number, missing since a week ago, has been kidnaped by government agents, a mob of fifteen hundred students today tribaled more than half of the thirty-nine police fireposts on campus at UMKC. As yet no count of casualties came to hand, but …”

ATAVISM

Facing Rico Posta, Ina felt her cheeks grow pale. But she maintained her voice at normal pitch and volume.

“Rico, whatever you and the rest of the board may say, Kate is my daughter. You punch for a double-check on those phony reports about her using her code at Interim.”

“Who says they’re phony?”

“Our own computers say so!”

“Uh-uh. A program written by one Sandy Locke says so, and he turned out to be a twitch and—”

“While he was saving us a couple of million a year you didn’t think he was a twitch. Otherwise you wouldn’t have been among the first to say he should be permed.”

“Well, I …”

She leaned earnestly forward.

“Rico, something muddy’s going on. You know it, though you haven’t admitted it to yourself. Did you try asking for data about Sandy recently?”

“As a matter of fact—yes.”

“And there aren’t any, are there? Not even a report of his death!”

“I guess he could have left the country.”

“Passport?”

There was a silence that crackled like the harbinger of an electrical storm.

Ina said at last, “Ever read a book called 1984?”

“Sure, in a college literature class.” Rico pursed his lips and gazed into nowhere. “I get what you mean. You think he’s been—uh—declared an unperson.”

“Right. And I think they’ve done the same to Kate.”

“I …” He had to swallow. “I guess I wouldn’t put it past them, knowing what one does about that gang in Washington. Say, you know something? I get nightmares now and then. About how I punch my code into a board and the signal comes back: deeveed!”

Ina said, “Me too. And I can’t believe we’re the only ones.”

STARTING TO GROW AGAIN

Since they quit shaving his scalp daily it had begun to itch. So far he had resisted the temptation to scratch, but he was compelled to rub now and then. To the onlookers, whom he knew to exist though he was not aware of their identity, he imagined that he might perhaps give the impression of being puzzled by the information he was taking in. He was watching a three-vee news broadcast. He’d spent much of his time catching up with the world since he was transferred to these more comfortable quarters.

In fact he was not in the least disoriented by what he learned. There were different items to report—another realignment of alliances in Latin America, a fresh outburst of unauthorized jehad in the Yemen, a new product about which the FDA was expressing doubts, something called an A-C Group Granulyser used in upgrading vegetable protein to compete with meat …

But the habit patterns, inevitably, had survived. To the air, with a wry grin, he murmured, “How long, O Lord? How long?”

In his private estimation: not long now.

And, as though on cue, the lock of the door clicked. He glanced around, expecting one of the usual armed men in white come to take him elsewhere.

To his surprise, however, the visitor was Freeman. And alone.

He carefully closed the door before speaking; when he did so, it was in a perfectly neutral tone.

“You probably noticed that I authorized the delivery of some refreshments to your quarters last night. I need a stiff drink. Make it whisky on the rocks.”

“I take it you’re not here?”

“What? Oh!” Freeman gave a hideous grin; his facial skin stretched so tight over his bones that it threatened to tear. “Quite correct. The monitors are being fed a wholly convincing set of lies.”

“Then—congratulations.”

“What do you mean?”

“This took a lot of courage on your part. Most people lack the guts to disobey an immoral order.”

Slowly, over several seconds, Freeman’s grin transformed into a smile.

“Goddamn,” he said. “Haflinger or whatever you’d rather call yourself. I fought like hell to stay objective, and I didn’t make it. Turns out I kind of like you. I can’t help it.”

Angrily he kicked around a chair and slumped into it.

A few moments later, over full glasses:

“Tell me something. What reflex got punched by whom to trigger this reaction?”

Freeman bridled. “No need to gibe at me. You can’t take credit for everything that’s happened inside my head.”

“At least you say credit, not blame … I suspect you found out you hate the people who give you your orders.”

“Ah … Yes. I got loaded with my final straw when they decided to bring Kate here. You were right about it not being my idea. So I did as I was told, neither more nor less.”

“So Hartz blasted you for not being smarter than he is. Galling, isn’t it?”

“Worse. Much worse.” Cradling his glass in bony fingers, Freeman leaned forward, staring at nothing. “All argument aside, I do believe that we need wisdom. Need it desperately. I have a conception of how it would be manifest. Hartz doesn’t have it. I think you do. And as to Kate …” The words trailed away.

“Kate Lilleberg is wise. No question of it.”

“I’m obliged to agree.” With a trace of defiance. “And because of it—well, you’ve seen.”

“What else would you expect? I don’t mean that sarcastically, by the way. Just as my recruitment to Tarnover was predictable once they learned of my existence, so her arrest was predictable when I led them to her.”

After a fractional hesitation Freeman said, “I get the idea you stopped classing me as one of them.”

“You absconded, didn’t you?”

“Hah! I guess I did.” He emptied his glass and waved aside the offer of a refill. “No, I’ll fix it. I know where … But it isn’t right, it can’t be right! What the hell did she do to deserve indefinite detention without trial, being interrogated until her soul is as naked as her body? We went off the track somewhere. It shouldn’t have turned out this way.”

“You think I may have notions about a different way?”

“Sure.” This response was crisp and instant. “And I want to hear them. I’ve lost my bearings. Right now I don’t know where in the world I am. You may find it hard to believe, but—well, I’ve always had an article of faith in my personal universe to the effect that maximizing information flow is objectively good. I mean being frank, and open, and candid, telling the truth as you see it regardless of the consequences.” A harsh laugh. “A shrink I know keeps insisting it’s overcompensation for the way I was taught to hide my body as a kid. I was raised to undress in the dark, sneak in and out the bathroom when nobody was looking, run like hell when I flushed the can for fear someone would notice me and think about what I’d done in there … Ah, maybe the poker’s partly right. Anyhow, I grew up to be a top-rank interrogator, dedicated to extracting information from people without torture and with the least possible amount of suffering. Phrase it that way and it sounds defensible, doesn’t it?”

“Of course. But it’s a different matter when the data you uncover are earmarked for concealment all over again, this time becoming the private property of those in power.”

“That’s it.” Freeman resumed his chair, fresh ice cubes tinkling in his refilled glass. “I took on the assignment to interrogate you like any other assignment. The list of charges against you was long enough, and there was one in particular that touched me on a sore spot. Feeding false data into the net, naturally. On top of which I’d heard about you. I moved here only three years ago—from Weychopee, incidentally, the place you know as ‘Electric Skillet’—and even then there was vague gossip among the students about some poker who once faded into the air and never got caught. You’ve become a sort of legend, did you know?”

“Anybody copying my example?”

Freeman shook his head. “They made it tougher to bow out. And maybe no one since your day has turned up with the same type of talent.”

“If so, doubtless he or she would have been drawn to your notice. You’re a person of considerable standing, aren’t you, Dr. Freeman? Or is it Mr. Freeman? I seem to have your measure pretty accurately. I’ll stab for ‘mister.’ ”

“Correct. My degrees are scholarates, not mere doctorates. I’ve always been very proud of that. Like surgeons over in Britain, taking offense at being called Dr. So-and -so. … But it’s irrelevant, it’s superfluous, it’s silly! Know what hit me hardest when I listened to your account of Precipice?”

“Tell me.”

“The dense texture of people’s lives. Filled out instead of being fined down. I’m trained in three disciplines, but I haven’t broadened out as a person from that base. I’ve fined down, focusing all I know along one narrow line.”

“That’s what’s wrong with Tarnover, isn’t it?”

“I—I half see what you mean. Amplify, please.”

“Well, you once defended Tarnover with the argument that it’s designed to provide an optimal environment for people so well adjusted to the rapid change of modern society that they can be trusted to plan for others as well as for themselves. Or words to that effect. But it’s not happening, is it? Why? Because it’s still under the overriding control of people who, craving power, achieved it by the same old methods they used in—hell, for all I know, in predynastic Egypt. For them there’s only one way to outstrip somebody who’s overtaking you. Go faster. But this is the space age, remember. And the other day I hit on a metaphor that neatly sums my point.”

He quoted the case of two bodies each in circular orbit.

Freeman looked faintly surprised. “But everybody knows—” he began, and then checked. “Oh. No, not everybody. I wish I’d thought of that. I’d have liked to ask Hartz.”

“I’m sure. But think it through. Not everybody knows. In this age of unprecedented information flow, people are haunted by the belief they’re actually ignorant. The stock excuse is that this is because there’s literally too much to be known.”

Freeman said defensively, “It’s true.” And sipped his whisky.

“Granted. But isn’t there another factor that does far more damage? Don’t we daily grow more aware that data exist which we’re not allowed to get at?”

“You said something about that before.” Freeman’s forehead creased with concentration. “A brand-new reason for paranoia, wasn’t that it? But if I’m to accept that you’re right, then … Damnation, it sounds as though you’re determined to deevee every single course of action we’ve taken in the past half century.”

“Yes.”

“But that’s out of the question!” Freeman straightened in dismay.

“No, that’s an illusion. A function of a wrongly chosen viewpoint. Take it by steps. Try the holist approach, which you used to decry. Think of the world as a unit, and the developed—the over-developed—nations as analogous to Tarnover, or better yet to Trianon. And think of the most successful of the less-rich countries as akin to those P-A communities which began under such unpromising circumstances yet which are turning out to be more tolerable places to live than most other cities on the continent. In short, what I’m talking about is Project Parsimony writ large: the discontinuation of an experiment that cost far too much to set up and hasn’t paid off.”

Freeman pondered for a long while. At last he said, “If I were to agree that you’re right, or even partly right, what would you expect me to do?”

“Well—ah … Well, you could start by letting me and Kate go.”

This silence was full of struggle. Eventually, with abrupt decision, Freeman drained his glass and rose, feeling in the side pocket of his jacket. From it he produced a flat gray plastic case, the size of his palm.

“It’s not a regular portable calculator,” he said in a brittle voice. “It’s a veephone. Screen’s under the lid. Flex and jack inside. There are phone points there, there and there.” Pointing to three corners of the room. “But don’t do anything until you get a code to do it with.”

AT THE DISSOLUTION

What was I saying about overcompensation?

There had been a lot of whisky, of course, and he was unused to drinking.

But am I drunk? I don’t feel I am. More, it’s that without being partly stonkered I couldn’t endure the torrent of dreadful truth that’s storming through my brain. What Hartz said to me. What Bosch almost said, only he managed to check himself. But I know damn well what he substituted with “nonspecialist.” Why should I spend the rest of my life knuckling under to liars like Bosch? Claiming the dogs they have at Precipice can’t exist! And blockheads like Hartz are even worse. Expecting the people they lord it over to think of things they aren’t smart enough to think of themselves, then denying that the fault is theirs!

Carefully Freeman locked his apartment, setting the don’t-disturb signs: one on the door, one on each of the veephones.

Now if I can just find my way to the index of reserved codes activated when they surpled 4GH … From Tarnover if from anywhere it should be possible to pull one out and upgrade it to status U-for-unquestionable. That’s the best trick of all. If Haflinger had latched on to it he need never have been caught.

Owlishly, but with full command of his not inconsiderable faculties—more important, not obliged to make do with the limited and potentially fallible input of a pocket veephone such as the one with which doubtless Haflinger would shortly be performing his own personal brand of miracle—he sat down to his data console. He wrote, then rewrote, then rewrote, a trial program on tape that could be tidily erased. As he worked he found himself more and more haunted by a tantalizing idea.

I could leech three codes as easily as two. ….

Eventually the program was status go, but before feeding it he said to the air, “Why not?” And checked how many codes were currently on reserve. The answer was of the order of a hundred thousand. Only about five depts would have dug into the store since it was ordained, so …

Why the hell not? Here I am pushing forty, and what have I done with my life? I have talents, intelligence, ambition. Going to waste! I hoped I’d be useful to society. I expected to spend my time dragging criminals and traitors into the light of day, exposing them to the contumely of honest citizens. Instead the biggest criminals of all escape scot-free and people like Kate who never harmed anybody … Oh, shit! I stopped being an investigator years ago. What I am now is an inquisitor. And I’ve lost all faith in the justice of my church.

He gave a sudden harsh laugh, made one final tiny amendment to his tape, and offered it up to the input.

THE INFLUENCE OF AFFLUENCE

“For the convenience of the lazy plebeians, the monthly distributions of corn were converted into a daily allowance of bread … and when the popular clamor accused the dearness and scarcity of wine … rigid sobriety was insensibly relaxed; and although the generous design of Aurelian does not appear to have been executed in its full extent, the use of wine was allowed on very easy and liberal terms … and the meanest Roman could purchase, with a small copper coin, the daily enjoyment of a scene of pomp and luxury which might excite the envy of the kings of Asia. … But the most lively and splendid amusement of the idle multitude depended on the frequent exhibition of public games and spectacles … the happiness of Rome appeared to hang on the event of a race.”

Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?

LET NOT THY WRONG HEAD KNOW WHAT THY RIGHT HEAD DOETH

Having completed his preparations, he disconnected the phone that had proved so invaluable, folded it, concealed it tidily in the inside pocket of his issue jacket. Then he hung that over a chair back, completed undressing normally, and went to bed at approximately his regular time.

What followed was a miniature—a microcosm—of his life, condensed into a span of no more than thirty-five minutes.

At an unidentifiable time of night one of the silent anonymous white-garbed escorts roused him and instructed him to dress quickly and come along, unperturbed by this departure from routine because for him routine might be expected to consist in unpredictability. It was, had been for centuries, a cheap and simple means of deranging persons under interrogation.

He led the way to a room with two doors, otherwise featureless apart from a bench. That was as far as his orders told him to go; with a curt command to sit down and wait, he departed.

There was a short period of silence. Finally the other door opened and a dumpy woman entered, yawning. She carried clothing in a plastic sack and a clipboard with a form on it. Grumpily she requested him to sign it; he did so, using the name she was expecting, which was not his own. Satisfied, yawning more widely than ever, she went out.

He changed into the garments she had brought: a white jersey shirt, blue-gray pants, blue jacket—well-fitting, unremarkable, unmemorable. Bundling up what he had worn in the sack, he went out the same way she had gone, and was in a corridor with several doors leading off it. After passing three of them, two to right and one to left, he arrived at a waste-reclamation chute and rid himself of his burden. Two doors farther along was an office, not locked. It was equipped with, among other things, a computer terminal. He tapped one key on its input board.

Remotely locked, a drawer slid open in an adjacent file stack. Among the contents of the drawer were temporary ID cards of the type issued to visitors on official business.

Meanwhile the printout station of the computer terminal was humming and a rapid paper tongue was emerging from it.

From the same drawer as the ID cards he extracted a neopolaroid color camera, which he set to self-portrait delay and placed on a handy table. Sitting down to face the camera, he waited the requisite few seconds, retrieved the film, placed his picture on the card and sealed it over with a device which, as the computers had promised, was also kept in the drawer. Finally, he typed in his borrowed name and the rank of major in the U.S. Army Medical Corps.

By then the computer had printed out what it was required to furnish: a requisition, in duplicate, for the custody of Kate Grierson Lilleberg. Having been prepared with a light-writer, which unlike old-fashioned mechanical printers was not limited to any one type style—or indeed to any one alphabet, since every single character was inscribed with a laser beam at minimum power—only examination under a microscope could have revealed that it was not a U.S. Army Form RQH-4479, the standard form of authority to transfer a prisoner from civil to military custody.

Suitably armed now, he replaced everything he had disturbed, tapped the computer board one more time to activate the final part of the program he had left in store, and left the room. Dutifully, the machines remote-locked the cabinet again, and the door of the office, and then undertook such other tasks as deleting their record of either having been unlocked during the night, and making a note of the “fact” that a temporary ID card had been accidentally spoiled so the stock in hand was one fewer than could be accounted for by recent visitors.

The door at the extreme end of the corridor gave into the open air, at the head of a flight of stairs leading to a dark concrete parking bay where an electric ambulance was standing. Its driver, who wore army uniform with Pfc’s badges, gave an uncertain salute, saying, “Major … ?”

“At ease,” the newcomer said briskly, displaying his ID card and duplicate forms. “Sorry to have kept you. Any trouble with the girl?”

The driver said with a shrug, “She’s out, sir. Like a busted light-tube oh-you-tee.”

“That’s how it should be. They gave you your route card?”

“Sure, they brought it when they delivered the girl. Oh, and this as well. Feels like her code card, I guess.” The soldier proffered a small flat package.

Peeling off the cover proved him half right. Not one code card, but two.

“Thanks. Not that she’ll have much use for it where she’s going.”

“I guess not.” With a sour grin.

“You already changed your batteries, did you? Fine—let’s get under way.”

Dark roads thrummed into the past to the accompaniment of a rattling of numbers, not spoken. He had memorized both codes before starting his veephone-mediated sabotage, but there was a lot more to this escape than simply two personal codes. He wanted everything down pat before the ambulance first had to stop for electricity, and the range of this model was only about two hundred miles.

Best if the driver didn’t have to get hurt. Though having been fool enough to volunteer for army service, of course, and worse still, having been fool enough to accept orders unquestioningly from a machine …

But everybody did that. Everybody, all the time. Otherwise none of this would have been possible.

Similarly, none of it would have had to happen.

FOR PURPOSES OF DISORIENTATION

At present and with luck from now on and forever regardless of what code I wear I am being Nicholas Kenton Haflinger. And whoever doesn’t like it will have to lump it.

PRESIDING AT AWAKE

“What the—? Who—? Why, Sandy!”

“Quiet. Listen carefully. You’re in an army ambulance. We’re about two hundred miles east of Tarnover supposedly on the way to Washington. The driver believes I’m a Medical Corps major escorting you. There was no convincing story I could invent to justify clothing fit for you to cross a public street in. All you have is that issue cotton gown. What’s more they shaved your head. Do you remember anything about this, or did they keep you all the time in regressed mode?”

She swallowed hard. “I’ve had what seem like dreams since they—they kidnaped me. I don’t know what’s true and what isn’t.”

“We’ll sort that out later. We’re laying over to change batteries. I sent the driver for coffee. He’ll be back any moment. I’ll find some other excuse to make him hang around, because I’ve seen an automat where I can buy you a dress, shoes and a wig. At the next stop be ready to put them on and vanish.”

“What—what are we going to do? Even if it comes off?”

Cynically he curled his lip. “The same as I’ve been doing all my adult life. Run the net. Only this time in more than one sense. And believe you me, they aren’t going to like it.”

Shutting the ambulance’s rear door again, he said loudly to the returning driver, “Damn monitors up front! Showed the sedative control had quit. But she’s lying like a log. Say, did you spot a men’s room? I guess before we get back on the road I ought to take a leak.”

Over the hum of the many steam and electric vehicles crowding the service area the driver answered, “Right next to the automat, sir. And—uh—if we’re not pulling out at once, I see they got Delphi boards and I’d kinda like to check out a nervous ticket.”

“Sure, go ahead. But keep it down to—let’s say five minutes, hm?”

TEMBLOR

“What do you mean, he can’t be reached? Listen again and make sure you know who I’m asking for. Paul—T-for-Tommy—Freeman! Want I should spell it?

“His new code? What about his—? Are you certain?

“But they don’t have any goddamn right to snatch him out from—Oh, shit. Sometimes I wonder who’s in charge around this country, us or the machines. Give me the new code, then.

“I don’t care what it says in back of its head listing. Just read it over to me. If you can, that is!

“Now you listen to me, you obstructive dimwit. When I give an order I expect it to be obeyed, and I won’t be talked back to by a self-appointed shithouse lawyer. You’re addressing the Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Data Processing Services, and—That’s more like it. Come on.

“It begins with what group? No, don’t bother to repeat it. I heard you. Oh my God. Oh my God.”

SPELLED “WEEKEND” BUT PRONOUNCED “WEAKENED”

A highway line drawn from Tarnover to Washington: a line to connect tomorrow with yesterday, via today. …

The most mobile population in all of history, the only one so totally addicted to going for the sake of going that it had deeveed excessive cost, energy crises, the disappearance of oil, every kind of obstacle in order to keep up the habit, was as ever on the move, even though half the continent was overlaid by end-of-fall weather, strong winds, low temperatures, rain turning to sleet. It was notoriously the sort of season that urged people to stop looking for and start finding.

He thought about that a lot during the journey.

Why move?

To choose a place right for sinking roots.

Go faster in order to drop back to a lower orbit? Doesn’t work. Drop back to a lower orbit; you go faster!

Even Freeman had had to have that pointed out to him. He knew obscurely he wouldn’t have to explain it to Kate. And she couldn’t be the only person who understood the truth by instinct.

Washington: yesterday. The exercise of personal power; the privileges of office; the individualization of the consensus into a single spokesman’s mouth, echo of an age when communities did indeed concur because they weren’t assailed with a hundred irreconcilable versions of events. (These days the typical elected representative is returned with fewer than forty percent of the votes cast; not infrequently he’s detested by four-fifths of those he purports to speak for, because the population of the state or district has turned over. They’ll surple him at the next opportunity, chafe until it arrives. Meanwhile his old supporters have scattered to upset another applecart. Voting registers are maintained by computers nowadays; all it takes to enter you on the roll at your new address is one, count it one, veephone call.)

Tarnover: tomorrow, sure. But hopefully the wrong tomorrow. Because it’s planned and controlled by people who were born the day before yesterday.

How do you cope with tomorrow when (a) it may not be like the real tomorrow but (b) it’s arrived when you weren’t ready for it?

One approach is offered by the old all-purpose beatitude: “blessed are they who expect the worst …” Hence reactions like Anti-Trauma Inc. Nothing worse can happen in later life than what was done to you as a child.

(Wrong tomorrow.)

Another is inherent in the concept of the plug-in life-style: no matter where you go, there are people like the ones you left behind, furniture and clothes and food like the ones you left behind, the same drinks available across any bar: “Say, settle a bet for us, willya? Is this the Paris Hilton or the Istanbul Hilton?”

(Wrong tomorrow. It offers the delusive hope that tomorrow will be pretty much like today, but it got here and it isn’t.)

Yet another lies in preparing for it: using public Delphi boards, for example, to monitor what people are ready to adapt to, yearn to adapt to, and won’t adapt to at any price.

(Wrong tomorrow. They decided to let traditional market forces flywheel the weight of decision. The favorite who started at odds-on broke his leg at the first fence and the race is far from over.)

Yet another lies in the paid-avoidance areas: you trade in your right to the latest-and-greatest against an allowance of unearned credit, enough to keep body and soul together.

(Wrong tomorrow. It’s going to overtake you anyway, and city-smashing quakes are part of it.)

While still another consists in getting good and clutched by some heavy brand of dope, so things that happen can’t really hurt.

(Wrong tomorrow. Ash longer, vita brevis.)

And so forth.

Religion?

Change cities, by order. Last place it was a Catholic framework; here it’s Ecumenical Pentecostal and the minister is kind of into the Tao.

Chemicals?

Almost everybody is high like troops on the way to battle. Shaking! You hear tension sing in the air you breathe. The only way you want awareness shifted is back to normal.

Trust in authority?

But it’s your right as a free and equal individual to be as authoritative as anybody else.

Model yourself on a celebrity?

But you were celebrated last week, you had a record-breaking Delphi ticket or your kid was on three-vee defying ’gators or you notched up one full year in the same house and the reporter called in from the local station. For ten whole minutes you’ve been famous too.

Collapse into overload?

That’s already happened, nearly as often as you’ve been to bed with a head cold.

And patiently, from every single one of these possible pathways, they’ve turned you back to where you were with a smile of encouragement and a pat on the shoulder and a bright illuminated certificate that reads no exit.

Therefore the world keeps turning, the ads keep changing, there are always programs to watch when you switch on the three-vee, there’s always food in the supermarket and power at the socket and water at the sink. Well, not quite always. But near as dammit.

And there’s nearly always a friend to answer the phone.

And there’s nearly always credit behind your code.

And there’s nearly always some other place you can go.

And when the night sky happens to be clear, there are invariably more stars in it, moving faster, than were put there at the Creation. So that’s okay.

Pretty well.

More or less.

HELP!

For these and sundry other reasons, at their next battery stop he gave the driver the slip and Kate her dress and shoes and wig and melted into the mass of people boarding a shuttle bus bound for the nearest veetol port. For the driver, who was sure to be puzzled, he left a note saying:

Thanks, soldier. You were very helpful. If you want to know how helpful, punch this code into the nearest phone.

The code, naturally, being his own new acquisition.

PRECEPT DINNED INTO TRAFFIC PATROL OFFICERS DURING TRAINING

Someone is apt to swoop on you from a great height if you ticket a vehicle with a heavy federal code behind the wheel.

MOUSING AROUND UNDER THE FEET OF ELEPHANTS

“Where are we going?” Kate whispered.

“I finally located my place to stand.”

“Precipice?” she suggested, half hopefully, half anxiously. “Surely that’s where they’ll head for straight away.”

“Mm-hm. Sorry, I don’t mean place. I mean places. I should have figured this out long ago. No one place could ever be big enough. I have to be in a hundred of them, all at the same time, and a thousand if I can manage it. It’s bound to take a while to put my insight into practice, but—oh, maybe in a couple of months we shall be able to sit back and enjoy the fireworks.”

“I always did like fireworks,” she said with the ghost of a smile, and took his hand.

FOUR-WAY INTERSECTION WITH STOP SIGNS

These days it was easy to lose track of what features belonged with what names. Therefore there were captions under each of the faces on the four-station secure link, names and offices. Hartz gazed at the split-screen array before him, reading from left to right.

From Tarnover, its chancellor: Admiral Bertrand Snyder, ascetic, gray-haired, short-spoken, who had been famous under the sobriquet of “Singleminded Snyder” during the Hawaiian Insurrection of 2002 … but that was before he entered the Civil Service and a cloud of secrecy.

From the Southern White House, the president’s special adviser on security, plump and bespectacled Dr. Guglielmo Dorsi, no longer known even to his intimates (though it had not proved possible to eradicate the nickname entirely from his dossiers) as Billy the Shiv.

And from another floor of this same building, his own superior, the Full Director of the Bureau, Mr. Aylwin Sullivan, tall, beak-nosed, shock-haired, and deliberately shabby. It had been the style for those working with computers when he launched out on his rocket-like career. Nonetheless it was odd to look at his open-neck shirt, pocketful of old pens, five-o’week shadow, black-rimmed nails.

As though the past had stepped into the present.

All three of the faces on the screen frowned at Hartz: Snyder with annoyance, Dorsi with suspicion, Sullivan with impatience. They let pecking order decide who should speak. Highest in the hierarchy Sullivan said, “Are you insane? Only a few days ago you insisted we deevee all the 4GH codes assigned to FBI, CIA, Secret Service—and now here you are claiming that the U-group codes must be junked too! You couldn’t cause more trouble if you were a paid subversive.”

Dorsi said, “Let me remind you of this, too. Upon my asking what to use when we replaced the 4GH, you personally advised me that there was no known means of leeching any code from the reserve and assigning it to U-group status without that fact being revealed in your own bureau’s computers. No record of such action can be found, can it? I can just see the president’s face if I were to go to him with such a crazy story.”

“But when I said that I didn’t know—” Hartz began. Snyder cut him short.

“What’s more, you’ve made a direct attack on my integrity and administrative efficiency. You’ve said in so many words that the person you claim to have carried out this act of sabotage is a graduate of Weychopee who moved to Tarnover at my special request and who was cleared by me in person for essential work here. I wholly agree with Mr. Sullivan. You must have taken leave of your senses.”

“Therefore,” Sullivan said, “I’m requiring you to take leave of absence as well. Preferably indefinite. Are we through with this conference? Good. I have other business to attend to.”

FOR PURPOSES OF OBFUSCATION

I know damn well I am Paul Thomas Freeman, aged thirty-nine, a government employee with scholars’ degrees in cybernetics, psychology and political science plus a master’s in data processing. Similarly I know that if as a kid I hadn’t been recruited much as Haflinger was, I’d probably have wound up as a petty criminal, into smuggling or dope or maybe running an illegal Delphi pool. Maybe I might not have been as smart as I imagine. Maybe I’d be dead.

And I also know I’ve been brilliantly maneuvered into a corner where I sacrificed everything I’ve gained in life on a spur-of-the-moment impulse, threw away my career, let myself in—quite possibly—for a treason trial … and with no better excuse than that I like Haflinger better than Hartz and the buggers at his back. A corner? More like a deep dark hole!

So why the hell do I feel so goddamn happy?

FULCRUM

When he finished explaining how he had contrived their escape, Kate said incredulously, “Was that all?”

“Not quite. I also made a call to the ten nines.”

“Ah. I should have guessed.”

A MATTER OF HYSTERICAL RECORD

When the short-lived Allende government was elected to power in Chile and needed a means of balancing that unfortunate country’s precarious economy, Allende appealed to the British cybernetics expert Stafford Beer.

Who announced that as few as ten significant quantities, reported from a handful of key locations where adequate communications facilities existed, would enable the state of the economy to be reviewed and adjusted on a day-to-day basis.

Judging by what happened subsequently, his claim infuriated nearly as many people as did the news that there are only four elements in the human genetic code.

LIKE THEY SAY, IT’S BOUNCE OR BREAK

At Ann Arbor, Michigan, research psychologist Dr. Zoë Sideropoulos had house guests for a week. She was an expert in hypnosis and had written a well-known study of the regression effect which, in suitable cases, makes possible the recovery of memories ordinarily lost to conscious awareness without such crude physical aids as electrodes planted in the subject’s brain.

During the week she made exceptionally intensive use of her home computer terminal. Or rather, that was what the machines believed.

When he was able to take a break from using Dr. Sideropoulos’s terminal—a new and extremely efficient model—Kate brought him omelets and the nearest surviving commercial equivalent of “real beer.”

“Eat before it’s cold,” she commanded. “Then talk. In detail and with footnotes.”

“I’m glad you said that. We’re going to have a lot of time to fill. I need to scramble some circuitry at Canaveral, or wherever, rather more completely than you scrambled these eggs, and I know for sure I’m going to have to make the computers do things they’re specifically forbidden to. But not to worry. When they built their defenses they weren’t reckoning on somebody like me.”

He set about demolishing the omelet; it lasted for a dozen hungry bites.

“But I do worry,” Kate muttered. “Are you certain you can trust Paul Freeman?”

He laid aside his empty plate. “Remember how at Lap-of-the-Gods you upbraided me because I wouldn’t believe anyone else was on my side?”

“Touchée. But I want my answer.”

“Yes. There’s an honest man. And finally he’s figured out what constitutes evil in the modern world.”

“So what’s your definition?”

“One that I already know you agree with, because we talked about Anti-Trauma Inc. If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.”

In a dry voice she said, “I won’t argue.”

At Boulder, Colorado, Professor Joachim Yent of the School of Economics and Business Administration had house guests for a few days. During that time, it was duly recorded that he made exceptionally frequent use of his home computer terminal.

“Kate, when you take a liking to somebody, do you speed up or slow down?”

“Do I what—? Oh, got it. Slow down, I guess. I mean to get where we can talk to each other I quit skipping for a while.”

“And vice versa?”

“Most times, no. In fact you’re the only person I ever met who could work it the other way—uh … Sandy? What is your name, damn it? I just realized I still don’t know.”

“You decide. Stick with Sandy if you like, or switch to what I started out with: Nicholas, Nickie, Nick. I don’t care. I’m myself, not a label.”

She puckered her lips to blow him a kiss. “I don’t care what you’re called, either. I only know I’m glad we slowed down to the same speed.”

At Madison, Wisconsin, Dean Prudence McCourtenay of the Faculty of Laws had house guests for a long weekend. It was’ similarly recorded that during their visit she made more than averagely frequent use of her domestic computer terminal.

It was becoming very cold. Winter had definitely begun.

“Yes, slowing down to the same speed is what everybody needs to do. With a lot of incidental energy to be dissipated. In fact a good many brakes are apt to melt. But the alternative is a head-on flatout smash.”

“Why?”

“Because everybody isn’t like you yet.”

“Sounds like a monotonous world!”

“I mean in the sense of being equally able to cope.”

“But …” She bit her lip. “It’s a fact of existence that some can and some can’t. Punishing those who can’t is cruel, but holding back those who can for the sake of the rest is—”

He broke in. “Our present society is cruel both ways. It does punish those who can’t cope. We bought our veephones and our data-net and our asteroid ore and the rest of it by spending people who wound up dead or in mental hospitals.” His face darkened briefly. “And it holds back those who can cope. I’m an example of that.”

“I find it terribly hard to believe, seeing what you can do now you’re working at full stretch!”

“But I have been held back, damn it. I didn’t know how much I could achieve until I saw you, shaven and limp like a lab specimen due to be carved up and thrown away with no more memorial than entry in a table of statistics. The sight forced me into—I guess you’d say mental overdrive.”

“What was it like?”

“As inexplicable as orgasm.”

In Shreveport, Louisiana, Dr. Chase Richmond Dellinger, a public-health analyst under contract to the city, had house guests during whose stay he had unusually frequent recourse to his home computer terminal. In the south it was still pleasantly warm, of course, but there was a lot of rain this year.

“So I absolutely had to find a way out—not just for you, not just for me, but for everybody. In an eyeblink I had discovered a new urge within myself, and it was as fundamental as hunger, or fear, or sex. I recall one argument I had with Paul Freeman …”

“Yes?”

“The idea came up that it took the advent of the H-bomb to bring about in human beings the response you see in other animals when confronted with bigger claws or teeth.”

“Or a dominant figure in his private cosmos. Like Bagheera rolling over kitten-style to greet me when I get back from school. I do hope they’re looking after him properly.”

“We’ve been promised that.”

“Yes, but … Never mind. I didn’t mean to change the subject.”

“On principle I differed with him, but he was quite justified in saying that for all we know maybe that is the case. Well, if it’s true that our threshold of survival-prone behavior is so high it takes the prospect of total extermination to activate modes of placation and compromise, may there not be other processes, equally life-preserving, which can similarly be triggered off only at a far higher level of stimulus than you find among our four-legged cousins?”

On his ranch in northern Texas, political historian Rush Compton and his wife Nerice, some years his junior and in occasional practice as a market-research counselor, entertained a couple of house guests. Considerable use was made of their home computer terminal. The weather was fresh and clear, with intermittent gusts of sharp northerly wind.

“Wait a moment. That threshold may be dangerously high. Think of population.”

“Yes indeed. I started with population. Not having a fixed breeding season was among the reasons why mankind achieved dominance; it kept our numbers topped up at an explosive rate. Past a certain stage restrictive processes set in: male libido is reduced or diverted into nonfertile channels, female ovulation is regularized and sometimes fails completely. But long before we reach that point we find the company of our fellow creatures so unbearable we resort to war, or a tribal match. Kill one another or ourselves.”

“So our evolutionary advantage has turned unnoticed into a handicap.”

“Kate, I love you.”

“I know. I’m glad.”

At his secluded home in Massachusetts, Judge Virgil Horovitz, retired, and his housekeeper Alice Bronson—he was widowed—entertained house guests and used his computer terminal for the first time since his retirement. A gale had stripped most of the trees around his house of their gorgeous red-gold foliage; at night, frost made the fallen leaves crackle and rustle underfoot.

“But what the hell can we do with an insight like yours? We’ve had insights before, from social theorists and historians and politicians and preachers, and we’re in a mess in spite of all. The idea of turning the entire planet into a madhouse in the hope of triggering off some species-saving reflex—no, it’s out of the question. Suppose at some early stage of your scheme we hit a level where a billion people go collectively in-insane?”

“That’s the best we can look forward to, and I do mean the best, if the people at Tarnover are allowed their way.”

“I think you’re serious!”

“Oh, maybe it wouldn’t be a whole billion. But it could be half the population of North America. And a hundred and some million is enough, isn’t it?”

“How would it happen?”

“Theoretically at least, one of the forces operating on us consists in the capacity, which we don’t share with other animals, to elect whether or not we shall give way to an ingrained impulse. Our social history is the tale of how we learned to substitute conscious ethical behavior for simple instinct, right? On the other hand, it remains true that few of us are willing to admit how much influence our wild heritage exercises on our behavior. Not directly, because we’re not still wild, but indirectly, because society itself is a consequence of our innate predispositions.”

With a rueful chuckle, he added, “You know, one of the things I most regret about what’s happened is that I could have enjoyed my arguments with Paul Freeman. There was so much common ground between us. … But I didn’t dare. At all costs I had to shake his view of the world. Otherwise he’d never have toppled when Hartz pushed him.”

“Stop digressing, will you?”

“Sorry. Where were we? Oh, I was about to say that at Tarnover they’re mistakenly trying to postpone the moment where our reflexes take over. They ought to know that’s wrong. Freeman himself cited the best treatment for personality shock, which doesn’t use drugs or any other formal therapy, just liberates the victim to do something he’s always wanted and never achieved. In spite of evidence like that, though, they go on trying to collect the people most sensitive to our real needs so that they can isolate them from the world. Whereas what they ought to be doing is turning them loose in full knowledge of their own talent, so that when we reach the inevitable overload point our reflexes will work for instead of against our best interests.”

“I recall a point made in one of the Disasterville monographs. I think it was number 6. Stripped of the material belongings which had located them in society, a lot of refugees who formerly held responsible, status-high positions broke down into whining useless parasites. Leadership passed to those with more flexible minds—not only kids who hadn’t ossified yet, but adults who previously had been called unpractical, dreamers, even failures. The one thing they had in common seemed to be a free-ranging imagination, regardless of whether it was due to their youth or whether it had lasted into maturity and fettered them with too great a range of possibilities for them to settle to any single course of action.”

“How well I know that feeling. And wouldn’t an injection of imagination be good for our society right now? I say we’ve had an overdose of harsh reality. A bit of fantasy would act as an antidote.”

Near Cincinnati, Ohio, Helga Thorgrim Townes, dramatist, and her husband Nigel Townes, architect, had house guests and were debbed for an exceptional amount of time rented on the data-net. Slight snow was falling in the region, but as yet had not settled to any marked extent.

“I’m not sure that if I hadn’t met people from Tarnover I would believe you. If I can judge by them, though …”

“Be assured they’re typical. They’ve been systematically steered away from understanding of the single most important truth about mankind. It’s as though you were to comb the continent for the kindest, most generous, most considerate individuals you could find, and then spend years persuading them that because such attitudes are rare, they must be abnormal and should be cured.”

“What most important truth?”

“You tell me. You’ve known it all your life. You live by its compass.”

“Anything to do with my reason for getting interested in you in the first place? I noticed how hard you were trying to conform to a stock pattern. It seemed like a dreadful waste.”

“That’s it. One charge I made against Freeman which I won’t retract: I accused him of dealing not in human beings but in approximations to a preordained model of a human being. I really am glad he decided to give it up. Bad habit!”

“Then I know what you’re talking about. It’s the uncertainty principle.”

“Of course. The opposite of evil. Everything implied by that shopworn term ‘free will.’ Ever run across the phrase ‘the new conformity’?”

“Yes, and it’s terrifying. In an age when we have more choice than ever before, more mobility, more information, more opportunity to fulfill ourselves, how is it that people can prefer to be identical? The plug-in life-style makes me puke.”

“But the concept has been sold with such persistence, the majority of people feel afraid not to agree that it’s the best way of keeping track in a chaotic world. As it were: ‘Everybody else says it is—who am I to argue?’ ”

“I am I.”

“Tat tvam asi.”

During the six weeks that the process took, approximately thirteen percent of households owning domestic computer terminals made above-average use of the machines in excess of the normal variation plus-or-minus ten percent. This was up by less than one percent over last year’s figures and could be ascribed to the start of the academic year.

SHADOWS BEFORE

“Hey, those odds … they doubled kinda fast, didn’t they?”

“What do you mean you can’t raise him? He’s a five-star priority—his phone can’t be out. Try again.”

“Christ, look at this lot, will you? Can’t the twitches keep their minds made up two days together?”

“Funny to get this on a weekend, but … Oh, I’m not going to complain about the chance to pick our new location from a list this long. Makes a change, doesn’t it, from all the time going where we’re told and no option?”

“But—but Mr. Sullivan! You did authorize it! Or at any rate it has your code affixed!”

HOMER

“It feels so strange,” Kate said as the cab turned the corner of her home street. Her eyes darted from one familar detail to another.

“I’m not surprised. I’ve been back to places, of course, but never to resume the same role as when I was there before … nor shall I this time, of course. Any objections?”

“Reservations, maybe.” With a distracted gesture. “After having been so many different people in such a short time that I can’t remember all my names: Carmen, Violet, Chrissie …”

“I liked you specially when you were Lilith.”

She pulled a face at him. “I’m not joking! Knowing that here if anywhere I’m bound to be recognized, even though we made sure the croakers pulled their watch—I guess I wasn’t quite ready for it.”

“Nor was I. I’d have liked to run longer and do more. But they’re no fools, the people who monitor the Fedcomps. Already I’m pretty sure they have an inkling of what’s about to crash on them. Before they react, we have to capitalize our last resources. You’re still a cause célèbre around KC; and judging by how she looked and sounded Ina is boiling with eagerness to put a good heavy G2S code between us and disaster.”

“I’m sure you’re right. Your logic is flawless. Even so—”

“You don’t have to live by logic. You’re wise. And that can transcend logic. No matter how logical your choice may seem in retrospect.”

“I was going to say: even so it’ll feel strange to go in and not have Bagheera come to rub against my ankles.”

The apt had been searched by experts. That aside, it was unchanged, though dusty. Kate picked up the paintbrush she had been using when “Fessier” called and grimaced at its clogged bristles.

“Anything missing?” he inquired, and she made a fast check.

“Nothing much. Some letters, my address-and-code book … Things I can live without. Most are still furnishing my head. But”—she wrinkled her nose—“the power was off for some time, wasn’t it, before you had it restored?”

“Sure, from the day after you were ’naped.”

“In that case, the moment I open the refrigerator the apt will be uninhabitable. I distinctly recall I’d laid in two dozen extra eggs. Come on, we have a lot of garbage cans to fill. There’s going to be a party here tonight.”

“A party?”

“Naturally. You never heard of Doubting Thomas? Besides, students are a gabby lot. What you’ve done is going to be on all strands of the net by this time tomorrow. I want it on the mouth-to-mouth circuit too.”

“But you know damn well I’ve written in a program that will call a press conference—”

“At noon the day after the balloon goes up,” she cut in. “Nick, Sandy, whatever the hell, darling, the avalanche you plan to start may have swept us into limbo long beforehand. If you’re going to hurt them as much as you think, you and I can’t safely plan so far ahead.”

He thought about that for a long moment. When he answered his voice shook a little.

“I know. I just haven’t faced the idea. Right, leave the clearing-up to me. Get on that phone and contact everybody you can. And you might as well enroll Ina’s help, get her to bring some friends from G2S.”

“I already thought of that,” she said with composure, and punched her mother’s code.

THE HATCHING OF THE WORM

On her way to visit friends for dinner, Dr. Zoë Sideropoulos paused before her home computer terminal long enough to activate a link to the continental net and strike a cluster of three digits on the board. Then she went out to her car.

Returning from an evening seminar, Professor Joachim Yent remembered what day it was and punched three digits into the board of his computer terminal.

Dean Prudence McCourtenay was in bed with a cold; she was a martyr to them every winter. But she had five veephones in her seven-room house, one being at her bedside.

Dr. Chase R. Dellinger took five from unexpected work at his lab—something suspect about a batch of newly imported mushroom spawn, perhaps contaminated with a mutant strain—and on his way back paused at a computer remote and tapped three digits into the net.

Nerice Compton misdialed a phone call and swore convincingly; she and Rush had friends in for drinks tonight.

Judge Virgil Horovitz had had a heart attack. At his age, that was not wholly unexpected. Besides, it had happened twice before. On returning from the hospital, his housekeeper remembered to activate the computer terminal and press three digital keys.

At a party with friends, Helga and Nigel Townes demonstrated some amusing tricks one could play with a computer remote. One aborted after three digits. The rest worked perfectly.

In any case, a complete emergency backup program was available which would have done the job by itself. However, many times in the history of Hearing Aid it had been proven that certain key data were better stored externally to the net.

By about 2300 EST the worm needed only fertilization to start laying its unprecedented eggs.

PARTY LINE

“I’ll be damned! Paul! Well, it’s great to see you. Come on in.”

Blinking shyly, Freeman complied. Kate’s apartment was alive with guests, mostly young and in brilliant clothes, but with a mix of more soberly clad people from G2S and the UMKC faculty. A portable coley unit had been set up and a trio of dancers were cautiously sticking to the chords of a simple traditional blues prior to launching a collective sequence of variations; as yet, they were still feeling out the unit’s tone-color bias.

“How did you know we were here? And what are you doing in KC, anyway? I understood you went to Precipice.”

“In a metaphorical sense.” Freeman gave a grin that made him look oddly boyish, as though he had shed twenty years with his formal working garb. “But it’s an awfully big place when you learn to recognize it. … No, in fact I figured out weeks ago that you were sure to be back sooner or later. I asked myself what the least likely place would be for me to find you, and—uh—took away the number I first thought of.”

“It’s alarming to think someone found my carefully randomized path so predictable. Ah, here comes Kate.”

Freeman stiffened as though to prepare for a blow, but she greeted him cordially, asked what he wanted to drink, and departed again to bring him beer.

“Isn’t that her mother?” Freeman muttered, having scanned the visible area of the apartment. “Over there in red and green?”

“Yes. You met her, didn’t you? And the man she’s talking to.”

“Rico Posta, isn’t that his name?”

“Right.”

“Hmm … What precisely is going on?”

“We had kind of a big temblor for a while, because of course once the news broke that Kate was back and she actually was kidnaped by a government agent as the students have been claiming, they were set to go tribal the campus. We put that idea into freeze, after a lot of argument, by hinting at all sorts of dire recriminations. And that’s what we’re discussing at the moment. Come and join us.”

“Such as—”

“Well, we’ll start by deeveeing Tarnover.”

Freeman stopped dead in midstride, and a pretty girl banged into him and spilled half a drink and there was a period of apologies. Then: “What?”

“It’s an obvious first step. A full Congressional inquiry should follow publication in the media of the Tarnover and Crediton Hill budgets. The others are in the pipeline, with Weychopee last because it’s hardest to crack open. And as well as financial revelations, naturally, there will be pictures of Miranda and her successors, and the fatality rates among the experimental children, and so on.”

“That looks like Paul Freeman!” Ina exclaimed, rising. She sounded alarmed.

“Yes indeed. And a bit dazed. I just began to tell him what we’re up to.”

Kate arrived with the promised beer, delivered it, sat down on the arm of the chair Ina was using. Rico Posta stood at her side.

“Dazed,” Freeman repeated after a pause. “Yes, I am. What’s the purpose of attacking Tarnover first?”

“To trigger a landslide of emotionalism. I guess you, coming fresh from an environment dedicated to rationality, doubt it’s a good policy. But it’s exactly what we need, and records from Tarnover are a short means to make it happen. Lots of things make people angry, but political graft and the notion of deliberately maltreating children are among the most powerful. One taps the conscious, the other the subconscious.”

“Oh, both hit the subconscious,” Ina said. “Rico has the same nightmare I do, about finding someone got to my credit records and deeveed everything I worked for all my life. And I don’t stand a prayer of finding out who’s responsible.” She turned to face her daughter squarely. “What’s more … Kate, I never dared tell you this before, but when I was pregnant with you I was so terrified you might not—uh—come out right, I—”

“You overloaded a few years later, and after that you were obsessively worried about me, and when I grew up you still worried because I’m a nonconformist. And I’m plain too. So what? I’m bright and I bounce. I’m a credit to any mother. Ask Nick,” she added with a mischievous grin.

Freeman glanced around. “Nick? You recovered from your prejudice against the name, then—Old Nick, Saint Nicholas and the rest?”

“As well as being the patron saint of thieves, Saint Nicholas is credited with reviving three murdered children. It’s a fair human-type compromise.”

“You’ve changed,” Freeman said soberly. “In a lot of ways. And … and the result is kind of impressive.”

“I owe much of it to you. If I hadn’t been derailed from the course I’d followed all my life—You know, that’s what’s wrong with us on the public level. We fret about how to keep going the same old way when we should be casting around for another way that’s better. Our society is hurtling in free fall toward heaven knows where, and as a result we’ve developed collective osteochalcolysis of the personality.”

“The way to go faster is to slow down,” Kate said with conviction.

Freeman’s brow furrowed. “Yes, perhaps. But how do we choose this better direction?”

“We don’t have to. It’s programed.”

“How can that possibly be true?”

Rico Posta spoke up in a strained tone. “I didn’t believe it either, not at first. Now I have to. I’ve seen the evidence.” He took an angry swig of his drink. “Hell, here I am allegedly vice-president in charge of long-term corporate planning, and I didn’t know that G2S’s social-extrapolation programs automatically mouse into a bunch of federal studies from Crediton Hill! Isn’t that crazy? It was set up by my last-but-two predecessor, that system, and he left under a cloud and omitted to advise the poker who took over. Nick got to it with no trouble, and he’s taken me on a guided tour of a section of the net I didn’t know existed.”

Pointing with a shaking hand, he concluded furiously: “On that goddamn veephone right over there! I feel sick, just sick. If a veep for G2S can’t find out what’s happening under his nose, what chance do ordinary people have?”

“I wish I’d been here,” Freeman said after a pause. “What do these Crediton Hill studies indicate?”

“Oh …” Posta took a deep breath. “More or less this: the cost of staying out front—economically, in terms of prestige, and so forth—has been to invoke the counterpart of the athlete’s ‘second wind,’ which burns up muscle tissue. You can’t keep that up forever. And what we’ve been burning is people who could have been useful, talented members of society if the pressure had been less intense. As it was, they turned to crime or suicide or went insane.”

Freeman said slowly, “I remember thinking that I could easily have taken to peddling dope. But I can’t see the world the way you do, can I? I owe to the people who recruited me for Weychopee the fact that I didn’t wind up in jail or an early grave.”

“Is our society on the right lines when one of its most gifted people can find no better career than crime unless literally millions per year of public money are lavished on him?”

Nick waited for an answer to that question. None came.

Around them the party was in full swing. The coley dancers had the measure of the unit. Their numbers had trebled without causing more than an occasional screech, and their chord pattern had evolved into a full AABA chorus of thirty-two bars, still in the key of the original blues though one of the more adventurous girls was trying to modulate into the minor. Unfortunately someone else was trying to impose triple time. The effect was … interesting.

Watching the dance, Freeman said helplessly, “Oh, what difference does it make whether I agree or not? I gave you your U-group codes. I knew damn well that was like handing you an H-bomb, and I went right ahead. I only wish I could believe in what you’re doing. You sound like an economist—worse, like a nihilist, planning to bring the temple pillars down around our ears.”

“The name for what we’re doing wasn’t coined by any kind of radical.”

“It has a name?”

“Sure it does,” Kate said firmly. “Agonizing reappraisal.”

Nick nodded. “During all my time at Tarnover it was drummed into me that I must search for wisdom. It’s the beginning of wisdom when you admit you’ve gone astray.”

The coley dancers dissolved into discords and laughter. As they scattered in search of fresh drinks they complimented one another on the length of time they had managed to keep dancing. An impatient exhibitionistic youth promptly jumped up and conjured a specialty number from the invisible beams. After the complexities of the nine-part dance it seemed thin and shallow in spite of being technically brilliant.

“Sweedack,” Freeman said eventually, his face glistening with sweat. “I guess now we hold tight and wait for the tsunami.”

THE RACE BETWEEN GUNS AND ARMOR

On the tree of evolution, last season’s flowers die, and often the most beautiful are sterile.

While Triceratops sported his triple horns, while Diplodocus waved his graceful tail, something without a name was stealing their tomorrow.

AN ALARMING ITEM TO FIND ON YOUR OVERNIGHT MAIL-STORE REEL

Origin: Tarnover Bioexperimental Laboratory

Reference: K3/E2/100715 P

Subject: In-vitro genetic modification (project #38)

Nature: Controlled crossover in gamete union

Surgeons: Dr. Jason B. Saville, Dr. Maud Crowther

Biologist i/c: Dr. Phoebe R. Whymper

Mother: Anon. volunt. GOL ($800 p.w., 1 yr.)

Father: Staff volunt. WVG ($1,000, flat pmt.)

Embryo: Female

Gestation:—11 days

Survival time: appx. 67 hr.

Description: Typical class G0 and G9 faults, viz. cyclopean eye, cleft palate, open fontanelle, digestive system incomplete, anal-vaginal fusion, pelvic deformities and all toes absent. Cf. project #6.

Conclusion: Programed inducement of crossover only partially successful employing template solution #17K.

Recommendation: Repeat but attempt layering of template on crystalline substrate (in hand) or use of gel version (in hand).

Disposition of remains: Authorized (initialed JBS).

AN ALARMING ITEM TO FIND ON YOUR CREDIT-RATING STATEMENT

Inspection of computerized records has revealed that over half the credit standing to your name derives from nonlegal undertakings, details of which have been forwarded to the Attorney General of the United States. In anticipation of criminal proceedings your permissible credit is limited to the Federal Supportive Norm, viz. $28.50 per day.

The Commission on Poverty has held this insufficient to provide an adequate diet; however, upgrading to the proposed norm of $67.50 per day still awaits presidential approval.

This is a cybernetic datum for the public service.

AN ALARMING ITEM TO FIND ON YOUR DESK COME MONDAY MORNING

To all employees of Marmaduke Smith Metal Products Inc.

The decision taken to commission the building and launching of an orbital factory for your company by Ground-to-Space Industries Inc. (contract noncancelable) was reached as the result of a warning from the chief accountant Mr. J. J. Himmelweiss that the corporation faces certain bankruptcy.

At the same meeting of the Board which confirmed the placing of the G2S contract all officers were voted an additional 100 percent of their respective holdings of stock to dispose of at temporarily inflated prices prior to the company’s voluntary liquidation which is scheduled for the end of next month.

Thsi is an unauthorized cybernetic announcement.

AN ALARMING ITEM TO FIND ON A COSMETICS PACKAGE

This product contains a known allergen and a known carcinogen. The manufacturers have expended over $650,000 in out-of-court settlements to avoid legal suits by former users. This is a cybernetic datum imprinted on the wrapper without the manufacturers’ knowledge or consent.

AN ALARMING ITEM TO FIND ON A PACK OF “HONEST-TO-GOODNESS” ^® BEEF STEW

Despite being advertised as domestic, this stew contains 15 to 35 percent imported meat originating in areas where typhus, brucellosis and trichinosomiasis are endemic. Authority to label the contents as domestic produce was obtained following the expenditure of appx. $215,000 in bribes to customs and public-health inspectors. This is a cybernetic datum derived from records not intended for publication.

AN ALARMING ITEM TO FIND ON A MONTHLY AUTO-DEBIT NOTICE

Advice to clients of Anti-Trauma Inc.

A status check of the first one hundred juveniles treated according to this corporation’s methods, all of whom are now at least three years past termination of their courses of therapy, reveals that:

66 are receiving prescribed psychotropic drugs;

62 are classed educationally subaverage;

59 have recently reported nightmares and hallucinations;

43 have been arrested at least once;

37 have run away from home at least once;

19 are in jail or subject to full-time supervision orders;

15 have been convicted of crimes of violence;

15 have been convicted of theft;

13 have been convicted of arson;

8 have been committed to mental hospitals at least once;

6 are dead;

5 have wounded parents, close relatives or guardians;

2 have murdered siblings;

1 awaits trial for molesting a girl aged three.

Totals do not sum to 100 because most are entered under more than one head. This is a cybernetic announcement in the public interest.

AN ALARMING ITEM TO FIND ON YOUR OVERDUE-TAX DEMAND

For the information of the person required to pay this tax Analysis of last year’s federal budget shows that: * * * 1 7 % of your tax dollar went on boondoggles

***13% ………………. propaganda, bribes and kickbacks

***11% ………………. federal contracts with companies

which are (a) fronting for criminal activities and/or (b) partly or wholly owned by persons subject to indictment for federal offenses and/or (c) hazardous to health and the environment. Fuller details may be obtained by punching the code number at top left of this form into any veephone. They take about 57 minutes to present.

This is a cybernetic datum appended without Treasury Department authorization.

AN ALARMING ITEM TO HEAR OVER THE VEEPHONE

“No, Mr. Sullivan, we can’t stop it! There’s never been a worm with that tough a head or that long a tail! It’s building itself, don’t you understand? Already it’s passed a billion bits and it’s still growing. It’s the exact inverse of a phage—whatever it takes in, it adds to itself instead of wiping … Yes, sir! I’m quite aware that a worm of that type is theoretically impossible! But the fact stands, he’s done it, and now it’s so goddamn comprehensive that it can’t be killed. Not short of demolishing the net!”

THE OUTCOME OF THE BRAIN RACE (COMPUTED)

The first shall be last and the last shall be first.

THE WHOLE CONTINENT ON THE BRINK OF ONE PRECIPICE

The press conference automatically called by Nick’s program was to be held in the largest auditorium on the UMKC campus. The students had been delighted to commandeer it. Discreetly, the university authorities declined a request from the state governor to intervene. Among the persons credited with work on Miranda and those like her were two incumbent faculty members, and they were—sensibly—spending today behind locked doors and steel shutters. The students were very unhappy about those deformed babies.

Moreover, for the first time in well over a generation, the mass of public opinion was in agreement with the students. Gratifying. If it didn’t heal the split, at least it moved the split to a healthier location.

The hall was packed—it was crammed. If modern technology hadn’t shrunk three-vee cameras and sound-recording equipment to a size that the engineers of fifty years ago would have called impossible, the puzzled but dutiful reporters who had arrived to cover a story they were certain must be sensational … whatever the hell it was, would have been unable to put anything on their tapes. As it was, they were obliged to use poles, electric floaters and their longest-range mikes and lenses because they couldn’t get anywhere near, the rostrum, and there was a squabble over priority in respect of lines of sight which delayed the start of the conference until well past the scheduled time of noon.

At long last, however, Kate was able to appear on stage, to be greeted by a standing ovation that threatened never to end. It took her a long time to pat down the noise. When she finally did so, the putter-of-cats-among-pigeons made his appearance, and the audience settled to an expectant hush.

“My name is Nicholas Haflinger.” In a loud clear voice, capable of filling the auditorium without the aid of microphones. “You’re wondering why I’ve called you here. The reason is simple. To answer all your questions. I mean—all. This is the greatest news of our time. As of today, whatever you want to know, provided it’s in the data-net, you can now know. In other words, there are no more secrets.”

That claim was so sweeping that his listeners sat briefly stunned. Long seconds slid away before there came a diffident call from a woman reporter near the front, one of the lucky ones who had arrived early.

“Rose Jordan, W3BC! What about this story that was on the beams, the bait that pulled us in? This thing where you said G2S will sue officials of the Bureau of Data Processing for kidnaping one of its employees, and also some girlfriend of his?”

“That was me, and the story’s absolutely true,” Kate said. “But you didn’t have to come here for the details. Ask any veephone.”

“Yesterday you’d have had to come here,” Nick amplified. “If there’s one thing BDP has brought to a fine art, it’s preventing the public from digging unpleasant truths from behind the scenes in government … right?”

A rattle of agreement: from the students on principle, but from several reporters too, who looked so glum one might presume they’d encountered that kind of trouble.

“Well, that’s over. From now on: ask and you shall know.”

“Hey!” In an incredulous tone from a man beside Rose Jordan. “All kind of weird stuff has been coming off the beams since yesterday, like they’ve been paying women to bear kids that are sure to be deformed. You mean this is supposed to be true?”

“What makes you doubt it?”

“Well—uh …” The man licked his lips. “I called my office half an hour back and my chief said it’s been authoritatively deeveed. By Aylwin Sullivan personally. Something about a saboteur.”

“That must be me.” Cocking one eyebrow. “Any word of this sabotage being stopped?”

“Not that I heard.”

“Good. At least they didn’t make that ridiculous promise. Because it can’t be stopped. I guess you all know about tapeworms … ? Good. Well, what I turned loose in the net yesterday was the father and mother—I’ll come back to that in a moment—the father and mother of all tapeworms.

“It consists in a comprehensive and irrevocable order to release at any printout station any and all data in store whose publication may conduce to the enhanced well-being, whether physical, psychological or social, of the population of North America.

“Specifically, whether or not anybody has required a printout of it, information concerning gross infringements of Canadian, Mexican and/or United States legal enactments respecting—in order of priority—public health, the protection of the environment, bribery and corruption, fair business and the payment of national taxes, shall be disseminated automatically to all the media. For this purpose ‘gross’ is defined by setting a threshold: no such infringement shall be published unless at least one person made from it an illegal profit of at least ten thousand dollars.”

He had straightened as he spoke. Now he was arrow-rigid, and his voice boomed in huge resounding periods like the tolling of a death bell.

“This is indeed the father and mother of a tapeworm. It’s of a type known as parthenogenetic. If you’re acquainted with contemporary data-processing jargon, you’ll have noticed how much use it makes of terminology derived from the study of living animals. And with reason. Not for nothing is a tapeworm called a tapeworm. It can be made to breed. Most can only do so if they’re fertilized; that’s to say, if they’re interfered with from outside. For example the worm that prevents the Fedcomps from monitoring calls to Hearing Aid, and the similar but larger one that was released at Weychopee—Electric Skillet—to shut down the net in the event of enemy occupation: those are designed to lie dormant until tampered with. That’s true of all phage-type worms.

“My newest—my masterpiece—breeds by itself. For a head it wears a maximum-national-advantage rating, a priority code that I stole from G2S. It was allocated to the corporation because like other hypercorps it’s been treated for years as though it were above the law. Imagine how embarrassing it would be to make known all the bribes, all the graft, all the untaxed kickbacks, which don’t appear in G2S’s annual report to the stockholders. …

“Right behind that, my worm wears a U-group code, which does the same for individuals. The owner of a U-group code will never find himself in court. Never. No matter if he rapes the mayor’s daughter at midday on Main Street. You don’t believe me? Go punch a veephone. Ask for a plain-language printout of the status label worn by a U-group code. As of about an hour and a half ago it will print out for anybody … and it’s enlightening.”

Two or three people rose in the body of the hall as though bent on confirming Nick’s assertion. He paused to let the disturbance subside.

“In back of that again, there’s the key which opens the secure data banks at all secret psychological research establishments, including Tarnover and Crediton Hill. Behind that is one which opens the Treasury files on tax-avoidance suits unpursued by presidential order. Behind that is the one which opens similar files belonging to the Attorney General. Behind that is the one which opens the files of the Food and Drug Authority. And so on. By now I don’t know exactly what there is in the worm. More bits are being added automatically as it works its way to places I never dared guess existed. The last I found out about before I came along to talk to you was a key for the CIA’s sexual-blackmail file. There’s some raunchy material in there, and I predict it will be popular home viewing this winter.

“A couple of final points before someone asks me. First, is this an unforgivable invasion of privacy? Invasion of privacy it is; unforgivable … Well, do you believe that justice shall not only be done but shall be seen to be done? The privacy my worm is designed to invade is that privacy under whose cover justice is not done and injustice is not seen. It doesn’t care whether the poker who leeched his tax-free payoff spent it on seducing little girls; it cares only that he was rewarded for committing a crime and wasn’t brought to book. It doesn’t care if the shivver who bought that congressman was straight or gay; it cares only that a public servant took a bribe. It doesn’t care if the judge who misdirected the jury was concerned to keep her lover’s identity secret; it cares only that a person was jailed who should have been released.

“And—no, it can’t be killed. It’s indefinitely self-perpetuating so long as the net exists. Even if one segment of it is inactivated, a counterpart of the missing portion will remain in store at some other station and the worm will automatically subdivide and send a duplicate head to collect the spare groups and restore them to their proper place. Incidentally, though, it won’t expand to indefinite size and clog the net for other use. It has built-in limits.”

He gave a faint smile.

“Though I say so myself, it’s a neat bit of work.”

All of a sudden a man no older than his thirties, but pot-bellied, who had been in a seat near the back of the hall, came yelling down the aisle.

“Traitor!” he howled. “Goddamned stinking traitor!”

With his right hand he was tugging at something under his jacket; it appeared to have caught. It came free. It was a pistol. He tried to aim it.

But a quick-witted student in a seat on the aisle stuck out his leg. The fat man went sprawling with a yell, and next moment a booted foot tramped on his right wrist and he was disarmed.

From the platform Nick said, “Ah. That’s the first. It won’t be the last.”

AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU YOU

Q This place Tarnover you keep talking about. I never heard of it.

A It’s a government establishment, one of several. All are under the direction of the spiritual successors of the people who deployed nuclear weapons in overkill quantity. Or maybe I should cite the people who thought nothing of taking a fee to condition little boys out of playing with themselves.

Q What?

A You don’t believe there were such people? Punch for data concerning the income of the Behavioral Science Department of the Lawrence campus of the University of Kansas back around 1969, 1970. I swear it’s true.

Q Same again, but this time Weychopee.

A Ah, yes. Working for G2S I moused deep into their banks. That’s Electric Skillet, the continental defense center. By defense they mean they override the controls on all incoming chunks of asteroid ore and send them crashing down on the eastern hemisphere like a rain of thousand-ton hailstones. I haven’t yet checked out how many of the people who bought asteroid drivers from G2S realized that facility was built in.

Q But that’s insane!

A Sure it is. The blast wave from the impact would level every structure on this continent taller than fifteen meters. They don’t core. They want to turn Ragnarök into rain-of-rocks. Excuse me. Yes?

Q The bottom dropped out of stock in Anti-Trauma. Your doing?

A Mostly theirs. Their failure rate has never fallen below sixty-five percent, but they’ve kept it such a close secret that last year they doubled their clientele. Never again, I hope.

Q Some weird things happened to Delphi odds lately.

A I’m glad you brought that up. Data from Crediton Hill are in the net by now. Check them out. A lot of you probably have deeveed tickets you can claim against. The legislation authorizing Delphi betting obliged the organizers to make refunds if it could be shown that the pool was manipulated, and there’s no reference to the organizers themselves being exempt.

Q But I thought the whole point of Delphi was to tell the government what changes the public was ready for. You mean it’s been turned around?

A Go find a veephone and ask for the incidence of federal intervention per annum for the last five years.

Q How the hell were you able to build a tapeworm this complicated?

A It’s a talent, like a musician’s, or a poet’s. I can play a computer read-in literally for hours at a time and never hit a wrong note.

Q Christ almighty. Well, this flood of data you let loose may be okay for people like you. Me, I’m scared shitless. A I’m sorry you’re scared of being free.

Q What?

A The truth shall make you free.

Q You say that as though you believe it.

A Well, hell! If I didn’t …! Anybody here get nightmares because you know data exist you can’t get at and other people can? Anybody suffering with chronic anxiety, insomnia, digestive trouble, general stress response syndrome? Mm-hm. Turn any wet stone and you find victims. And as to the underlying cause … Any of you play at fencing? Yes? Then you know how frustrating it is to find that your opponent has claimed a point slam in the middle of your best potential triangle. All your cherished schemes go crash because he outsmarted you. Well, that’s a game. When it’s a matter of real life it’s not fun any more, is it? And up to now the data net has been consciously manipulated to prevent us finding out what we most need to know.

Q Come again?

A We know, we feel in our guts, that decisions are constantly being made which are going to wreck our ambitions, our dreams, our personal relationships. But the people making those decisions are keeping them secret, because if they don’t they’ll lose the leverage they have over their subordinates. It’s a marvel we’re not all gibbering with terror. A good few of us do wind up gibbering, don’t they? Others manage to keep afloat by denying—repressing—awareness of the risk that it’s all going to go smash. Others still drive themselves into null passivity, what’s been called “the new conformity,” so that even if they are suddenly unplugged from one side of the continent and relocated on the other they’ll be able to carry on without noticing the change. Which is sick. Is the purpose of creating the largest information-transmission system in history to present mankind with a brand-new reason for paranoia?

Q And you think what you’ve done is going to put all this to rights.

A Do I sound that arrogant? I hope not! No, what I’ve done at best means there’s a chance of it coming right that didn’t exist before. A chance is better than no chance. The rest … Well, it’s up to all of us, not just to me.

SIEGE PERILOUS

It was quiet at Kate’s home: outside, where volunteer students patrolled the streets for three blocks in all directions, proud that here of all places had been chosen to unleash the avalanche of truth; inside also, where Freeman was working at a remote data console donated by G2S on Rico Posta’s authority, coupled via regular phone lines to the corporation’s own immense computer facilities.

The veephone was quiet too. There had been so many calls, they had recruited a filtration service.

Bringing coffee, Kate said, “Paul, how’s it going?”

“Ask Nick. He can keep more things in his head at one time than I can.”

Working with an ordinary desk calculator and a scratch pad, Nick said, “Fairly well. There already were a couple of resource-allocation programs in store, and one of them is very, damned good. Very flexible. The update facility is particularly elegant.”

“Better than this, then,” Freeman muttered. “I just found a loophole you could fly an orbital factory through. But I got to one thing that ought to wring some withers.”

“Tell me!” Nick glanced up alertly.

“Proof that all poverty on this continent is artificial except what stems from physical illness, mental incapacity or private choice. Like homesteading a patch of the Canadian northwoods … or going into a monastery. That’s about—oh—a quarter of one percent, max.”

Kate stared at him. “You make it sound as though we’d be better off, not worse, after some kind of continental disaster. And that’s absurd!”

“Not entirely.” Nick went on tapping his calculator as he spoke. “One case that comes to mind. During and after World War II they cut food rations in Britain to what most of us would think of as starvation level. Two ounces of margarine a week, an egg a month if you were lucky, things like that. But back then they had more sense than they do now. They hired top-rank dietitians to plot their priorities. They raised the tallest, handsomest, healthiest generation in their history. When rickets reappeared again after rationing ended, it made national headlines. We think of abundance and good health as going hand in hand. It doesn’t follow. That way lies heart failure, too.”

The phone sounded. Kate gave a start. But Nick had come to a point where he could break off and ponder what he had written. Reaching out absently, he turned the camera so he could be seen by the caller.

And exclaimed, “Ted Horovitz!”

The others tensed, everything else forgotten.

The sheriff of Precipice exhaled gustily and wiped his face.

“Lord, after fighting my way past your filtration service I was afraid I might be too late! Listen carefully. This is a breach of Hearing Aid rules but I think it’s justified. Ever hear of a shivver named Hartz? Claims to be the former Deputy Director of BDP.”

Freeman leaned into camera field. “I didn’t know about the ‘former’ bit,” he said. “But the rest is solid.”

“Then get the hell away from where you are. Clear the house—the surrounding streets too, for preference. He says a hit job has been authorized against you. Category V, he called it.”

Freeman whistled. “That means ‘execute regardless of casualties’—and they generally use a bomb for those!”

“It figures. We got a tip about someone smuggling a bomb into Precipice, too. Sent Natty Bumppo and the rest of the dogs on perimeter patrol—Oh, I’ll tell you when you get here.”

“You’re able to transport three?” Nick rapped.

Freeman cut him short. “Not me. I stay close to G2S. I need their facilities. Don’t argue!” He smiled; he was more relaxed now, able to do so without looking like a death’s head. “I’ve done some bad things with my life. If I finish this job I can make up for them all at one go.”

Horovitz glanced at his watch. “Right. I’ve arranged for you to be met in about ten minutes. Jake Treves was intending to stop by your place, of course, but I contacted him and warned him there’d be a change of rendezvous. Make a suggestion and I’ll pass the word for him to be there.”

NIGHT ERRAND

“You look kind of down,” the driver said.

“Hell, with the continent crumbling around us … !” The passenger in the rear seat of the quiet electric car fumbled with the lock of the briefcase across his knees. “Everything’s gone into a spin. First I get the order to do the job, then they say hold it, we may send in the National Guard instead, then they say back to plan one after all. Jesus, the damage that’s been done while they were dithering! Okay, this will be close enough.”

The driver said in astonishment, “But we’re still five blocks away!”

“They got all them students on guard. Could be armed.”

“Yeah, but … Look, I drove this kind of mission before. If you’re planning to hit them from here you—”

“Save it. I got what you wouldn’t believe.” The passenger clicked open his case and began to assemble something slim, and tapered and matt-black. “Pull over. I got to launch it from a dead stop.”

Obeying, the driver glanced in his mirror. His eyes widened.

“That little-bitty thing brings down a house?”

“Told you you wouldn’t believe it,” the passenger answered curtly. He lowered his window and leaned out.

“So what in the—?”

“None of your business!”

Then, relenting with a sigh: “Ah, what difference does it make? Classified—top secret—doesn’t matter since that bugger turned his worm loose. Tomorrow anybody can get at plans for this gadget. It’s called a kappa-bird. Ever hear the name?”

The driver frowned. “Believe I did. You got two other cars around the area, right?”

“Mm-hm. Giving a one-meter fix on the roof of the target.”

“But—hell, a whole house?”

“Instant firestorm. Hotter than the surface of the sun.” The passenger gave a wry chuckle. “Still want to be closer when she blows?”

The driver shook his head emphatically.

“Nor me. Okay, there she goes. Swing around, head south, don’t hurry.”

Later there was a bright reflection on the low gray cloud sealing in the city.

WELL DOCUMENTED

Dutifully, at each state border control post, Dr. Jake Treves presented a succession of documents to the inspectors: his own ID, his certificate of professional status, his permit as a research biologist to transport protected species interstate, and his manifest for this particular journey.

Upon which the dialogue developed in predictable patterns.

“You really got a mountain lion in this truck?”

“Mm-hm. Safely sedated, of course.”

“Say! I never saw a live mountain lion. Can I. …?”

“Sure.”

Invited to slide back the door over a peephole, the inspectors saw an elderly though still sleek male specimen of Felis concolor, drowsy but alert enough to curl his lip in annoyance.

Also they smelt a strong feline stench. From an aerosol can. Very useful to induce big cats to breed in captivity.

“Faugh! Sure hope for your sake you got air conditioning in your cab!”

And for getting up the nose of nosyparkers.

COUNCIL OF PERFECTION

For a while Bagheera had padded around Ted Horovitz’s moss-green office, searching for Natty Bumppo, whose trace-scent was everywhere, but all the adult dogs were still on perimeter patrol. Now he way lying contentedly at Kate’s side while she gently scratched him behind the ears. Occasionally he emitted a purr of satisfaction at having been reunited with her.

The problem of what to do when he discovered he was among more than a hundred dogs built to his own scale would have to wait.

Looking around the company of local people—Josh and Lorna Treves, Suzy Dellinger, Sweetwater, Brad Compton—Ted said briskly, “Now I know Nick and Kate got a lot of questions for us. Before we get into that area, any of you got questions for them? Keep ’em short, please. Yes, Sweetwater?”

“Nick, how long before they see through your doubletalk about a parthenogenetic worm?”

Nick spread his hands. “I’ve no idea. People like Aylwin Sullivan and his top aides probably suspect the truth already. What I’m banking on, though, is … Well, there are two factors. First, I really did write one worm that’s too tough for them to tackle. Second, from their point of view, whatever this new gimmick may be it’s doing precisely what a parthenogenetic worm would do if such a thing could be written. Now there’s a recherché theorem in n-value mean-path analysis which suggests that at some stage in the evolution of a data-net it must become possible to extract from that net functional programs that were never fed into it.”

“Hey, hey!” Brad Compton clapped his plump hands. “Neat, oh very neat! That’s what they call the virgin-birth theorem, isn’t it? And you’ve given them a nice subtle signpost to it!” He chuckled and clapped again.

“That’s the essence. Not original. I stole the idea. The western powers, back in World War II, pioneered the trick. They set their scientists to building devices which looked as though they absolutely must do something, put them in battered metal cases, took them out on a firing range and shot them up with captured enemy ammunition. Then they arranged for the things to be found by the Nazis. One such bit of nonsense could tie up a dozen top research personnel for weeks before they dared decide it wasn’t a brand-new secret weapon.”

A ripple of amusement ran around the group.

“In any case,” Nick added, “it won’t make much odds how soon they decide they’ve been misled. They’d still have to shut down the net to stop what’s happening, wouldn’t they?”

“No doubt of that,” Mayor Dellinger said crisply. “At latest count we have ninety-four sets of those Treasury files they changed the lock on, and over sixty of the FBI files, and—well, nothing that I know of has been copied to fewer than forty separate locations. And while the Fedcomps are tracing them we can be sure that people we don’t know about will be making copies in their turn.”

“People we’d better not know about,” Lorna Treves muttered. Her husband gave a vigorous nod.

“Yes, it’s a fraught situation. Granted, it’s what we always said we were preparing for, but … Oh well; the fact that it took us by surprise is just another example of Toffler’s Law, I guess: the future arrives too soon and in the wrong order. Nick, how long before they conclude Kate’s home was empty when they bombed it?”

“Again I can’t guess. I didn’t find time on the way here to stop off at a phone and inquire.”

That provoked another unison smile.

“In any case,” Ted put in, “I’ve been taking precautions. Right now, after the media showing of their press conference, Nick and Kate have about the most recognizable faces on the continent. So they’re going to be recognized. In one location after another and sometimes simultaneously. Oh, we can keep them hopping for several days.”

“Days,” Josh Treves echoed. “Well, I guess it’s all been computed.”

Brad nodded. “And, remember, we’re dipping the biggest cima pool in history.”

There was a pause. Kate stirred when she realized no one else was about to speak.

“Can I put a question, please?”

Ted waved her an invitation.

“It seems kind of silly, but … Oh, hell! I really want to know. And I think Nick does too.”

“Whatever it is,” Nick said dryly, “I agree. I’m still operating ninety percent on guesswork.”

“You want the story of Precipice?” Ted grunted. “Okay, I’ll tell it. But the rest of us better get back to work. Among other things the crisis is overextending the resources of Hearing Aid, and if we don’t cope …”

“Brad can stay too,” Sweetwater said, rising. “He just came off shift, and I won’t have him back after the last call he handled.”

“Rough?” Nick said sympathetically. The plump librarian swallowed hard and nodded.

“See you later,” Suzy Dellinger said, and led the way out.

Leaning back with his hands on his ample paunch and gazing at the shimmering green ceiling, Brad said, “Y’know, we wouldn’t be telling you this if you’d done as Polly Ryan suggested the day you arrived.”

“What do you mean?” Kate demanded.

“Come ask for a sight of our first edition of the ‘Disasterville U.S.A.’ series. How many of the monographs did your father have?”

“Why, the full set of twenty!”

“Which, of course, looked to him, as to everybody, like a nice round number. Our edition, though, contains a twenty-first. The one that no publisher would handle, no printer would set in type—the one that finally in desperation we printed ourselves and had ready for distribution, only one night a bomb went off in the shed where we’d stored our first ten thousand copies and they burned to ash. Obviously we were fighting a losing battle. So …” He sighed.

Kate leaned forward tensely. “What was the twenty-first about?”

“It accounted with names, dates, places, photostats of canceled checks—all the necessary evidence—for half a million of the four million dollars of public money which by then had gone astray and never reached the refugees who were supposed to benefit.”

“You’re not telling the whole story,” Ted said in a brittle voice. “Kate, when you were first here you asked whether Claes College broke up because most of its members stayed at Precipice—remember?”

She nodded, her face strained.

“The answer’s yes. After the night when that shed was bombed, they didn’t have a choice. Brad and I helped to bury them.”

There was a long empty silence. Eventually Kate said, “This last monograph—did it have a title?”

“Yes. Prophetically enough, it was to be called Discovering the Power Base.”

The next silence stretched so long, the air felt as though it were being drawn out until it threatened to snap. At last Nick uttered a gusting sigh.

“Hell, I never looked at it that way. I must be blind.”

“I won’t argue,” the sheriff said, his expression very grave. “But you were not alone. Yet in retrospect … Figure it this way. You equip the population of a whole continent with unprecedented techniques: access to information, transportation, so much credit nobody need ever be poor again—assuming, that is, that it’s properly shared. Just about at the same time, you admit there’s no point in fighting any more major wars because there’s too much to lose and not enough to win. In Porter’s famous phrase, it’s time for the brain race.

“But you’re in government. Your continuance in power has always depended on the ultimate sanction: ‘if you don’t obey we’ll kill you.’ Maybe you weren’t consciously aware of that basic truth. Maybe it only became clear to you, against your will, when you were obliged to try and work out why things were no longer ticking along as smoothly as they used to. As a result, naturally, of the shift in emphasis from weaponry to individual brilliance as the key national resource.

“But brilliant individuals are cantankerous, unpredictable, fond of having their own way. It seems out of the question to use them as mere tools, mere objects. Almost, you find yourself driven to the conclusion that you’re obsolete. Power of your kind isn’t going to be viable in the modern world.

“And then it dawns on you. There’s another organization exercising immense power which has always been dependent on individuals far more troublesome than those you’re being defeated by. In some cases they’re outright psychopathic.”

“And this organization is equally determined to maintain its place in the sun,” Brad supplemented. “It’s equally willing to apply the final sanction to those who disobey.”

Kate’s jaw dropped.

“I think we got through,” Ted murmured.

“Yes—yes, I’m afraid so.” Kate folded her hands into fists. “But I can’t bring myself to believe it. Nick … ?”

“Since your apt was blown up,” Nick said stonily, “I’ve been prepared to believe anything about them. It was a miracle we had enough warning to clear the streets. Or did we … ? Ted, I’ve been meaning to ask. Was anybody injured?”

The sheriff gave a sour nod. “I’m afraid some of the students didn’t take the warning literally. Ten were hurt. Two of them have died.”

Kate buried her face in her palms, her shoulders shaking.

“Go ahead, Nick,” Ted invited. “Spell it out as you see it. You yourself said yesterday: the truth shall make us free. That holds good no matter how abominable the truth.”

“There was exactly one power base available to sustain the old style of government,” Nick grunted. “Organized crime.”

Ted rose and set to pacing back and forth, back and forth. He said, “Of course that’s not exactly news. It must be fifty or sixty years since the traditional fortunes that used to put this party, then the other, into office either ran dry or came under the control of people who weren’t willing to play along. That left a vacuum. Into it criminals looking for ways to convert their huge financial resources into real power flooded like water through a breached dam. They’d always been intimately involved at city and state level; now was their chance to ascend the ladder’s final rung. It’s true that the syndicate’s first attempt at the presidency was pretty much of a bust. They didn’t realize how bright a spotlight could be shone on 1600 Pennsylvania. Moreover, they used tricks that were already well known, like laundering their bribe-money through Mexico and the Virgins. But they learned fast.”

“They did indeed,” Brad said. “The moral of monograph 21 lies not in the half-million dollars we were able to trace, but in the rest of the money which we couldn’t. We know where it went—into political war chests—but we stood no chance of finding the evidence.”

“In the context of the world nuclear disarmament treaty,” Ted muttered, “we were hoping for something better.”

“I bet you were.” Nick was scowling. “Oh, I should have figured this out long ago.”

“You weren’t so favorably placed,” Brad countered dryly. “Sharing a tent with ten refugees, without a change of clothing, decent food or even safe water to drink, it was easy to spot the resemblance between the federal agent and the mafioso. The fact that they were invariably on the friendliest terms merely underlined what we’d already realized.”

“I should have got there by another route,” Nick said. “I should have wondered why behavioral science received such colossal government subsidies during the eighties and nineties.”

“An important point,” Ted said with a nod. “Consistent with the rest of the pattern. The behaviorists reduced the principle of the carrot and the stick to the same kind of ‘scientific’ basis as the Nazis used for their so-called racial science. It’s not surprising they became the darlings of the establishment. Governments rely on threat and trauma to survive. The easiest populace to rule is weak, poor, superstitious, preferably terrified of what tomorrow may bring, and constantly being reminded that the man in the street must step into the gutter when his superiors deign to pass him by. Behaviorist techniques offered a means to maintain this situation despite the unprecedented wealth, literacy and ostensible liberty of twenty-first-century North America.”

“If you recognize in Ted’s description a resemblance to Sicily,” Brad murmured, “that’s not purely coincidental.”

Kate by now had recovered her self-control and was leaning forward with elbows on knees, listening intently.

“The data-net must have posed a terrible threat to them,” she suggested.

“True, but one they were able to guard against,” Ted answered. “Until now, I mean. They took every precaution. They built the Delphi system on the base provided by the existing gambling syndicates. They claim it was modeled on the stock market, but there was really very little difference, since by then gambling money was one of the two or three biggest sources of speculative investment. They took to leaving tribes alone when they went on the warpath, and the result was that the most ambitious kids, the ones with both rage and intelligence, wound up dead or crippled. That came naturally. Since time immemorial they’d been carefully isolating gang wars from involvement with the general public. Also they turned over the massive computer capacity designed to get men safely to and from the Moon to tracking a population moving to a new place at the rate of twenty percent a year. And so on. I don’t need to recite the whole list.”

“But if they were so careful how did you—?” Kate checked and bit her lip. “Oh. Stupid of me. Hearing Aid.”

“Mm-hm.” Ted dropped back into his chair. “Our computer capacity at Precipice has been adequate to dissect out patterns from the calls made to Hearing Aid for about—oh—sixteen or seventeen years. Now and then, moreover, we’ve had a single call that opened up a whole new area of investigation for us. Yours while you were at Tarnover, for example.” He nodded at Nick. “We’ve quietly followed up one lead after another, accumulating things like the keys needed to open Federal-secure data banks, convinced that ultimately a crisis must occur that would leave the public dazed and panicky. At which time they would want to be told where they were in the world. To further our design we created the—the underground railroad which we passed you along: friends, colleagues, associates, supporters, sympathizers, in literally hundreds of different professions.”

“Paul Freeman put it neatly,” Nick said. “According to him, Precipice is a very big place once you learn to recognize it.”

Ted chuckled. “Oh, yes! If you count in all those people whom we’ve created freemen, entitled to be defended by our defenses, our population totals five or six times what you find in a census return.”

“We had models to copy,” Brad said. “The old hippie movement, for one. The eighteenth-century community of science. An organization called Open Door which flourished in the middle of the last century. And so forth.”

“Your foresight was fantastic,” Kate said warmly.

“Pretty fair,” Ted acknowledged. “Above average, that’s for certain. But we never foresaw that the crisis would arrive in the shape of one young man!”

“Not one,” Nick said. “Several. Tarnover deserter, life-style counselor, preacher, fencing hustler—”

“Person,” Kate said firmly, and laid her hand over his. “And by the way, Ted!”

“Yes?”

“Thank you for saving Bagheera.”

“Wasn’t too hard. Did you talk to Jake Treves on the way here, find out why he was able to help out?”

She shook her head. “He put us straight into the concealed compartment. We didn’t show our heads the whole time.”

“Safer that way, I guess. Well, Jake is one of the people working on the problem of how to get our dogs to live to a ripe old age. It’s part of a wide program to find out how stress is linked to aging. When you get the chance you’ll enjoy talking to Jake, you know. Your father’s hypothesis—”

He was interrupted. Distant in the night there was a sharp bark, followed by another and another.

Brad cocked his head. “Sounds as though Nat caught the bomber we’re expecting.”

Ted rose to his feet. “If so,” he grunted, “I wouldn’t care to be in his shoes.”

AMONG THE FACTORS THAT CLIMAXED IN A BREAKDOWN OF GOVERNMENT

1: Thank you for your inquiry concerning the whereabouts of Secret Service Operative Miskin A. Breadloaf. He is under intensive medical care at Precipice CA recovering from injuries sustained while resisting arrest by Sheriff Theodore Horovitz. He was in possession of six self-seeking catapult bombs, U.S. Army Code QB3, issued to him at 1010 PST yesterday from stocks held in the National Guard Armory at San Feliciano CA in pursuance of Confidential Presidential Directive #919 001 HVW, which states in full:

“I’m sick of Hearing Aid. Get the buggers who run it and never mind who else you hurt.”

2: As a result of the failure of Mr. Breadloaf’s mission a strike has been authorized against Precipice CA at 0130 PST tomorrow by aircraft based at Lowndes Field near San Diego. Since this is to be carried out with junior nukes (USAF Code 19L-12) Mr. Breadloaf is not expected to survive.

(N3: part 2 of the foregoing message is a cybernetic datum published in direct contravention of DoD Regulation #229RR3X3, as being conducive to the physical, psychological and/or social well-being of the population.)

EXTREMELY CROSS SECTION

“Wipe that grin off your face! You knew the company was going broke and I can prove it!”

“Precipice? Where’s that?”

“My sister went blind, near me? Blind! And she never used any eye makeup except your brand!”

“Bomb an American city? Oh, it must be a mistake.”

“It was my money, and I sweated blood to earn it, and it went to feather your stinking nest!”

“Precipice? Seems to me I heard that name before.”

“Christ, what you did to the poor little slittie! She hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in months, she always wakes up screaming and howling, and I was fool enough to bring her back for more. I could never look her in the face again if I didn’t ruin yours.”

“What was that about Precipice?”

“Damn right I voted for him. But if I’d known then what I know now I wouldn’t have cast a vote. I’d have cast a brick.”

“A strike? With nukes? My God, I know Hearing Aid isn’t exactly popular, but—!”

“Jim, I don’t believe you know my lawyer Charles Sweyn. He has something to give you. Charlie? Fine. You’ll notice the summons mentions damages of fifty million.”

“I thought we were talking about some town called Precipice.”

“I read what it said on that tax form and I swear to God I’ll pay you in buckshot if you show your filthy nose around my place!”

“Really? I always wondered where their base was.”

“Precipice?”

“Hearing Aid?”

“Nukes?”

“My God! Do you think they know about this? Where’s a phone? Quick!”

TOUCH AND GO

Past one a.m. at the headquarters of Hearing Aid. Ordinarily a dead time of night because most of the continent had orbited into sleep and only a handful of the most lonely, the most dismal, the most despairing were still anxious to talk to an anonymous listener.

Tonight was different. The room was crackling with restrained tension. The goal to which since its foundation Precipice had been dedicated was upon them, and they had never expected it to be so soon.

Solemn expressions were on the faces of the dozen people present. Only half of them were engaged in listening duty; other calls were being relayed to private homes. The remainder were monitoring the progress of their super-tapeworm.

To them generally Nick said, turning away from his board, “News from Paul Freeman. He got that body-and-soul program on the move, the one he hoped to adapt from the existing federal resources-allocation program. He said it was tough.”

“That was the postwar one?” Sweetwater inquired.

“Right.” Nick stretched his long arms. “Consequently it was drafted to ensure that only people the government approved of would be allotted food, medicine, clothing and power.”

“You mean,” Kate supplied, “it was built to make certain that the people fool enough to drag us into a major war would wind up on top again afterwards.”

“So they could screw us up the next time, right. But Paul managed to peel away that factor by substituting a half-like basis for entitlement to credit, and left the rest intact to run the net with even more authority than it had when it was an arm for Weychopee. He was there when it was written. Spotted its weaknesses right away.”

“So what does it do now?” Brad Compton demanded.

“Not a few good things. If people vote for Proposition #1, no greedy shivver will get his wall-to-wall three-vee so long as anybody’s homeless. He won’t get his round-the-planet airship cruise so long as people are dying from any disease we know how to cure.”

“Smooth enough for starters,” Sweetwater said. “But has there been any progress on your side, Nick—rationalizing the tax structure? That’s what I want to know about. When I think how angry I got paying off the croakers in Oakland because of their local ordinance against mediums … !”

“Oh, yes. Proposition #2 is cooking as nicely as #1,” Nick said, and tapped a quick code into his board. “It went back to have a couple of loopholes deleted, and if there’s no further snag … Ah, good. Coming up in about two minutes.”

Suzy Dellinger said absently, “You know, I always wondered what democracy might smell like. Finally I detect it in the air.”

“Curious that it should arrive in the form of electronic government,” Sweetwater murmured.

Brad Compton glanced at her. “Not really, when you think about the history of liberty. It’s the story of how principle has gradually been elevated above the whim of tyrants. When the law was defined as more powerful than the king, that was one great breakthrough. Now we’ve come to another milestone. We’re giving power to more people than have ever before enjoyed it, and—”

“And it makes me feel,” Nick interrupted, “the way they must have felt when they started the first nuclear chain reaction. Will there still be a world in the morning?”

There was a short pause, silent but for the hum of the electrical equipment, as they contemplated the continental pre-empt scheduled for the day after tomorrow. From 0700 local until 1900 every veephone on the continent would display, over and over, two propositions, accompanied by a spoken version for the benefit of the illiterate. Most would be in English, but some would be in Spanish, some in Amerind languages, some in Chinese … the proportions being based on the latest continental census. After each repetition would follow a pause, during which any adult could punch into the phone his or her code, followed by a “yes” or a “no.”

And according to the verdict, the computers of the continent would respond.

Proposition #1 concerned the elimination of all but voluntary poverty. Proposition #2—

“Here it comes,” Nick said, scanning the columns of figures and code groups appearing on his screen. “Seems to be pretty well finalized. Categorizes occupations on three axes. One: necessary special training, or uncommon talent in lieu—that’s to cover people with exceptional creative gifts like musicians or artists. Two: drawbacks like unpredictable hours and dirty working conditions. Three: social indispensability.”

Brad slapped his thigh. “What a monument to Claes College!”

“Mm-hm. There’ll be a footnote on every single printout explaining that if we’d paid attention to what the Claes group discovered by working among the Bay Quake refugees this could have been settled a generation back. … Hmm! Yes, I think this balances out very nicely. For instance, a doctor will score high on special training and social importance too, but he can only get into the top pay bracket if he accepts responsibility for helping emergency cases, instead of keeping fixed office hours. That puts him high on all three scales. And a garbage collector, though rating low on special training, will do well on scales two and three. All public servants like police and firemen will automatically score high on scale three and most on scale two as well, and—oh, yes. I like the look of it. Particularly since a lot of parasites who were at the top in the old days will now pay tax at ninety percent because they score zero on all three axes.”

“Zero?” someone demanded in disbelief.

“Why not? People in advertising, for example.”

The questioner’s eyebrows rose. “Never thought of that before. But it figures.”

“Think they’ll stand for it?” Kate said nervously, patting Bagheera who lay at her side. Since meeting Natty Bumppo he had refused to be left out of sight of her, although he and the dog had exhibited mutual tolerance, as favorable a reaction as might have been hoped for.

“Their choice is to close down the net,” Nick said, and snapped his fingers. “Thereby breaking their own necks. Suzy, you look worried.”

The mayor nodded. “Even if they don’t deliberately blow the net when they find they can’t interfere with our pre-empt, to make some kind of grand suicidal gesture … there’s another and more disturbing question.”

“What?”

“Are people scared into their right minds yet?”

The following silence was broken by the soft buzz of an incoming call. Kate switched it to her board and put on her phones.

Seconds later she uttered a loud gasp, and all heads turned to her.

Peeling off her phones again, she spun her chair, her cheeks as pale as paper and her eyes wide with fear.

“It can’t be true! It simply can’t be true! My God, it’s already twenty past one—the plane must have taken off!”

“What? What?” A chorus of anxious voices.

“That caller claimed to be a cousin of Miskin Breadloaf. The would-be bomber you arrested, Ted. She says Precipice is going to be attacked with nukes at 0130!”

“Ten minutes? We can’t possibly evacuate the town in ten minutes!” Suzy whispered, clenching her fists and staring at the wall clock as though willing it to show some earlier time.

“We’ll have to try!” Ted snapped, jumping to his feet and heading for the door. “I’ll get Nat to rouse everybody and—” He checked. Nick had suddenly launched into a burst of furious activity, punching his board with fingers that flew faster than a pianist’s.

“Nick! Don’t waste time—move! We need everybody’s help!”

“Shut up!” Nick grated between clenched teeth. “Go on, wake the town, get everybody away that you can … but leave me alone!”

“Nick!” Kate said, taking an uncertain pace toward him.

“You too! Run like hell—because this may not work!”

“If you’re going to stay then I—”

“Go, damn it!” Nick hissed. “Go!”

“But what are you trying to do?”

“Shut—up—and—go!”

Suddenly Kate found herself out in the chilly dark, and at her side Bagheera was trembling, the hairs on his nape raised and rough under her fingers. There was incredible noise: the dogs barking, Ted shouting through a bullhorn, everybody who could find any means of banging or rattling or clanging using it to create a racket no one could have slept through.

“Leave town! Run like hell! Don’t take anything, just run!”

From nowhere a dog appeared in front of her. Kate stopped in alarm, wondering whether she could hold Bagheera back if he was frightened and confused enough to pounce.

The dog wagged its great tail. She abruptly recognized Natty Bumppo.

Head low, neck in a concave bend, in a wholly uncharacteristic puppy-like posture, he approached Bagheera, giving a few more ingratiating strokes with his tail. Bagheera’s nape hairs relaxed; he allowed Nat to snuff his muzzle, though his claws were half-unsheathed.

What was the meaning of this pantomime? Should Nat not be on duty, waking people with his barking?

And then Bagheera reached a conclusion. He stretched his neck and rubbed his cheek against Natty Bumppo’s nose. His claws disappeared.

“Kate!” someone shouted from behind her. She started. Sweetwater’s voice.

“Kate, are you all right?” The tall Indian woman came running to her side. “Why aren’t you—? Oh, of course. You daren’t let loose Bagheera!”

Kate took a deep breath. “I thought I couldn’t. Nat just set me right.”

“What?” Sweetwater stared incomprehension.

“If human beings had half the insight of this dog … !” Kate gave a near-hysterical laugh, releasing her grip on Bagheera’s collar. Instantly Natty Bumppo , turned around and went bounding into the darkness with Bagheera matching him stride for stride.

“Kate, what the hell are you talking about?” Sweetwater insisted.

“Didn’t you see? Nat just made Bagheera a freeman of Precipice!”

“Oh, for—! Kate, come with me! We only have seven minutes left!”

There was no chance to organize the flight; the Precipicians simply scattered, taking the shortest route to the edge of town and continuing into the surrounding farmland. Gasping, her feet cut by sharp grass and stones, Kate was overtaken by a bitch loping easily with a screaming child astride her back; she thought it might have been Brynhilde. Then a branch whipped across her face and she almost fell, but a strong arm caught and steadied her, hurried her another dozen paces, then hurled her to the ground in what shelter was offered by a shallow dip.

“No point in trying to go on,” Ted’s gruff voice said out of darkness. “Better to be closer behind a good solid bank of earth than further away and on your feet in the open.”

Two more people tumbled over the rim of the hollow. One she didn’t know; the other was the restaurant keeper, Eustace Fenelli.

“What is all the panic?” he demanded with a trace of petulance.

Rapidly Ted explained, and concluded after a glance at his watch, “The strike is scheduled for 0130, in about a minute and a half.”

For a moment Eustace said nothing. Then, with magnificent simplicity, making the single word into a whole encyclopedia of objurgation: “Shit!”

To her astonishment Kate had to giggle.

“I’m glad someone finds it funny!” Eustace grunted. “Who—? Oh, Kate! Hello. Is Nick here too?”

“He wouldn’t come,” she said in the steadiest voice she could achieve.

“He what?”

“He stayed behind.”

“But—! You mean nobody could find and tell him?”

“No. He … Oh, Ted!”

She turned blindly and fell against the sheriff’s shoulder, her body racked with dreadful sobs.

Faint in the distance they could now hear the teeth-aching whine of electric lifters, the superpowerful type fitted to low-level short-range strike planes. It grew louder.

Louder.

Louder.

THE LINE OF MOST RESISTANCE

To the President of the United States

URGENT AND MOST SECRET

Sir:

Copied to you herewith is a signal received at Lowndes Field at 0014 hours today, purporting to emanate from yourself as commander in chief and ordering a nuclear strike at coordinates that manifestly are within the continental United States.

In view of the fact that it was superficially convincing, being properly enciphered in a one-time cipher scheduled for use today, it came close to causing a disaster, specifically the death of approx. 3000 civilians in the town of Precipice CA. I regret to have to advise you that the mission was actually initiated, and only by a miracle was it aborted in time (on receipt of DoD signal #376 774 P, which warned all naval, military and air force bases that saboteurs might have gained access to the data net).

I have taken steps to discipline the officer who authorized inception of the mission, and upon my own responsibility have issued a signal summarizing the matter to all West Coast bases. I respectfully suggest that the some be done on a national basis, and at once.

I remain. Sir,

(signed)

Wilbur H. Neugebauer, General

AFTER TOUCH AND GO, GO

They saw the plane as it swooped. They saw it clearly by the eerie blue glow around its repulsors, gulping vast quantities of air into electrical fields so fierce that were a man to put his arm incautiously within their shining ring he would withdraw a stump after mere seconds.

They heard it, too: a howl as of a banshee.

But as it crossed the town … it let fall nothing.

After an hour of waiting, teeth chattering, fists clenched, scarcely daring to raise their heads in case the threatened attack should after all take place, the inhabitants of Precipice rediscovered hope.

And through the dark they stumbled and staggered homeward to an orchestra of wailing children.

Somehow—Kate never knew quite how—she found that she was walking with Bagheera at her side again, while next to Ted and a couple of paces ahead was Natty Bumppo.

Bagheera was purring.

It was as though he felt flattered at being declared an honorary dog.

Cautiously Ted opened the door of the Hearing Aid headquarters, while Kate and Sweetwater craned to look past him. Behind, half a dozen other people—Suzy, Eustace, Josh and Lorna, Brad, those who had begun to guess the explanation for their salvation—waited in impatience.

There was Nick, hands on arms, slumped forward fainting over his board.

Kate thrust past Ted and ran to his side, calling his name.

He stirred, licking his lips, and sat upright, putting his right hand to his temple. He seemed giddy. But on seeing Kate he forced a smile, and continued it to the others who by now were flooding into the room.

“It worked,” he said in a thin, husky voice. “I never dared believe it would. I was so scared, so terrified. … But I was just in time.”

Ted halted before him, gazing around the room.

“What did you do?”

Nick gave a faint chuckle and pointed to his screen. On it a signal from someone called General Neugebauer to the president was cycling over and over in clear text, there being too much of it to display all at once.

“It was a close call,” he added. “Damned close. The duty officer at Lowndes must be used to doing as he’s told and no questions please. … When I realized the plane was already on its way I nearly collapsed.”

Sweetwater, pushing her way through the crowd, stared at the screen.

“Hey,” she said after a moment’s thought. “Was there a Department of Defense signal number whatever?”

“Of course not.” Nick rose, stretched, stifled a colossal yawn. “But it seemed like the quickest solution to invent it.”

“Quickest!” Sweetwater withdrew half a pace, eyes large with awe, and started to count off on her fingers. “Near as I can figure it, you had to write the signal in proper jargon, find a reference number for it, encode it in the proper cipher for today, feed it to Lowndes over the proper circuit—”

“Mark it for automatic decipherment instead of being left over to the morning like most nighttime signals traffic,” Ted butted in. “Right, Nick?”

“Mh-hm,” he agreed around another and fiercer yawn. “But that wasn’t what took the time. I had to track down General Neugebauer’s home code, which is ex-directory at all levels below Class Two Star priority. And he wasn’t happy at being woken up, either.”

“And you did it in less than ten minutes?” Kate said faintly.

Nick gave a shy grin. “Oh, looking back on it, I feel I had all the time in the world.”

Drawing herself up to her full height, Suzy Dellinger advanced on him.

“It doesn’t often happen,” she said with a trace of awkwardness, “that a mayor of this town has to undertake the sort of formal ceremony you find in other places. We tend to do it without the trimmings. This is that sort of occasion. I don’t have to ask permission of my fellow citizens. Anybody who disagreed wouldn’t be a Precipician. Nicholas Kenton Haflinger, in my official capacity, I’m proud to convey the thanks of us all.”

She made to shake hands with him. And was forestalled.

Natty Bumppo had as usual taken station next to his owner. Unexpectedly he rose, shouldered Suzy aside, planted his vast front paws on Nick’s chest, and slapped him across both cheeks with his broad red tongue.

Then he resumed his stance beside Ted.

“I—uh …” Nick had to swallow before he could go on. “I guess that must be what you call an accolade.”

Suddenly everyone was laughing, except him. And except Kate, whose arms were around him and whose face was wet with tears.

“Nothing like this happened before, did it?” she whispered.

“Not that I know of,” he answered softly.

“And you did the right thing, the only thing …” She caught him around the neck and drew his ear close to her mouth to utter words no one else was meant to hear.

“Wise man!”

Upon which he kissed her, thoroughly and for a long time.

THE CONTENT OF THE PROPOSITIONS

#1: That this is a rich planet. Therefore poverty and hunger are unworthy of it, and since we can abolish them, we must.

#2: That we are a civilized species. Therefore none shall henceforth gain illicit advantage by reason of the fact that we together know more than one of us can know.

THE OUTCOME OF THE PLEBISCITE

Well—how did you vote?