“He wouldn’t admit that the DEE had made a mistake,” the manager said. “He knows it did, but he just covers himself by saying that there’s an override available. Well, I’m calling up the table of departmental regulations, and we’ll see if the bastard is lying.”
Later, the manager called Lotus and told her that there was no override permission in the instructions issued by the DEE. But he had cooled off, and it would be too much trouble to raise hell about the arrogance and stupidity of the DEE. He might find himself in hot water if he did, though he had legality and right on his side.
Caird and Wang were at the DEE at eight in the morning with about three hundred others. After an hour’s delay, they were ushered into a viewing room. The instruction tape they saw could just as easily have been transmitted to their apartment, and no one was there to give answers to any questions.
On the way home on the bus, Caird said, “I can see how smooth the Changeover is going to be. Very well organized, no screw-ups, no tangled lines.”
“I told you it would be a mess.”
Lotus had not said anything of the sort, but he discreetly did not point that out.
That evening, while he and Lotus were at the Seven Sages, a huge weedie named Quigley steamed up to their table. Legs straddled, eyes red, voice slurred, Quigley said, “You’re the great revolutionary, the asshole who’s responsible for this.”
“For what?” Caird said mildly. “Though I don’t admit I’m the revolutionary.”
“Don’t try that multiple-personality crap on me!” Quigley roared. “If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have to go to the wilds of Hoboken and work my ass off! I could live the way I want to live. But, no, you screwed things up for me!”
“The government did that, not me.”
“Blame it on the government, blame it on the government!”
A few minutes before, Quigley’s loud voice at the bar had been doing just that, excoriating the government. Now, suddenly, Caird was the villain.
Before he could protest further, he was knocked backward off his chair by a hard fist against his forehead. He fell hard, half-stunned, unable to move for a moment. Quigley drove the sharp toe of her shoe into his ribs. Lotus screamed and hit the big redhead on the back of her neck with her bottle of beer. That staggered her, but she recovered swiftly and backhanded Lotus across the mouth. After that there was the brawl that always lurked in the wings of a weedie tavern, ready to step into the spotlight. Caird stayed on his back until the ganks came, though he wanted very much to plunge into the melee. He had not struck a blow, but he was arrested along with all the others. Since he offered no resistance, he was allowed to ride in the van with the more peaceable rioters. Quigley and a couple of others were rendered unconscious by stun guns and stoned, then transported to the precinct station. Caird and Lotus got off with a lecture from the judge, a light fine, and a promise to attend psychicist counseling for three days. Quigley spat in the judge’s face and tried to attack Caird again. She was stunned again and carted off to the jail.
“Now I’ll have to take more time off from work to go to the psychicist,” Lotus said as they walked home. “I hope nothing like this happens again.”
“I doubt I’m going to be very popular,” he said. “There are too many like Quigley. They’ll blame whoever’s handiest and I’ll be handy.”
He was right. Whereas he had been a hero of the locals, he now was a scapegoat. Hostile stares and muttered insults were to be a common reception. After a while, he quit going to the Seven Sages and tried another, though Lotus complained about missing the old place and her friends. He got the same treatment there from those who had been drafted into the Hoboken project. Eventually, he did most of his drinking at home, which caused Lotus more unhappiness. Finally, weeping and screaming that he had never loved her, she kicked him out. Her life had been hell since she had started rooming with him. Both statements were distortions of the truth, but he did not argue. He got a bachelor apartment on the West Side.
He saw Lotus a number of times again. He could not avoid it since they had to attend the same instruction sessions, and he had to endure her reproaches after the meeting. If he had truly loved her, she said, he would have resisted her order to leave. He would have argued with and cajoled her and convinced her that he truly loved her. She had been miserable, absolutely wretched, since he had gone. But she did not want him back.
“Then it’s best we don’t talk to each other,” he said. He started to walk away.
“That’s right!” she shouted after him. “Reject me, you son of a bitch! You never did love me! I knew it all the time!”
“Why do they blame me?” he said to the psychicist, Adrian Koos Hafiz, at the final counselling. “I didn’t cause the changeover.”
“Oh, yes, you did,” Hafiz said. “If it weren’t for you, it would never have come about.”
“It’s evident that the government had planned it all along,” Caird said.
“It would not have come about so soon,” Doctor Hafiz said, “maybe not for a very long time, if you hadn’t catalyzed it.”
“You really dislike me, don’t you?” Caird said. “You should be angry at the government, not at me. It wasn’t I who did it. I’m not the original Caird. I don’t even want to be named Caird. I think of myself as Baker No Wiley.”
“You can’t expect the common citizen to make the distinction.”
“How about you?” Caird said. “Have you been inconvenienced by the Changeover?”
“Inconvenienced, hell!” Hafiz said loudly. “I’ve been ordered to go to Hoboken to be a camp counsellor! Do you know what this means to me and my family? Do you have any idea at all what we have to give up? No, you don’t, weedie!”
“I could report you for your nonprofessional attitude, your antagonism, and your insults,” Caird said. “But I won’t. My condolences.”
The Changeover did not move swiftly. Four submonths passed before he was informed that he should report for training as a waiter in a camp mess hall at the Brooklyn Forest Park. The requirement of a high-school degree for this job had been waived.
Each day for four subweeks, he traveled via a DEE bus across Washington Bridge and then north to the training site. According to a plaque at the gateway, this area had been occupied in ancient times by a U.S. Veterans’ Hospital. Caird, under close supervision, spent a subweek waiting on diners at a long wooden table in a huge quonset. The diners were robots programmed to act like human eaters. Whoever had set up their behavior was either a joker or had a very cynical view of humans. The human-looking machines were very hungry, unreasonably demanding, and uncouth. They “accidentally” knocked over glasses and pitchers of water and orange juice, dribbled food down the fronts of their shirts, spilled food on the table and the floors, and frequently belched and farted. Their complaints about the slowness and sloppiness of the service were loud.
Why the camp was set up here and not in the Hoboken area, Caird never learned. Nor did he find out why he had to put in eight hours a day for twenty-eight days to learn something he could have mastered in five hours or less.
He had looked forward to waiting on real human beings. But when he did, he discovered that the citizens might as well have been robots. The humans were, thank God, not as flatulent as the robots, but they were as demanding and complained more often and more loudly and were not far behind their mechanical counterparts in slovenliness and bad table manners. At first, he thought that this was because most of the diners were weedies. Then he found out, as time went by, that there were more of the “upper class” there than there were weedies.
The situation got worse when the diners found out that he was Jefferson Caird, the man they blamed for their situation. They found fault with everything he did and were not backward in insulting him. Near the end of the third subweek, he was attacked. A man who had been grousing about the quality of the food (unreasonably, Caird thought) rose from his table, slammed a plate of meat and vegetables into Caird’s face
, and then punched him in the stomach.
He was not consoled by the immediate arrest and consequent conviction of the attacker. He had to spend two days in a hospital bed. Moreover, except for one orderly, a Robert Gi Snawky, he seemed to be disliked and resented by all the hospital personnel. Snawky told Caird that he had heard that there were openings in the newly created destoning corps. He advised Caird to apply for one. Caird doubted that he would escape the resentment of people in the corps. However, the work would be more interesting than being a waiter.
Caird had talked via screen to his daughter now and then. He told Ariel about his troubles and his wish to be transferred to the destoning corps.
“There was a time when I would’ve scorned trying to use connections to get a job,” he said. “But I’m becoming more realistic. Your husband is fairly high up in the Department of Physical Services. Do you think he could do me any good?”
“He will if he knows what’s good for him,” Ariel said.
A subweek passed before he heard back from her.
“Great news! Morris used his influence, and he’s been promised that your application will be accepted. It’ll be in the hands of the general committee, they’re all on intertemporal visas because of the need for swift coordination, and a woman Morry knows, he doesn’t want anyone to know her name, will see to it that you get into the destoning corps.”
The application was accepted, but neither Morris’s connections nor the vaunted speed of computers could hasten the glacier-slowness of the bureaucracy. After two submonths, Caird was informed that his application had been accepted. He was to report to a camp in New Jersey three subweeks from the date of notification of acceptance. Since this was too far away for him to travel each day, he took up quarters in it. This turned out to be very near the warehouse in which he, as Duncan, had freed Snick from her enstonement. He did not become aware of that until Ariel told him about it during a Tuesday evening long-distance conversation. After a period of instruction, he worked under direct supervision.
His task was to take the newly destoned person and guide him through the adjustment period. He found that fascinating, though often traumatic.
Only those who were physically healthy and young enough to work were brought out of the cylinders. These were all criminals of various degrees. Some of them had been here for over a thousand obyears, waiting for the invention of psychological techniques or chemical treatments which would ensure their rehabilitation. But they were not going into therapy. Instead, they were going to work for The Organic Commonwealth of Earth. Moreover, they would now be working every day. The government had decided that the destoned workers and their supervisors would no longer be gorgonized six days out of seven.
It was not easy to make some of the destonees understand what had happened. When they finally did, they were told that if they did not wish to participate in Changeover, they would be warehoused again. If they did choose to work, they would be given a pardon at the end of fifteen subyears. After which, if they managed to stay out of trouble, they would become full-fledged citizens.
There were five billion in the warehouses. Of these, there were almost a billion who were healthy, sane, and young enough to qualify as workers. That meant that, even with a slow destoning process, the population of the Earth would be increased by nearly a billion within the next fifteen obyears. Knowing that this number of new people would greatly strain all its resources and be impossible to control, the government was going to destone only about one hundred million. These would mostly be felons convicted for the lighter charges, though there would be among them many who had been stoned for crimes of passion.
“One hundred million crazies!” Caird’s boss said. “They’ll have to be kept in walled camps with armed guards. Otherwise, they’ll just take off into the woods. There’s not enough person-power to go after them. Just guarding and taking care of them is going to be a hell of a project!”
That was bad enough, Caird thought. What was worse was that those who guarded and trained and served the destoned would also become prisoners.
“There’ll be barbed wire around the camps,” the boss said. “Do you realize there hasn’t been a barbed wire camp for a thousand years?”
Many of the destoned were not going to make the grade as workers, Caird knew. They would go back into the cylinders, and others would be released to try their luck.
One of his wards, a Michael Simon Shemp, was a very cynical young man. “Yeah, they promise us we’ll go free after we’ve built all their new cities,” he told Caird. “But you wait. When it’s done, back we go into the stoners, They’ll find some excuse.”
“If you believe that, why don’t you ask to be stoned again?” Caird said.
“No. Anything’s better than that. I think.”
Whatever else awaited Shemp and Caird, they were no longer timehoppers. They would see every sunrise and every sunset; they would enjoy the natural slow-motion growth of a flower from seed to stalk to bud to bloom, no gaps between planting and cutting.
34
Part of Caird’s job was to observe and evaluate the conduct and attitude of those under his care. If one appeared too dangerous, too intractable, Caird was to report his judgement to the chief organic officer in charge of this section. Caird hated the idea that he might have to send anyone back into the stoner.
Shemp had been selected for destoning because he had been a construction worker. Though he obeyed orders with quickness and a smile and showed no signs of obstreperousness, his biodata indicated that he had a violent temper. He had been convicted because he had killed a gank attempting to arrest him. He had failed to be rehabilitated, and so he had gone into the stoner, Shemp had been twenty-six subyears old then. His sole child, a daughter, had been born when Shemp was twenty-five subyears old. She was still living but was in Wednesday’s New Haven, Connecticut-subarea, and was eighty-eight subyears old. Her son was dead, and her grandchild and one great-grandchild also lived in New Haven.
“I’d like to see them,” Shemp said.
“You don’t have a chance in hell of doing so,” Caird said. “Not until you’ve been discharged as rehabilitated, and you won’t even get any therapy until you’ve completed your work assignment, which’ll be years from now.”
“Which means never, right?”
“That I can’t say. Be realistic. You’d be a stranger to your family. There’s no background of long intimacy. Besides, you’re a felon. That’d make them uncomfortable.”
“I’m going to see them, one way or the other.”
“You’re going to try to escape?”
Shemp did not reply, but his intention was obvious. Caird, however, did not report the conversation. He was no snitch, though he was supposed to be. He attempted to talk Shemp out of the idea, and it looked as if he had convinced him. At least, Shemp seemed to agree. Then, one morning, Shemp did not appear for roll call. Two hours later, he was brought back from the forest into which he had fled northward. That he had been found so quickly indicated to Caird that a transmitter had been implanted in Shemp. He suspected that all the destonees were carrying transmitters in their bodies. T his was illegal, but then he was probably carrying one, too.
A half-hour after his return to the camp, Shemp was thrust, screaming, into a cylinder, stoned, and then trucked back to the warehouse. Caird was called on the carpet by his boss.
“This’ll be a black mark on your record,” Donald Turek Normandy said. “You should have warned us of his recidivist tendencies.”
“How was I to know?” Caird said. “He never said anything to me about wanting to escape. I told him that escape was impossible.”
“We know. Shemp was TMed, and when we asked him if he had ever told you that he was going to attempt to escape, he said no. If he’d said yes, you’d be out of a job and probably on trial for conspiracy.”
Caird thought back on his conversation with Shemp. It was a good thing that Shemp had only said that he was going to see his descendants,
“one way or the other.” People under TM were literal in their replies to the questions.
Normandy said, “You’ll get a printout of an official rebuke. But, on the whole, you’ve got a good record. You get along with the felons, and they seem to like you, though that in itself could be a cause for suspicion. You know how some of these ganks are. Makes no difference now. You’re going to Hoboken. The work here is almost finished. You’ll continue doing there what you’re doing here, unless you fuck up again.”
Two submonths later, he got onto the train near the warehouse and rode in a car that floated a few inches above the trackbed while it was shot forward by electromagnetic fields radiating from the line of huge rings surrounding the road. He arrived at the receiving station outside Hoboken within twenty minutes. The scenery had been mostly woods, but once, he passed by a vast clearing where machines and people were busy preparing a new city.
After he was shown his quarters, a cubicle in a monstrously large quonset, he attended the initiation briefing. Nothing brief about this; it lasted three hours. After that and lunch, he was in a group tour of Hoboken and then of the complex of warehouses several miles from it in the western forest.