The exit lock slammed. Benteley was alone in the machinery-crammed cubicle.
On the screen Al Davis was buying this girl a second drink. Neither he nor Miss Lloyd had much to say: the sound coming over the aud was a blur of crowd noise and clink of glasses. Benteley caught a glimpse through the microscopic window of the liner and his heart constricted. The ship was getting near the sprawling Indonesian Empire, the largest functioning aggregate of human beings in the nine-planet system.
It wasn’t hard to picture the teeps checking the mechanics of their interception network. A vision of the first contact: a teep lounging at the transport field, or pounding a typer as some minor official in the ticket office. Or a female teep hanging around with the usual squad of bed girls that met the incoming ships. Or a teep child being tugged along by its parents. Or a terribly old man, a veteran of some roger-war, sitting feebly in the shade with a blanket over his knees.
Anybody. Anywhere. What looked like a lipstick, a fluff of candy, a mirror, a newspaper, a coin, a handkerchief. The variety of modern high-quality weapons was infinite.
On the screen the passengers of the transport were getting fussily to their feet and preparing to land. There was always this moment of suspense and tension as the sleek liner set itself down; then the sigh of relief as the reactors clicked off and the landing locks rumbled open.
Keith Pellig got clumsily to his feet and made vague motions toward Margaret Lloyd. The two of them joined the slowly-moving crowd that pushed down the ramp to the passenger level. Davis was doing fairly well; once he stumbled, but that was all. Benteley glanced up tautly at the detailed schematic of the Directorate’s Batavia buildings. The landing field was linked directly to the main building grounds; the position of Pellig was already indicated on the schematics by a moving pin of color.
There it was—but no pin showed the position of the teep network. Without effort Benteley could calculate how soon the first contact between Pellig, the artificial android, and the teep network, would occur. In minutes, it could be figured on one hand.
* * *
Wakeman arranged for the C-plus rocket to be brought up to the surface from its storage locker. He poured himself a drink of Scotch, gulped it hastily, and then conferred with Shaeffer. “In half an hour Batavia will be a cul-de-sac for Pellig. Bait but no quarry.”
Shaeffer’s hurried response came back to him. “We now have an inferential report on Pellig. He boarded a regular non-stop intercon liner at Bremen. Passage to Java. He’s on his way someplace between here and Europe.”
“You don’t know which ship?”
“He has a non-specific commute ticket. But we can assume he’s already taken off.”
Wakeman hurried upstairs to Cartwright’s private quarters. Cartwright was listlessly packing his things with the aid of two MacMillan robots and Rita O’Neill. Rita was pale and tense, but composed. She was going through aud reference tapes with a high-speed scanner, sorting those worth keeping. Wakeman found himself smiling at the slim, efficient figure with a lucky cat’s foot dangling between her breasts as she worked.
“Keep hold of that,” Wakeman said to Rita, indicating the cat’s foot.
She glanced quickly up. “Any news?”
“Pellig will be showing up any minute. Transports land all the time; we have somebody there to check them in. Our own ship is almost ready.” He indicated Cartwright’s unpacked things. “Do you want me to help you pack?”
Cartwright roused himself. “Look, I don’t want to get caught out in space. I—don’t want to.”
Wakeman was astonished at the words, and at the thoughts he caught behind them. A naked fear trickled piteously through the old man’s mind, up from the deepest levels. “We won’t get caught in space,” Wakeman said rapidly; there wasn’t much time for any more shilly-shallying. “The ship is the new experimental C-plus, the first off the assembly-line. We’ll be there almost instantly. Nobody can stop a C-plus once it’s in motion.”
Cartwright’s gray lips twitched. “Is it a good thing to break up the Corps? You said some will be here and some will go with us. And I know you can’t scan over that great a distance. Wouldn’t it be—”
“Goddamn it,” Rita O’Neill said explosively. She threw down her armload of tapes. “Stop doing what you’re doing! It’s not like you!”
Cartwright grunted miserably and began pawing at his heap of shirts. “I’ll do what you say, Wakeman, I trust you.” He went on clumsily packing, but from his terrified and bewildered mind leaked the growing tendrils of his primitive, atavistic longing-fear. It swelled and became stronger each moment: the overpowering urge to hurry into the reinforced inner office Verrick had constructed, and to lock himself in. Wakeman flinched as the raw primal panic hit him, the frantic desire to claw a way back into the womb. He deliberately turned his mind from Cartwright’s to Rita O’Neill’s.
As he did so, Wakeman got a further shock. A thin icy column of hate radiated from the girl’s mind directly at him. He quickly began untangling it, surprised and taken aback by its suddenness: it hadn’t been there before.
Rita saw the expression on his face, and her thoughts changed. Quick, canny, she had sensed his awareness; she was thinking now of the aud tape humming through her ears as she operated the scanner. She passed it on to him; he was deafened by a furious roar of voices, speeches, lectures, parts of Preston’s books, arguments, comments …
“What is it?” he said to her. “What’s wrong?”
Rita said nothing, but her lips pressed together until they were white. Abruptly she turned and hurried out of the room.
“I can tell you what it is,” Cartwright said hoarsely. He slammed his battered suitcases and locked them. “She blames you for this.”
“For what?”
Cartwright caught up his two eroded suitcases and moved slowly toward the hall door. “You know, I’m her uncle. She’s always seen me at the head of things, in authority, giving orders and making plans. Now I’m mixed up in something I don’t understand.” His voice died into a troubled murmur. “Situations I can’t control. I have to rely on you.” He moved wanly aside to let Wakeman open the door. “I suppose I’ve changed, since I came here. She’s disappointed … and she blames you for it.”
“Oh,” Wakeman said. He moved after Cartwright, aware of two things: that he didn’t understand people as well as he thought; and that finally Cartwright had made up his mind to do as the Corps suggested.
The C-plus ship was up-ended on the emergency platform in the center of the main building. As soon as Cartwright and his niece and the group of Corpsmen had entered, the hull locks slid smoothly into place and sealed themselves tight. The roof of the building rolled back and the bright noon-day sky blazed down.
“This is a small ship,” Cartwright observed. He had turned pale and sickly; his hands shook as he strapped himself to his seat. “Interesting design.”
Wakeman quickly fastened Rita’s belt for her and then his own. She said nothing to him; the pencil of hostility had melted a little. “We may black-out during the flight. The ship is robot-operated.” Wakeman settled down in his seat and thought the go-ahead signal to the intricate mechanism beneath them. The sensitive relays responded, the machinery shifted, and, someplace close by, high-powered reactors screamed shrilly into life.
With the ship responsive to his thoughts, Wakeman enjoyed the luxury of imagining a vast steel and plastic extension of his own small body. He relaxed and drank in the clean, sleek purr of the drive as it warmed. It was a beautiful ship: the first actually made from the original model and designs.
“You know how I feel,” Rita O’Neill said to him abruptly, shattering his temporary pleasure. “You were scanning me.”
“I know how you felt. I don’t think you still feel that way.”
“Perhaps not; I don’t know. It’s irrational to blame you. You’re doing your job the best you can.”
“I think,” Wakeman said, “I’m doing the right thing. I think I?
??ve got this under control.” He waited a moment. “Well? The ship’s ready to take off.”
Cartwright managed to nod. “I’m ready.”
Wakeman considered briefly. “Any sign?” he thought to Shaeffer.
“Another passenger transport coming in,” the rapid thought came back. “Entering scanning range any moment.”
Pellig would arrive at Batavia; that was certain. He would search for Cartwright; that was also certain. The unknown was Pellig’s detection and death. It could be assumed that if he escaped the teep net, he would locate the Lunar resort. And if he located the resort …
“There’s no protection on Luna,” Wakeman thought to Shaeffer. “We’re giving up all positive defense once we take him there.”
“That’s right,” Shaeffer agreed. “But I think we’ll get Pellig here at Batavia. Once we make contact, that’s it.”
Wakeman decided. “All right. We’ll take the chance; the odds are good enough.” He gave the mental signal and the ship moved into position for the take-off. Automatic grapples lined it up with its destination, the pale dead eye hanging dully in the noon-day sky. Wakeman closed his eyes and forced relaxation on his body-muscles.
The ship moved. First, there was the regular turbine thrust, then the furious lash of energy as the C-plus drive swung into life, sparked by the routine release of power.
For a moment the ship hovered over the Directorate buildings, glowing and shimmering. Then the C-plus drive caught, and in an instant the ship hurtled from the surface in a flash of blinding speed that rolled back waves of unconsciousness over the people within.
As the darkness relentlessly collected Peter Wakeman, a vague blur of satisfaction drifted through his dwindling mind. Keith Pellig would find nothing at Batavia, nothing but his own death. The Corps’ strategy was working out.
In the moment Wakeman’s signal sent the glowing C-plus ship away from Batavia, the regular intercon liner rumbled to a slow halt at the space field and slid back its locks.
With a group of businessmen and commuters, Keith Pellig stepped eagerly down the metal ramp and emerged in the sunlight, blinking and peering excitedly around him, at his first view of the Directorate buildings, the endless hurrying people and traffic—and the waiting network of teeps.
ELEVEN
At five-thirty a.m. the heavy construction rocket settled down in the center of what had once been London. In front of it and behind it thin razor-sharp transports hissed to smooth landings and disgorged parties of armed guards. They quickly fanned out and took up positions to intercept stray Directorate police patrols.
Within a few moments the dilapidated old building that was the offices of the Preston Society had been surrounded.
Reese Verrick, in a heavy wool greatcoat and boots, stepped out and followed his construction workers down the sidewalk and around the side of the building. The air was chill and thin; buildings and streets were moist with night dampness, gray silent structures with no sign of life.
“This is the place,” the foreman said to Verrick. “They own this old barn.” He indicated the courtyard, strewn with rubble and waste. “The monument is there.”
Verrick paced ahead of the foreman, up the debris-littered path to the courtyard. The workmen were already tearing down the steel and plastic monument. The yellowed plastic cube which was John Preston’s crypt had been yanked down and was resting on the frozen concrete among bits of trash and paper that had accumulated through the months. Within the translucent crypt the dried-up shape had shifted slightly to one side; the face was obscured by one pipe-stem arm flung across the glasses and nose.
“So that’s John Preston,” Verrick said thoughtfully.
The foreman squatted down and began examining the seams of the crypt. “It’s a vacuum-seal, of course. If we open it here it’ll pulverize to dust particles.”
Verrick hesitated. “All right,” he agreed reluctantly. “Take the whole works to the labs. We’ll open it there.”
The work crews who had entered the building appeared with armloads of pamphlets, tapes, records, furniture, light fixtures, clothing, endless boxes of raw paper and printing supplies. “The whole place is a storeroom,” one of them said to the foreman. “They have junk heaped to the ceiling. There seems to be a false wall and some kind of sub-surface meeting chamber. We’re prying the wall out and getting in there.”
This was the slatternly run-down headquarters from which the Society had operated. Verrick wandered into the building and found himself in the front office. The work crews were collecting everything in sight; only the bare water-stained walls, peeling and dirty, remained. The front office led onto a yellow hall. Verrick headed down it, past a dusty fly-specked photograph of John Preston still hanging among some rusty scarf hooks. “Don’t forget this,” he said to his foreman. “This picture here.”
Beyond the picture a section of wall had been torn away. A crude false passage ran parallel to the hall; workmen were swarming around, hunting within the passage for additional concealed entrances.
“We suppose there’s some kind of emergency exit,” the foreman explained. “We’re looking for it, now.”
Verrick folded his arms and studied the photograph of John Preston. Preston had been a small man, like most cranks. He was a tiny withered leaf of a creature with prominent wrinkled ears pulled forward by his heavy horn-rimmed glasses. There was a wild tangle of dark gray hair, rough and uncut and uncombed, and small, almost feminine lips. His stubbled chin was not prominent, but hard with determination. He had a crooked, lumpish nose, a jutting Adam’s apple and unsightly neck protruded from his food-stained shirt.
It was Preston’s eyes that attracted Verrick: harsh, blazing, two uncompromising steel-sharp orbs that smoldered behind his thick lenses. Preston glared out, furious with wrath, like an ancient prophet. One crabbed hand was up, fingers twisted with arthritis. It was almost a gesture of defiance, but more of pointing. The eyes glowered fiercely at Verrick; their aliveness startled him. Even behind the dust-thick glass of the photograph, the eyes were hot with fire and life and feverish excitement. Preston had been a birdlike cripple, a bent-over half-blind scholar, astronomer and linguist … And what eke?
“We located the escape passage,” Verrick’s foreman said to him. “It leads to a cheap public sub-surface garage. They probably came and went in ordinary cars. This building seems to have been their only headquarters. They had some kind of clubs spread around Earth, but those met in private apartments and didn’t number over two or three members apiece.”
“Is everything loaded?” Verrick demanded.
“All ready to go: the crypt, the stuff we found in the building, and snap-models of the layout here, for future reference.”
Verrick followed his foreman back to the construction ship. A few moments later they were on their way back to Farben.
Herb Moore appeared immediately, as the yellowed cube was being lowered to a lab worktable. “This is his crypt?” he demanded.
“I thought you were hooked into that Pellig machinery,” Verrick said, taking off his greatcoat.
Moore ignored him and began rubbing dirt from the translucent shield that covered John Preston’s withered body. “Get this stuff off,” he ordered his technicians.
“It’s old,” one of them protested. “We have to work carefully or it’ll turn to powder.”
Moore grabbed a cutting tool and began severing the shield from its base. “Powder, hell. He probably built this thing to last a million years.”
The shield split, brittle and dry with age. Moore clawed it away and dropped it to splinter against the floor. From the opened cube a cloud of stale musty air billowed out; swirls of dust danced in the faces of Moore and his assistants and made them cough and pull back. Around the worktable vidcameras ground away, taking a permanent record of the procedure and materials examined.
Moore impatiently signalled. Two MacMillans lifted the wizened body from the hollow cube and held it suspended at eye-level on their
surface of magnetic force. Moore poked at the face of the body with a pointed probe; suddenly he grabbed the right arm and yanked. The arm came off without resistance and Moore stood holding it foolishly.
The body was a plastic dummy.
“See?” he shouted. “Imitation!” He threw the arm down violently; one of the MacMillans caught it before it reached the floor. Where the arm had been attached a hollow tear gaped. The body itself was hollow. Metal ribs supported it, careful struts placed by a master builder.
Moore walked all around it, face dark and brooding, saying nothing to Verrick until he had examined it from all sides. Finally he took hold of the hair and tugged. The skull-covering came off, leaving a dull-gleaming metal hemisphere. Moore tossed the wig to one of the robots and then turned his back on the exhibit.
“It looks exactly like the photograph,” Verrick said admiringly.
Moore laughed. “Naturally! The dummy was made first and then photographed. But it’s probably about the way Preston looked.” His eyes flickered. “Looks, I mean.”
Eleanor Stevens detached herself from the watching group and approached the dummy cautiously. “But is this anything new? Your work goes much farther than this. Presumably Preston adapted the MacMillan papers the way you did. He built a synthetic of himself the way you built Pellig.”
“What we heard,” Moore said, “was Preston’s actual voice. It was not a vocal medium artificially constructed. No two voices have the same tape-pattern. Even if he’s modeled a synthetic after his own body—”
“You think he’s still alive in his own body?” Eleanor demanded. “That isn’t possible!”
Moore didn’t answer. He was staring moodily at the dummy of John Preston; he had picked up the arm again and was mechanically pulling loose the artificial fingers one by one. The look on his face was nothing Eleanor had ever seen before.
“My synthetic,” Moore said very faintly, “will live a year. Then it deteriorates. That’s as long as it’s good for.”