That promise stirred the first emotion in Donald Hogan Mark II.
There was something impressive about it.
* * *
To begin with: bare hands.
“Now on this dummy of a yellowbelly I’ve marked the most vulnerable points: blue for temporary disablement, like the groin, the solar plexus and the eyes; red for the places at which a blow can kill, like the vocal cords. A blow with the closed fist works best here, here and here. If you can get a shod foot to any of these points, so much the better, of course. Here, the bunched fingers are the optimum choice. Here, stabbing with a single stiff finger. And at these places you grip and press, at these you apply leverage and at these you twist. Now we’ll move on to attacks from the rear, which are always to be preferred.”
Next: with a blade.
“There are two main classes of blade, the close and the extended. The former and latter classes each divide into the same two types, the stabbing type and the slashing type. The former are typified by the stiletto and the cut-throat razor respectively, while the later are typified by the rapier and the axe.”
Next: with a cord.
“This group of weapons exhibits the common characteristic of thinness and flexibility. They include the whip and tripwire, which are disabling weapons, and the noose and the garrotte, which are killing weapons. The lasso and bolas fall into either category according to the user’s purpose.”
Next: with traditional guns.
“Projectile weapons fall into three classes: side-arms, calling for extreme skill especially in the smaller calibres, long arms, calling for almost as much skill, and spray-guns firing large numbers of slugs, which are the best for unskilled operators at medium and close range.”
Next: with power-weapons.
“Bolt-guns exist as side-arms, firing about twelve to fifteen bolts between rechargings, and as long arms firing up to forty. Advantages include the fact that a direct hit anywhere in the body is fatal and a near-miss may be so if the target is for example touching a metal hand-rail or standing on wet ground in uninsulated footwear. Also, they can be re-charged from domestic current of one hundred volts and up, or from cross-country power-lines. However, they require a lot of down-time and are normally reserved for situations where at least three weapons are available per user, two on charge and one in the field.”
Next: with modern military weapons.
“This is a kazow, standard equipment for marines going in for such tasks as raid on an enemy supply-dump. The magazines each contain twenty miniature rockets, discharged in five seconds, and the heads can be set—in darkness, by counting the clicks as you turn the fuze-knob—to seek a human being, a refrigerated tank, and metal against a background of vegetation. Or, naturally, to fly a straight course to wherever the kazow is pointing.”
Next: with portable nukes.
“These have the drawback that their half-life is rather short, a matter of a few months, so they become poisoned with their own decay-products during long-term storage. Also the radiation level is high enough to show on police scanners, which incidentally makes them dangerous to anyone who carries them for more than a few hours at a time. However, nothing else, of course, matches them for destructive power combined with portability. Current types can be time-fuzed and placed by hand, or launched by a special attachment from a Mark IX kazow.”
Next: with chemical explosives.
“Two main types are in use: grenade or bomb packages, and disguised packages. The former are chiefly for military purposes, so we’ll concentrate on the latter. Modern explosives have the great advantage that they can be moulded to look like almost anything and won’t go off without the proper catalyst. For example, the casing of your communikit is made of about half a pound of PDQ. It would completely wreck a room of two thousand cubic feet. But it won’t explode, even if it’s dropped in a hot fire, unless you combine it with phosphorus. The regular way to detonate it is by laying a full match-book face down inside the lid and turning the volume knob to the unmarked setting. This gives you eighteen seconds to get clear before the full charge of the battery is shorted across the uppermost face and triggers the bang.”
Next: with gas-guns and grenades.
“You’ve used a Jettigun, I gather. You’ll be equipped with its military counterpart, which is about as large as a regular pen and cartridge-filled on the same principle. There’s a choice of fatal nerve-gases including the old standby, potassium cyanide, which is a thirty-second killer provided you get it into the target’s nose or mouth and not to be disregarded merely because it’s been around for a while. Then there are disabling gases—emetics, vesicants, strangulants and so forth—which have the drawback that they don’t dilute so fast and may all too easily affect the user as well as the target.”
And finally: with ad-hoc weapons.
“Anything which was said about attacks with the unaided human body applies to the use of improvised weapons. Some are obvious, like the use of a pillow for suffocation, which is quick and if properly managed is also silent. Some, like smashing a bottle or a window to obtain a sharp cutting-edge, are reasonably self-evident. But some require a good deal of insight. In the vicinity of a machine-shop, for example, magnesium swarf may be available, and that becomes thermite. On a building-site, a man can be suffocated very efficiently with quicklime or undamped cement-dust. Cracking a man’s hand or foot in a door as you slam it; pushing his face at a window; smearing a regular domestic needle with a compound from a home medicine-cabinet and putting it where he’ll scratch himself on it; strangling a long-haired codder or shiggy with his or her own hair; placing pressure-sensitive tape over the mouth or nose; biting through the windpipe; tripping at the head of a steep flight of steps; throwing a pan of scalding water off a stove—the possibilities are endless.”
Donald Hogan Mark II, born into a strange hostile world where any innocent thing in the home or on the street could become an implement of death, where any other person no matter how apparently polite and civilised might turn and rend him, nodded intently and absorbed the information as gospel.
* * *
When Delahanty flew in to give him his final briefing before departure, four short days after his arrival at Boat Camp, Donald sat opposite him in the office of the colonel who had welcomed him originally and waited while he checked through the various reports that had been compiled to show his progress. There was one other man present, a sergeant who had discreetly accompanied Donald wherever he went for the past twenty-four hours, unquestioned and nameless, his individuality fined down to his gun and his constantly worn Karatand.
Sitting stiffly on the edge of his chair, wearing the anonymous fatigues of a draftee but with incongruous lieutenant’s bars on the shoulders, Donald paid the sergeant no more attention than hitherto.
He was much too puzzled by Delahanty. He had a curious feeling that the man was not real. He came out of the life of Donald Hogan Mark I, a dead man. There was a bridge where there ought to have been at most a ford with a few stepping-stones. Since leaving home he had moved into another zone of time, which nowhere connected with the customary world. He had existed for ten years on the assumption that he was linked to exterior events through his study of reports of them, through talking with people he knew, through surveying the streets he walked along and checking the news daily on TV. All that, suddenly, had been switched off.
Delahanty finished his perusal of the reports. Without looking up, he said, “That’ll be all, sergeant.”
“Yes, sir,” the man said—the first words Donald had heard him utter—and went out of the room, his feet making the inevitable soft clanging because all the floors everywhere in Boat Camp were of resonant metal.
“You figured out who he was, presumably,” Delahanty said almost affably, raising his head at last to look at Donald. Donald shrugged. It was obvious the man must be a bodyguard.
“Fast eptification of the kind you’ve undergone can be risky,” Delahanty amplified. “The killer in
stinct exists in all of us, but it has to be overlaid with certain social inhibitions. Taking them all off at once occasionally leads to random outbreaks of violence in the subject. You seem to have responded very well, though. All that remains for me is to issue you with your travelling kit and documents, and then we’d better get you along to the emergency expressport.”
“Emergency?” Donald repeated.
Delahanty betrayed faint surprise. “Of course. You don’t imagine they could already have—Ah, you wouldn’t have heard, possibly. The yellowbellies put another one over on us. An express from Manila went to the refuelling bay and proved to be carrying a static charge on its tanks. When they coupled up the hoses it blew the entire fuel-store.”
Donald nodded with new-found professional appreciation of an ingenious trick.
“However, it’s perhaps a blessing in disguise for our purposes,” Delahanty continued. “There’s forty-eight hours’ worth of accumulated traffic being pressure-hosed out of the emergency port, and with luck they’ll also be bottlenecked at the arrival end, so you won’t rate too intense a scrutiny. You can’t exactly call it turning the tables, but when the advantage presents itself one grabs it—as no doubt you’ve been taught. Now, as to your equipment!”
He pointed at a pile of baggage stacked in the corner. “Some of that is gear reclaimed from your own apt. Some of it’s new. All the new stuff is trigger-rigid, like a Karatand. Make sure you’re wearing some of the new clothing all the time over your vital organs. It’s almost bullet-proof and an excellent insulator.
“Your communikit, as you’ve been shown, is a bomb. But that’s for dire emergency only. For minor emergencies—which had sheeting well better be emergencies, nonetheless—you’ll have a well-disguised gas-gun. We daren’t give you anything more in the way of weaponry. You must have gathered from your study of Yatakangi that no slit-eye government these days gives a pint of whaledreck whether a round-eye gets lynched or mugged or chased through the streets with a halter round his neck. That’s why we decided we’d have to eptify you. Otherwise you’d be defenceless. Okay?”
Donald nodded.
“Good. As to your professional cover, then! You’ve been taught the use of the standard communikit. I’m going to give you a press authorisation and a Satelserv credit card, and a correspondent’s manual which you must study at the first opportunity. It’s been convincingly well-thumbed, with facsimiles of your own prints, but there’s nothing like the genuine article.
“Your main contact in Gongilung is Engrelay Satelserv’s regular stringer, an English-speaking woman called Deirdre Kwa-Loop. She’s a black South African, which is why her name and picture aren’t much used over internal American services, but they think very highly of her indeed—so highly, they’ve been satisfied to rely on her dispatches throughout this big sensational series of stories from Yatakang. If we hadn’t asked for their co-operation, they wouldn’t have planned on sending anybody to give special coverage. As it is, you may find her a little touchy—she’s apt to feel that your assignment is an expression of lack of confidence in what she’s been doing. Watch that, won’t you? Be tactful.
“And remember, too, that as far as she’s concerned you’re exactly what you claim to be. She has no inside data. The man who has—the man who acts as our link to Jogajong—is a freelance, a Pakistani immigrant called Zulfikar Halal. While it’s wholly convincing that he will want to sell exclusive information to someone like yourself, representing one of the world’s biggest beam agencies, this piece of the cover must be reserved until you’re in sight of the successful completion of the assignment.
“Which is, in the full official version: to investigate the claim made by the Yatakangi government regarding the optimisation of future births; to file normal press dispatches on it, some of which will actually be used by programmes up to and including SCANALYZER, by the way; and to seek out—with all due diligence, as the phrase goes—proof that the claim can’t be substantiated.
“When you have it, you’re to rendezvous with Jogajong and give it to him in full. The disappointment resulting from refutation of the claim, so our computers tell us, may well spark the wave of indignation that sweeps him to power in place of Solukarta.”
“And supposing I don’t find such proof?”
Delahanty looked bewildered. “You’re to keep at it until you do, or until you’re recalled. I thought that went without saying.”
“You miss my point. I read all the scientific papers Sugaiguntung ever published, while I was on standby.” The jargon phrase tripped lightly off Donald’s tongue; what did feel uncomfortable was saying “I”—it seemed like laying false claim to someone else’s work. “And if there’s anyone alive in the world today who can make the promise come true, it’s Sugaiguntung.”
“Our computer evaluations show the project is uneconomic,” Delahanty answered stiffly. “You’ve just been through eptification, so you know what techniques exist already to make optimised individuals. But we can’t even afford to eptify our adult population en masse, let alone apply prenatal techniques that call for vast numbers of skilled tectogeneticists.”
“But what if he’s made a breakthrough to something quick and easy? Suppose he’s envisaging a modified Gershenson technique—say by immersing the ovum in a solution of a template organic?”
“In that case, obviously, we’ve got to have the details. And very, very fast.”
Donald hesitated. He said eventually, “I saw Sergeant Schritt at Guinevere Steel’s party.”
“I wager you did,” Delahanty sighed. “So did everyone else. I can’t really blame the poor bleeder, I guess—but he’ll be no more use to me.”
His tone made it clear that he didn’t intend to pursue the subject, but he went on regarding Donald thoughtfully. “I should have made more allowance for your not being able to follow the news,” he continued at length. “You must put that right at once, because a lot has happened since the claim was made public. To give you a rough idea, multiply Schritty’s reaction by a thousand.”
Chad Mulligan, Donald recalled—and the recollection was like the echo of a dream—made it a million.
“You get the picture? Very well, then. I’ll wish you luck and send you on your way. Unless you have any more questions?”
Donald shook his head. The one thing Delahanty had not said straight out was perfectly clear; whether the process could be made to work or not, it must not be allowed to work in Yatakang.
tracking with closeups (15)
OUR PARENTS’ FEET WERE BLACK
After the greetings, the sisterly and the sister-in-lawly kisses, the invitations to sit down and the how have you been since we saw you lasts: an absolute dead pause, as though neither Pierre Clodard, nor his sister Jeannine, nor his wife Rosalie, had anything to say to one another.
The house, in a sought-after district of Paris within easy walk of the Bois de Boulogne, was the one which Etienne Clodard père had bought on coming home unwillingly from Africa following Algeria’s independence. The whole of it, but this salon in particular, retained the flavour of another continent and another century. The layout, betrayed North African influences in the long low couches against the walls, the use of a carpet not to walk on but as a wall-hanging, the small tables on one of which rested a set of tiny copper cups for Algerian coffee, each nestling in its own hollow in a tray of beaten brass with formalised Arabic script enamelled around the rim. In absolute contrast the room also memorialised what Etienne Clodard the ex-colonial administrator had thought of as proper Parisian elegance when he was out there in the heat and barbarity of Africa: the florid wall-paper, the heavy glazed chintz of the curtains, the two intrusive overstuffed armchairs.
Some of Pierre’s friends said it was impossible to tell whether the house reflected the way his mind worked or whether his mind had been conditioned by the house.
He was a person of some elegance and presence: a nervous, lean man whose avocation of playing the piano might have been guessed e
ven without seeing the handsome instrument occupying the best-lit corner of the room. Further, one might have predicted his actual preference for Debussy and Satie without exploring the rack of recordings flanking the narrow screen of his early-model holographic reproducer. His black hair was beginning to recede a little. For a while when he was younger he had conformed to the current tendency of beardedness, but a few years ago he had shaved his chin and cheeks, leaving only a neat moustache to stress the sensitivity of his mouth.
What in him emerged as handsomeness of a refined, rather intellectual and potentially weak kind, was recognisable in his sister Jeannine as something marginally less than beauty. Like him—and both their parents—she was thin and dark, but with paler complexion, lighter bones and larger eyes. At forty-one the only clue to her actual age lay in the lined skin around her eyes and at the base of her throat; otherwise she might have passed for thirty.
Rosalie, on the other hand, was a total contrast: buxom, plump-cheeked, with bright china-blue eyes and fair brown hair. Normally she was a cheerful person, but—for some reason she wished she could discover, because she hated it as an intolerable failing—the presence of her husband and her sister-in-law in the same room at the same time made her vacant and gloomy.
With a desperate effort to restore gaiety, she said, “Jean-nine! May I make you some coffee, or would you rather have liquor?”
“Coffee would be excellent,” Jeannine said.
“And some kief?” Pierre suggested. He took up a chased silver box from the nearest of the many low coffee-tables, releasing as he lifted the lid the curious fragrance of the best Moroccan hashish.
Bustling, Rosalie left the room, unable to disguise her eagerness to be gone. When the door had closed Jeannine looked at its old-fashioned moulded panels, barely inclining towards the light Pierre was offering.