The Syndic

By C. M. Kornbluth

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Title: The Syndic

Author: C.M. Kornbluth

Release Date: December 27, 2012 [EBook #41714]

Language: English


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                              the SYNDIC

                          BY C. M. KORNBLUTH

                        ILLUSTRATED BY SUSSMAN

    [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction
    Adventures Magazine December 1953 and March 1954. Extensive research
    did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this
    publication was renewed.]


    There have been a thousand tales of future Utopias and
    possible civilizations. They have been ruled by benevolent
    dictatorships and pure democracies, every form of government from
    extreme right to absolute left. Unique among these is the easy-going
    semi-anarchistic society ruled by THE SYNDIC.


[Illustration]


     "It was not until February 14th that the Government declared a
     state of unlimited emergency. The precipitating incident was the
     aerial bombardment and destruction of B Company, 27th Armored
     Regiment, on Fort George Hill in New York City. Local Syndic
     leaders had occupied and fortified George Washington High School,
     with the enthusiastic co-operation of students, faculty and
     neighborhood. Chief among them was Thomas 'Numbers' Cleveland,
     displaying the same coolness and organizational genius which had
     brought him to pre-eminence in the metropolitan policy-wheel
     organization by his thirty-fifth year.

     "At 5:15 A.M. the first battalion of the 27th Armored took up
     positions in the area as follows: A Company at 190th Street and St.
     Nicholas Avenue, with the mission of preventing reinforcement of
     the school from the I.R.T. subway station there; Companies B, C,
     and D hill down from the school on the slope of Fort George Hill
     poised for an attack. At 5:25 the sixteen Patton tanks of B Company
     revved up and moved on the school, C and D Companies remaining in
     reserve. The plan was for the tanks of B Company to surround the
     school on three sides--the fourth is a precipice--and open fire if
     a telephone parley with Cleveland did not result in an
     unconditional surrender. There was no surrender and the tanks
     attacked.

     "Cleveland's observation post was in the tower room of the school.
     Seeing the radio mast of the lead tank top the rise of the hill, he
     snapped out a telephone order to contact pilots waiting for the
     word at a Syndic field floating outside the seven mile limit. The
     pilots, trained to split-second precision in their years of public
     service, were airborn by 5:26, but this time their cargo was not
     liquor, cigarettes or luggage. In three minutes, they were whipping
     rocket bombs into the tanks of Company B; Cleveland's runners
     charged the company command post; the trial by fire had begun.

     "Before it ended North America was to see deeds as gallant and
     strategy as inspired as any in the history of war: Cleveland's
     historic announcement--'It's a great day for the race!'--his death
     at the head of his runners in a charge on the Fort Totten garrison,
     the firm hand of Amadeo Falcaro taking up the scattered reins of
     leadership, parley, peace, betrayal and execution of hostages, the
     Treaty of Las Vegas and a united Mob-Syndic front against
     Government, O'Toole's betrayal of the Continental Press wire room
     and the bloody battle to recapture that crucial nerve center, the
     decisive march on Baltimore...."

     B. Arrowsmith Hynde,

     _The Syndic--a Short History_.

       *       *       *       *       *

     "No accurate history of the future has ever been written--a fact
     which I think disposes of history's claim to rank as a science.
     Astronomers quail at the three-body problem and throw up their
     hands in surrender before the four-body problem. Any given moment
     in history is a problem of at least two billion bodies. Attempts at
     orderly abstraction of manipulable symbols from the realities of
     history seem to me doomed from the start. I can juggle mean
     rain-falls, car-loading curves, birth-rates and patent
     applications, but I cannot for the life of me fit the recurring
     facial carbuncles of Karl Marx into my manipulations--not even,
     though we know, well after the fact, that agonizing staphylococcus
     aureus infections behind that famous beard helped shape
     twentieth-century totalitarianism. In pathology alone the list
     could be prolonged indefinitely: Julius Caesar's epilepsy,
     Napoleon's gastritis, Wilson's paralysis, Grant's alcoholism,
     Wilhelm II's withered arm, Catherine's nymphomania, George III's
     paresis, Edison's deafness, Euler's blindness, Burke's stammer, and
     so on. Is there anybody silly enough to maintain that the world
     today would be what it is if Marx, Caesar, Napoleon, Wilson, Grant,
     Wilhelm, Catherine, George, Edison, Euler and Burke--to take only
     these eleven--were anything but what they were? Yet that is the
     assumption behind theories of history which exclude the carbuncles
     of Marx from their referents--that is to say, every theory of
     history with which I am familiar....

     "Am I then saying that history, past and future, is unknowable;
     that we must blunder ahead in the dark without planning because no
     plan can possibly be accurate in prediction and useful in
     application? I am not. I am expressing my distaste for holders of
     extreme positions, for possessors of eternal truths, for keepers of
     the flame. Keepers of the flame have no trouble with the questions
     of ends and means which plague the rest of us. They are quite
     certain that their ends are good and that therefore choice of means
     is a trivial matter. The rest of us, far from certain that we have
     a general solution of the two-billion body problem that is
     history, are much more likely to ponder on our means...."

     F. W. Taylor,

     _Organization, Symbolism and Morale_




I


Charles Orsino was learning the business from the ground up--even though
"up" would never be very high. He had in his veins only a drop or two of
Falcaro blood: enough so that room had to be made for him; not enough
for it to be a great dearth of room. Counting heavily on the good will
of F. W. Taylor, who had taken a fancy to him when he lost his parents
in the Brookhaven Reactor explosion of '83, he might rise to a rather
responsible position in Alky, Horsewire, Callgirl, recruitment and
Retirement or whatever line he showed an aptitude for. But at 22 one
spring day, he was merely serving a tour of duty as bagman attached to
the 101st New York Police Precinct. A junior member of the Syndic
customarily handled that job; you couldn't trust the cops not to squeeze
their customers and pocket the difference.

He walked absently through the not-unpleasant routine of the shakedown.
His mind was on his early-morning practice session of polo, in which he
had almost disgraced himself.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Orsino; a pleasure to see you again. Would you like
a cold glass of beer while I get the loot?"

"No, but thanks very much, Mr. Lefko--I'm in training, you know. Wish I
could take you up on it. Seven phones, isn't it, at ten dollars a
phone?"

"That's right, Mr. Orsino, and I'll be with you as soon as I lay off the
seventh at Hialeah; all the ladies went for a plater named Hearthmouse
because they thought the name was cute and left me with a dutch book. I
won't be a minute."

Lefko scuttled to a phone and dickered with another bookie somewhere
while Charles absently studied the crowd of chattering, laughing
horseplayers. ("Mister Orsino, did you come out to make a monkey of
yourself and waste my time? Confound it, sir, you have just fifty round
to a chukker and you must make them count!" He grinned unhappily. Old
Gilby, the pro, could be abrasive when a bone-head play disfigured the
game he loved. Charles had been sure Benny Grashkin's jeep would conk
out in a minute--it had been sputtering badly enough--and that he would
have had a dirt-cheap scoring shot while Benny changed mounts. But
Gilby blew the whistle and wasn't interested in your fine-spun logic.
"Confound it, sir, when will you young rufflers learn that you must
crawl before you walk? Now let me see a team rush for the goal--and I
mean _team_, Mr. Orsino!")

"_Here_ we are, Mr. Orsino, and just in time. There goes the seventh."

Charles shook hands and left amid screams of "Hearthmouse! Hearthmouse!"
from the lady bettors watching the screen.

High up in the Syndic Building, F. W. Taylor--Uncle Frank to
Charles--was giving a terrific tongue-lashing to a big, stooped old man.
Thornberry, president of the Chase National Bank, had pulled a butch and
F. W. Taylor was blazing mad about it.

He snarled: "One more like this, Thornberry, and you are out on your
padded can. When a respectable member of the Syndic chooses to come to
you for a line of credit, you will in the future give it without any
tom-fool quibbling about security. You bankers seem to think this is the
middle ages and that your bits of paper still have their old black
magic.

"Disabuse yourself of the notion. Nobody except you believes in it. The
Inexorable Laws of Economics are as dead as Dagon and Ishtar, and for
the same reason. No more worshippers. You bankers can't shove anybody
around any more. You're just a convenience, like the non-playing banker
in a card game.

"What's real now is the Syndic. What's real about the Syndic is its own
morale and the public's faith in it. Is that _clear_?"

Thornberry brokenly mumbled something about supply and demand.

Taylor sneered. "Supply and demand. Urim and Thummim. Show me a supply,
Thornberry, show me a--oh, hell. I haven't time to waste re-educating
you. Remember what I told you and don't argue. Unlimited credit to
Syndic members. If they overdo it, _we'll_ rectify the situation. Now,
get out." And Thornberry did, with senile tears in his eyes.

At Mother Maginnis' Ould Sod Pub, Mother Maginnis pulled a long face
when Charles Orsino came in. "It's always a pleasure to see you, Mr.
Orsino, but I'm afraid this week it'll be no pleasure for you to see
me."

She was always roundabout. "Why, what do you mean, Mrs. M.? I'm always
happy to say hello to a customer."

"It's the business, Mr. Orsino. It's the business. You'll pardon me if I
say that I can't see how to spare twenty-five dollars from the till, not
if my life depended on it. I can go to fifteen, but so help me--"

Charles looked grave--graver than he felt. It happened every day. "You
realize, Mrs. Maginnis, that you're letting the Syndic down. What would
the people in Syndic Territory do for protection if everybody took your
attitude?"

She looked sly. "I was thinking, Mr. Orsino, that a young man like you
must have a way with the girls--" By a mighty unsubtle maneuver, Mrs.
Maginnis' daughter emerged from the back room at that point and began
demurely mopping the bar. "And," she continued, "sure, any young lady
would consider it an honor to spend the evening with a young gentleman
from the Syndic--"

"Perhaps," Charles said, rapidly thinking it over. He would infinitely
rather spend the evening with a girl than at a Shakespeare revival as he
had planned, but there were drawbacks. In the first place, it would be
bribery. In the second place, he might fall for the girl and wake up
with Mrs. Maginnis for his mother-in-law--a fate too nauseating to
contemplate for more than a moment. In the third place, he had already
bought the tickets for himself and bodyguard.

"About the shakedown," he said decisively. "Call it fifteen this week.
If you're still doing badly next week, I'll have to ask for a look at
your books--to see whether a regular reduction is in order."

She got the hint, and colored. Putting down fifteen dollars, she said:
"Sure, that won't be necessary. I'm expecting business to take a turn
for the better. It's sure to pick up."

"Good, then." To show there were no hard feelings, he stayed for a
moment to ask: "How are your husbands?"

"So-so. Alfie's on the road this week and Dinnie's got the rheumatism
again but he can tend bar late, when it's slow."

"Tell him to drop around to the Medical Center and mention my name, Mrs.
Maginnis. Maybe they can do something for him."

She glowed with thanks and he left.

It was pleasant to be able to do things for nice people; it was pleasant
to stroll along the sunny street acknowledging tipped hats and friendly
words. (That team rush for the goal had been a sorry mess, but not his
fault--quite. Vladek had loosed a premature burst from his fifty caliber
at the ball, and sent it hurling off to the right; they had braked and
backed with much grinding of gears to form V again behind it, when
Gilby blew the whistle again.)

       *       *       *       *       *

A nervous youngster in the National Press Service New York drop was
facing his first crisis on the job. Trouble lights had flashed
simultaneously on the Kansas City-New York, Hialeah-New York and
Boston-New York trunks. He stood, paralyzed.

His supervisor took it in in a flash and banged open the circuit to
Service. To the genial face that appeared on the screen, he snapped:
"Trace Hialeah, Boston and Kansas City--in that order, Micky."

Micky said: "Okay, pal," and vanished.

The supervisor turned to the youngster. "Didn't know what to do?" he
asked genially. "Don't let it worry you. Next time you'll know. You
noticed the order of priority?"

"Yes," the boy gulped.

"It wasn't an accident that I gave it to him that way. First, Hialeah
because it was the most important. We get the bulk of our revenue from
serving the horse rooms--in fact, I understand we started as a horse
wire exclusively. Naturally the horse-room customers pay for it in the
long run, but they pay without pain. Nobody's forcing them to improve
the breed, right?

"Second, Boston-New York trunk. That's common-carrier while the Fair
Grounds isn't running up there. We don't make any profit on
common-carrier service, the rates are too low, but we owe it to the
public that supports us.

"Third, Kansas City-New York. That's common carrier too, but with one
terminal in Mob Territory. No reason why we should knock ourselves out
for Regan and his boys, but after the other two are traced and closed,
we'll get around to them. Think you got it straight now?"

"Yes," the youngster said.

"Good. Just take it easy."

       *       *       *       *       *

The supervisor moved away to do a job of billing that didn't need
immediate doing; he wanted to avoid the very appearance of nagging the
boy. He wondered too, if he'd really put it over, and decided he hadn't.
Who could, after all. It took years on the wires to get the feel. Slowly
your motivation changed. You started by wanting to make a place for
yourself and earn some dough. After years you realized, not with a
blinding flash, but gradually, that you were working for quite another
reason. Nice gang here that treats you right. Don't let the Syndic down.
The customers pay for their fun and by God, you see that they get it or
bust a gut trying.

       *       *       *       *       *

On his way to the 101st Precinct station house, the ears of Charles
Orsino burned as he thought of the withering lecture that had followed
the blast on Gilby's whistle. "_Mister_ Orsino, is it or is it not your
responsibility as team captain to demand that a dangerous ball be taken
out of play? And did or did not that last burst from Mister Vladek beat
the ball out of round, thus giving rise to a distinct possibility of
dangerous ricochets?" The old man was right of course, but it had been a
pocked and battered practice ball to start with; in practice sessions,
you couldn't afford to be fussy--not with regulation 18 inch armor steel
balls selling for thirty dollars each at the pro shop.

He walked between the two green lamps of the precinct station and dumped
his bag on the sergeant's desk. Immediately the sergeant started a tale
of woe: "Mr. Orsino, I don't like to bother you with the men's personal
troubles, but I wonder if you could come through with a hundred dollar
present for a very deserving young fellow here. It's Patrolman Gibney,
seven years in the old 101st and not a black mark against him. One
citation for shooting it out with a burglar and another for nabbing a
past-post crook at Lefko's horse room. Gibney's been married for five
years and has two of the cutest kids you ever saw, and you know that
takes money. Now he wants to get married again, he's crazy in love with
the girl and his first wife don't mind, she says she can use a helping
hand around the house, and he wants to do it right with a big wedding.

"If he can do it on a hundred, he's welcome to it," Charles said,
grinning. "Give him my best wishes." He divided the pile of bills into
two orderly stacks, transferred a hundred dollars to one and pocketed
the other.

He dropped it off at the Syndic Building, had an uninteresting dinner in
one of its cafeterias and went to his furnished room downtown. He read a
chapter in F. W. Taylor's--Uncle Frank's--latest book, _Organization,
Symbolism and Morale_, couldn't understand a word he read, bathed and
got out his evening clothes.

       *       *       *       *       *

A thin and attractive girl entered a preposterously-furnished room in
the Syndic Building, arguing bitterly with a white-bearded, hawk-nosed
old man.

"My dear ancestor," she began, with exaggerated patience.

"God-damn it, Lee, don't call me an ancestor! Makes me feel as if I was
dead already."

"You might as well be for all the sense you're talking."

"All right, Lee." He looked wounded and brave.

"Oh, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, Edward--" She studied his face
with suddenly-narrowed eyes and her tone changed. "Listen, you old
devil, you're not fooling me for a minute. I couldn't hurt your feelings
with the blunt edge of an axe. You're not talking me into anything. It'd
just be sending somebody to his death. Besides, they were both
accidents." She turned and began to fiddle with a semi-circular screen
whose focus was a large and complicated chair. Three synchronized
projectors bore on the screen.

The old man said very softly: "And what if they weren't? Tom McGurn and
Bob were good men. None better. If the damn Government's knocking us off
one by one, something ought to be done. And you seem to be the only
person in a position to do it."

"Start a war," she said bitterly. "Sweep them from the seas. Wasn't Dick
Reiner chanting that when I was in diapers?"

"Yes," the old man brooded. "And he's still chanting it now that you're
in--whatever young ladies wear nowadays. Promise me something, Lee. If
there's another try, will you help us out?"

"I am so sure there won't be," she said, "that I'll promise. And God
help you, Edward, if you try to fake one. I've told you before and I
tell you now that it's almost certain death."

       *       *       *       *       *

Charles Orsino studied himself in a three-way mirror.

The evening suit was new; he wished the gunbelt was. The holster rode
awkwardly on his hip; he hadn't got a new outfit since his eighteenth
birthday and his chest had filled out to the last hole of the
cross-strap's buckle since then. Well, it would have to wait; the
evening would cost him enough as it was. Five bodyguards! He winced at
the thought. But you had to be seen at these things and you had to do it
right or it didn't count.

He fell into a brief reverie of meeting a beautiful, beautiful girl at
the theater, a girl who would think he was interesting and handsome and
a wonderful polo player, a girl who would happily turn out to be in the
direct Falcaro line with all sorts of powerful relations to speak up for
him....

Someone said on his room annunciator: "The limousine is here, Mr.
Orsino. I'm Halloran, your chief bodyguard."

"Very well, Halloran," he said casually, just as he'd practiced it in
the bathroom that morning and rode down.

The limousine was a beauty and the guards were faultlessly turned out.
One was democratic with one's chief guard and a little less so with the
others. As Halloran drove, Charles chatted with him about the play,
which was Julius Caesar in modern dress. Halloran said he'd heard it was
very good.

       *       *       *       *       *

Their arrival in the lobby of the Costello created no sensation. Five
bodyguards wasn't a lot of bodyguards, even though there seemed to be no
other Syndic people there. So much for the beautiful Falcaro girl.
Charles chatted with a television director he knew slightly. The
director explained to him that the theater was sick, very sick, that
Harry Tremaine,--he played Brutus--made a magnificent stage picture but
couldn't read lines.

By then Halloran was whispering in his ear that it was time to take
their seats. Halloran was sweating like a pig and Charles didn't get
around to asking him why. Charles took an aisle seat, Halloran was
across the aisle and the others sat to his side, front and rear.

The curtain rose on "New York--A Street."

The first scene, a timekiller designed to let fidgeters subside and
coughers finish their coughing, was a 3-D projection of Times Square,
with a stylized suggestion of a public relations consultant's office
"down in one" on the apron.

When Caesar entered Orsino started, and there was a gratified murmur
around the auditorium. He was made up as French Letour, one of the
Mobsters from the old days--technically a hero, but one who had sailed
mighty close to the wind. This promised to be interesting.

"Peace, ho! Caesar speaks."

And so to the apron where the soothsayer--public relations
consultant--delivered the warning contemptuously ignored by
Letour-Caesar, and the spotlight shifted to Cassius and Brutus for their
long, foreboding dialogue. Brutus' back was to the audience when it
started; he gradually turned--

"What means this shouting? I do fear the people will choose Caesar for
their king!"

And you saw that Brutus was Falcaro--old Amadeo Falcaro himself, with
the beard and hawk nose and eyebrows.

Well, let's see now. It must be some kind of tortured analogy with the
Treaty of Las Vegas when Letour made a strong bid to unite Mob and
Syndic and Falcaro had fought against anything but a short-term,
strictly military alliance. Charles felt kind of sore about Falcaro not
getting the title role, but he had to admit that Tremaine played Falcaro
as the gutsy magnifico he had been. When Caesar re-entered, the contrast
became clear; Caesar-Letour was a fidgety, fear-ridden man. The rest of
the conspirators brought on through Act One turned out to be good
fellows all, fresh and hearty; Charles guessed everything was all right
and he wished he could grab a nap. But Cassius was saying:

"Him and his worth and our great need of him--"

All very loyal, Charles thought, smothering a yawn. A life for the
Syndic and all that, but a high-brow version. Polite and dignified, like
a pavanne at Roseland. Sometimes--after, say, a near miss on the polo
field--he would wonder how polite and dignified the great old days
actually had been. Amadeo Falcaro's Third Year Purge must have been an
affair of blood and guts. Two thousand shot in three days, the history
books said, adding hastily that the purged were unreconstructed,
unreconstructable thugs whose usefulness was past, who couldn't realize
that the job ahead was construction and organization.

       *       *       *       *       *

And Halloran was touching Charles on the shoulder. "Intermission in a
second, sir."

They marched up the aisle as the curtain fell to applause and the rest
of the audience began to rise. Then the impossible happened.

Halloran had gone first; Charles was behind him, with the four other
guards hemming him in. As Halloran reached the door to the lobby at the
top of the aisle, he turned to face Charles and performed an
inexplicable pantomime. It was quite one second before Charles realized
that Halloran was tugging at his gun, stuck in the holster.

The guard to the left of Charles softly said: "Jesus!" and threw himself
at Halloran as the chief guard's gun came loose. There was a .45 caliber
roar, muffled. There was another that crashed, unmuffled, a yard from
Charles' right ear. The two figures at the head of the aisle collapsed
limply and the audience began to shriek. Somebody with a very loud voice
roared: "Keep calm! It's all part of the play! Don't get panicky! It's
part of the play!"

The man who was roaring moved up to the aisle door, fell silent, saw
and smelled the blood and fainted.

A woman began to pound the guard on Charles' right with her fists,
yelling: "What did you do to my husband? You shot my husband!" She meant
the man who had fainted; Charles peeled her off the bodyguard.

Somehow they got into the lobby, followed by most of the audience. The
three bodyguards held them at bay. Charles found he was deaf in his
right ear and supposed it was temporary. Least of his worries. Halloran
had taken a shot at him. The guard named Weltfisch had intercepted it.
The guard named Donnel had shot Halloran down.

He said to Donnel: "You know Halloran long?"

Donnel, not taking his eyes from the crowd, said: "Couple of years, sir.
He was just a guy in the bodyguard pool."

"Get me out of here," Orsino said. "To the Syndic Building."

In the big black car, he could almost forget the horror; he could hope
that time would erase it completely. It wasn't like polo. That shot had
been _aimed_.

The limousine purred to a halt before the titanic bulk of the Syndic
Building, was checked and rolled on into the Unrestricted Entrance. An
elevator silently lifted the car and passengers past floors devoted to
Alcohol Clerical, Alcohol Research, and Testing, Transport, Collections
Audit and Control, Cleaning and Dying, Female Recruitment and
Retirement, up, up, up, past sections and sub-sections Charles had never
entered, Syndic member though he was, to an automatic stop at a floor
whose indicator said: _enforcement and public relations_.

It was only 9:45 P.M.; F. W. Taylor would be in and working. Charles
said: "Wait here, boys," and muttered the code phrase to the door. It
sprang open.

F. W. Taylor was dictating, machine-gun fashion, to a mike. He looked
dog-tired. His face turned up with a frown as Charles entered and then
the frown became a beam of pleasure.

"Charles, my boy! Sit down!" He snapped off the machine.

"Uncle--" Charles began.

"It was so kind of you to drop in. I thought you'd be at the theater."

"I was, Uncle, but--"

"I'm working on a revision for the next edition of _Organization,
Symbolism and Morale_. You'd never guess who inspired it."

"I'm sure I wouldn't, Uncle. Uncle--"

"Old Thornberry, President of the Chase National. He had the infernal
gall to refuse a line of credit to young McGurn. _Bankers!_ You won't
believe it, but people used to _beg_ them to take over their property,
tie up their incomes, virtually enslave them. People _demanded_ it. The
same way they demanded inexpensive liquor, tobacco and consumer goods,
clean women and a chance to win a fortune and our ancestors obliged
them. Our ancestors were sneered at in their day, you know. They were
called criminals when they distributed goods and services at a price
people could afford to pay."

"Uncle!"

"Hush, boy, I know what you're going to say. You can't fool the people
forever! When they'd had enough hounding and restriction, they rose in
their might.

"The people demanded freedom of choice, Falcaro and the rest rose to
lead them in the Syndic and the Mob and they drove the Government into
the sea."

"Uncle Frank--"

"From which it still occasionally ventures to annoy our coastal cities,"
F. W. Taylor commented. He warmed to his subject. "You should have seen
the old boy blubber. The last of the old-time bankers, and they deserved
everything they got. They brought it on themselves. They had what they
called laissez-faire, and it worked for awhile until they got to
tinkering with it. They demanded things called protective tariffs, tax
remissions, subsidies--regulation, regulation, regulation, always of the
other fellow. But there were enough bankers on all sides for everybody
to be somebody else's other fellow. Coercion snowballed and the
Government lost public acceptance. They had a thing called the public
debt which I can't begin to explain to you except to say that it was
something written on paper and that it raised the cost of everything
tremendously. Well, believe me or not, they _didn't_ just throw away the
piece of paper or scratch out the writing on it. They let it ride until
ordinary people couldn't afford the pleasant things in life."

"Uncle--"

       *       *       *       *       *

A cautious periscope broke the choppy water off Sea Island, Georgia. At
the other end of the periscope were Captain Van Dellen of the North
American Navy, lean as a hound, and fat little Commander Grinnel.

"You might take her in a little closer, Van," said Grinnel mildly.

"The exercise won't do you any lasting damage," Van Dellen said. Grinnel
was very, very, near to a couple of admirals and normally Van Dellen
gave him the kid-glove treatment in spite of ranking him. But this was
_his_ ship and no cloak and dagger artist from an O.N.I. desk was
telling him how to con it.

Grinnel smiled genially at the little joke. "I could call it a
disguise," he said patting his paunch, "but you know me too well."

"You'll have no trouble with a sea like this," Van Dellen said, strictly
business. He tried to think of some appropriate phrase to recognize the
danger Grinnel was plunging into with no resources except quick wits, a
trick ring and a pair of guns. But all that bubbled up to the top of his
head was; thank God I'm getting rid of this bastardly little Sociocrat.
He'll kill me some day if he gets a clean shot and the chance of
detection is zero. Thank God I'm a Constitutionist. We don't go in for
things like that--or do we? Nobody ever tells me anything. A hack of a
pigboat driver. And this little bastard's going to be an admiral some
day. But that boy of mine'll be an admiral. He's brainy, like his
mother.

Grinnel smiled and said: "Well, this would be it, wouldn't it?"

"Eh?" Van Dellen asked. "Oh. I see what you mean. Chuck!" he called a
sailor. "Break out the Commander's capsules. Pass the word to stand by
for ejection."

The Commander was fitted, puffing, into the capsule. He growled at the
storekeeper: "You sure this was just unsealed? It feels sticky already."

A brash jayee said: "I saw it unsealed myself three minutes ago,
Commander. It'll get stickier if we spend any more time talking. You
have"--he glanced at his chronometer--"seventeen minutes now. Let me
snap you in."

The Commander huddled down after a searching glance at the jayee's face
which photographed it forever in his memory. The top snapped down. Some
day--some happy day--that squirt would very much regret telling him off.
He gave an okay sign to Van Dellen who waved back meagerly and managed a
smile. Three crewmen fitted the capsule into its lock.

Foomf!

It was through the hatch and bobbing on the surface. Its color matched
the water's automatically. Grinnel waggled the lever that aimed it
inshore and began to turn the propellor crank. He turned fast; the
capsule--rudders, crank, flywheel, shaft and all--would dissolve in
approximately fifteen minutes. It was his job to be ashore when that
happened.

And ashore he'd be practically a free agent with the loosest sort of
roving commission, until January 15th. Then his orders became most
specific.




III


Charles Orsino squirmed in the chair. "Uncle--" he pleaded.

"Yes," F. W. Taylor chuckled, "Old Amadeo and his colleagues were called
criminals. They were called bootleggers when they got liquor to people
without worrying about the public debt or excise taxes. They were called
smugglers when they sold cheap butter in the south and cheap margerine
in the north. They were called counterfeiters when they sold cheap
cigarettes and transportation tickets. They were called high-jackers
when they wrested goods from the normal inflation-ridden chain of
middlemen and delivered them at a reasonable price to the consumers.

"They were criminals. Bankers were pillars of society.

"Yet these bankers who dominated society, who were considered the voice
of eternal truth when they spoke, who thought it was insanity to
challenge their beliefs, started somewhere and perhaps they were the
best thing for their day and age that could be worked out...."

       *       *       *       *       *

Father Ambrosius gnawed at a bit of salt herring, wiped his hands, dug
through the litter in his chest and found a goose quill and a page of
parchment. He scrubbed vigorously with a vinegar-soaked sponge, at the
writing on the parchment and was pleased to see that it came off nicely,
leaving him a clean surface to scribble his sermon notes on. He cut the
quill and slit it while waiting for the parchment to dry, wondering idly
what he had erased. (It happened to be the last surviving copy of
Tacitus' _Annals_, VII. i-v.)

To work then. The sermon was to be preached on Sexagesima Sunday, a
prelude to the solemn season of Lent. Father Ambrosius' mind wandered in
search of a text. Lent ... salt herring ... penitence ... the capital
sins ... avarice ... usury ... delinquent pew rent ... fat-headed young
Sir Baldwin in his tumbledown castle on the hill ... salt herring now
and _per saeculae saeculorum_ unless Sir Baldwin paid up his delinquent
pew rent.

At the moment, Sir Baldwin came swaggering into the cell. Father
Ambrosius rose courteously and said, with some insincerity: "_Pax
vobiscum._"

"Eh?" asked Sir Baldwin, his silly blue eyes popping as he looked over
his shoulder. "Oh, you meant me, padre. It don't do a bit of good to
chatter at me in Latin, you know. The king's Norman is what I speak. I
mean to say, if it's good enough for his majesty Richard, it's good
enough for me, what? Now, what can I do for you, padre?"

Father Ambrosius reminded him faintly: "You came to see me, Sir
Baldwin."

"Eh? Oh. So I did. I was huntin' stag, padre, and I lost him after
chasin' the whole morning, and what I want to know is, who's the right
saint chap to ask for help in a pickle like that? I mean to say, I
wanted to show the chaps some good sport and we started this beast and
he got clean away. Don't misunderstand me, padre, they were good chaps
and they didn't rot me about it, but that kind of talk gets about and
doesn't do one a bit of good, what? So you tell me like a good fellow
who's the right saint chap to put the matter in the best light for me?"

Father Ambrosius repressed an urge to grind his teeth, took thought and
said: "St. Hubert, I believe, is interested in the stag hunt."

"Right-oh, padre! St. Hubert it is. Hubert, Hubert. I shan't forget it
because I've a cousin named Hubert. Haven't seen him for years, poor old
chap. He had the fistula--lived on slops and couldn't sit his horse for
a day's huntin'. Poor old chap. Well, I'm off--no, there's another thing
I wanted. Suppose this Sunday you preach a howlin' strong sermon against
usury, what? That chap in the village, the goldsmith fellow, has the
infernal gall to tell me I've got to give him Fallowfield! Forty acres,
and he has the infernal gall to tell me they aren't mine any more. Be a
good chap, padre, and sort of glare at him from the pulpit a few times
to show him who you mean, what?"

"Usury _is_ a sin," Father Ambrosius said cautiously, "but how does
Fallowfield enter into it?"

Sir Baldwin twiddled the drooping ends of his limp, blond mustache with
a trace of embarrassment. "Fact is, I told the chap when I borrowed the
twenty marks that Fallowfield would stand as security. I ask you, padre,
is it my fault that my tenants are a pack of lazy, thieving Saxon swine
and I couldn't raise the money?"

The parish priest bristled unnoticeably. He was pure Saxon himself. "I
shall do what I can," he said. "And Sir Baldwin, before you go--"

The young man stopped in the doorway and turned.

"Before you go, may I ask when we'll see your pew rent, to say nothing
of the tithe?"

Sir Baldwin dismissed it with an airish wave of the hand. "I thought I
just told you, padre. I haven't a farthing to my name and here's this
chap in the village telling me to clear out of Fallowfield that I got
from my father and his father before him. So how the devil--excuse
me--can I pay rent and tithes and Peters pence and all the other things
you priest chaps expect from a man, what?" He held up his gauntleted
hand as Father Ambrosius started to speak. "No, padre, not another word
about it. I know you'd love to tell me I won't go to heaven if I act
this way. I don't doubt you're learned and all that, but I can still
tell you a thing or two, what? The fact is, I _will_ go to Heaven. You
see, padre, God's a gentleman and he wouldn't bar another gentleman over
a trifle of money trouble that could happen to any gentleman, now would
he?"

The fatuous beam was more than Father Ambrosius could bear; his eyes
fell.

"Right-oh," Sir Baldwin chirped. "And that saint chap's name was St.
Hubert. I didn't forget, see? Not quite the fool some people think I
am." And he was gone, whistling a recheat.

Father Ambrosius sat down again and glared at the parchment. Preach a
sermon on usury for that popinjay. Well, usury _was_ a sin. Christians
were supposed to lend to one another in need and not count the cost or
the days. But who had ever heard of Sir Baldwin ever lending anything?
Of course, he was lord of the manor and protected you against invasion,
but there didn't seem to be any invasions anymore....

Wearily, the parish priest dipped his pen and scratched on the
parchment: RON. XIII ii, viii, XV i. "Whosoever resisteth the power
resisteth the ordinance of God ... owe no man any thing ... we that are
strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak...." A triple-plated
text, which, reinforced by a brow of thunder from the pulpit should make
the village goldsmith think twice before pressing his demand on Sir
Baldwin. Usury _was_ a sin.

There was a different knock on the door frame.

The goldsmith, a leather-aproned fellow named John, stood there twisting
his cap in his big, burn scarred hands.

"Yes, my son? Come in." But he scowled at the fellow involuntarily. He
should know better than to succumb to the capital sin of avarice. "Well,
what is it?"

"Father," the fellow said, "I've come to give you this." He passed a
soft leather purse to the priest. It clinked.

Father Ambrosius emptied it on his desk and stirred the broad silver
coins wonderingly with his finger. Five marks and eleven silver pennies.
No more salt herring until Lent! Silver forwarded to his bishop in an
amount that would do credit to the parish! A gilding job for the image
of the Blessed Virgin! Perhaps glass panes in one or two of the church
windows!

And then he stiffened and swept the money back into the purse. "You got
this by sin," he said flatly. "The sin of avarice worked in your heart
and you practiced the sin of usury on your fellow Christians. Don't give
this money to the Church; give it back to your victims."

"Father," the fellow said, nearly blubbering, "excuse me but you don't
understand! They come to me and come to me. They say it's all right with
them, that they're hiring the money the way you'd hire a horse. Doesn't
that make sense? Do you think I _wanted_ to become a moneylender? No! I
was an honest goldsmith and an honest goldsmith can't help himself. All
the money in the village drifts somehow into his hands. One leaves a
mark with you for safekeeping and pays you a penny the year to guard it.
Another brings you silver coins to make into a basin, and you get to
keep whatever coins are left over. And then others come to you and say
'Let me have soandso's mark to use for a year and then I'll pay it back
and with it another mark'. Father, they beg me! They say they'll be
ruined if I don't lend to them, their old parents will die if they can't
fee the leech, or their dead will roast forever unless they can pay for
masses and what's a man to _do_?"

"Sin no more," the priest answered simply. It was no problem.

The fellow was getting angry. "Very well for you to sit there and say
so, father. But what do you think paid for the masses you said for the
repose of Goodie Howat's soul? And how did Tom the Thatcher buy his
wagon so he could sell his beer in Glastonbury at a better price? And
how did Farmer Major hire the men from Wealing to get in his hay before
the great storm could ruin it? And a hundred things more. I tell you,
this parish would be a worse place without John Goldsmith and he doesn't
propose to be pointed at any longer as a black sinner! I didn't want to
fall into usury but I did, and _when_ I did, I found out that those who
hoist their noses highest at the moneylender when they pass him in the
road are the same ones who beg the hardest when they come to his shop
for a loan!"

The priest was stunned by the outburst. John seemed honest, the facts
were the facts--can good come out of evil? And there were stories that
His Holiness the Pope himself had certain dealings with the
Longobards--benchers, or bankers or whatever they called themselves....

"I must think on this, my son," he said. "Perhaps I was over hasty.
Perhaps in the days of St. Paul usury was another thing entirely.
Perhaps what you practice is not _really_ usury but merely something
that resembles it. You may leave this silver with me."

When John left, Father Ambrosius squeezed his eyes tight shut and
pressed the knuckles of both hands to his forehead. Things _did_ change.
Under the dispensation of the Old Testament, men had more wives than
one. That was sinful now, but surely Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were in
heaven? Paul wrote his epistles to little islands of Christians
surrounded by seas of pagans. Surely in those days it was necessary for
Christians to be bound closely together against the common enemy,
whereas in these modern times, the ties could be safely relaxed a
trifle? How could sinning have paid for the repose of Goodie Howat's
soul, got a better price for brewer Thatcher's ale and saved the village
hay crop? The Devil was tricky, but not _that_ tricky, surely. A few
more such tricks and the parish would resemble the paradise terrestrial!

Father Ambrosius dashed from his study to the altar of the little stone
church and began furiously to turn the pages of the huge metal-bound
lectern Bible.

"_For the love of money is the root of all evil--_"

It burst on Father Ambrosius with a great light that the words of Paul
were in reference not to _John Goldsmith's_ love of money but to _Sir
Baldwin's_ love of money.

He dashed back to his study and his pen began to squeak over the
parchment, obliterating the last dim trace of Tacitus' _Annals_, VIII
i.v. The sermon would be a scorcher, all right, but it wouldn't scorch
John Goldsmith. It would scorch Sir Baldwin for ruthlessly and against
the laws of God and man refusing to turn Fallowfield over to the
moneylender. There would be growls of approval in the church that
Sunday, and many black looks directed against Sir Baldwin for his
attempt to bilk the parish's friend and benefactor, the moneylender.

       *       *       *       *       *

"And that," F. W. Taylor concluded, chuckling, "is how power passes from
one pair of hands to another, and how public acceptance of the change
follows on its heels. A strange thing--people always think that each
exchange of power is the last that will ever take place."

He seemed to be finished.

"Uncle," Orsino said, "somebody tried to kill me."

Taylor stared at him for a long minute, speechless. "What happened?" he
finally asked.

"I went formal to the theater, with five bodyguards. The chief guard,
name of Halloran, took a shot at me. One of my boys got in the way. He
was killed."

Taylor's fingers began to play a tattoo on his annunciator board. Faces
leaped into existence on its various screens as he fired orders.
"Charles Orsino's chief bodyguard for tonight--Halloran. Trace him. The
works. He tried to kill Orsino."

He clicked off the board switches and turned grimly to Orsino. "Now
you," he said. "What have _you_ been up to?"

"Just doing my job, uncle," Orsino said uneasily.

"Still bagman at the 101st?"

"Yes."

"Fooling with any women?"

"Nothing special, uncle. Nothing intense."

"Disciplined or downgraded anybody lately?"

"Certainly not. The precinct runs like a watch. I'll match their morale
against any outfit east of the Mississippi. Why are you taking this so
heavy?"

"Because you're the third. The other two--your cousin Thomas McGurn and
your uncle Robert Orsino--didn't have guards to get in the way. One
other question."

"Yes, uncle."

"My boy, _why_ didn't you tell me about this when you first came in?"




IV


A family council was called the next day. Orsino, very much a junior,
had never been admitted to one before. He knew why the exception was
being made, and didn't like the reason.

Edward Falcaro wagged his formidable white beard at the thirty-odd
Syndic chiefs around the table and growled: "I think we'll dispense with
reviewing production and so on. I want to talk about this damn gunplay.
Dick, bring us up to date."

He lit a vile cigar and leaned back.

Richard W. Reiner rose.

"Thomas McGurn," he said, "killed April 15th by a burst of eight machine
gun bullets in his private dining room at the Astor. Elsie Warshofsky,
his waitress, must be considered the principal suspect, but--"

Edward Falcaro snapped: "Suspect, hell! She killed him, didn't she?"

"_I was about to say_, but the evidence so far is merely cumulative.
Mrs. Warshofsky jumped--fell--or was pushed--from the dining room
window. The machine gun was found beside the window.

"There are no known witnesses. Mrs. Warshofsky's history presents no
unusual features. An acquaintance submitted a statement--based, she
frankly admitted, on nothing definite--that Mrs. Warshofsky sometimes
talked in a way that led her to wonder if she might not be a member of
the secret terrorist organization known as the D.A.R. In this
connection, it should be noted that Mrs. Warshofsky's maiden name was
Adams.

"Robert Orsino, killed April 21st by a thermite bomb concealed in his
pillow and fuzed with a pressure-sensitive switch. His valet, Edward
Blythe, disappeared from view. He was picked up April 23rd by a posse on
the beach of Montauk Point, but died before he could be questioned.
Examination of his stomach contents showed a lethal quantity of sodium
fluoride. It is presumed that the poison was self-administered."

"Presumed!" the old man snorted, and puffed out a lethal quantity of
cigar smoke.

"Blythe's history," Reiner went on blandly, "presents no unusual
features. It should be noted that a commerce-raider of the so-called
United States Government Navy was reported off Montauk Point during the
night of April 23rd-24th by local residents.

"Charles Orsino, attacked April 30th by his bodyguard James Halloran in
the lobby of the Costello Memorial Theater. Halloran fired one shot
which killed another bodyguard and was then himself killed. Halloran's
history presents no unusual features except that he had a considerable
interest in--uh--history. He collected and presumably read obsolete
books dealing with pre-Syndic Pre-Mob America. Investigators found by
his bedside the first volume of a work published in 1942 called _The
Growth of The American Republic_ by Morison and Commager. It was opened
to Chapter Ten, The War of Independence!"

Reiner took his seat.

F. W. Taylor said dryly: "Dick, did you forget to mention that
Warshofsky, Blythe and Halloran are known officers of the U. S. Navy?"

Reiner said: "You are being facetious. Are you implying that I have
omitted pertinent facts?"

"I'm implying that you artistically stacked the deck. With a rumor, a
dubious commerce-raider report and a note on a man's hobby, you want us
to sweep the bastards from the sea, don't you--just the way you always
have?"

"I am not ashamed of my expressed attitude on the question of the
so-called United States Government and will defend it at any proper time
and place."

"Shut the hell up, you two," Edward Falcaro growled. "I'm trying to
think." He thought for perhaps half a minute and then looked up,
baffled. "Has anybody got any ideas?"

Charles Orsino cleared his throat, amazed at his own temerity. The old
man's eyebrows shot up, but he grudgingly said: "I guess you can say
something, since they thought you were important enough to shoot."

Orsino said: "Maybe it's some outfit over in Europe or Asia?"

Edward Falcaro asked: "Anybody know anything about Europe or Asia?
Jimmy, you flew over once, didn't you? To see about Anatolian poppies
when the Mob had trouble with Mex labor?"

Jimmy Falcaro said creakily: "Yeah. It was a waste of time. They have
these little dirt farmers scratching out just enough food for the family
and maybe raising a quarter-acre of poppy. That's _all_ there is from
the China Sea to the Mediterranean. In England--Frank, you tell 'em. You
explained it to me once."

Taylor rose. "The forest's come back to England. When finance there lost
its morale and couldn't hack its way out of the paradoxes that was the
end. When that happens you've got to have a large, virile criminal class
ready to take over and do the work of distribution and production. Maybe
some of you know how the English were. The poor beggars had civilized
all the illegality out of the stock. They couldn't do anything that
wasn't respectable. From sketchy reports, I gather that England is now
forest and a few hundred starving people. One fellow says the men still
wear derbies and stagger to their offices in the city.

"France is peasants, drunk three-quarters of the time.

"Russia is peasants, drunk _all_ the time.

"Germany--well, there the criminal class was _too_ big and _too_ virile.
The place is a cemetery."

He shrugged: "Say it, somebody. The Mob's gunning for us."

Reiner jumped to his feet. "I will _never_ support such a hypothesis!"
he shrilled. "It is _mischievous_ to imply that a century of peace has
been ended, that our three-thousand-mile border with our friend to the
West--"

Taylor intoned satirically: "_Un_-blemished, my friends, by a _single_
for-ti-fi-_ca_-tion--"

Edward Falcaro yelled: "Stop your damn foolishness, Frank Taylor! This
is no laughing matter."

Taylor snapped: "Have you been in Mob Territory lately?"

"I have," the old man said. He scowled.

"How'd you like it?"

Edward Falcaro shrugged irritably. "They have their ways, we have ours.
The Regan line is running thin, but we're not going to forget that Jimmy
Regan stood shoulder to shoulder with Amadeo Falcaro in the old days.
There's such a thing as loyalty."

F. W. Taylor said: "There's such a thing as blindness."

He had gone too far. Edward Falcaro rose from his chair and leaned
forward, bracing himself on the table. He said flatly: "This is a
statement, gentlemen. I won't pretend I'm happy about the way things are
in Mob Territory. I won't pretend I think old man Regan is a balanced,
dependable person. I won't pretend I think the Mob clients are enjoying
anywhere near the service that Syndic clients enjoy. I'm perfectly aware
that on our visits of state to Mob Territory we see pretty much what our
hosts want us to see. But I cannot believe that any group which is
rooted on the principles of freedom and service can have gone very
wrong.

"Maybe I'm mistaken, gentlemen. But I cannot believe that a descendant
of Jimmy Regan would order a descendant of Amadeo Falcaro murdered. We
will consider every other possibility first. Frank, is that clear?"

"Yes," Taylor said.

"All right," Edward Falcaro grunted. "Now let's go about this thing
systematically. Dick, you go right down the line with the charge that
the Government's responsible for these atrocities. I hate to think that
myself. If they are, we're going to have to spend a lot of time and
trouble hunting them down and doing something about it. As long as they
stick to a little commerce-raiding and a few coastal attacks, I can't
say I'm really unhappy about them. They don't do much harm, and they
keep us on our toes and--maybe this one is most important--they keep our
client's memories of the bad old days that we delivered them from alive.
That's a great deal to surrender for the doubtful pleasures of a long,
expensive campaign. If assassination's in the picture I suppose we'll
have to knock them off--but we've got to be _sure_."

"May I speak?" Reiner asked icily.

The old man nodded and re-lit his cigar.

"I have been called--behind my back, naturally--a fanatic," Reiner
said. He pointedly did not look anywhere near F. W. Taylor as he spoke
the word. "Perhaps this is correct and perhaps fanaticism is what's
needed at a time like this. Let me point out what the so-called
Government stands for: brutal 'taxation,' extirpation of gambling,
denial of life's simple pleasures to the poor and severe limitation of
them to all but the wealthy, sexual prudery viciously enforced by penal
laws of appalling barbarity, endless regulation and coercion governing
every waking minute of the day. That was its record during the days of
its power and that would be its record if it returned to power. I fail
to see how this menace to our liberty can be condoned by certain
marginal benefits which are claimed to accrue from its continued
existence." He faltered for a moment as his face twisted with an
unpleasant memory. In a lower, unhappier voice, he went on: "I--I was
alarmed the other day by something I overheard. Two small children were
laying bets at the Kiddy Counter of the horse room I frequent, and I
stopped on my way to the hundred-dollar window for a moment to hear
their childish prattle. They were doping the forms for the sixth at
Hialeah, I believe, when one of them digressed to say: 'My Mommy doesn't
play the horses. She thinks all the horse rooms should be closed.'

"It wrung my heart, gentlemen, to hear that. I wanted to take that
little boy aside and tell him: 'Son, your Mommy doesn't have to play the
horses. Nobody has to play the horses unless he wants to. But as long as
one single person wants to lay a bet on a horse and another person is
willing to take it, nobody has the right to say the horse rooms should
be closed.' Naturally I did not take the little boy aside and tell him
that. It would have been an impractical approach to the problem. The
_practical_ approach is the one I have always advocated and still do.
Strike at the heart of the infection! Destroy the remnants of Government
and cauterize the wound so that it will never re-infect again. Nor is my
language too strong. When I realize that the mind of an innocent child
has been corrupted so that he will prattle that the liberties of his
brothers must be infringed on, that their harmless pleasures must be
curtailed, my blood runs cold and I call it what it is: _treason_."

Orsino had listened raptly to the words and joined in a burst of
spontaneous applause that swept around the table. He had never had a
brush with Government himself and he hardly believed in the existence of
the shadowy, terrorist D.A.R., but Reiner had made it sound so near and
menacing!

But Uncle Frank was on his feet. "We seem to have strayed from the
point," he said dryly. "For anybody who needs his memory refreshed, I'll
state that the point is two assassinations and one near miss. I fail to
see the connection, if any with Dick Reiner's paranoid delusions of
persecution. I especially fail to see the relevance of the word
'treason.' Treason to what--us? The Syndic is not a government. It must
not become enmeshed in the symbols and folklore of a government or it
will be first chained and then strangled by them. The Syndic is an
organization of high morale and easy-going, hedonistic personality. The
fact that it succeeded the Government occurred because the Government
had become an organization of low morale and inflexible, puritanic,
sado-masochistic personality. I have no illusions about the Syndic
lasting forever, and I hope nobody else here has. Naturally I want it to
last our lifetime, my children's lifetime, and as long after that as I
can visualize my descendants, but don't think I have any burning
affection for my unborn great-great grandchildren. Now, if there is
anybody here who doesn't want it to last that long, I suggest to him
that the quickest way to demoralize the Syndic is to adopt Dick Reiner's
proposal of a holy war for a starter. From there we can proceed to an
internal heresy hunt, a census, excise taxes, income taxes and wars of
aggression. Now, what about getting back to the assassinations?"

Orsino shook his head, thoroughly confused by now. But the confusion
vanished as a girl entered the room, whispered something in the ear of
Edward Falcaro and sat down calmly by his side. He wasn't the only one
who noticed her. Most of the faces there registered surprise and some
indignation. The Syndic had a very strong tradition of masculinity.

Edward Falcaro ignored the surprise and indignation. He said placidly:
"That was very interesting, Frank, what I understood of it. But it's
always interesting when I go ahead and do something because it's the
smart thing to do, and then listen to you explain my reasons--including
fifty or sixty that I'm more than positive never crossed my mind."

There was a laugh around the table that Charles Orsino thought was
unfair. He knew, Edward Falcaro knew, and everybody knew that Taylor
credited Falcaro with sound intuitive judgment rather than analytic
power. He supposed the old man--intuitively--had decided a laugh was
needed to clear the air of the quarrel and irrelevance.

Falcaro went on: "The way things stand now, gentlemen, we don't know
very much, do we?" He bit a fresh cigar and lighted it meditatively.
From a cloud of rank smoke he said: "So the thing to do is find out
more, isn't it?" In spite of the beard and the cigar, there was
something of a sly, teasing child about him. "So what do you say to
slipping one of our own people into the Government to find out whether
they're dealing in assassination or not?"

Charles Orsino alone was naive enough to speak; the rest knew that the
old man had something up his sleeve. Charles said: "You can't do it,
sir! They have lie-detectors and drugs and all sorts of things--" His
voice died down miserably under Falcaro's too-benign smile and the looks
of irritation verging on disgust from the rest. The enigmatic girl
scowled. _Goddam them all!_ Charles thought, sinking into his chair and
wishing he could sink into the earth.

"The young man," Falcaro said blandly, "speaks the truth--no less true
for being somewhat familiar to us all. But what if we have a way to get
around the drugs and lie-detectors, gentlemen? Which of you bold fellows
would march into the jaws of death by joining the Government, spying on
them and trying to report back?"

Charles stood up, prudence and timidity washed away by a burning need to
make up for his embarrassment with a grandstand play. "I'll go, sir," he
said very calmly. _And if I get killed that'll show 'em; then they'll be
sorry._

"Good boy," Edward Falcaro said briskly, with a well-that's that air.
"The young lady here will take care of you."

Charles steadily walked down the long room to the head of the table,
thinking that he must be cutting a rather fine figure. Uncle Frank
ruined his exit by catching his sleeve and halting him as he passed his
seat. "Good luck, Charles," Uncle Frank whispered. "And for Heaven's
sake, keep a better guard up. Can't you see the old devil planned it
this way from the beginning?"

"Good-bye, Uncle Frank," Charles said, suddenly feeling quite sick as he
walked on. The young lady rose and opened the door for him. She was
graceful as a cat, and a conviction overcame Charles Orsino that he was
the canary.




V


Max Wyman shoved his way through such a roar of voices and such a crush
of bodies as he had never known before. Scratch Sheet Square was bright
as day--brighter. Atomic lamps, mounted on hundred-story buildings hosed
and squirted the happy mob with blue-white glare. The Scratch Sheet's
moving sign was saying in fiery letters seventy-five feet tall: "_11:58
PM EST ... December 31st ... Cops say two million jam NYC streets to
greet New Year ... 11:59 PM EST ... December 31st ... Falcaro jokes on
TV 'Never thought we'd make it' ... 12:00 midnight January 1st ... Happy
New Year ..._"

The roar of voices had become insane. Max Wyman held his head, hating
it, hating them all, trying to shut them out. Half a dozen young men
against whom he was jammed were tearing the clothes off a girl. They
were laughing and she was too, making only a pretense of defending
herself. It was one of New York's mild winter nights. Wyman looked at
the white skin not knowing that his eyes gloated. He yelled curses at
her, and the young men. But nobody heard his whiskey-hoarsened young
voice.

Somebody thrust a bottle at him and made mouths, trying to yell: "Happy
New Year!" He grabbed feverishly at the bottle and held it to his mouth,
letting the liquor gurgle once, twice, three times. Then the bottle was
snatched away, not by the man who had passed it to him. A hilarious fat
woman plastered herself against Wyman and kissed him clingingly on the
mouth, to his horror and disgust. She was torn away from him by a
laughing, white-haired man and turned willingly to kissing him instead.

Two strapping girls jockeyed Wyman between them and began to tear _his_
clothes off, laughing at their switcheroo on the year's big gag. He
clawed out at them hysterically and they stopped, the laughter dying on
their lips as they saw his look of terrified rage. A sudden current in
the crowd parted Wyman from them; another bottle bobbed on the sea of
humanity. He clutched at it and this time did not drink. He stuffed it
hurriedly under the waistband of his shorts and kept a hand on it as the
eddy of humanity bore him on to the fringes of the roaring mob.

"_Syndic leaders hail New Year ... Taylor praises Century of Freedom ...
12:05 AM EST January 1st ..._"

Wyman was mashed up against a girl who first smiled at his young face
invitingly ... and then looked again. "Get away from me!" she shrieked,
pounding on his chest with her small fists. You could hear individual
voices now, but the crowd was still dense. She kept screaming at him and
hitting him until suddenly Scratch Sheet Square Upramp loomed and the
crowd fizzed onto it like uncorked champagne, Wyman and the screaming
girl carried along the moving plates underfoot. The crowd boiled onto
the northbound strip, relieving the crush; the girl vanished,
whimpering, into the mob.

Wyman, rubbing his ear mechanically, shuffled with downcast eyes to the
Eastbound ramp and collapsed onto a bench gliding by at five miles per
hour. He looked stupidly at the ten-mile and fifteen-mile strips, but
did not dare step onto them. He had been drinking steadily for a month.
He would fall and the bottle would break.

He lurched off the five-mile strip at Riverside Downramp. Nobody got off
with him. Riverside was a tangle of freightways over, under and on the
surface. He worked there.

Wyman picked his way past throbbing conveyors roofed against pilferage,
under gurgling fuel and water and waste pipes, around vast metal
warehouses and storage tanks. It was not dark or idle in Riverside.
Twenty-four hours was little enough time to bring Manhattan its daily
needs and carry off its daily waste and manufactures. Under daylight
atomics the transport engineers in their glass perches read the dials
and turned the switches. Breakdown crews scurried out from emergency
stations as bells clanged to replace a sagging plate, remag a failing
ehrenhafter, unplug a jam of nylon bales at a too-sharp corner.

He found Breakdown Station 26, hitched his jacket over the bottle and
swayed in, drunk enough to think he could pretend he was sober. "Hi," he
said hoarsely to the shift foreman. "Got jammed up in the celebration."

"We heard it clear over here," the foreman said, looking at him closely.
"Are you all right, Max?"

The question enraged him. "'Smatter?" he yelled. "Had a couple, sure.
Think 'm drunk? Tha' wha' ya think?"

"Gee," the foreman said wearily. "Look, Max, I can't send you out
tonight. You might get killed. I'm trying to be reasonable and I wish
you'd do as much for me. What's biting you, boy? Nobody has anything
against a few drinks and a few laughs. I went on a bender last month
myself. But you get so Goddammed _mean_ I can't stand you and neither
can anybody else."

Wyman spewed obscenity at him and tried to swing on him. He was
surprised and filled with self-pity when somebody caught his arm and
somebody else caught his other arm. It was Dooley and Weintraub, his
shift-mates, looking unhappy and concerned.

"Lousy rats!" Wyman choked out. "Leas' a man's buddies c'd do is back'm
up...." He began to cry, hating them, and then fell asleep on his feet.
Dooley and Weintraub eased him down onto the floor.

The foreman mopped his head and appealed to Dooley: "He always like
this?" He had been transferred to Station 26 only two weeks before.

Dooley shrugged. "You might say so. He showed up about three months ago.
Said he used to be a breakdown man in Buffalo, on the yards. He knew the
work all right. But I never saw such a mean kid. Never a good word for
anybody. Never any fun. Booze, booze, booze. This time he really let
go."

Weintraub said unexpectedly: "I think he's what they used to call an
alcoholic."

"What the hell's that?" the foreman demanded.

"I read about it. It's something they used to have before the Syndic. I
read about it. Things were a lot different then. People picking on you
all the time, everybody mad all the time. The girls were scared to give
it away and the boys were scared to take it--but they did anyway and it
was kind of like fighting with yourself _inside_ yourself. The fighting
wore some people out so much they just couldn't take it any more.
Instead of going on benders for a change of pace like sensible people,
they boozed _all_ the time--and they had a fight inside themselves
about _that_ so they boozed harder." He looked defensive at their
skeptical faces. "I _read_ it," he insisted.

"Well," the foreman said inconclusively, "I heard things used to be
pretty bad. Did these alcoholers get over it?"

"I don't know," Weintraub admitted. "I didn't read that far."

"Hm. I think I'd better can him." The foreman was studying their faces
covertly, hoping to read a reaction. He did. Both the men looked
relieved. "Yeh. I think I'd better can him. He can go to the Syndic for
relief if he has to. He doesn't do us much good here. Put some soup on
and get it down him when he wakes up." The foreman, an average kindly
man, hoped the soup would help.

But at about three-thirty, after two trouble calls in succession, they
noticed that Wyman had left leaving no word.

       *       *       *       *       *

The fat little man struggled out of the New Year's eve throng; he had
been caught by accident. Commander Grinnel did not go in for
celebrations. When he realized that January fifteenth was now fifteen
days away, he doubted that he would ever celebrate again. It was a
two-man job he had to do on the fifteenth, and so far he had not found
the other man.

He rode the slidewalk to Columbus Square. He had been supplied with a
minimum list of contacts. One had moved, and in the crazily
undisciplined Syndic Territory it was impossible to trace anybody.
Another had died--of too much morphine. Another had beaten her husband
almost to death with a chair leg and was in custody awaiting trial. The
Commander wondered briefly and querulously: why do we always have such
unstable people here? Or does that louse Emory deliberately saddle me
with them when I'm on a mission? Wouldn't put it past him.

The final contact on the list was a woman. She'd be worthless for the
business of January fifteenth; that called for some physical strength,
some technical knowledge, and a residual usefulness to the Government.
Professor Speiser had done some good work here on industrial sabotage,
but taken away from the scene of possible operations, she'd just be a
millstone. He had his record to think of.

Sabotage--

If a giggling threesome hadn't been looking his way from a bench across
the slidewalk, he would have ground his teeth. In recent weeks, he had
done what he estimated as an easy three million dollars worth of damage
to Mob Territory industry. And the stupid fools hadn't _noticed_ it!
Repair crews had rebuilt the fallen walls, mechanics had tut-tutted over
the wrecked engines and replaced them, troubleshooters had troubleshot
the scores of severed communications lines and fuel mains.

He had hung around.

"Sam, you see this? Melted through, like with a little thermite bomb.
How in the hell did a thing like that happen?"

"I don't know. I wasn't here. Let's get it fixed kid."

"Okay ... you think we ought to report this to somebody?"

"If you want to. I'll mention it to Larry. But I don't see what he can
do about it. Must've been some kids. You gotta put it down as fair wear
and tear. But boys will be boys."

Remembering, he did grind his teeth. But they were at Columbus Square.

       *       *       *       *       *

Professor Speiser lived in one of the old plastic brick faculty houses.
Her horsy face, under a curling net, looked out of the annunciator
plate. "Yes? What is it?"

"Professor Speiser, I believe you know my daughter, Miss _Freeman_. She
asked me to look you up while I was in New York. Have I come much too
late?"

"Oh, dear. Why, no. I suppose not. Come in, Mr.--Mr. Freeman."

In her parlor, she faced him apprehensively. When she spoke she rolled
out her sentences like the lecturer she was. "Mr. Freeman--as I suppose
you'd prefer me to call you--you asked a moment ago whether you'd come
too late. I realize that the question was window-dressing, but my answer
is quite serious. You have come too late. I have decided to dissociate
myself from--let us say, from your daughter, Miss Freeman."

The Commander asked only: "Is that irrevocable?"

"Quite. It wouldn't be fair of me to ask you to leave without an
explanation. I am perfectly willing to give one. I realize now that my
friendship with Miss Freeman and the work I did for her stemmed from,
let us say a certain vacancy in my life."

He looked at a picture on her desk of a bald, pleasant-faced fellow with
a pipe.

She followed his eyes and said with a sort of shy pride: "That is Dr.
Mordecai, of the University's Faculty of Dentistry. Like myself, a
long-time celibate. We plan to marry."

The Commander said: "Do you feel that Dr. Mordecai might like to meet my
daughter?"

"No. I do not. We expect to have very little time for outside
activities, between our professional careers and our personal lives.
Please don't misunderstand, Mr. Freeman. I am still your daughter's
friend. I always shall be. But somehow I no longer find in myself an
urgency to express the friendship. It seems like a beautiful dream--and
a quite futile one. I have come to realize that one can live a full life
without Miss Freeman. Now, it's getting quite late--"

He smiled ruefully and rose. "May I wish you every happiness, Professor
Speiser?" he said, extending his hand.

She beamed with relief. "I was so afraid you'd--"

Her face went limp and she stood swaying drunkenly as the needle in the
ring popped her skin.

The Commander, his face as dead as hers, disconnected his hand and
sheathed the needle carefully again. He drew one of his guns, shot her
through the heart and walked out of the apartment.

Old fool! She should have known better.

       *       *       *       *       *

Max Wyman stumbled through the tangle of Riveredge, his head a pot of
molten lead and his legs twitching under him as he fled from his shame.

Dimly, as if with new eyes, he saw that he was not alone. Riveredge was
technically uninhabited. Then what voices called guardedly to him from
the shadows: "Buddy--buddy--wait up a minute, buddy--did you score? Did
you score?"

He lurched on and the voices became bolder. The snaking conveyors and
ramps sliced out sectors of space. Storage tanks merged with inflow
mains to form sheltered spots where they met. No spot was without its
whining, appealing voice. He stood at last, quivering, leaning against a
gigantic I-beam that supported a heavy-casting freightway. A scrap sheet
of corrugated iron rested against the bay of the I-beam, and the sheet
quivered and fell outward. An old man's voice said: "You're beat, son.
Come on in."

He staggered a step forward and collapsed on a pallet of rags as
somebody carefully leaned the sheet back into place again.




VI


Max Wyman woke raving with the chuck horrors. There was somebody there
to hand him candy bars, sweet lemonade, lump sugar. There was somebody
to shove him easily back into the pallet of rags when he tried to
stumble forth in a hunt for booze. On the second day he realized that
it was an old man whose face looked gray and paralyzed. His name was T.
G. Pendelton, he said.

After a week, he let Max Wyman take little walks about their part of
Riverside--but not by night. "We've got some savage people here," he
said. "They'd murder you for a pint. The women are worse. If one calls
to you, don't go. You'll wind up dumped through a manhole into the
Hudson. Poor folk."

"You're _sorry_ for them?" Wyman asked, startled. It was a new idea to
him. Since Buffalo, he had never been sorry for anybody. Something awful
had happened there, some terrible betrayal ... he passed his bony hand
across his forehead. He didn't want to think about it.

"Would I live here if I weren't?" T. G. asked him. "Sometimes I can help
them. There's nobody else to help them. They're old and sick and they
don't fit anywhere. That's why they're savage. You're young--the only
young man I've ever seen in Riveredge. There's so much outside for the
young. But when you get old it sometimes throws you."

"The Goddammed Syndic," Wyman snarled, full of hate.

T. G. shrugged. "Maybe it's too easy for sick old people to get booze.
They lose somebody they spent a life with and it throws them. People
harden into a pattern. They always had fun, they think they always will.
Then half of the pattern's gone and they can't stand it, some of them.
You got it early. What was the ringing bell?"

Wyman collapsed into the bay of the I-beam as if he'd been kicked in the
stomach. A wave of intolerable memory swept over him. A ringing bell, a
wobbling pendulum, a flashing light, the fair face of his betrayer, the
hateful one of Hogan, stirred together in a hell brew. "Nothing," he
said hoarsely, thinking that he'd give his life for enough booze to
black him out. "Nothing."

"You kept talking about it," T. G. said. "Was it real?"

"It couldn't have been," Wyman muttered. "There aren't such things. No.
There was her and that Syndic and that louse Hogan. I don't want to talk
about it."

"Suit yourself."

He did talk about it later, curiously clouded though it was. The years
in Buffalo. The violent love affair with Inge. The catastrophic scene
when he found her with Regan, king-pin mobster. The way he felt turned
inside-out, the lifetime of faith in the Syndic behind him and the
lifetime of a faith in Inge ahead of him, both wrecked, the booze, the
flight from Buffalo to Erie, to Pittsburgh, to Tampa, to New York. And
somehow, insistently, the ringing bell, the wobbling pendulum and the
flashing light that kept intruding between episodes of reality.

T. G. listened patiently, fed him, hid him when infrequent patrols went
by. T. G. never told him his own story, but a bloated woman who lived
with a yellow-toothed man in an abandoned storage tank did one day, her
voice echoing from the curving, windowless walls of corrugated plastic.
She said T. G. had been an alky chemist, reasonably prosperous,
reasonably happy, reasonably married. His wife was the faithful kind and
he was not. With unbelievable slyness she had dulled the pain for years
with booze and he had never suspected. They say she had killed herself
after one frightful week-long debauche in Riveredge. T. G. came down to
Riveredge for the body and returned after giving it burial and drawing
his savings from the bank. He had never left Riveredge since.

"Worsh'p the grun' that man walks on," the bloated woman mumbled. "Nev'
gets mad, nev' calls you hard names. Give y'a bottle if y' need it. Talk
to y' if y' blue. Worsh'p that man."

Max Wyman walked from the storage tank, sickened. T. G.'s charity
covered that creature and him.

It was the day he told T. G.: "I'm getting out of here."

The gray, paralyzed-looking face almost smiled. "See a man first?"

"Friend of yours?"

"Somebody who heard about you. Maybe he can do something for you. He
feels the way you do about the Syndic."

Wyman clenched his teeth. The pain still came at the thought. Syndic,
Hogan, Inge and betrayal. God, to be able to hit back at them!

The red ride ebbed. Suddenly he stared at T. G. and demanded: "Why? Why
should you put me in touch? What is this?"

T. G. shrugged. "I don't worry about the Syndic. I worry about people.
I've been worrying about you. You're a little insane, Max, like all of
us here."

"God damn you!"

"He has...."

Max Wyman paused a long time and said: "Go on, will you?" He realized
that anybody else would have apologized. But he couldn't and he knew
that T. G. knew he couldn't.

The old man said: "A little insane. Bottled-up hatred. It's better out
of you than in. It's better to sock the man you hate and stand a chance
of having him sock you back than it is just to hate him and let the
hate gnaw you like a grave-worm."

"What've you got against the Syndic?"

"Nothing, Max. Nothing against it and nothing for it. What I'm for is
people. The Syndic is people. You're people. Slug 'em if you want and
they'll have a chance to slug you back. Maybe you'll pull down the
Syndic like Samson in the temple; more likely it'll crush you. But
you'll be _doing_ something about it. That's the great thing. That's the
thing people have to learn--or they wind up in Riveredge."

"You're crazy."

"I told you I was, or I wouldn't be here."

The man came at sunset. He was short and pudgy, with a halo of wispy
hair and the coldest, grimmest eyes that Wyman had ever seen. He shook
hands with Wyman, and the young man noted simultaneously a sharp pain in
his finger and that the stranger wore an elaborate gold ring. Then the
world got hazy and confused. He had a sense that he was being asked
questions, that he was answering them, that it went on for hours and
hours.

When things quite suddenly came into focus again, the pudgy man was
saying: "I can introduce myself now. Commander Grinnel, of the North
American Navy. My assignment is recruiting. The preliminary examination
has satisfied me that you are no plant and would be a desirable citizen
of the N. A. Government. I invite you to join us."

"What would I do?" Wyman asked steadily.

"That depends on your aptitudes. What do you think you would like to
do?"

Wyman said: "Kill me some Syndics."

The commander stared at him with those cold eyes. He said at last: "It
can probably be arranged. Come with me."

       *       *       *       *       *

They went by train to Cape Cod. At midnight on January 15th, the
commander and Wyman left their hotel room and strolled about the
streets. The commander taped small packets to the four legs of the
microwave relay tower that connected Cape Cod with the Continental Press
common carrier circuits and taped other packets to the police station's
motor pool gate.

At 1:00 A.M., the tower exploded and the motor pool gate fused into an
impassible puddle of blue-hot molten metal. Simultaneously, fifty men in
turtle-neck sweaters and caps appeared from nowhere on Center Street.
Half of them barricaded the street, firing on citizens and cops who came
too close. The others systematically looted every store between the
barricade and the beach.

Blinking a flashlight in code, the commander approached the deadline
unmolested and was let through with Wyman at his heels. The goods, the
raiders, the commander and Wyman were aboard a submarine by 2:35 and
under way ten minutes later.

After Commander Grinnel had exchanged congratulations with the sub
commander, he presented Wyman.

"A recruit. Normally I wouldn't have bothered, but he had a rather
special motivation. He could be very useful."

The sub commander studied Wyman impersonally. "If he's not a plant."

"I've used my ring. If you want to get it over with, we can test him and
swear him in now."

They strapped him into a device that recorded pulse, perspiration,
respiration, muscle-tension and brainwaves. A sweatered specialist came
and mildly asked Wyman matter-of-fact questions about his surroundings
while he calibrated the polygraph.

Then came the pay-off. Wyman did not fail to note that the sub commander
loosened his gun in his holster when the questioning began.

"Name, age and origin?"

"Max Wyman. Twenty-two. Buffalo Syndic Territory."

"Do you like the Syndic?"

"I hate them."

"What are your feelings toward the North American Government?"

"If it's against the Syndic, I'm for it."

"Would you rob for the North American Government?"

"I would."

"Would you kill for it?"

"I would."

"Have you any reservations yet unstated in your answers?"

"No."

It went on for an hour. The questions were re-phrased continuously;
after each of Wyman's firm answers, the sweatered technician gave a
satisfied little nod. At last it ended and he was unstrapped from the
device.

Max was tired.

The sub commander seemed a little awed as he got a small book and read
from it: "Do you, Max Wyman, solemnly renounce all allegiances
previously held by you and pledge your allegiance to the North American
Government?"

"I do," the young man said fiercely.

In a remote corner of his mind, for the first time in months, the bell
ceased to ring, the pendulum to beat and the light to flash.

Charles Orsino knew again who he was and what was his mission.




VII


It had begun when the girl led him through the conference room door.
Naturally one had misgivings; naturally one didn't speak up. But the
vault-like door far downstairs was terrifying when it yawned before you
and even more so when it closed behind you.

"What is this place?" he demanded at last. "Who are you?"

She said: "Psychology lab."

It produced on him the same effect that "alchemy section" or "Division
of astrology" would have on a well-informed young man in 1950. He
repeated flatly: "Psychology lab. If you don't want to tell me, very
well. I volunteered without strings." Which should remind her that he
was a sort of hero and should be treated with a certain amount of
dignity and that she could save her corny jokes.

"I meant it," she said, fiddling busily with the locks of yet another
vault-like door. "I'm a psychologist. I'm also by the way, Lee
Falcaro--since you asked."

"The old man--Edward Falcaro's line?" he asked.

"Simon pure. He's my father's brother. Father's down in Miami, handling
the tracks and gaming in general."

The second big door opened on a brain-gray room whose air had a
curiously dead feel to it. "Sit down," she said, indicating a very
unorthodox chair. He did, and found that the chair was the most
comfortable piece of furniture he had ever known. Its contact with his
body was so complete that it pressed nowhere, it poked nowhere. The girl
studied dials in its back nevertheless and muttered something about
adjusting it. He protested.

"Nonsense," she said decisively. She sat down herself in an ordinary
seat. Charles shifted uneasily in his chair to find that it moved with
him. Still no pressure, still no poking.

"You're wondering," she began, "about the word 'psychology'. It has a
bad history and people have given it up as a bad job. It's true that
there isn't pressure nowadays to study the human mind. People get along.
In general what they want they get, without crippling effort. In your
uncle Frank Taylor's language, the Syndic is an appropriately-structured
organization of high morale and wide public acceptance. In my language
the Syndic is a father-image which does a good job of fathering. In good
times, people aren't introspective.

"There is, literally, no reason why my line of the family should have
kept up a tradition of experimental psychology. Way, way back, old
Amadeo Falcaro often consulted Professor Oscar Sternweiss of the
Columbia University psychology faculty--he wasn't as much of a dashing
improvisor as the history books make him out to be. Eventually one of
his daughters married one of Sternweiss' sons and inherited the
Sternweiss notebooks and library and apparatus. It became an irrational
custom to keep it alive. When each academic school of psychology managed
to prove that every other school of psychology was dead wrong and
psychology collapsed as a science, the family tradition was unaffected;
it stood outside the wrangling.

"Now, you're wondering what this has to do with trying to slip you into
the Government."

"I am," Charles said fervently. If she'd been a doll outside the Syndic,
he would minutes ago have protested that all this was foolish and walked
out. Since she was not only in the Syndic, but in the Falcaro line, he
had no choice except to hear her babble and _then_ walk out. It was all
rot, psychology. Id, oversoul, mind-vectors, counseling,
psychosomatics--rot from sick-minded old men. Everybody knew--

"The Government, we know, uses deinhibiting drugs as a first screening
of its recruits. As an infallible second screening, they use a
physiological lie-detector based on the fact that telling a lie causes
tensions in the liar's body. We shall get around this by slipping you in
as a young man who hates the Syndic for some valid reason--"

"Confound it, you were just telling me that they can't be fooled!"

"We won't fool them. You'll _be_ a young man who hates the Syndic. We'll
tear down your present personality a gray cell at a time. We'll pump you
full of Seconal every day for a quarter of a year.... We'll obliterate
your personality under a new one. We'll bury Charles Orsino under a
mountain of suggestions, compulsions and obsessions shoveled at you
sixteen hours a day while you're too groggy to resist. Naturally the
supplanting personality will be neurotic, but that works in with the
mission."

He struggled with a metaphysical concept, for the first time in his
life. "But--but--how will I know I'm _me_?"

"We think we can put a trigger on it. When you take the Government oath
of allegiance, you should bounce back."

He did not fail to note a little twin groove between her brows that
appeared when she said _think_ and _should_. He knew that in a sense he
was nearer death now than when Halloran's bullet had been intercepted.

"Are you staying with it?" she asked simply.

Various factors entered into it. _A life for the Syndic_, as in the
children's history books. That one didn't loom very large. But multiply
it by _it sounds like more fun than hot-rod polo_, and that by _this is
going to raise my stock sky-high with the family_ and you had something.
Somehow, under Lee Falcaro's interested gaze, he neglected to divide it
by _if it works_.

"I'm staying with it," he said.

She grinned. "It won't be too hard," she said. "In the old days there
would have been voting record, social security numbers, military
service, addresses they could check on--hundreds of things. Now about
all we have to fit you with is a name and a subjective life."

It began that spring day and went on into late fall.

The ringing bell.

The flashing light.

The wobbling pendulum.

You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic Territory. You are Max Wyman of
Buffalo Syndic Territory. You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic....

[Illustration]

Mom fried pork sausages in the morning, you loved the smell of
pumpernickel from the bakery in Vesey Street.

Mr. Watsisname the English teacher with the mustache wanted you to go to
college--

    _Nay, ye can not, though ye had Argus eyes,
    In abbeyes they haue so many suttyll spyes;
    For ones in the yere they have secret vvsytacyons,
    And yf ony prynce reforme...._

--but the stockyard job was closer, they needed breakdown men--

You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic Territory. You are--

The ringing bell.

The flashing light.

The wobbling pendulum.

And the pork sausages and the teacher with the mustache and poems you
loved and

_page 24, paragraph 3, maximum speed on a live-cattle walkway is three
miles per hour: older walkways hold this speed with reduction gears
coupled to a standard 18-inch ehrenhafter unit. Standard practice in new
construction calls for holding speed by direct drive from a
specially-wound ehrenhafter. This places a special obligation in
breakdown maintenance men, who must distinguish between the two types,
carry two sets of wiring diagrams and a certain number of
mutually-uninterchangeable parts, though good design principles hold
these to a minimum. The main difference in the winding of a standard
18-incher and a lowspeed ehrenhafter rotor--_

Of course things are better now, Max Wyman, you owe a great debt to Jim
Hogan, Father of the Buffalo Syndic, who fought for your freedom in the
great old days, and to his descendants who are tirelessly working for
your freedom and happiness.

And bow-happiness is a girl named Inge Klohbel now that you're almost a
man.

You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic Territory. You are Max Wyman of
Buffalo Syndic Territory.

And Inge Klohbel is why you put away the crazy dream of scholarship, for
her lips and hair and eyes and legs mean more to you than anything, more
than

_Later phonologic changes include palatal mutation; i.e., before_ cht
_and_ hs _the diphthongs_ eo, io, _which resulted from breaking, became_
ie (i, y) _as in_ cneoht, chieht, _and_ seox (_x equalling_ hs), siex,
six, syx....

the crazy dream of scholarship, what kind of a way is that to repay the
Mob and

The ringing bell.

The flashing light.

The wobbling pendulum.

repay the Syndic and young Mike Hogan all over the neighborhood suddenly
and Inge says he did stop and say hello but of course he was just being
polite.

so you hit the manuals hard and one day you go out on a breakdown call
and none of the older men could figure out why the pump was on the blink;
a roaring, chewing monster of a pump it was, sitting there like a dead
husk and the cattlefeed backed up four miles to a storage tank in the
suburbs and the steers in the yards bawling with hunger, and you traced
the dead wire, you out with the spot-welder, a zip of blue flame and the
pump began to chew again and you got the afternoon off.

       *       *       *       *       *

And there they were.

_Lee Falcaro: (Bending over the 'muttering, twitching carcass)
Adrenalin. Brighter picture and louder sound._

_Assistant: (Opening a pinch cock in the tube that enters the arm,
increasing video contrast, increasing audio): He's weakening._

_Lee Falcaro: (In a whisper) I know. I know. But this is IT._

_Assistant: (Inaudibly) You cold-blooded bitch._

You are Max Wyman, you are Max Wyman,

and you don't know what to do about the Syndic that betrayed you, about
the girl who betrayed you with the living representative of the Syndic,
about the dream of scholarship that lies in ruins, the love that lies in
ruins after how many promises and vows, the faith of twenty years that
lies in ruins after how many declarations.

The ringing bell.

The flashing light.

The wobbling pendulum.

And a double whiskey with a beer chaser.

_Lee Falcaro: The alcohol. (It drips from a sterile graduate, trickles
through the rubber tubing and into the arm of the mumbling, sweating
carcass. The molecules mingle with the molecules of serum: In seconds
they are washed against the cell-walls of the forebrain. The cell-walls
their structure as the alcohol molecules bumble against them; the
lattices of jelly that wall in the cytoplasm and nuclear jelly become
thinner than they were. Streams of electrons that had coursed in
familiar paths through chains of neurones find easier paths through the
poison-thinned cell-walls. A "Memory" or an "Idea" or a "Hope" or a
"Value" that was a configuration of neurones linked by electron streams
vanishes when the electron streams find an easier way to flow a New
"Memories," "Ideas," "Hopes" and "Values" that are configurations of
neurones linked by electron streams are born.)_

Love and loyalty die, but not as if they had never been. Their ghosts
remain, Max Wyman and you are haunted by them. They hound you from
Buffalo to Erie, but there is no oblivion deep enough in the Mex joints,
or in Tampa tequila or Pittsburgh zubrovka or New York gin.

You tell incurious people who came to the place on the corner for a shot
and some talk that you're the best breakdown man that ever came out of
Erie; you tell them women are no God-damn good, you tell them the
Syndic--here you get sly and look around with drunken caution, lowering
your voice--you tell them the Syndic's no God-damned good, and you
drunkenly recite poetry until they move away, puzzled and annoyed.

_Lee Falcaro: (Passing a weary hand across her forehead) well, he's had
it. Disconnect the tubes, give him a 48-hour stretch in bed and then get
him on the street pointed towards Riveredge._

_Assistant: Does the apparatus go into dead storage?_

_Lee Falcaro: (Grimacing uncontrollably) No. Unfortunately, no._

_Assistant: (Inaudibly, as she plucks needle-tipped tubes from the
carcass' elbows) who's the next sucker?_




VIII


The submarine surfaced at dawn. Orsino had been assigned a bunk and, to
his surprise, had fallen asleep almost at once. At eight in the morning,
he was shaken awake by one of the men in caps.

"Shift change," the man explained laconically.

Orsino started to say something polite and sleepy. The man grabbed his
shoulder and rolled him onto the deck, snarling: "You going to _argue_?"

Orsino's reactions were geared to hot-rod polo--doing the split-second
right thing after instinctively evaluating the roll of the ball, the
ricochet of bullets, the probable tactics and strategy of the opposing
four. They were not geared to a human being who behaved with the blind
ferocity of an inanimate object. He just gawked at him from the deck,
noting that the man had one hand on a sheath knife.

"All right, buster," the man said contemptuously, apparently deciding
that Orsino would stay put. "Just don't mess with the Guard." He rolled
into the bunk and gave a good imitation of a man asleep until Orsino
worked his way through the crowded compartment and up a ladder to the
deck.

There was a heavy, gray over-cast. The submarine seemed to be planing
the water; salt spray washed the shining deck. A gun crew was forward,
drilling with a five-incher. The rasp of a petty-officer singing out the
numbers mingled with the hiss and gurgle of the spray. Orsino leaned
against the conning tower and tried to comb his thoughts out clean and
straight.

It wasn't easy.

He was Charles Orsino, very junior Syndic member, with all memories
pertaining thereto.

He was also, more dimly, Max Wyman with _his_ memories. Now, able to
stand outside of Wyman, he could recall how those memories had been
implanted--down to the last stab of the last needle. He thought some
very bitter thoughts about Lee Falcaro--and dropped them, snapping to
attention as Commander Grinnel pulled himself through the hatch. "Good
morning, sir," he said.

The cold eyes drilled him. "Rest," the commander said. "We don't play it
that way on a pigboat. I hear you had some trouble about your bunk."

Orsino shrugged uncomfortably.

"Somebody should have told you," the commander said. "The boat's full of
Guardsmen. They have a very high opinion of themselves--which is
correct. They carried off the raid in good style. You don't mess with
Guards."

"What are they?" Orsino asked.

Grinnel shrugged. "The usual elite," he said. "Loman's gang." He noted
Orsino's blank look and smiled coldly. "Loman's President of North
America," he said.

"On shore," Orsino hazarded, "we used to hear about somebody named Ben
Miller."

"Obsolete information. Miller had the Marines behind him. Loman was
Secretary of Defense. He beached the Marines and broke them up into
guard detachments. Took away their heavy weapons. Meanwhile, he built up
the Guard, very quietly--which, with the Secretary of Information behind
him, he could do. About two years ago, he struck. The Marines who didn't
join the Guard were massacred. Miller had the sense to kill himself. The
Veep and the Secretary of State resigned, but it didn't save their
necks. Loman assumed the Presidency automatically, of course, and had
them shot. They were corrupt as hell anyway. They were owned body and
soul by the southern bloc."

Two seamen appeared with a folding cot, followed by the sub commander.
He was red-eyed with lack of sleep. "Set it there," he told them, and
sat heavily on the sagging canvas. "Morning, Grinnel," he said with an
effort. "Believe I'm getting too old for the pigboats. I want sun and
air. Think you can use your influence at court to get me a corvette?" He
bared his teeth to show it was a joke.

Grinnel said, with a minimum smile: "If I had any influence, would I
catch the cloak-and-dagger crap they sling at me?"

The sub commander rolled back onto the cot and was instantly asleep, a
muscle twitching the left side of his face every few seconds.

Grinnel drew Orsino to the lee of the conning tower. "We'll let him
sleep," he said. "Go tell that gun crew Commander Grinnel says they
should lay below."

Orsino did. The petty officer said something exasperated about the
gunnery training bill and Orsino repeated his piece. They secured the
gun and went below.

Grinnel said, with apparent irrelevance: "You're a rare bird, Wyman.
You're capable--and you're uncommitted. Let's go below. Stick with me."

       *       *       *       *       *

He followed the fat little commander into the conning tower. Grinnel
told an officer of some sort: "I'll take the con, mister. Wyman here
will take the radar watch." He gave Orsino a look that choked off his
protests. Presumably, Grinnel knew that he was ignorant of radar.

The officer, looking baffled, said: "Yes, Commander." A seaman pulled
his head out of a face-fitting box and told Wyman: "It's all yours,
stranger." Wyman cautiously put his face into the box and was confronted
by meaningless blobs of green, numerals in the dark, and a couple of
arrows to make confusion complete.

He heard Grinnel say to the helmsman: "Get me a mug of joe, sailor. I'll
take the wheel."

"I'll pass the word, sir."

"Nuts you'll pass the word, sailor. Go get the coffee--and I want it now
and not when some steward's mate decides he's ready to bring it."

"Aye, aye, sir." Orsino heard him clatter down the ladder. Then his arm
was gripped and Grinnel's voice muttered in his ear: "When you hear me
bitch about the coffee, sing out: 'Aircraft 265, DX 3,000'. Good and
loud. No, don't stop looking. Repeat it."

Orsino said, his eyes crossing on double images of the meaningless,
luminous blobs: "Aircraft 265, DX 3,000. Good and loud. When you bitch
about the coffee."

"Right. Don't forget it."

He heard the feet on the ladder again. "Coffee, sir."

"Thanks, sailor." A long sip and then another. "I always said the
pigboats drink the lousiest joe in the Navy."

"Aircraft 265, DX 3,000!" Orsino yelled.

A thunderous alarm began to sound. "Take her down!" yelled Commander
Grinnel.

"Take her down, sir!" the helmsman echoed. "But sir, the skipper--"

Orsino remembered him too then, dead asleep in his cot on the deck, the
muscle twitching the left side of his face every few seconds.

"God-damn it, those were aircraft! _Take her down!_"

The luminous blobs and numbers and arrows swirled before Orsino's eyes
as the trim of the ship changed, hatches clanged to and water thundered
into the ballast tanks. He staggered and caught himself as the deck
angled sharply underfoot.

He knew what Grinnel had meant by saying he was uncommitted, and he knew
now that it was no longer true.

He thought for a moment that he might be sick into the face-fitting box,
but it passed.

Minutes later, Grinnel was on the mike, his voice sounding metallically
through the ship: "To all hands. To all hands. This is Commander
Grinnel. We lost the skipper in that emergency dive--but you and I know
that that's the way he would have wanted it. As senior line officer
aboard, I'm assuming command for the rest of the voyage. We will remain
submerged until dark. Division officers report to the wardroom. That's
all."

He tapped Orsino on the shoulder. "Take off," he said. Orsino realized
that the green blobs--clouds, were they?--no longer showed, and recalled
that radar didn't work through water.

He wasn't in on the wardroom meeting, and wandered rather forlornly
through the ship, incredibly jammed as it was with sleeping men,
coffee-drinking men and booty. Half a dozen times he had to turn away
close questioning about his radar experience and the appearance of the
aircraft on the radar scope. Each time he managed it, with the feeling
that one more question would have cooked his goose.

The men weren't sentimental about the skipper they had lost. Mostly they
wondered how much of a cut Grinnel would allot them from the booty of
Cape Cod.

At last the word passed for "Wyman" to report to the captain's cabin. He
did, sweating after a fifteen-minute chat with a radar technician.

Grinnel closed the door of the minute cabin and smirked at him. "You
have trouble, Wyman?" he asked.

"Yes."

"You'd have worse trouble if they found out for sure that you don't know
radar. I'd be in the clear. I could tell them you claimed to be a
qualified radar man. That would make me out to be pretty gullible, but
it would make you out to be a murderer. Who's backing you, Wyman? Who
told you to get rid of the skipper?"

"Quite right, sir," Orsino said. "You've really got me there."

"Glad you realize it, Wyman. I've got you and I can use you. It was a
great bit of luck, the skipper corking off on deck. But I've always had
a talent for improvisation. If you're determined to be a leader, Wyman,
nothing is more valuable. Do you know, I can relax with you? It's a rare
feeling. For once I can be certain that the man I'm talking to isn't one
of Loman's stooges, or one of Clinch's N.A.B.I. ferrets or anything else
but what he says he is--

"But that's beside the point. I have something else to tell you. There
are two sides to working for me, Wyman. One of them's punishment if you
get off the track. That's been made clear to you. The other is reward if
you stay on. I have plans, Wyman, that are large-scale. They simply
eclipse the wildest hopes of Loman, Clinch, Baggot and the rest. And
yet, they're not wild. How'd you like to be on the inside when the North
American Government returns to the mainland?"

Orsino uttered an authentic gasp and Commander Grinnel looked satisfied.




IX


The submarine docked at an indescribably lovely bay in the south of
Ireland. Orsino asked Grinnel whether the Irish didn't object to this,
and was met with a blank stare. It developed that the Irish consisted of
a few hundred wild men in the woods--maybe a few thousand. The stupid
shore-bound personnel couldn't seem to clean them out. Grinnel didn't
know anything about them, and he cared less.

Ireland appeared to be the naval base. The government proper was located
on Iceland, vernal again after a long, climatic swing. The Canaries and
Ascencion were outposts.

Orsino had learned enough on the voyage to recognize the Government for
what it was. It had happened before in history; Uncle Frank had pointed
it out. Big-time Caribbean piracy had grown from very respectable
origins. Gentlemen-skippers had been granted letters of marque and
reprisal by warring governments, which made them a sort of contract
navy. Periods of peace had found these privateers unwilling to give up
their hard earned complicated profession and their investments in it.
When they could no longer hoist the flag of England or France or Spain,
they simply hoisted the Jolly Roger and went it alone.

Confusing? Hell, yes! The famous Captain Kidd thought he was a gallant
privateer and sailed trustingly into New York. Somewhere he had failed
to touch third base; they shipped him to London for trial and hanged him
as a pirate. The famous Henry Morgan had never been anything but a
pirate and a super-pirate; as admiral of a private fleet he executed a
brilliant amphibious operation and sacked the city of Panama. He was
knighted, made governor of a fair-sized English island in the West
Indies and died loved and respected by all.

Charles Orsino found himself a member of a pirate band that called
itself the North American Government.

More difficult to learn were the ins and outs of pirate politics, which
were hampered with an archaic, structurally-inappropriate nomenclature
and body of tradition. Commander Grinnel was a Sociocrat, which meant
that he was in the same gang as President Loman. The late sub commander
had been a Constitutionist, which meant that he was allied with the
currently-out "southern bloc." The southern bloc did not consist of
southerners at this stage of the North American Government's history but
of a clique that tended to include the engineers and maintenance men of
the Government. That had been the reason for the sub commander's
erasure.

The Constitutionists traditionally commanded pigboats and aircraft while
surface vessels and the shore establishments were in the hands of the
Sociocrats--the fruit of some long-forgotten compromise.

Commander Grinnel cheerfully explained to Charles that there was a
crypto-Sociocrat naval officer primed and waiting to be appointed to the
command of the sub. The Constitutionist gang would back him to the hilt
and the Sociocrats would growl and finally assent. If, thereafter, the
Constitutionists ever counted on the sub in a coup, they would be
quickly disillusioned.

There wasn't much voting. Forty years before there had been a bad
deadlock following the death by natural causes of President Powell after
seventeen years in office. An ad hoc bipartisan conference called a
session of the Senate and the Senate elected a new president.

It was little information to be equipped with when you walked out into
the brawling streets of New Portsmouth on shore leave.

       *       *       *       *       *

The town had an improvised look which was strange to Orsino. There was a
sanitation reactor every hundred yards or so, but he mistrusted the look
of the ground-level mains that led to it from, the houses. There were
house flies from which he shied violently. Every other shack on the
waterfront was a bar or a notch joint. He sampled the goods at one of
the former and was shocked by the quality and price. He rolled out, his
ears still ringing from the belt of raw booze; as half a dozen sweatered
Guards rolled in, singing some esoteric song about their high morale and
even higher venereal rate. A couple of them looked at him appraisingly,
as though they wondered what kind of a noise he'd make if they jumped on
his stomach real hard, and he hurried away from them.

The other entertainment facilities of the waterfront were flatly ruled
out by a quick inspection of the wares. He didn't know what to make of
them. Joints back in Syndic Territory if you were a man, made sense. You
went to learn the ropes, or because you were afraid of getting mixed up
in something intense when you didn't want to, or because you wanted a
change, or because you were too busy, lazy or shy to chase skirts on
your own. If you were a woman and not too particular, a couple of years
in a joint left you with a considerable amount of money and some
interesting memories which you were under no obligation to discuss with
your husbands or husband.

But the sloppy beasts who called to him from the windows of the joints
here on the waterfront, left him puzzled and disgusted. He reflected,
strolling up Washington Street with eyes straight ahead, that women must
be in short supply if they could make a living--or that the male
citizens of the Government had no taste.

A whiff from one of those questionable sewer mains sent him reeling. He
ducked into another saloon in self-defense and leaned groggily against
the bar. A pretty brunette demanded: "What'll you have?"

"Gin, please." He peeled a ten off the roll Grinnel had given him. When
the girl poured his gin he looked at her and found her fair. In all
innocence, he asked her a question, as he might have asked a barmaid
back home. She could have answered, "Yes," "No," "Maybe," or "What's in
it for me?"

Instead she called him a lousy bastard, picked up a beer mug and was
about to shatter it on his head when a hand caught her and a voice
warned: "Hold it, Mabel! This guy's off my ship.

"He's just out of the States; he doesn't know any better. You know what
it's like over there."

Mabel snarled: "You better wise him up, then, friend. He can't go around
talking like that to decent women." She slapped down another glass,
poured gin and flounced down the bar.

Charles gulped his gin and turned shakily to his deliverer, a little
reactor specialist he had seen on the sub once or twice. "Thanks," he
said feeling inadequate. "Maybe you better wise me up. All I said was,
'Darling, do you--'"

The reactor man held up his hand. "That's enough," he said. "You don't
talk that way over here unless you want your scalp parted."

Charles, buzzing a little with the gin, protested hotly: "But what's the
harm? All she had to say was no; I wasn't going to throw her down on the
floor!"

It was all very confusing.

A shrug. "I heard about things in the States--Wyman, isn't it? I guess I
didn't really believe it. You mean I could go up to any woman and just
ask her how's about it?"

"Within reason, yes."

"And _do_ they?"

"Some do, some don't--like here."

"Like hell, like here! Last liberty--" and the reactor man told him a
long, confusing story about how he had picked up this pig, how she had
dangled it in front of him for one solid week while he managed to spend
three hundred and eighty-six dollars on her, and how finally she had
bawled that she couldn't, she just hated herself but she couldn't do
anything like _that_ and bang went the door in his face, leaving him to
finish out the evening in a notch joint.

"Good God!" Charles said, appalled. "Was she out of her mind?"

"No," the reactor man said glumly, "but I must have been. I should of
got her drunk and raped her the first night."

Charles was fully conscious that values were different here. Choking
down something like nausea, he asked carefully: "Is there much rape?"

The little man signalled for another gin and downed it. "I guess so.
Once when I was a kid a dame gave me this line about her cousin raped
her when she was little so she was frigid. I had more ambition then, so
I said: 'Then this won't be anything new to you, baby,' I popped her on
the button--"

"I've got to go now," Charles said, walking straight out of the saloon.
He was beginning to understand the sloppy beasts in the windows of the
notch joint and why men could bring themselves to settle for nothing
better. He was also overwhelmed by a great wave of home sickness.

The ugly pattern was beginning to emerge. Prudery, rape, frigidity,
intrigue for power--and assassination? Beyond the one hint, Grinnel had
said nothing that affected Syndic Territory.

But nothing would be more logical than for this band of brigands to lust
after the riches of the continent.

Back of the waterfront were shipfitting shops and living quarters. Work
was being done by a puzzling combination of mechanization and
musclepower. In one open shed he saw a lathe-hand turning a gunbarrel
out of a forging; the lathe was driven by one of those standard 18-inch
ehrenhaft rotors Max Wyman knew so well. But a vertical drillpress next
to it--Orsino blinked. Two men, sweating and panting, were turning a
stubborn vertical drum as tall as they were, and a belt drive from the
drum whirled the drill bit as it sank into a hunk of bronze. The men
were in rags, dirty rags. And it came to Orsino with a stunning shock
when he realized what the dull, clanking things were that swung from
their wrists. They were chained to the handles of the wheel.

He walked on, almost dazed, comprehending now some cryptic remarks that
had been passed aboard the sub.

"No Frog has staying power. Give a Limey his beef once a day and he'll
outsweat a Frog."

"Yeah, but you can't whip a Limey. They just go bad when you whip a
Limey."

"They just get sullen for awhile. But let me tell you, friend, don't
ever whip a Spig. You whip a Spig, he'll wait twenty years if he has to
but he'll _get_ you, right between the ribs."

"If a Spig wants to be boiled, I should worry."

It had been broken up in laughter.

_Boiled!_ Could such things be?

Sixteen ragged, filth-crusted sub-humans were creeping down the road,
each straining at a rope. An inch at a time, they were dragging a skid
loaded with one huge turbine gear whose tiny herringbone teeth caught
the afternoon sun.

The Government had reactors, the Government had vehicles--why this? He
slowly realized that the Government's metal and machinery and atomic
power went into its warships; that there was none left over for
consumers, and the uses of peace. The Government had degenerated into a
dawn-age monster, specialized all to teeth and claws and muscles to
drive them with. The Government was now, whatever it had been, a
graceless, humorless incarnate ferocity. Whatever lightness or joy
survived was the meaningless vestigial twitching of an obsolete organ.

Somewhere a child began to bawl and Charles was surprised to feel a
profound pity welling up in him. Like a sedentary man who after a
workout aches in muscles he never knew he owned, Charles was discovering
that he had emotions which had never been poignantly evoked by the bland
passage of the hours in Syndic Territory.

Poor little bastard, he thought, growing up in this hellhole. I don't
know what having slaves to kick around will do to you, but I don't see
how you can grow up a human being. I don't know what fear of love will
do to you--make you a cheat? Or a graceful rutting animal with a choice
only between graceless rutting violence and a stinking scuffle with a
flabby and abstracted stranger in a strange unloved room? We have our
guns to play with and they're good toys, but I don't know what kind of
monster you'll become when they give you a gun to live with and violence
for a god.

_Reiner was right_, he thought unhappily. _We've got to do something
about this mess._

A man and a woman were struggling in an alley as he passed. Old habit
almost made him walk on, but this wasn't the playful business of ripping
clothes as practiced during hilarious moments in Mob Territory. It was a
grim and silent struggle--

The man wore the sweater of the Guards. Nevertheless, Charles walked
into the alley and tore him away from the woman; or rather, he yanked at
the man's rock-like arm and the man, in surprise, let go of the woman
and spun to face him.

"Beat it," Charles said to the woman, not looking around. He saw from
the corner of his eye that she was staying right there.

The man's hand was on his sheath knife. He told Charles: "Get lost. Now.
You don't mess with the Guards."

Charles felt his knees quivering, which was good. He knew from many a
chukker of polo that it meant that he was strung to the breaking point,
ready to explode into action. "Pull that knife," he said, "and the next
thing you know you'll be eating it."

The man's face went dead calm and he pulled the knife and came in low,
very fast. The knife was supposed to catch Charles in the middle. If
Charles stepped inside it, the man would grab him in a bear hug and
knife him in the back.

There was only one answer.

He caught the thick wrist from above with his left hand as the knife
flashed toward his middle and shoved out. He felt the point catch and
slice his cuff. The Guardsman tried a furious and ill-advised kick at
his crotch; with his grip on the knife-hand, Charles toppled him into
the filthy alley as he stood one-legged and off balance. He fell on his
back, floundering, and for a black moment, Charles thought his weight
was about to tear the wrist loose from his grip. The moment passed, and
Charles put his right foot in the socket of the Guardsman's elbow,
reinforced his tiring left hand with his right and leaned, doubling the
man's forearm over the fulcrum of his boot. The man roared and dropped
the knife. It had taken perhaps five seconds.

Charles said, panting: "I don't want to break your arm or kick your head
in or anything like that. I just want you to go away and leave the woman
alone." He was conscious of her, vaguely hovering in the background. He
thought angrily: _She might at least get his knife._

The Guardsman said thickly: "You give me the boot and I swear to God
I'll find you and cut you to ribbons if it takes me the rest of my
life."

_Good_, Charles thought. _Now he can tell himself he scared me. Good._
He let go of the forearm, straightened and took his foot from the man's
elbow, stepping back. The Guardsman got up stiffly, flexing his arm, and
stooped to pick up and sheath his knife without taking his eyes off
Charles. Then he spat in the dust at Charles' feet. "Yellow crud," he
said. "If the goddam crow was worth it, I'd cut your heart out." He
walked off down the alley and Charles followed him with his eyes until
he turned the corner into the street.

Then he turned, irritated that the woman had not spoken.

She was Lee Falcaro.

"Lee!" he said, thunderstruck. "What are you doing here?" It was the
same face, feature for feature, and between her brows appeared the same
double groove he had seen before. But she didn't know him.

"You know me?" she asked blankly. "Is that why you pulled that ape off
me? I ought to thank you. But I can't place you at all. I don't know
many people here. I've been ill, you know."

There was a difference apparent now. The voice was a little querulous.
And Charles would have staked his life that never could Lee Falcaro
have said in that slightly smug, slightly proprietary, slightly
aren't-I-interesting tone: "I've been ill, you know."

"But what are you _doing_ here? Damn it, don't you know me? I'm Charles
Orsino!"

He realized then that he had made a horrible mistake.

"Orsino," she said. And then she spat: "_Orsino!_ Of the _Syndic_!"
There was black hatred in her eyes.

She turned and raced down the alley. He stood there stupidly, for almost
a minute, and then ran after her, as far as the alley's mouth. She was
gone. You could run almost anywhere in New Portsmouth in almost a
minute.

A weedy little seaman wearing crossed quills on his cap was lounging
against a building. He snickered at Charles. "Don't chase that one,
sailor," he said. "She is the property of O.N.I."

"You know who she is?"

The yeoman happily spilled his inside dope to the fleet gob: "Lee
Bennet. Smuggled over here couple months ago by D.A.R. The hottest thing
that ever hit Naval Intelligence. Very small potato in the Syndic--knows
all the families, who does what, who's a figurehead and who's a worker.
Terrific! Inside stuff! Hates the Syndic. A gang of big-timers did her
dirt."

"Thanks," Charles said, and wandered off down the street.

It wasn't surprising. He should have _expected_ it.

_Noblesse oblige._

Pride of the Falcaro line. She wouldn't send anybody into deadly peril
unless she were ready to go herself.

Only somehow the trigger that would have snapped neurotic, synthetic Lee
Bennet into Lee Falcaro hadn't worked.

He wandered on aimlessly, wondering whether it would be minutes or hours
before he'd be picked up and executed as a spy.



PART II




X


It took minutes only.

He had headed back to the waterfront, afraid to run, with some vague
notion of stealing a boat. Before he reached the row of saloons and
joints, a smart-looking squad of eight tall men overtook him.

"Hold it, mister," a sergeant said. "Are you Orsino?"

"No," he said hopelessly. "That crazy woman began to yell at me that I
was Orsino, but my name's Wyman. What's this about?"

The other men fell in beside and behind him. "We're stepping over to
O.N.I.," the sergeant said.

"There's the son of a bitch!" somebody bawled. Suddenly there were a
dozen sweatered Guardsmen around them. Their leader was the thug Orsino
had beaten in a fair fight. He said silkily to the sergeant: "We want
that boy, leatherneck. Blow."

       *       *       *       *       *

The sergeant went pale. "He's wanted for questioning by the O.N.I.," he
said stolidly.

"Get the marine three-striper!" the Guardsman chortled. He stuck his jaw
into the sergeant's face. "Tell your squad to blow. You marines ought to
know by now that you don't mess with the Guard."

A very junior officer appeared. "What's going on here, you men?" he
shrilled. "Atten-_shun_!" He was ignored as Guardsman and marines
measured one another with their eyes. "I said _attention_! Dammit,
sergeant, _report_!" There was no reaction. The officer yelled: "You men
may think you can get away with this but by God, you're wrong!" He
strode away, his fists clenched and his face very red.

Orsino saw him stride through a gate into a lot marked _Bupers Motor
Pool_. And he felt a sudden wave of communal understanding that there
were only seconds to go. The sergeant played for time: "I'll be glad to
surrender the prisoner," he started, "if you have anything to show in
the way of--"

The Guardsman kicked for the pit of the sergeant's stomach. He was a
sucker Orsino thought abstractedly as he saw the sergeant catch his
foot, dump him and pivot to block another Guardsman. Then he was
fighting for his life himself, against three bellowing Guardsmen.

A ripping, hammering noise filled the air suddenly. Like cold magic, it
froze the milling mob where it stood. Fifty-caliber noise.

The jaygee was back, this time in a jeep with a twin fifty. And he was
glaring down its barrels into the crowd. People were beginning to stream
from the saloons, joints and shipfitting shops.

The jaygee cocked his cap rakishly over one eye. "_Fall in!_" he rasped,
and a haunting air of familiarity came over Orsino.

The waiting jeep, almost bucking in its eagerness to be let
loose--Orsino on the ground, knees trembling with tension--a perfect
change of mount scene in a polo match. He reacted automatically.

There was a surrealist flash of the jaygee's face before he clipped him
into the back of the square little truck. There was another flash of
spectators scrambling as he roared the jeep down the road.

From then on it was just a question of hanging onto the wheel with one
hand, trying to secure the free-traversing twin-fifty with the other,
glancing back to see if the jaygee was still out, avoiding yapping dogs
and pedestrians, staying on the rutted road, pushing all possible speed
out of the jeep, noting landmarks, estimating the possibility of
dangerous pursuit. For a two-goal polo player, a dull little practice
session.

The road, such as it was, wound five miles inland through scrubby
woodland and terminated at a lumber camp where chained men in rags were
dragging logs.

Orsino back tracked a quarter-mile from the camp and jolted overland in
a kidney-cracking hare and hounds course at fifty per.

The jeep took it for an hour in the fading afternoon light and then
bucked to a halt. Orsino turned for an overdue check on the jaygee and
found him conscious, but greenly clinging to the sides of the vehicle.
But he saw Orsino staring and gamely struggled to his feet, standing in
the truck bed. "You're under arrest, sailor," he said. "Striking an
officer, abuse of government property, driving a government vehicle
without a trip-ticket--" His legs betrayed him and he sat down, hard.

Orsino thought very briefly of letting him have a burst from the
twin-fifty, and abandoned the idea.

He seemed to have bitched up everything so far, but he was still on a
mission. He had a commissioned officer of the Government approximately
in his power. He snapped: "Nonsense. _You're_ under arrest."

The jaygee seemed to be reviewing rapidly any transgressions he may have
committed, and asked at last, cautiously: "By what authority?"

"I represent the Syndic."

It was a block-buster. The jaygee stammered: "But you can't--But there
isn't any way--But how--"

"Never mind how."

"You're crazy. You must be, or you wouldn't stop here. I don't believe
you're from the continent and I don't believe the jeep's broken down."
He was beginning to sound just a little hysterical. "It can't break down
here. We must be more than thirty miles inland."

"What's special about thirty miles inland?"

"The natives, you fool!"

The natives again. "I'm not worried about natives. Not with a pair of
fifties."

"You don't understand," the jaygee said, forcing calm into his voice.
"This is The Outback. They're in charge here. We can't do a thing with
them. They jump people in the dark and skewer them. Now fix this damn
jeep and let's get rolling!"

"Into a firing squad? Don't be silly, lieutenant. I presume you won't
slug me while I check the engine?"

The jaygee was looking around him. "My God, no," he said. "You may be a
gangster, but--" He trailed off.

Orsino stiffened. Gangster was semi-dirty talk. "Listen, pirate," he
said nastily, "I don't believe--"

"_Pirate?_" the jaygee roared indignantly, and then shut his mouth with
a click, looking apprehensively about. The gesture wasn't faked; it
alarmed Orsino.

"Tell me about your wildmen," he said.

"Go to hell," the jaygee said sulkily.

"Look, you called me a gangster first. What about these natives? You
were trying to trick me, weren't you?"

"Kiss my royal North American eyeball, gangster."

"Don't be childish," Charles reproved him, feeling adult and superior.
(The jaygee looked a couple of years younger than he.) He climbed out of
his seat and lifted the hood. The damage was trivial; a shear pin in the
transmission had given way. He reported mournfully: "Cracked block. The
jeep's through forever. You can get on your way, lieutenant. I won't try
to hold you."

The jaygee fumed: "You couldn't hold me if you wanted to, gangster. If
you think I'm going to try and hoof back to the base alone in the dark,
you're crazy. We're sticking together. Two of us may be able to hold
them off for the night. In the morning, we'll see."

Well, maybe the officer did _believe_ there were wildmen in the woods.
That didn't mean there _were_.

The jaygee got out and looked under the hood uncertainly. It was obvious
that in the first place he was no mechanic and in the second place he
couldn't conceive of anybody voluntarily risking the woods rather than
the naval base. "Uh-huh," he said. "Dismount that gun while I get a fire
started."

"Yes, sir," Charles said sardonically, saluting. The jaygee absently
returned the salute and began to collect twigs.

Orsino asked: "How do these aborigines of yours operate?"

"Sneak up in the dark. They have spears and a few stolen guns. Usually
they don't have cartridges for them but you can't count on that. But
they have ... witches."

Orsino snorted. He was getting very hungry indeed. "Do you know any of
the local plants we might eat?"

The jaygee said confidently: "I guess we can get by on roots until
morning."

Orsino dubiously pulled up a shrub, dabbed clods off its root and tasted
it. It tasted exactly like a root. He sighed and changed the subject.
"What do we do with the fifties when I get them both off the mount?"

"The jeep mount breaks down some damn way or other into two low-mount
tripods. See if you can figure it out while I get the fire going."

The jaygee had a small, smoky fire barely going in twenty minutes.
Orsino was still struggling with the jeep gun mount. It came apart, but
it couldn't go together again. The jaygee strolled over at last
contemptuously to lend a hand. He couldn't make it work either.

Two lost tempers and four split fingernails later it developed the
"elevating screw" really held the two front legs on and that you
elevated by adjusting the rear tripod leg. "A hell of an officer you
are," Orsino sulked.

It began to rain, putting the fire out with a hiss. They wound up prone
under the jeep, not on speaking terms, each tending a gun, each
presumably responsible for 180 degrees of perimeter.

       *       *       *       *       *

Charles was fairly dry, except for a trickle of icy water following a
contour that meandered to his left knee. After an hour of
eye-straining--nothing to be seen--and ear-straining--only the patter of
rain--he heard a snore and kicked the jaygee.

The jaygee cursed wearily and said: "I guess we'd better talk to keep
awake."

"_I'm_ not having any trouble, pirate."

"Oh, knock it off--where do you get that pirate bit, gangster?"

"You're outlaws, aren't you?"

"Like hell we are. _You're_ the outlaws. You rebelled against the
lawfully constituted North American Government. Just because you
won--for the time being--doesn't mean you were right."

"The fact that we won does mean that we were right. The fact that your
so-called Government lives by raiding and scavenging off us means you
were wrong. God, the things I've seen since I joined up with you thugs!"

"I'll bet. Respect for the home, sanctity of marriage, sexual morality,
law and order--you never saw anything like that back home, did you
gangster?" He looked very smug.

Orsino clenched his teeth. "Somebody's been telling you a pack of lies,"
he said. "There's just as much home and family life and morality and
order back in Syndic Territory as there is here. And probably a lot
more."

"Bull. I've seen intelligence reports; I know how you people live. Are
you telling me you don't have sexual promiscuity? Polygamy? Polyandry?
Open gambling? Uncontrolled liquor trade? Corruption and shakedowns?"

Orsino squinted along the barrel of the gun into the rain. "Look," he
said, "take me as an average young man from Syndic Territory. I know
maybe a hundred people. I know just three women and two men who are what
you'd call promiscuous. I know one family with two wives and one
husband. I don't really know any people personally who go in for
polyandry, but I've met three casually. And the rest are ordinary
middle-aged couples."

"Ah-_hah_! Middle-aged! Do you mean to tell me you're just leaving out
anybody under middle age when you talk about morality?"

"Naturally," Charles said, baffled. "Wouldn't you?"

The only answer was a snort.

"What are bupers?" Charles asked.

"Bu-Pers," the jaygee said distinctly. "Bureau of Personnel, North
American Navy."

"What do you do there?"

"What _would_ a personnel bureau do?" the jaygee said patiently. "We
recruit, classify, assign, promote and train personnel."

"Paperwork, huh? No wonder you don't know how to shoot or drive."

"If I didn't need you to cover my back, I'd shove this MG down your
silly throat. For your information, gangster, all officers do a tour of
duty on paperwork before they're assigned to their permanent branch. I'm
going into the pigboats."

"Why?"

"Family. My father commands a sub. He's Captain Van Dellen."

_Oh, God. Van Dellen._ The sub commander Grinnel--and he--had murdered.
The kid hadn't heard yet that his father had been "lost" in an emergency
dive.

       *       *       *       *       *

The rain ceased to fall; the pattering drizzle gave way to irregular,
splashing drops from leaves and branches.

"Van Dellen," Charles said. "There's something you ought to know."

"It'll keep," the jaygee answered in a grim whisper. The bolt of his gun
clicked. "I hear them out there."




XI


She felt the power of the goddess working in her, but feebly. Dark ...
so dark ... and so tired ... how old was she? More than eight hundred
moons had waxed and waned above her head since birth. And she had run at
the head of her spearmen to the motor sounds. A motor meant the
smithymen from the sea, and you killed smithymen when you could.

She let out a short shrill chuckle in the dark. There was a rustling of
branches. One of the spearmen had turned to stare at the sound. She knew
his face was worried. "Tend to business, you fool!" she wheezed. "Or by
Bridget--" His breath went in with a hiss and she chuckled again. You
had to let them know who was the cook and who was the potatoes every now
and then. Kill the fool? Not now; not when there were smithymen with
guns waiting to be taken.

The power of the goddess worked stronger in her withered breast as her
rage grew at their impudence. Coming into _her_ woods with their
stinking metal!

There were two of them. A grin slit her face. She had not taken two
smithymen together for thirty moons. For all her wrinkles and creaks,
what a fine vessel she was for the power, to be sure! Her worthless,
slow-to-learn niece could run and jump and she had a certain air, but
she'd never be such a vessel. Her sister--the crone spat--these were
degenerate days. In the old days, the sister would have been spitted
when she refused the ordeal in her youth. The little one now, whatever
her name was, she would make a _fine_ vessel for the power when she was
gathered to the goddess. If her sister or her niece didn't hold her head
under water too long, or have a spear shoved too deep into her gut or
hit her on the head with too heavy a rock.

These were degenerate days. She had poisoned her own mother to become
the vessel of power.

The spearmen to her right and left shifted uneasily. She heard a faint
mumble of the two smithymen talking. Let them talk! Doubtless they were
cursing the goddess obscenely; doubtless that was what the smithymen all
did when their mouths were not stuffed with food.

She thought of the man called Kennedy who forged spearheads and
arrowpoints for her people--he was a strange one, touched by the
goddess, which proved her infinite power. She could touch and turn the
head of even a smithyman. He was a strange one. Well now, to get on with
it. She wished the power were working stronger in her; she was tired and
could hardly see. But by the grace of the goddess there would be two new
heads over her holy hut come dawn. She could hardly see, but the goddess
wouldn't fail her....

She quavered like a screech-owl, and the spearmen began to slip forward
through the brush. She was not allowed to eat honey lest its sweetness
clash with the power in her, but the taste of power was sweeter than the
taste of honey.

       *       *       *       *       *

With frightful suddenness there was an ear-splitting shriek and a
trampling rush of feet. By sheer reflex, Orsino clamped down on the
trigger of his fifty, and his brain rocked at its thunder. Shadowy
figures were blotted out by the orange muzzle-flash. You're supposed to
fire neat, spaced bursts of eight he told himself. I wonder what old
Gilby would say if he could see his star pupil burning out a barrel and
swinging his gun like a fire hose?

The gun stopped firing; end of the belt. Twenty, fifty or a hundred
rounds? He didn't remember. He clawed for another belt and smoothly, in
the dark, loaded again and listened.

"You all right, gangster?" the jaygee said behind him, making him jump.

"Yes," he said. "Will they come back?"

"I don't know."

"You filthy swine," an agonized voice wheezed from the darkness. "Me
back is broke, you stinking lice." The voice began to sob.

They listened to it in silence for perhaps a minute. At last he said to
the jaygee: "If the rest are gone maybe we can at least--make him
comfortable."

"Too risky," the jaygee said after a long pause.

The sobbing went on. As the excitement of the attack drained from
Orsino, he felt deathly tired, cramped and thirsty. The thirst he could
do something about. He scooped water from the muddy runnel by his knee
and sucked it from his palms twice. The third time, he thought of the
thirst that the sobbing creature out in the dark must be feeling, and
his hand wouldn't go to his mouth.

"I'm going to get him," he whispered to the jaygee.

"Stay where you are! That's an order!"

He didn't answer, but began to work his cramped and aching body from
under the jeep. The jaygee, a couple of years younger and lither than
he, slid out first from his own side. Orsino sighed and relaxed as he
heard his footsteps cautiously circle the jeep.

"Finish me off!" the wounded man was sobbing. "For the love of the
goddess, finish me off, you bitches' bastards! You've broke me
back--_ah!_" That was a cry of savage delight.

There was a strangled noise from the jaygee and then only a soft, deadly
thrashing noise from the dark. Hell, Orsino thought bitterly. It was my
idea. He snaked out from under the jeep and raced through wet brush.

The two of them were a tangled knot of darkness rolling on the ground. A
naked back came uppermost; Orsino fell on it and clawed at its head. He
felt a huge beard, took two hand-fulls of it and pulled as hard as he
could. There was a wild screech and a flailing of arms. The jaygee broke
away and stood up, panting hoarsely. Charles heard a sharp crunch and a
snap, and the flailing sweaty figure, beneath him lay still.

"Back to the guns," the jaygee choked. He swayed, and Orsino took him by
the arm.... On the way back to the jeep, they stumbled over something
that was certainly a body.

Orsino's flesh shrank from lying down again in the mud behind his gun,
but he did, shivering. He heard the jaygee thud wearily into position.
"What did you do to him?" he asked. "Is he dead?"

"Kicked him," the jaygee choked. "His head snapped back and there was
that crack. I guess he's dead. I never heard of that broken-wing trick
before. I guess he wanted to take one more with him. They have a kind of
religion."

The jaygee sounded as though he was teetering on the edge of breakdown.
Make him mad, intuition said to Orsino. He might go howling off among
the trees unless he snaps out of it.

"It's a hell of way to run an island," he said nastily. "You beggars
were chased out of North America because you couldn't run it right and
now you can't even control a lousy little island for more than five
miles inland." He added with deliberate, superior amusement: "Of course,
they've got witches."

"Shut your mouth, gangster--_I'm warning you._" The note of hysteria was
still there. And then the jaygee said dully: "I didn't mean that. I'm
sorry. You did come out and help me after all."

"Surprised?"

"Yes. Twice. First time when you wanted to go out yourself. I suppose
you can't help being born where you were. Maybe if you came over to us
all the way, the Government would forgive and forget. But no--I suppose
not." He paused, obviously casting about for a change of subject. He
still seemed sublimely confident that they'd get back to the naval base
with him in charge of the detail. "What ship did you cross in?"

"Atom sub _Taft_," Orsino said. He could have bitten his tongue out.

"_Taft?_ That's my father's pigboat! Captain Van Dellen. How is he? I
was going down to the dock when--"

"He's dead," Orsino said flatly. "He was caught on deck during an
emergency dive."

The jaygee said nothing for a while and then uttered an unconvincing
laugh of disbelief. "You're lying," he said. "His crew'd never let that
happen. They'd let the ship be blown to hell before they took her down
without the skipper."

"Grinnel had the con. He ordered the dive and roared down the crew when
they wanted to get your father inboard. I'm sorry."

"Grinnel," the jaygee whispered. "Grinnel. Yes, I know Commander
Grinnel. He's--he's a good officer. He must have done it because he had
to. Tell me about it, please."

It was more than Orsino could bear. "Your father was murdered," he said
harshly. "I know because Grinnel put me on radar watch--and I don't know
a God-damned thing about reading a radarscope. He told me to sing out
'enemy planes' and I did because I didn't know what the hell was going
on. He used that as an excuse to crash-dive while your father was
sleeping on deck. Your good officer murdered him."

He heard the jaygee sobbing hoarsely. At last he asked Orsino in a dry,
choked voice: "Politics?"

"Politics," Orsino said.

Orsino jumped wildly as the jaygee's machine gun began to roar a long
burst of twenty, but he didn't fire himself. He knew that there was no
enemy out there in the dark, and that the bullets were aimed only at an
absent phantom.

"We've got to get to Iceland," the jaygee said at last, soberly. "It's
our only chance."

"Iceland?"

"This is one for the C.C. of the Constitutionists. The Central
Committee. It's a breach of the Freiberg Compromise. It means we call
the Sociocrats, and if they don't make full restitution--war."

"What do you mean, _we_?"

"You and I. You're the source of the story; you're the one who'd be
lie-tested."

You've got him, Orsino told himself, but don't be fool enough to count
on it. He's been light-headed from hunger and no sleep and the shock of
his father's death. You helped him in a death struggle and there's team
spirit working on him. The guy covering my back, how can I fail to trust
him, how could I dare not to trust him? But don't be fool enough to
count on it after he's slept. Meanwhile, push it for all it's worth.

"What are your plans?" he asked gravely.

"We've got to slip out of Ireland by sub or plane," the jaygee brooded.
"We can't go to the New Portsmouth or Com-Surf organizations; they're
Sociocrat, and Grinnel will have passed the word to the Sociocrats that
you're out of control."

"What does that mean?"

"Death," the jaygee said.




XII


Commander Grinnel, after reporting formally, had gone straight to a
joint. It wasn't until midnight that he got The Word, from a friendly
O.N.I. lieutenant who had dropped into the house.

"What?" Grinnel roared. "Who is this woman? Where is she? Take me to her
at once!"

"Commander!" the lieutenant said aghast. "I just got here!"

"You heard me, mister! At once!"

While Grinnel dressed he demanded particulars. The lieutenant dutifully
scoured his memory. "Brought in on some cloak-and-dagger deal,
Commander. The kind you usually run. Lieutenant-Commander Jacobi was in
Syndic Territory on a recruiting, sabotage and reconnaissance mission
and one of the D.A.R. passed the girl on him. A real Syndic member.
Priceless. And, as I said, she identified this fellow as Charles Orsino,
another Syndic. Why are you so interested, if I may ask?"

The Commander dearly wanted to give him a grim: "You may not," but
didn't dare. Now was the time to be frank and open. One hint that he had
anything to hide or cover up would put his throat to the knife. "The
man's my baby, lieutenant," he said. "Either your girl's mistaken or Van
Dellen and his polygraph tech and I were taken in by a brand-new
technique." _That_ was nice work, he congratulated himself. Got in Van
Dellen and the tech.... Maybe, come to think of it, the tech _was_
crooked? No; there was the way Wyman had responded perfectly under scop.

O.N.I.'s building was two stories and an attic, wood-framed, beginning
to rot already in the eternal Irish damp.

"We've got her on the third floor, Commander," the lieutenant said. "You
get there by a ladder."

"In God's name, why?" They walked past the Charge of Quarters, who
snapped to a guilty and belated attention, and through the deserted
offices of the first and second floors.

"Frankly, we've had a little trouble hanging on to her."

"She runs away?"

"No, nothing like that--not yet, at least. Marine G-2 and Guard
Intelligence School have both tried to snatch her from us. First with
requisitions, then with muscle. We hope to keep her until the word gets
to Iceland. Then, naturally, _we'll_ be out in the cold."

The lieutenant laughed. Grinnel, puffing up the ladder, did not.

The door and lock on Lee Bennet's quarters were impressive. The
lieutenant rapped. "Are you awake, Lee? There's an officer here who
wants to talk to you."

"Come in," she said.

The lieutenant's hands flew over the lock and the door sprang open. The
girl was sitting in the dark.

"I'm Commander Grinnel, my dear," he said. After eight hours in the
joint, he could feel authentically fatherly to her. "If the time isn't
quite convenient--"

"It's all right," she said listlessly. "What do you want to know?"

"The man you identify as Orsino--it was quite a shock to me. Commander
Van Dellen, who died a hero's death only days ago accepted him as
authentic and so, I must admit, did I. He passed both scop and
polygraph."

"I can't help that," she said. "He came right up to me and told me who
he was. I recognized him, of course. He's a polo player. I've seen him
play on Long Island often enough, the damned snob. He's not much in the
Syndic, but he's close to F. W. Taylor. Orsino's an orphan. I don't know
whether Taylor's actually adopted him or not. I think not."

"No--possible--mistake?"

"No possible mistake." She began to tremble. "My God, Commander
Whoever-You-Are, do you think I could forget one of those damned
sneering faces. Or what those people did to me? Get the lie detector
again! Strap me into the lie detector! I insist on it! I won't be called
a liar! Do you hear me? Get the lie detector!"

"Please," the Commander soothed. "I do believe you, my dear. Nobody
could doubt your sincerity. Thank you for helping us, and good night."
He backed out of the room with the lieutenant. As the door closed he
snapped at him: "Well, mister?"

The lieutenant shrugged. "The lie detector always bears her out. We've
stopped using it on her. We're convinced that she's on our side. Almost
deserving of citizenship."

"Come, now," the Commander said. "You know better than that."

Behind the locked door, Lee Bennet had thrown herself on the bed,
dry-eyed. She wished she could cry, but tears never came. Not since
those three roistering drunkards had demonstrated their virility as
males and their immunity as Syndics on her ... she couldn't cry any
more.

[Illustration]

Charles Orsino--another one of them. She hoped they caught him and
killed him, slowly. She knew all this was true. Then why did she feel
like a murderess? Why did she think incessantly of suicide? Why, why,
why?

       *       *       *       *       *

Dawn came imperceptibly. First Charles could discern the outline of
treetops against the sky and then a little of the terrain before him and
at last two twisted shadows that slowly became sprawling half-naked
bodies. One of them was a woman's, mangled by fifty-caliber slugs. The
other was the body of a bearded giant--the one with whom they had
struggled in the dark.

Charles crawled out stiffly. The woman was--had been--a stringy, white
haired crone. Some animal's skull was tied to her pate with sinews as a
head-dress, and she was tattooed with blue crescents. The jaygee joined
him standing over her and said: "One of their witches. Part of the
religion, if you can call it that."

"A brand-new religion?" Charles asked dubiously. "Made up out of whole
cloth?"

"No," the jaygee said. "I understand it's an _old_
religion--pre-Christian. It kept going underground until the Troubles.
Then it flared up again all over Europe. A filthy business. Animal
sacrifices every new moon. Human sacrifices twice a year. What can you
expect from people like that?"

Charles reminded himself that the jaygee's fellow-citizens boiled
recalcitrant slaves. "I'll see what I can do about the jeep," he said.

The jaygee sat down on the wet grass. "What the hell's the use?" he
mumbled wearily. "Even if you get it running again. Even if we get back
to the base. They'll be gunning for you. Maybe they'll be gunning for me
if they killed my father." He tried to smile. "You got any aces in the
hole, gangster?"

"Maybe," Orsino said slowly. "What do you know about a woman named
Lee--Bennet? Works with O.N.I.?"

"Smuggled over here by the D.A.R. A goldmine of information. She's a
little nuts, too. What have you got on her?"

"Does she swing any weight? _Is she a citizen?_"

"No weight. They're just using her over at Intelligence to fill out the
picture of the Syndic. And she couldn't be a citizen. A woman has to
marry a citizen to be naturalized. What have you got to do with her, for
God's sake? Did you know her on the other side? She's death to the
Syndic; she can't do anything for you."

Charles barely heard him. That had to be it. The trigger on Lee
Falcaro's conditioning had to be the oath of citizenship as it was for
his. And it hadn't been tripped because this pirate gang didn't
particularly want or need women as first-class, all-privileges citizens.
A small part of the Government's cultural complex--but one that could
trap Lee Falcaro forever in the shell of her synthetic substitute for a
personality. Lie-tests, yes. Scopolamine, yes. But for a woman, no
subsequent oath.

"I ran into her in New Portsmouth. She knew me from the other side. She
turned me in...." He knelt at a puddle and drank thirstily; the water
eased hunger cramps a little. "I'll see what I can do with the jeep."

He lifted the hood and stole a look at the jaygee. Van Dellen was
dropping off to sleep on the wet grass. Charles pried a shear pin from
the jeep's winch, punched out the shear pin that had given way in the
transmission and replaced it. It involved some hammering. Cracked block,
he thought contemptuously. An officer and he couldn't tell whether the
block was cracked or not. If I ever get out of this we'll sweep them
from the face of the earth--or more likely just get rid of their
tom-fool Sociocrats and Constitutionists. The rest are probably all
right. Except maybe for those bastards of Guardsmen. A bad lot. Let's
hope they get killed in the fighting.

The small of his back tickled; he reached around to scratch it and felt
cold metal.

"Turn slowly or you'll be spitted like a pig," a bass voice growled.

He turned slowly. The cold metal now at his chest, was the leaf-shaped
blade of a spear. It was wielded by a red-haired, red-bearded,
barrel-chested giant whose blue-green eyes were as cold as death.

"Tie that one," somebody said. Another half-naked man jerked his wrists
behind him and lashed them together with cords.

"Hobble his feet." It was a woman's voice. A length of cord or sinew was
knotted to his ankles with a foot or two of play. He could walk but not
run. The giant lowered his spear and stepped aside.

The first thing Charles saw was that Lieutenant (j.g.) Van Dellen of the
North American Navy had escaped forever from his doubts and confusions.
They had skewered him to the turf while he slept. Charles hoped he had
not felt the blow.

The second thing he saw was a supple and coltish girl of perhaps 20
tenderly removing the animal skull from the head of the slain witch and
knotting it to her own red-tressed head. Even to Orsino's numbed
understanding, it was clearly an act of the highest significance. It
subtly changed the composition of the six-men group in the little glade.
They had been a small mob until she put on the skull, but the moment she
did they moved instinctively--one a step or two, the other merely
turning a bit, perhaps--to orient on her. There was no doubt that she
was in charge.

A witch, Orsino thought. "It kept going underground until the Troubles."
"A filthy business--human sacrifices twice a year."

She approached him and, like the shifting of a kaleidoscope, the group
fell into a new pattern of which she was still the focus. Charles
thought he had never seen a face so humorlessly conscious of power. The
petty ruler of a few barbarians, she carried herself as though she were
empress of the universe. Nor did a large gray louse that crawled from
her hairline across her forehead and back again affect her in the
slightest. She wore a greasy animal hide as though it were royal purple.
It added up to either insanity or a limitless pretension to religious
authority. And her eyes were not mad.

"You," she said coldly. "What about the jeep and the guns? Do they go?"

He laughed suddenly and idiotically at these words from the mouth of a
stone-age goddess. A raised spear sobered him instantly. "Yes," he said.

"Show my men how," she said, and squatted regally on the turf.

"Please," he said, "could I have something to eat first?"

She nodded indifferently and one of the men loped off into the brush.

       *       *       *       *       *

His hands untied and his face greasy with venison fat, Charles spent the
daylight hours instructing six savages in the nomenclature, maintenance
and operation of the jeep and the twin-fifty machine gun.

They absorbed it with utter lack of curiosity. They more or less learned
to start and steer and stop the jeep. They more or less learned to load,
point and fire the gun.

Through the lessons the girl sat absolutely motionless, first in shadow,
then in noon and afternoon sun and then in shadow again. But she had
been listening. She said at last: "You are telling them nothing new now.
Is there no more?"

Charles noted that a spear was poised at his ribs. "A great deal more,"
he said hastily. "It takes months."

"They can work them now. What more is there to learn?"

"Well, what to do if something goes wrong."

She said, as though speaking from vast experience: "When something goes
wrong, you start over again. That is all you can do. When I make
death-wine for the spear blades and the death-wine does not kill, it is
because something went wrong--a word or a sign or picking a plant at the
wrong time. The only thing to do is make the poison again. As you grow
in experience you make fewer mistakes. That is how it will be with my
men when they work the jeep and the guns."

She nodded ever so slightly at one of the men and he took a firmer grip
on his spear.

Death swooped low.

"No!" Charles exploded. "You don't understand! This isn't like anything
you do at all!" He was sweating, even in the late afternoon chill.
"You've got to have somebody who knows how to repair the jeep and the
gun. If they're busted they're busted and no amount of starting over
again will make them work!"

She nodded and said: "Tie his hands. We'll take him with us." Charles
was torn between relief and wonder at the way she spoke. He realized
that he had never, literally _never_, seen any person concede a point in
quite that fashion. There had been no hesitation, there had been no
reluctance in the voice, not a flicker of displeasure in the face.
Simply, without forcing, she had said: "We'll take him with us." It was
as though--as though she had re-made the immediate past, un-making her
opposition to the idea, nullifying it. She was a person who was not at
war with herself in any respect whatever, a person who knew exactly who
she was and what she was--

The girl rose in a single flowing motion, startling after her day spent
in immobility. She led the way, flanked by two of the spearmen. The
other four followed in the jeep, at a crawl. Last of all came Charles,
and nobody had to urge him. In his portable trap his hours would be
numbered if he got separated from his captors.

Stick with them, he told himself, stumbling through the brush. Just stay
alive and you can outsmart these savages. He fell, cursed, picked
himself up, stumbled on after the growl of the jeep.

Dawn brought them to a collection of mud-and-wattle huts, a corral
enclosing a few dozen head of wretched diseased cattle, a few adults and
a few children. The girl was still clear-eyed and supple in her
movements. Her spearmen yawned and stretched stiffly. Charles was a
walking dead man, battered by countless trees and stumbles on the long
trek. With red and swollen eyes he watched while half-naked brats
swarmed over the jeep and grownups made obeisances to the girl--all but
one.

This was an evil-faced harridan who said to her with cool insolence: "I
see you claim the power of the goddess now, my dear. Has something
happened to my sister?"

"The guns killed a certain person. I put on the skull. You know what I
am; do not say 'claim to be.' I warn you once."

"Liar!" shrieked the harridan. "You killed her and stole the skull! St.
Patrick and St. Bridget shrivel your guts! Abaddon and Lucifer pierce
your eyes!"

An arena formed about them as the girl said coldly: "I warn you the
second time."

The harridan made signs with her fingers, glaring at her; there was a
moan from the watchers; some turned aside and a half-grown girl fainted
dead away.

The girl with the skull on her pate said, as though speaking from a
million years and a million miles away: "This is the third warning;
there are no more. Now the worm is in your backbone gnawing. Now the
maggots are at your eyes, devouring them. Your bowels turn to water;
your heart pounds like the heart of a bird; soon it will not beat at
all." As the eerie, space-filling whisper drilled on the watchers broke
and ran, holding their hands over their ears, white-faced, but the
harridan stood as if rooted to the earth. Charles listened dully as the
curse was droned, nor was he surprised when the harridan fell, blasted
by it. Another sorceress, aided it is true by pentothal, had months ago
done the same to him.

The people trickled back, muttering and abject.

Just stay alive and you can outsmart these savages, he repeated
ironically to himself. It had dawned on him that these savages lived by
an obscure and complicated code harder to master than the intricacies of
the Syndic or the Government.

A kick roused him to his feet. One of the spearmen grunted: "I'm putting
you with Kennedy."

"All right," Charles groaned. "You take these cords off me?"

"Later." He prodded Charles to a minute, ugly block house of logs from
which came smoke and an irregular metallic clanging. He cut the cords,
rolled great boulders away from a crawl-hole and shoved him through.

The place was about six by nine feet, hemmed in by ten-inch logs. The
light was very bad and the smell was too. A few loopholes let in some
air. There was a latrine pit and an open stone hearth and a naked brown
man with wild hair and a beard.

Rubbing his wrists, Charles asked uncertainly: "Are you Kennedy?"

The man looked up and croaked: "Are you from the Government?"

"Yes," Charles said, hope rekindling. "Thank God they put us together.
There's a jeep. Also a twin-fifty. If we play this right the two of us
can bust out--"

He stopped, disconcerted. Kennedy had turned to the hearth and the
small, fierce fire glowing on it and began to pound a red-hot lump of
metal. There were spear heads and arrow heads about in various stages
of completion, as well as files and a hone.

"What's the matter?" he demanded. "Aren't you interested?"

"Of course I'm interested," Kennedy said. "But we've got to begin at the
beginning. You're too _general_." His voice was mild, but reproving.

"You're right," Charles said. "I guess you've made a try or two
yourself. But now that there are two of us, what do you suggest? Can you
drive a jeep? Can you fire a twin-fifty?"

The man poked the lump of metal into the heart of the fire again, picked
up a black-scaled spear head and began to file an edge into it. "Let's
get down to essentials," he suggested apologetically. "What is escape?
Getting from an undesirable place to a desirable place, opposing and
neutralizing things or persons adverse to the change of state in the
process. But I'm not being specific, am I? Let's say, then, escape is
getting _us_ from a relatively undesirable place to a relatively
desirable place, opposing and neutralizing the aborigines." He put aside
the file and reached for the hone, sleeking it along the bright metal
ribbon of the new edge. He looked up with a pleased smile and asked:
"How's that for a plan?"

"Fine," Charles muttered. Kennedy beamed proudly as he repeated: "Fine,
fine," and sank to the ground, born down by the almost physical weight
of his depression. His hoped-for ally was stark mad.




XIII


Kennedy turned out to have been an armorer-artificer of the North
American Navy, captured two years ago while deer-hunting too far from
the logging-camp road to New Portsmouth. Fed on scraps of gristle,
isolated from his kind, beaten when he failed to make his daily task of
spear heads and arrow points, he had shyly retreated into beautifully
interminable labyrinths of abstraction. Now and then, Charles Orsino got
a word or two of sense from him before the rosy clouds closed in. When
attempted conversation with the lunatic palled, Charles could watch the
aborigines through chinks in the palisade. There were about fifty of
them. There would have been more if they hadn't been given to
infanticide--for what reason, Charles could not guess.

He had been there a week when the boulders were rolled away one morning
and he was roughly called out. He said to Kennedy before stooping to
crawl through the hole: "Take it easy, friend. I'll be back, I hope."

Kennedy looked up with a puzzled smile: "That's such a _general_
statement, Charles. Exactly what are you implying--"

The witch girl was there, flanked by spearmen. She said abruptly: "I
have been listening to you. Why are you untrue to your brothers?"

He gawked. The only thing that seemed to fit was: "That's such a
_general_ statement," but he didn't say it.

"Answer," one of the spearmen growled.

"I--I don't understand. I have no brothers."

"Your brothers in Portsmouth, on the sea. Whatever you call them, they
are your brothers, all children of the mother called Government. Why are
you untrue to them?"

He began to understand. "They aren't my brothers. I'm not a child of the
government. I'm a child of another mother far away, called Syndic."

She looked puzzled--and almost human--for an instant. Then the visor
dropped over her face again as she said: "That is true. Now you must
teach a certain person the jeep and the guns. Teach her well. See that
she gets her hands on the metal and into the grease." To a spearman she
said: "Bring Martha."

The spearman brought Martha, who was trying not to cry. She was a
half-naked child of ten!

The witch girl abruptly left them. Her guards took Martha and bewildered
Charles to the edge of the village where the jeep and its mounted guns
stood behind a silly little museum exhibit rope of vine. Feathers and
bones were knotted into the vine. The spearmen treated it as though it
were a high-tension transmission line.

"_You_ break it," one of them said to Charles. He did, and the spearmen
sighed with relief. Martha stopped scowling and stared.

The spearman said to Charles: "Go ahead and teach her. The firing pins
are out of the guns, and if you try to start the jeep you get a spear
through you. Now teach her." He and the rest squatted on the turf around
the jeep. The little girl shied violently as he took her hand, and tried
to run away. One of the spearmen slung her back into the circle. She
brushed against the jeep and froze, white-faced.

"Martha," Charles said patiently, "there's nothing to be afraid of. The
guns won't go off and the jeep won't move. I'll teach you how to work
them so you can kill everybody you don't like with the guns and go
faster than a deer in the jeep--"

He was talking into empty air as far as the child was concerned. She was
muttering, staring at the arm that had brushed the jeep: "That did it, I
guess. There goes the power. May the goddess blast her--no. The power's
out of me now. I felt it go." She looked up at Charles, quite calmly,
and said: "Go on. Show me all about it. Do a good job."

"Martha, what are you talking about?"

"She was afraid of me, my sister, so she's robbing me of the power.
Don't you know? I guess not. The goddess hates iron and machines. I had
the power of the goddess in me, but it's gone now; I felt it go. Now
nobody'll be afraid of me any more." Her face contorted and she said:
"Show me how you work the guns."

       *       *       *       *       *

He taught her what he could while the circle of spearmen looked on and
grinned, cracking raw jokes about the child as anybody anywhere, would
about a tyrant deposed. She pretended to ignore them, grimly repeating
names after him and imitating his practiced movements in loading drill.
She was very bright, Charles realized. When he got a chance he muttered,
"I'm sorry about this, Martha. It isn't my idea."

She whispered bleakly: "I know. I liked you. I was sorry when the other
outsider took your dinner." She began to sob uncontrollably. "I'll never
see anything again! Nobody'll ever be afraid of me again!" She buried
her face against Charles' shoulder.

He smoothed her tangled hair mechanically and said to the watching,
grinning circle: "Look, hasn't this gone far enough? Haven't you got
what you wanted?"

The headman stretched and spat. "Guess so," he said. "Come on, girl." He
yanked Martha from the seat and booted her toward the huts.

Charles scrambled down just ahead of a spear. He let himself be led back
to the smithy block house and shoved through the crawl hole.

"I was thinking about what you said the other day," Kennedy beamed,
rasping a file over an arrowhead. "When I said that to change one
molecule in the past you'd have to change _every_ molecule in the past,
and you said, 'Maybe so.' I've figured that what you were driving at
was--"

"Kennedy," Charles said, "please shut up just this once. I've got to
think."

"In what sense do you mean that, Charles? Do you mean that you're a
rational animal and therefore that your _being_ rather than _essense_
is--"

"_Shut up or I'll pick up a rock and bust your head in with it!_"
Charles roared. He more than half meant it. Kennedy hunched down before
his hearth looking offended and scared. Charles squatted with his head
in his hands.

_I have been listening to you._

Repeated drives of the Government to wipe out the aborigines. Drives
that never succeeded.

_I'll never see anything again._

The way the witch girl had blasted her rival--but that was suggestion.
But--

_I have been listening to you. Why are you untrue to your brothers?_

He'd said nothing like that to anybody, not to her or poor Kennedy.

He thought vaguely of _psi_ force, a fragment in his memory. An old
superstition, like the id-ego-superego triad of the sick-minded
psychologists. Like vectors of the mind, exploded nonsense. But--

_I have been listening to you. Why are you untrue to your brothers?_

Charles smacked one fist against the sand floor in impotent rage. He was
going as crazy as Kennedy. Did the witch girl--and Martha--have
hereditary _psi_ power? He mocked himself savagely: that's such a
_general_ question!

Neurotic adolescent girls in kerosene-lit farmhouses, he thought
vaguely. Things that go bump--and crash and blooie and _whoo-oo-oo!_ in
the night. Not in electric lit city apartments. Not around fleshed-up
middle-aged men and women. You take a hyperthyroid virgin, isolate her
from power machinery and electric fields, put on the pressures that make
her feel alone and tense to the bursting point--and naturally enough,
something bursts. A chamberpot sails from under the bed and shatters on
the skull of stepfather-tyrant. The wide-gilt-framed portrait of
thundergod-grandfather falls with a crash. Sure, the nail crystallized
and broke--_who crystallized it?_

Neurotic adolescent girls speaking in tongues, reading face-down cards
and closed books, screaming aloud when sister or mother dies in a
railroad wreck fifty miles away, of cancer a hundred miles away, in a
bombing overseas.

Sometimes they made saints of them. Sometimes they burned them. Burned
them and _then_ made saints of them.

A blood-raw hunk of venison came sailing through one of the loopholes
and flopped on the sand.

_I was sorry when the other outsider took your dinner._

Three days ago he'd dozed off while Kennedy broiled the meat over the
hearth. When he woke, Kennedy had gobbled it all and was whimpering with
apprehension. But he'd done nothing and said nothing; the man wasn't
responsible. He'd said nothing, and yet somehow the child knew about it.

His days were numbered; soon enough the jeep would be out of gas and the
guns would be out of ammo or an unreplaceable part lost or broken. Then,
according to the serene logic that ruled the witch girl, he'd be
surplus.

But there was a key to it somehow.

He got up and slapped Kennedy's hand away from the venison. "Naughty,"
he said, and divided it equally with a broad spearblade.

"Naughty," Kennedy said morosely. "The naught-class, the null-class. I'm
the null-class. I plus the universe equal one, the universe-class. If
you could transpose--but you can't transpose." Silently they toasted
their venison over the fire.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was a moonless night with one great planet, Jupiter he supposed,
reigning over the star-powdered sky. Kennedy slept muttering feebly in a
corner. The hearthfire was out. It had to be out by dark. The spearmen
took no chance of their trying to burn down the place. The village had
long since gone to sleep, campfires doused, skin flaps pulled to across
the door holes. From the corral one of the spavined, tick-ridden cows
mooed uneasily and then fell silent.

       *       *       *       *       *

Charles then began the hardest job of his life. He tried to think,
straight and uninterrupted, of Martha, the little girl. Some of the
things that interrupted him were:

The remembered smell of fried onions; they didn't have onions here;

Salt;

I wonder how the old 101st Precinct's getting along;

That fellow who wanted to get married on a hundred dollars;

Lee Falcaro, damn her!

This, is damn foolishness; it can't possibly work;

Poor old Kennedy;

I'll starve before I eat another mouthful of that greasy deer-meat;

The Van Dellen kid, I wonder if I could have saved him;

Reiner's right; we've got to clean up the Government and then try to
civilize these people;

There must be something wrong with my head, I can't seem to
concentrate;

That terrific third-chukker play in the Finals, my picture all over
town;

Would Uncle Frank laugh at this?

It was hopeless. He sat bolt upright, his eyes squeezed tensely
together, trying to visualize the child and call her and it couldn't be
done. Skittering images of her zipped through his mind, only to be
shoved aside. It was damn foolishness, anyway....

He unkinked himself, stretched and lay down on the sand floor thinking
bitterly: why try? You'll be dead in a few days or a few weeks; kiss the
world good-bye. Back in Syndic Territory, fat, sloppy, happy Syndic
Territory, did they know how good they had it? He wished he could tell
them to cling to their good life. But Uncle Frank said it didn't do any
good to cling; it was a matter of tension and relaxation. When you
stiffen up a way of life and try to fossilize it so it'll stay that way
forever, then you find you've lost it.

Little Martha wouldn't understand it. Magic, ritual, the power of the
goddess, fear of iron, fear of the jeep's vine enclosure--cursed, no
doubt--what went on in such a mind? Could she throw things like a
poltergeist-girl? They didn't have 'em any more; maybe it had something
to do with electric fields or even iron. Or were they all phonies? An
upset adolescent girl is a hell of a lot likelier to fake phenomena that
produce them. Little Martha hadn't been faking her despair, though. The
witch-girl--her sister, wasn't she?--didn't fake her icy calm and power.
Martha'd be better off without such stuff--

"_Charles_," a whisper said.

He muttered stupidly: "My God. She heard me," and crept to the palisade.
Through a chink between the logs she was just visible in the starlight.

She whispered: "I thought I wasn't going to see anything or hear
anything ever again but I sat up and I heard you calling and you said
you wanted to help me if I'd help you so I came as fast as I could
without waking anybody up--you _did_ call me, didn't you?"

"Yes, I did. Martha, do you want to get out of here? Go far away with
me?"

"You bet I do. _She's_ going to take the power of the goddess out of me
and marry me to Dinny, he stinks like a goat and he has a cockeye, and
then she'll kill all our babies. Just tell me what to do and I'll do
it." She sounded very grim and decided.

"Can you roll the boulders away from the hole there?" He was thinking
vaguely of teleportation; each boulder was a two-man job.

She said no.

He snarled: "Then why did you bother to come here?"

"Don't talk like that to me," the child said sharply--and he remembered
what she thought she was.

"Sorry," he said.

"What I came about," she said calmly, "was the ex-plosion. Can you make
an ex-plosion like you said? Back there at the jeep?"

What in God's name was she talking about?

"Back there," she said with exaggerated patience, "you was thinking
about putting all the cartridges together and blowing up the whole damn
shebang. Remember?"

He did, vaguely. One of a hundred schemes that had drifted through his
head.

"I'd sure like to see that ex-plosion," she said. "The way _she_ got
things figured, I'd almost just as soon get exploded myself as not."

"I might blow up the logs here and get out," he said slowly. "I think
you'd be a mighty handy person to have along, too. Can you get me about
a hundred of the machine gun cartridges?"

"They'll miss 'em."

"Sneak me a few at a time. I'll empty them, put them together again and
you sneak them back."

She said, slow and troubled: "_She_ set the power of the goddess to
guard them."

"Listen to me, Martha," he said. "I mean _listen_. You'll be doing it
for me and they told me the power of the goddess doesn't work on
outsiders. Isn't that right?"

There was a long pause, and she said at last with a sigh: "I sure wish I
could see your eyes, Charles. I'll try it, but I'm damned if I would if
Dinny didn't stink so bad." She slipped away and Charles tried to follow
her with his mind through the darkness, to the silly little rope of vine
with the feathers and bones knotted in it--but he couldn't. Too tense
again.

Kennedy stirred and muttered complainingly as an icy small breeze cut
through the chinks of the palisade, whispering.

His eyes, tuned to the starlight, picked up Martha bent almost double,
creeping toward the smithy-prison. She wore a belt of fifty-caliber
cartridges around her neck like a stole. Looked like about a dozen of
them. He hastily scooped out a bowl of clean sand and whispered: "Any
trouble?"

He couldn't see the grin on her face, but knew it was there. "It was
easy," she bragged. "One bad minute and then I checked with you and it
was okay."

"Good kid. Pull the cartridges out of the links the way I showed you and
pass them through."

She did. It was a tight squeeze.

He fingered one of the cartridges. The bullet fitted nicely into the
socket of an arrowhead. He jammed the bullet in and wrenched at the
arrowhead with thumb and forefinger--all he could get onto it. The brass
neck began to spread. He dumped the powder into his little basin in the
sand and reseated the bullet.

Charles shifted hands on the second cartridge. On the third he realized
that he could put the point of the bullet on a hearth-stone and press on
the neck with both thumbs. It went faster then; in perhaps an hour he
was passing the re-assembled cartridges back through the palisade.

"Time for another load?" he asked.

"Nope," the girl said. "Tomorrow night."

"Good kid."

She giggled. "It's going to be a hell of a big bang, ain't it, Charles?"




XIV


"Leave the fire alone," Charles said sharply to Kennedy. The little man
was going to douse it for the night.

There was a flash of terrified sense: "They beat you. If the fire's on
after dark they beat you. Fire and dark are equal and opposite." He
began to smile. "Fire is the negative of dark. You just change the sign,
in effect rotate it through 180 degrees. But to rotate it through 180
degrees you have to first rotate it through one degree. And to rotate it
through one degree you first have to rotate it through half a degree."
He was beaming now, having forgotten all about the fire. Charles banked
it with utmost care, heaping a couple of flat stones for a chimney that
would preserve the life of one glowing coal invisibly.

He stretched out on the sand, one hand on the little heap beneath which
five pounds of smokeless powder was buried. Kennedy continued to drone
out his power-series happily.

Through the chinks in the palisade a man's profile showed against the
twilight. "Shut up," he said.

Kennedy shivering, rolled over and muttered to himself. The spearman
laughed and went on.

Charles hardly saw him. His whole mind was concentrated on the spark
beneath the improvised chimney. He had left such a spark seven nights
running. Only twice had it lived more than an hour. Tonight--tonight,
it _had_ to last. Tonight was the last night of the witch-girl's monthly
courses, and during them she lost--or thought she lost, which was the
same thing--the power of the goddess.

Primitive aborigines, he jeered silently at himself. A life time wasn't
long enough to learn the intricacies of their culture--as occasional
executions among them for violating magical law proved to the hilt. His
first crude notion--blowing the palisade apart and running like
hell--was replaced by a complex escape plan hammered out in detail
between him and Martha.

Martha assured him that the witch girl could track him through the dark
by the power of the goddess except for four days a month--and he
believed it. Martha herself laid a matter-of-fact claim to keener second
sight than her sister because of her virginity. With Martha to guide him
through the night and the witch-girl's power disabled, they'd get a
day's head start. His hand strayed to a pebble under which jerked
venison was hidden and ready.

"But Martha. Are you sure you're not--not kidding yourself? Are you
_sure_?"

He felt her grin on the other side of the palisade. "You're sure wishing
Uncle Frank was here so you could ask him about it, don't you, Charles?"

He sure was. He wiped his brow, suddenly clammy.

Kennedy couldn't come along. One, he wasn't responsible. Two, he might
have to be Charles' cover-story. They weren't too dissimilar in build,
age, or coloring. Charles had a beard by now that sufficiently obscured
his features, and two years absence should have softened recollections
of Kennedy. Interrogated, Charles could take refuge in an imitation of
Kennedy's lunacy.

"Charles, the one thing I don't get is this Lee dame. She got a spell on
her? You don't want to mess with that."

"Listen, Martha, we've _got_ to mess with her. It isn't a
spell--exactly. Anyway I know how to take it off and then she'll be on
our side."

"Can I set off the explosion? If you let me set off the explosion, I'll
quit my bitching."

"We'll see," he said.

She chuckled very faintly in the dark. "Okay," she told him. "If I
can't, I can't."

He thought of being married to a woman who could spot your smallest lie
or reservation, and shuddered.

Kennedy was snoring by now and twilight was deepening into blackness.
There was a quarter-moon, obscured by over-cast. He hitched along the
sand and peered through a chink at a tiny noise. It was the small
scuffling feet of a woods-rat racing through the grass from one morsel
of food to the next. It never reached it. There was a soft rush of wings
as a great dark owl plummeted to earth and struck talons into the brown
fur. The rat squealed its life away while the owl lofted silently to a
tree branch where it stood on one leg, swaying drunkenly and staring
with huge yellow eyes.

As sudden as that, it'll be, Charles thought abruptly weighted with
despair. A half-crazy kid and yours truly trying to outsmart and
out-Tarzan these wild men. If only the little dope would let me take the
jeep! But the jeep was out. She rationalized her retention of the power
even after handling iron by persuading herself that she was only acting
for Charles; there was some obscure precedent in a long, memorized poem
which served her as a text-book of magic. But riding in the jeep was
_out_.

By now she should be stringing magic vines across some of the huts and
trails. "They'll see 'em when they get torches and it'll scare 'em. Of
course I don't know how to do it right, but they don't know that. It'll
slow 'em down. If _she_ comes out of her house--and maybe she
won't--she'll know they don't matter and send the men after us. But
we'll be on our way. Charles, you _sure_ I can't set off the explosion?
Yeah, I guess you are. Maybe I can set off one when we get to New
Portsmouth?"

"If I can possibly arrange it."

She sighed: "I guess that'll have to do."

It was too silent; he couldn't bear it. With feverish haste he uncovered
the caches of powder and meat. Under the sand was a fat clayey soil. He
dug up hands-full of it, wet it with the only liquid available and
worked it into paste. He felt his way to the logs decided on for
blasting, dug out a hole at their bases in the clay. After five careful
trips from the powder cache to the hole, the mine was filled. He covered
it with clay and laid on a roof of flat stones from the hearth. The
spark of fire still glowed, and he nursed it with twigs.

She was there, whispering: "Charles?"

"Right here. Everything set?"

"All set. Let's have that explosion."

He took the remaining powder and with minute care, laid a train across
the stockade to the mine. He crouched into a ball and flipped a burning
twig onto the black line that crossed the white sand floor.

The blast seemed to wake up the world. Kennedy charged out of sleep,
screaming, and a million birds woke with a squawk. Charles was conscious
more of the choking reek than the noise as he scooped up the jerked
venison and rushed through the ragged gap in the wall. A hand caught
his--a small hand.

"You're groggy," Martha's voice said, sounding far away. "Come on--fast.
_Man_, that was a great ex-plosion!"

She towed him through the woods and underbrush--fast. As long as he hung
on to her he didn't stumble or run into a tree once. Irrationally
embarrassed by his dependence on a child, he tried letting go for a
short time--very short--and was quickly battered into changing his mind.
He thought dizzily of the spearmen trying to follow through the dark and
could almost laugh again.

       *       *       *       *       *

Their trek to the coast was marked by desperate speed. For twenty-four
hours, they stopped only to gnaw at their rations or snatch a drink at a
stream. Charles kept moving because it was unendurable to let a
ten-year-old girl exceed him in stamina. Both of them paid terribly for
the murderous pace they kept. The child's face became skull-like and her
eyes red; her lips dried and cracked. He gasped at her as they pulled
their way up a bramble-covered 45-degree slope: "How do you do it? Isn't
this ever going to end?"

"Ends soon," she croaked at him. "You know we dodged 'em three times?"

He could only shake his head.

She stared at him with burning red eyes. "This ain't hard," she croaked.
"You do this with a gut-full of poison, _that's_ hard."

"_Did_ you?"

She grinned crookedly and chanted something he did not understand:

    "_Nine moons times thirteen is the daughter's age
      When she drinks the death-cup.
    Three leagues times three she must race and rage
      Down hills and up_--"

She added matter-of-factly: "Last year. Prove I have the power of the
goddess. Run, climb, with your guts falling out. This year, starve for a
week and run down a deer of seven points."

He had lost track of days and nights when they stood on the brow of a
hill at dawn and looked over the sea. The girl gasped: "'Sall right now.
_She_ wouldn't let them go on. She's a bitch, but she's no fool." The
child fell in her tracks. Charles, too tired for panic, slept too.

       *       *       *       *       *

Charles woke with a wonderful smell in his nostrils. He followed it
hungrily down the reverse slope of the hill to a grotto.

Martha was crouched over a fire on which rocks were heating. Beside it
was a bark pot smeared with clay. As he watched, she lifted a red-hot
rock with two green sticks and rolled it into the pot. It boiled up and
continued to boil for an astonishing number of minutes. That was the
source of the smell.

"Breakfast?" he asked unbelievingly.

"Rabbit stew," she said. "Plenty of runways, plenty of bark, plenty of
green branches. I made snares. Two tough old bucks cooking in there for
an hour."

They chewed the meat from the bones in silence. She said at last: "We
can't settle down here. Too near to the coast. And if we move further
inland, there's _her_. And others. I been thinking." She spat a string
of tough meat out. "There's England. Work our way around the coast. Make
a raft or steal a canoe and cross the water. _Then_ we could settle
down. You can't have me for three times thirteen moons yet or I'd lose
the power. But I guess we can wait. I heard about England and the
English. They have no hearts left. We can take as many slaves as we
want. They cry a lot but they don't fight. And none of their women has
the power." She looked up anxiously. "You wouldn't want one of their
women, would you? Not if you could have somebody with the power just by
waiting for her?"

He looked down the hill and said slowly: "You know that's not what I had
in mind, Martha. I have my own place with people far away. I want to get
back there. I thought--I thought you'd like it too." Her face twisted.
He couldn't bear to go on, not in words. "Look into my mind, Martha," he
said. "Maybe you'll see what it means to me."

She stared long and deep. At last she rose, her face inscrutable, and
spat into the fire. "Think I saved you for that?" she asked. "And for
_her_? Not me. Save yourself from now on, mister. I'm going to beat my
way south around the coast. England for me, and I don't want any part of
you."

She strode off down the hill, gaunt and ragged, but with arrogance in
her swinging, space-eating gait. Charles sat looking after her,
stupefied, until she had melted into the underbrush. "Think I saved you
for that? And for _her_?" She'd made some kind of mistake. He got up
stiffly and ran after her, but he could not pick up an inch of her
woods-wise trail. Charles slowly climbed to the grotto again and sat in
its shelter.

He spent the morning trying to concoct simple springs out of bark strips
and whippy branches. He got nowhere. The branches broke or wouldn't bend
far enough. The bark shredded, or wouldn't hold a knot. Without metal,
he couldn't shape the trigger to fit the bow so that it would be both
sensitive and reliable.

At noon he drank enormously from a spring and looked morosely for plants
that might be edible. He decided on something with a bulbous, onion-like
root. For a couple of hours after that he propped rocks on sticks here
and there. When he stepped back and surveyed them, he decided that any
rabbit he caught with them would be, even for a rabbit, feeble-minded.
He could think of nothing else to do.

First he felt a slight intestinal qualm and then a far from slight
nausea. Then the root he had eaten took over with drastic thoroughness.
He collapsed, retching, and only after the first spasms had passed was
he able to crawl to the grotto. The shelter it offered was mostly
psychological, but he had need of that. Under the ancient, mossy stones,
he raved with delirium until dark.

Sometimes he was back in Syndic Territory, Charles Orsino of the
two-goal handicap and the flashing smile. Sometimes he was back in the
stinking blockhouse with Kennedy spinning interminable, excruciatingly
boring strands of iridescent logic. Sometimes he was back in the
psychology laboratory with the pendulum beating, the light blinking, the
bell ringing and sense-impressions flooding him and drowning him with
lies. Sometimes he raced in panic down the streets of New Portsmouth
with sweatered Guardsmen pounding after him, their knives flashing fire.

But at last he was in the grotto again, with Martha sponging his head
and cursing him in a low, fluent undertone for being seven times seven
kinds of fool.

She said tartly as recognition came into his eyes: "Yes, for the fifth
time, I'm back. I should be making my way to England and a band of my
own, but I'm back and I don't know why. I heard you in pain and I
thought it served you right for not knowing deathroot when you see it,
but I turned around and came back."

"Don't go," he said hoarsely.

She held a bark cup to his lips and made him choke down some nauseating
brew. "Don't worry," she told him bitterly. "I won't go. I'll do
everything you want, which shows that I'm as big a fool as you are, or
bigger because I know better. I'll help you find her and take the spell
off her. And may the goddess help me because I can't help myself."

       *       *       *       *       *

"... things like sawed tree-trunks, shells you call them ... a pile of
them ... he looks at them and he thinks they're going bad and they ought
to be used soon ... under a wooden roof they are ... a thin man with
death on his face and hate in his heart ... he wears blue and gold ...
he sticks the gold, you call a coat's wrist the cuff, he sticks the cuff
under the nose of a fellow and yells his hate out and the fellow feels
ready to strangle on blood ... it's about a boat that sank ... this
fellow, he's a fat little man and he kills and kills, he'd kill the man
if he could...."

A picket boat steamed by the coast twice a day, north after dawn and
south before sunset. They had to watch out for it; it swept the coast
with powerful glasses.

"... it's the man with the bellyache again but now he's sleepy ... he's
cursing the skipper ... sure there's nothing on the coast to trouble
us ... eight good men aboard and that one bastard of a skipper...."

Sometimes it jumped erratically, like an optical lever disturbed by the
weight of a hair.

"... board over the door painted with a circle, a zig-zag on its side,
an up-and-down line ... they call it office of intelligent navels ...
the lumber camp ... machine goes chug-rip, chug-rip ... and the place
where they cut metal like wood on machines that spin around ... a
deathly-sick little fellow loaded down and chained ... fell on his
face, he can't get up, his bowels are water, his muscles are stiff, like
dry branches and he's afraid ... they curse him, they beat him, they
take him to a machine that spins ... _they_ ... _they_--_they_--"

She sat bolt upright, screaming. Her eyes didn't see Charles. He drew
back one hand and slammed it across her cheek in a slap that
reverberated like a pistol shot. Her head rocked to the blow and her
eyes snapped back from infinity-focus.

She never told Charles what they had done to the sick slave in the
machine shop, and he never asked her.

Without writing equipment, for crutches, Charles doubted profoundly that
he'd be able to hang onto any of the material she supplied. He
surprised himself; his memory developed with exercise.

The shadowy ranks of the New Portsmouth personnel became solider daily
in his mind; the chronically-fatigued ordnance-man whose mainspring was
to get by with the smallest possible effort; the sex-obsessed little man
in Intelligence who lived only for the brothels where he selected older
women--women who looked like his mother; the human weasel in BuShips who
was impotent in bed and a lacerating tyrant in the office; the admiral
who knew he was dying and hated his juniors proportionately to their
youth and health.

And--

"... this woman of yours ... she ain't at home there ... she ain't
at ... at home ... _anywhere_. ... the fat man, the one that kills,
he's talking to her but she isn't ... yes she is ... no she isn't--she's
answering him, talking about over-the-sea...."

"Lee Falcaro," Charles whispered. "Lee Bennet."

The trance-frozen face didn't change; the eerie whisper went on without
interruption: "... Lee Bennet on her lips, Lee Falcaro down deep in her
guts ... and the face of Charles Orsino down there too...."

An unexpected pang went through him.

He sorted and classified endlessly what he had learned. He formed and
rejected a dozen plans. At last there was one he could not reject.




XV


Commander Grinnel was officer of the day, and sore as a boil about it.
O.N.I. wasn't supposed to catch the duty. You risked your life on
cloak-and-dagger missions; let the shore-bound fancy dans do the
drudgery. But there he was, nevertheless, in the guard house office with
a .45 on his hip, the interminable night stretching before him, and the
ten-man main guard snoring away outside.

He eased his bad military conscience by reflecting that there wasn't
anything to guard, that patrolling the shore establishment was just worn
out tradition. The ships and boats had their own watch. At the very
furthest stretch of the imagination, a tarzan might sneak into town and
try to steal some ammo. Well, if he got caught he got caught. And if he
didn't, who'd know the difference with the accounting as sloppy as it
was here? They did things differently in Iceland.

       *       *       *       *       *

They crept through the midnight dark of New Portsmouth's outskirts. As
before, she led with her small hand. Lights flared on a wharf where,
perhaps, a boat was being serviced. A slave screamed somewhere under the
lash or worse.

"Here's the doss house," Martha whispered. It was smack between
paydays--part of the plan--and the house was dark except for the
hopefully-lit parlor. They ducked down the alley that skirted it and
around the back of Bachelor Officer Quarters. The sentry, if he were
going his rounds at all, would be at the other end of his post when they
passed--part of the plan.

Lee Falcaro was quartered alone in a locked room of the O.N.I. building.
Martha had, from seventy miles away, frequently watched the lock being
opened and closed.

They dove under the building's crumbling porch two minutes before a late
crowd of drinkers roared down the street and emerged when they were
safely gone. There was a charge of quarters, a little yeoman, snoozing
under a dim light in the O.N.I. building's lobby.

"Anybody else?" Charles whispered edgily.

"No. Just her. She's asleep. Dreaming about--never mind. Come on
Charles. He's out."

The little yeoman didn't stir as they passed him and crept up the
stairs. Lee Falcaro's room was part of the third-floor attic, finished
off specially. You reached it by a ladder from a second-floor one-man
office.

The lock was an eight-button piccolo--very rare in New Portsmouth and
presumably loot from the mainland. Charles' fingers flew over it:
1-7-5-4-, 2-2-7-3-, 8-2-6-6- and it flipped open silently.

But the door squeaked.

"She's waking up!" Martha hissed in the dark. "She'll yell!"

Charles reached the bed in two strides and clamped his hand over Lee
Falcaro-Bennet's mouth. Only a feeble "mmm!" came out, but the girl
thrashed violently in his grip.

"Shut up, lady!" Martha whispered. "Nobody's going to rape you."

There was an astonished "mmm?" and she subsided, trembling.

"Go ahead," Martha told him. "She won't yell."

He took his hand away nervously. "We've come to administer the oath of
citizenship," he said.

The girl answered in the querulous voice that was hardly hers: "You
picked a strange time for it. Who are you? What's all the whispering
for?"

He improvised. "I'm Commander Lister. Just in from Iceland aboard atom
sub _Taft_. They didn't tell you in case it got turned down, but I was
sent for authorization to give you citizenship. You know how unusual it
is for a woman."

"Who's this child? And why did you get me up in the dead of night?"

He dipped deeply into Martha's probings of the past week.
"Citizenship'll make the Guard Intelligence gang think twice before they
try to grab you again. Naturally they'd try to block us if we
administered the oath in public. Ready?"

"Dramatic," she sneered. "Oh, I suppose so. Get it over with."

"Do you, Lee Bennet, solemnly renounce all allegiances previously held
by you and pledge your allegiance to the North American Government?"

"I do," she said.

There was a choked little cry from Martha. "Hell's fire," she said.
"Like breaking a leg!"

"What are you talking about, little girl?" Lee asked, coldly alert.

"It's all right," Charles said wearily. "Don't you know my voice? I'm
Orsino. You turned me in back there because they don't give, citizenship
to women and so your de-conditioning didn't get triggered off. I managed
to break for the woods. A bunch of natives got me. I busted loose with
the help of Martha here. Among her other talents, the kid's a mind
reader. I remember the triggering shocked me out of a year's growth; how
do you feel?"

Lee was silent, but Martha answered in a voice half puzzled and half
contemptuous: "She feels fine, but she's crying."

"Am not," Lee Falcaro gulped.

Charles turned from her, embarrassed. In a voice that strove to be
normal, he whispered to Martha: "What about the boat?"

"Still there," she said.

Lee Falcaro said tremulously: "Wh-wh-what boat?"

"Martha's staked out a reactor-driven patrol speedboat at a wharf. One
guard aboard. She--watched it in operation and I have some small-boat
time. I really think we can grab it. If we get a good head-start, they
don't have anything based here that'll catch up with it. If we get a
break on the weather, their planes won't be able to pick us up."

Lee Falcaro stood up, dashing tears from her eyes. "Then let's go," she
said evenly.

"How's the C.Q.--that man downstairs, Martha?"

"Still sleepin'. The way's as clear now as it'll ever be."

They closed the door behind them and Charles worked the lock. The Charge
of Quarters looked as though he couldn't be roused by anything less
than an earthquake as they passed--but Martha stumbled on one of the
rotting steps after they were outside the building.

"Patrick and Bridget rot my clumsy feet off!" she whispered. "He's
awake."

"Under the porch," Charles said. They crawled into the dank space
between porch floor and ground. Martha kept up a scarcely-audible
volleyfire of maledictions aimed at herself.

When they stopped abruptly Charles knew it was bad.

Martha held up her hand for silence, and Charles imagined in the dark
that he could see the strained and eerie look of her face. After a pause
she whispered: "He's using the--what do you call it? You talk and
somebody hears you far away? A prowler he says to them. A wild man from
the woods. The bitches bastard must have seen you in your handsome suit
of skin and dirt, Charles. Oh, we're _for_ it! May my toe that stumbled
grow the size of a boulder! May my cursed eyes that didn't see the step
fall out!"

They huddled down in the darkness and Charles took Lee Falcaro's hand
reassuringly. It was cold. A moment later his other hand was taken, with
grim possessiveness, by the child.

Martha whispered: "The fat little man. The man who kills, Charles."

He nodded. He thought he had recognized Grinnel from her picture.

"And ten men waking up. Charles, do you remember the way to the wharf?"

"Sure," he said. "But we're net going to get separated."

"They're mean, mad men," she said. "Bloody-minded. And the little man is
the worst."

They heard the stomping feet and a babble of voices, and Commander
Grinnel's clear, fat-man's tenor: "Keep it quiet, men. He may still be
in the area." The feet thundered over their heads on the porch.

In the barest of whispers Martha said: "The man that slept tells them
there was only one, and he didn't see what he was like except for the
bare skin and the long hair. And the fat man says they'll find him
and--and--and says they'll find him." Her hand clutched Charles'
desperately and then dropped it as the feet thudded overhead again.

Grinnel was saying: "Half of you head up the street and half down. Check
the alleys, check open window--hell, I don't have to tell you. If we
don't find the bastard on the first run we'll have to wake up the whole
Guard Battalion and patrol the whole base with them all the goddam
night, so keep your eyes open. Take off."

"Remember the way to the wharf, Charles," Martha said. "Good-bye lady.
Take care of him. Take good care of him." She wrenched her hand away and
darted out from under the porch.

Lee muttered some agonized monosyllable. Charles started out after the
child instinctively and then collapsed weakly back onto the dirt. They
heard the rest.

"Hey, you--it's him, by God! Get him! Get him!"

"Here he is, down here! Head him off!"

"Over there!" Grinnel yelled. "Head him off! Head him--good work!"

"For God's sake. It's a girl."

"Those goddam yeomen and their goddam prowlers."

Grinnel: "Where are you from, kid?"

"That's no kid from the base, commander. Look at her!"

"I just was, sarge. Looks good to me, don't it to you?"

Grinnel, tolerant, fatherly, amused: "Now, men, have your fun but keep
it quiet."

"Don't be afraid, kid--" There was an animal howl from Martha's throat
that made Lee Falcaro shake hysterically and Charles grind his
fingernails into his palms.

Grinnel: "Sergeant, you'd better tie your shirt around her head and take
her into the O.N.I. building."

"Why, commander! And let that lousy little yeoman in on it?"

Grinnel, amused, a good Joe, a man's man: "That's up to you, men. Just
keep it quiet."

"Why, commander, sometimes I like to make a little noise--"

"Ow!" a man yelled. There was a scuffle of feet and babbling voices.
"Get her, you damn fool!" "She bit my hand--" "There she goes--" and a
single emphatic shot.

Grinnel's voice said into the silence that followed: "That's that, men."

"Did you _have_ to shoot, Commander?" an aggrieved Guardsman said.

"Don't blame me, fellow. Blame the guy that let her go."

"God-dammit, she bit me--"

Somebody said as though he didn't mean it: "We ought to take her
someplace."

"The hell with that. Let 'em get her in the morning."

"Them as wants her." A cackle of harsh laughter.

Grinnel, tolerantly: "Back to the guardhouse, men. And keep it quiet."

They scuffled off and there was silence again for long minutes. Charles
said at last: "We'll go down to the wharf." They crawled out and looked
for a moment from the shelter of the building at the bundle lying in the
road.

Lee muttered: "Grinnel."

"Shut up," Charles said. He led her down deserted alleys and around
empty corners, strictly according to plan.

The speedboat was a twenty-foot craft at Wharf Eighteen, bobbing on the
water safely removed from other moored boats and ships. Lee Falcaro let
out a small, smothered shriek when she saw a uniformed sailor sitting in
the cockpit, apparently staring directly at them.

"It's all right," Charles said. "He's a drunk. He's always out cold by
this time of night." Smoothly Charles found the rope locker, cut lengths
with the sailor's own knife and bound and gagged him. The man's eyes
opened, weary, glazed and red while this was going on and closed again.
"Help me lug him ashore," Charles said. Lee Falcaro took the sailor's
legs and they eased him onto the wharf.

They went back into the cockpit. "This is deep water," Charles said, "so
you'll have no trouble with pilotage. You can read a compass and charts.
There's an automatic dead reckoner. My advice is just to pull the
moderator rods out quarter-speed, point the thing west, pull the rods
out as far as they'll go--and relax. Either they'll overtake you or they
won't."

She was beginning to get the drift. She said nervously: "You're talking
as though you're not coming along."

"I'm not," he said, playing the lock of the arms rack. The bar fell
aside and he pulled a .45 pistol from its clamp. He thought back and
remembered where the boat's diminutive magazine was located, broke the
feeble lock and found a box of short, fat, heavy little cartridges. He
began to snap them into the pistol's magazine.

"What do you think you're up to?" Lee Falcaro demanded.

"Appointment with Commander Grinnel," he said. He slid the heavy
magazine into the pistol's grip and worked the slide to jack a cartridge
into the chamber.

"Shall I cast off for you?" he asked.

"Don't be a fool," she said. "You sound like a revival of a Mickey
Spillane comedy. You can't bring her back to life and you've got a job
to do for the Syndic."

"You do it," he said, and snapped another of the blunt, fat, little
cartridges into the magazine.

She cast off, reached for the moderator-rod control and pulled it hard.

"Gee," he gasped, "you'll sink us!" and dashed for the controls. You had
seconds before the worm-gears turned, the cadmium rods withdrew from
their slots, the reactor seethed and sent boiling metal cycling through
the turbine--

He slammed down manual levers that threw off the fore and aft mooring
lines, spun the wheel, bracing himself, and saw Lee Falcaro go down to
the deck in a tangle, the .45 flying from her hand and skidding across
the knurled plastic planking. But by then the turbine was screaming an
alarm to the whole base and they were cutting white water through the
buoy-marked gap in the harbor net.

Lee Falcaro got to her feet. "I'm not proud of myself," she said to him.
"But she told me to take care of you."

He said grimly: "We could have gone straight to the wharf without that
little layover to pick you up. Take the wheel."

"Charles, I--"

He snarled at her.

"_Take the wheel._"

She did, and he went aft to stare through the darkness. The harbor
lights were twinkling pin-points; then his eyes misted so he could not
see them at all. He didn't give a damn if a dozen corvettes were already
slicing the bay in pursuit. He had failed.




XVI


It was a dank fog-shrouded morning. Sometime during the night the quill
of the dead reckoner had traced its fine red line over the 30th
meridian. Roughly half-way, Charles Orsino thought, rubbing the sleep
from his eyes. But the line was straight as a string for the last four
hours of their run. The damn girl must have fallen asleep on watch. He
glared at her in the bow and broke open a ration. Blandly oblivious to
the glare, she said: "Good morning."

Charles swallowed a mouthful of chocolate, half-chewed, and choked on
it. He reached hastily for water and found the tall plastic column of
the ion-exchange apparatus empty. "Damn it," he snarled, "why didn't you
refill this thing when you emptied it? And why didn't you zig-zag
overnight? You're utterly irresponsible." He hurled the bucket overside,
hauled it up and slopped seawater into the apparatus. Now there'd be a
good twenty minutes before a man-sized drink accumulated.

"Just a minute," she told him steadily. "Let's straighten this out. I
haven't had any water on the night watch so I didn't have any occasion
to refill the tube. You must have taken the last of the water with your
dinner. And as for the zig-zag, you said we should run a straightaway
now and then to mix it up. I decided that last night was as good a time
as any."

He took a minute drink from the reservoir, stalling. There was
something--yes; he had _meant_ to refill the apparatus after his dinner
ration. And he _had_ told her to give it a few hours of straightaway
some night....

He said formally: "You're quite right on both counts. I apologize." He
bit into a ration.

"That's not good enough," she said. "I'm not going to have you tell me
you're sorry and then go scowling and sulking about the boat. In fact I
don't like your behavior at all."

He said, enormously angry: "_Oh, you don't do you?_" and hated her, the
world and himself for the stupid inadequacy of the comeback.

"No. I don't. I'm seriously worried. I'm afraid the conditioning you got
didn't fall away completely when they swore you in. You've been acting
irrationally and inconsistently."

"What about you?" he snapped. "You got conditioned too."

"That's right," she said. "That's another reason why you're worrying me.
I find impulses in myself that have no business there. I simply seem to
do a better job of controlling them than you're doing. For instance:
we've been quarreling and at cross-purposes ever since you and Martha
picked me up. That couldn't be unless I were contributing to the
friction."

The wheel was fixed; she took a step or two aft and said professorially:
"I've never had trouble getting along with people. I've had differences,
of course, and at times I've allowed myself displays of temper when it
was necessary to assert myself. But I find that you upset me; that for
some reason or other your opinion on a matter is important to me, that
if it differs with mine there should be a reconciliation."

He put down the ration and said wonderingly: "Do you know, that's the
way I feel about you? And you think it's the conditioning or--or
something?" He took a couple of steps forward, hesitantly.

"Yes," she said in a rather tremulous voice. "The conditioning or
something. For instance, you're inhibited. You haven't made an indecent
proposition to me, not even as a matter of courtesy. Not that I care, of
course, but--" In stepping aft, she tripped over the water bucket and
went down to the deck with a faint scream.

He said: "Here, let me help you." He picked her up and didn't let go.

"Thanks," she said faintly. "The conditioning technique can't be called
faulty, but it has inherent limitations...." She trailed off and he
kissed her. She kissed back and said more faintly still: "Or it might be
the drugs we used.... Oh, Charles, what _took_ you so long?"

He said, brooding: "You're way out of my class, you know. I'm just a
bagman for the New York police. I wouldn't even be that if it weren't
for Uncle Frank, and you're a Falcaro. It's just barely thinkable that I
could make a pass at you. I guess that held me off and I didn't want to
admit it so I got mad at you instead. Hell, I could have swum back to
the base and made a damned fool of myself trying to find Grinnel, but
down inside I knew better. The kid's _gone_."

"We'll make a psychologist of you yet," she said.

"Psychologist? Why? You're joking."

"No. It's not a joke. You'll _like_ psychology, darling. You can't go on
playing polo forever, you know."

Darling! What was he getting into? Old man Gilby was four-goal at sixty,
wasn't he? Good God, was he hooked into marriage at twenty-three? Was
she married already? Did she know or care whether he was? Had she been
promiscuous? Would she continue to be? He'd never know; that was the one
thing you never asked; your only comfort, if you needed comfort, was
that she could never dream of asking you. What went on here? Let me out!

It went through his mind in a single panicky flash and then he said:
"The hell with it," and kissed her again.

She wanted to know: "The hell with what, darling?"

"Everything. Tell me about psychology. I can't go on playing polo
forever."

It was an hour before she got around to telling him about psychology:
"The neglect has been criminal--and inexplicable. For about a century
it's been _assumed_ that psychology is a dead fallacy. Why?"

"All right," he said amiably, playing with a lock of her hair. "Why?"

"Lieberman," she said. "Lieberman of Johns-Hopkins. He was one of the
old-line topological psychology men--don't let the lingo throw you,
Charles; it's just the name of a system. He wrote an attack on
the _mengenlehre_ psychology school--point-sets of emotions,
class-inclusions of reactions and so on. He blasted them to bits by
proving that their constructs didn't correspond to the emotions and
reactions of random-sampled populations. And then came the pay-off: he
tried the same acid test on his _own_ school's constructs and found out
that they didn't correspond either. It didn't frighten him; he was a
scientist. He published, and then the jig was up. Everybody, from full
professors to undergraduate students went down the roster of the schools
of psychology and wrecked them so comprehensively that the field was as
dead as palmistry in twenty years. The miracle is that it hadn't
happened before. The flaws were so glaring! Textbooks of the older kind
solemnly described syndromes, psychoses, neuroses that simply couldn't
be found in the real world! And that's the way it was all the way down
the line."

"So where does that leave us?" Charles demanded. "Is it or isn't it a
science?"

"It is," she said simply. "Lieberman and his followers went too far. It
became a kind of hysteria. The experimenters must have been too eager.
They misread results, they misinterpreted statistics, they misunderstood
the claims of a school and knocked down not its true claims but
straw-man claims they had set up themselves."

"But--_psychology_!" Charles protested, obscurely embarrassed at the
thought that man's mind was subject to scientific study--not because he
knew the first thing about it, but because _everybody_ knew psychology
was phony.

She shrugged. "I can't help it. We were doing physiology of the sensory
organs, trying to settle the oldie about focusing the eye, and I got to
grubbing around the pre-Lieberman texts looking for light in the
darkness. Some of it sounded so--not sensible, but _positive_ that I ran
off one of Lieberman's population checks. And the old boy had been dead
wrong. _Mengenlehre_ constructs correspond quite nicely to the actual
way people's minds work. I kept checking and the schools that were
destroyed as hopelessly fallacious a century ago checked out, some
closely and some not so closely, as good descriptions of the way the
mind works. Some have predictive value. I used _mengenlehre_ psychology
algorithms to compute the conditioning on you and me, including the
trigger release. It worked. You see, Charles? We're on the rim of
something tremendous!"

"When did this Lieberman flourish?"

"I don't have the exact dates in my head. The breakup of the schools
corresponded roughly with the lifetime of John G. Falcaro."

That pin-pointed it rather well. John G. succeeded Rafael, who succeeded
Amadeo Falcaro, first leader of the Syndic in revolt. Under John G., the
hard-won freedom was enjoyed, the bulging store-houses were joyously
emptied, craft union rules went joyously out the window and builders
_worked_, the dollar went to an all-time high and there was an all-time
number of dollars in circulation. It had been an exhuberant time still
fondly remembered; just the time for over-enthusiastic rebels against a
fusty scholasticism to joyously smash old ways of thought without too
much exercise of the conscience. It all checked out.

She started and he got to his feet. A hardly-noticed discomfort was
becoming acute; the speedboat was pitching and rolling quite seriously,
for the first time since their escape. "Dirty weather coming up," he
said. "We've been too damned lucky so far." He thought, but didn't
remark, that there was much to worry about in the fact that there seemed
to have been no pursuit. The meager resources of the North American Navy
wouldn't be spent on chasing a single minor craft--not if the weather
could be counted on to finish her off.

"I thought we were unsinkable?"

"In a way. Seal the boat and she's unsinkable the way a corked bottle
is. But the boat's made up of a lot of bits and pieces that go together
just so. Pound her for a few hours with waves and the bits and pieces
give way. She doesn't sink, but she doesn't steam or steer either. I
wish the Syndic had a fleet on the Atlantic."

"Sorry," she said. "The nearest fleet I know of is Mob ore boats on the
great lakes and they aren't likely to pick us up."

The sea-search radar pinged and they flew to the screen. "_Something_ at
273 degrees, about eight miles," he said. "It can't be pursuit. They
couldn't have any reason at all to circle around us and come at us from
ahead." He strained his eyes into the west and thought he could see a
black speck on the gray.

Lee Falcaro tried a pair of binoculars and complained: "These things
won't work."

"Not on a rolling, pitching platform they won't--not with an optical
lever eight miles long. I don't suppose this boat would have a
gyro-stabilized signal glass." He spun the wheel to 180; they staggered
and clung as the bow whipped about, searched and steadied on the new
course. The mounting waves slammed them broadside-to and the rolling
increased. They hardly noticed; their eyes were on the radarscope.
Fogged as it was with sea return, they nevertheless could be sure after
several minutes that the object had changed course to 135. Charles made
a flying guess at her speed, read their own speed off and scribbled for
a moment.

He said nothing, but spun the wheel to 225 and went back to the
radarscope. The object changed course to 145. Charles scribbled again
and said at last, flatly: "They're running collision courses on us.
Automatically computed, I suppose, from a radar. We're through."

He spun the wheel to 180 again, and studied the crawling green spark on
the radarscope. "This way we give 'em the longest run for their money
and can pray for a miracle. The only way we can use our speed to outrun
them is to turn around and head back into Government Territory--which
isn't what we want. Relax, Lee. Maybe if the weather thickens they'll
lose us--no; not with radar."

They sat together on a bunk, wordlessly, for hours while the spray
dashed higher and the boat shivered to hammering waves. Briefly they saw
the pursuer, three miles off, low, black and ugly, before fog closed in
again.

At nightfall there was the close, triumphant roar of a big reaction
turbine and a light stabbed through the fog, flooding the boat with
blue-white radiance. A cliff-like black hull loomed alongside as a
bull-horn roared at them: "Cut your engines and come about into the
wind."

Lee Falcaro read white-painted letters on the black hull: "_Hon. James
J. Regan, Chicago_." She turned to Charles and said wonderingly: "It's
an ore boat. From the Mob great lakes fleet."




XVII


"Here?" Charles demanded. "_Here?_"

"No possible mistake," she said, stunned. "When you're a Falcaro you
travel. I've seen 'em in Duluth, I've seen 'em in Quebec, I've seen 'em
in Buffalo."

The bull-horn voice roared again, dead in the shroud of fog; "Come into
the wind and cut your engines or we'll put a shell into you."

Charles turned the wheel and wound in the moderator rod; the boat
pitched like a splinter on the waves. There was a muffled double
explosion and two grapnels crunched into the plastic hull, bow and
stern. As the boat steadied, sharing the inertia of the ore ship, a dark
figure leaped from the blue-white eye of the searchlight to their deck.
And another. And another.

"Hello, Jim," Lee Falcaro said almost inaudibly. "Haven't met since Las
Vegas, have we?"

The first boarder studied her cooly. He was built for football or any
other form of mayhem. He ignored Charles completely. "Lee Falcaro as
advised. Do you still think twenty reds means a black is bound to come
up? You always were a fool, Lee. And now you're in real trouble."

"What's going on, mister?" Charles snapped. "We're Syndics and I presume
you're Mobsters. Don't you recognize the treaty?"

The boarder turned to Charles inquiringly. "Some confusion," he said.
"Max Wyman? Charles Orsino? Or just some wild man from outback?"

"Orsino," Charles said formally. "Second cousin of Edward Falcaro, under
the guardianship of Francis W. Taylor."

The boarder bowed slightly. "James Regan IV," he said. "No need to list
my connections. It would take too long and I feel no need to justify
myself to a small-time dago chisler. Watch him gentlemen!"

Charles found his arms pinned by Regan's two companions. There was a gun
muzzle in his ribs.

Regan shouted to the ship and a ladder was let down. Lee Falcaro and
Charles climbed it with guns at their backs. He said to her: "Who is
that lunatic?" It did not even occur to him that the young man was who
he claimed to be--the son of the Mob Territory opposite number of Edward
Falcaro.

"He's Regan," she said. "And I don't know who's the lunatic, him or me.
Charles, I'm sorry, terribly sorry, I got you into this."

He managed to smile. "I volunteered," he said.

"Enough talk," Regan said, following them onto the deck. Dull-eyed
sailors watched them incuriously, and there were a couple of anvil-jawed
men with a stance and swagger Charles had come to know. Guardsmen--he
would have staked his life on it. Guardsmen of the North American
Government Navy--aboard a Mob Territory ship and acting as if they were
passengers or high-rated crewmen.

Regan smirked: "I'm on the horns of a dilemma. There are no
accomodations that are quite right for you. There are storage
compartments which are worse than you deserve and there are passenger
quarters which are too good for you. I'm afraid it will have to be one
of the compartments. Your consolation will be that it's only a short run
to Chicago."

Chicago--headquarters for Mob Territory. The ore ship had been on a
return trip to Chicago when alerted somehow by the Navy to intercept the
fugitives. _Why?_

"Down there," one of the men gestured briskly with a gun. They climbed
down a ladder into a dark, oily cavern fitfully lit by a flash in
Regan's hand.

"Make yourselves comfortable," Regan told them. "If you get a headache,
don't worry. We were carrying some avgas on the outward run." The flash
winked out and a door clanged on them.

"I can't believe it," Charles said. "That's a top Mob man? Couldn't you
be mistaken?" He groped in the dark and found her. The place did reek of
gasoline.

She clung to him and said: "Hold me, Charles.... Yes that's Jimmy Regan.

"That's what will become top man in the Mob. Jimmy's a charmer at a Las
Vegas Hotel. Jimmy's a gourmet when he orders at the Pump Room and he's
trying to overawe you. Jimmy plays polo too, but he's crippled three of
his own team-mates because he's not very good at it. I kept telling
myself whenever I ran into him that he was just an accident, the Mob
could survive him. But his father acts--funny. There's something with
them, there's some--

"They roll out the carpet when you show up but the people around them
are afraid of them. There's a story I never believed--but I believe it
now. What would happen if my uncle pulled out a pistol and began
screaming and shot a waiter: Jimmy's father did it, they tell me. And
nothing happened except that the waiter was dragged away and everybody
said it was a good thing Mr. Regan saw him reach for his gun and shot
him first. Only the waiter didn't have any gun.

"I saw Jimmy last three years ago. I haven't been in Mob Territory
since. I didn't like it there. Now I know why. Give Mob Territory enough
time and it'll be like New Portsmouth. Something went wrong with them.
We have the Treaty of Las Vegas and a hundred years of peace and there
aren't many people going back and forth between Syndic and Mob except
for a few high-ups like me who have to circulate. Manners. So you pay
duty calls and shut your eyes to what they're really like.

"_This_ is what they're like. This dark, damp stinking compartment. And
my uncle--and all the Falcaros--and you--and I--we aren't like them. Are
we? _Are we?_" Her fingers bit into his arms. She was shaking.

"Easy," he soothed her. "Easy, easy. We're all right. We'll be all
right. I think I've got it figured out. This must be some private
gun-running Jimmy's gone in for. Loaded an ore boat with avgas and ammo
and ran it up the Seaway. If anybody in Syndic Territory gave a damn
they thought it was a load of ore for New Orleans via the Atlantic and
the Gulf. But Jimmy ran his load to Ireland or Iceland, H.Q. A little
private flier of his. He wouldn't dare harm us. There's the Treaty and
you're a Falcaro."

"Treaty," she said. "I tell you they're all in it. Now that I've seen
the Government in action I understand what I saw in Mob Territory.
They've gone rotten, that's all. They've gone rotten. The way he treated
you, because he thought you didn't have his rank! Sometimes my uncle's
high-handed, sometimes he tells a person off, sometimes he lets him know
he's top man in the Syndic and doesn't propose to let anybody teach him
how to suck eggs. But the spirit's different. In the Syndic it's parent
to child. In the Mob it's master to slave. Not based on age, not based
on achievement, but based on the accident of birth. You tell me 'You're
a Falcaro' and that packs weight. Why? Not because I was born a Falcaro
but because they let me stay a Falcaro. If I hadn't been brainy and
quick, they'd have adopted me out before I was ten. They don't do that
in Mob Territory. Whatever chance sends a Regan is a Regan then and
forever. Even if it's a paranoid constitutional inferior like Jimmy's
father. Even if it's a giggling pervert like Jimmy.

"God, Charles, I'm scared.

"At last I know these people and I'm scared. You'd have to see Chicago
to know why. The lakefront palaces, finer than anything in New York.
Regan Memorial Plaza, finer than Scratch Sheet Square--great gilded
marble figures, a hundred running yards of heroic frieze. But the hovels
you see only by chance! Gray brick towers dating from the Third Fire!
The children with faces like weasels, the men with faces like hogs, the
women with figures like beer barrels and all of them glaring at you when
you drive past as if they could cut your throat with joy. I never
understood the look in their eyes until now, and you'll never begin to
understand what I'm talking about until you see their eyes...."

Charles revolted against the idea. It was too gross to go down. It
didn't square with his acquired picture of life in North America and
therefore Lee Falcaro must be somehow mistaken or hysterical. "There,"
he murmured, stroking her hair. "We'll be all right. We'll be all
right." He tried to soothe her.

She twisted out of his arms and raged: "I _won't_ be humored. They're
mad, I tell you. Dick Reiner was right. We've got to wipe out the
Government. But Frank Taylor was right too. We've got to blast the Mob
before they blast us. They've died and decayed into something too
horrible to bear. If we let them stay on the continent, with us their
stink will infect us and poison us to death. We've got to do something.
We've got to do something."

"What?"

It stopped her cold. After a minute she uttered a shaky laugh. "The fat,
sloppy, happy Syndic," she said, "sitting around while the wolves
overseas and the maniacs across the Mississippi are waiting to jump.
Yes--do what?"

Charles Orsino was not good at arguments or indeed at any abstract
thinking. He knew it. He knew the virtues that had commended him to F.
W. Taylor were his energy and an off-hand talent for getting along with
people. But something rang terribly false in Lee's words.

"That kind of thinking doesn't get you anywhere, Lee," he said slowly.
"I didn't absorb much from Uncle Frank, but I did absorb this: you run
into trouble if you make up stories about the world and then act as if
they're true. The Syndic isn't somebody sitting around. The Government
isn't wolves. The Mobsters aren't maniacs. And they aren't waiting to
jump on the Syndic. The Syndic isn't anything that's jumpable. It's some
people and their morale and credit."

"Faith is a beautiful thing," Lee Falcaro said bitterly. "Where'd you
get yours?"

"From the people I knew and worked with. Numbers-runners, bookies,
sluts. Decent citizens."

"And what about the scared and unhappy ones in Riveredge? That sow of a
woman in the D.A.R. who smuggled me aboard a coast raider? The neurotics
and psychotics I found more and more of when I invalidated the Lieberman
findings? Charles, the North American Government didn't scare me
especially. But the thought that they're lined up with a continental
power does. It scares me damnably because it'll be three against one.
Against the Syndic, the Mob, the Government--and our own unbalanced
citizens."

Uncle Frank never let that word "citizens" pass without a tirade. "We
are not a government!" he always yelled. "We are not a government! We
must not think like a government! We must not think in terms of duties
and receipts and disbursements. We must think in terms of the old
loyalties that bound the Syndic together!" Uncle Frank was sedentary,
but he had roused himself once to the point of wrecking a bright young
man's newly installed bookkeeping system for the Medical Center. He had
used a cane, most enthusiastically, and then bellowed: "The next wise
guy who tries to sneak punch-cards into this joint will get them down
his throat! What the hell do we need punch-cards for? Either there's
room enough and doctors enough for the patients or there isn't. If there
is, we take care of them. If there isn't, we put 'em in an ambulance and
take them someplace else. And if I hear one goddammed word about
'efficiency'--" he glared the rest and strode out, puffing and leaning
on Charles' arm. "Efficiency," he growled in the corridor. "Every so
often a wise guy comes to me whimpering that people are getting away
with murder, collections are ten per cent below what they ought to be,
the Falcaro Fund's being milked because fifteen per cent of the dough
goes to people who aren't in need at all, eight per cent of the people
getting old-age pensions aren't really past sixty. Get efficient, these
people tell me. Save money by triple-checking collections. Save money by
tightening up the Fund rules. Save money by a nice big vital-statistics
system so we can check on pensioners. Yeah! Have people who might be
_working_ check on collections instead, and make enemies to boot
whenever we catch somebody short. Make the Fund a grudging Scrooge
instead of an open-handed sugar-daddy--and let people _worry_ about
their chances of making the Fund instead of _knowing_ it'll take care of
them if they're caught short. Set up a vital statistics system from
birth to death, with numbers and finger-prints and house registration
and maybe the gas-chamber if you forget to report a change of address.
You know what's wrong with the wise guys, Charles? Constipation. And
they want to constipate the universe." Charles remembered his uncle
restored to chuckling good humor by the time he had finished
embroidering his spur-of-the-moment theory with elaborate scatological
details.

"The Syndic will stand," he said to Lee Falcaro, thinking of his uncle
who knew what he was doing, thinking of Edward Falcaro who did the right
thing without knowing why, thinking of his good friends in the 101st
Precinct, the roaring happy crowds in Scratch Sheet Square, the
good-hearted men of Riveredge Breakdown Station 26 who had borne with
his sullenness and intolerance simply because that was the way things
were and that was the way you acted. "I don't know what the Mob's up to,
and I got a shock from the Government, and I don't deny that we have a
few miserable people who can't seem to be helped. But you've seen too
much of the Mob and Government and our abnormals. Maybe you don't know
as much as you should about our ordinary people. Anyway, all we can do
is wait."

"Yes," she said. "All we can do is wait. Until Chicago we have each
other."




XVIII


They were too sick with gasoline fumes to count the passing hours or
days. Food was brought to them from time to time, but it tasted like
avgas. They could not think for the sick headaches that pounded
incessantly behind their eyes. When Lee developed vomiting spasms that
would not stop, Charles Orsino pounded on the bulkhead with his fists
and yelled, his voice thunderous in the metal compartment, for an hour.

Somebody came at last--Regan. The light stabbed Charles' eyes when he
opened the door. "Trouble?" Regan asked, smirking.

"Miss Falcaro may be dying," Charles said. His own throat felt as though
it had been gone over with a cobbler's rasp. "I don't have to tell you
your life won't be worth a dime if she dies and it gets back to Syndic
Territory. She's got to be moved and she's got to have medical
attention."

"Death threat from the dago?" Regan was amused. "I have it on your own
testimony that the Syndic is merely morale and people and credit--not a
formidable organization. Yes, there was a mike in here. One reason for
your discomfort. You'll be gratified to learn that I thought most of
your conversation decidedly dull. However, the lady will be of no use to
us dead and we're now in the Seaway entering Lake Michigan. I suppose it
can't do any harm to move you two. Pick her up, will you? I'll let you
lead the way--and I'll remind you that I may not, as the lady said, be a
four-goal polo player but I am a high expert with the handgun. Get
moving."

Charles did not think he could pick his own feet up, but the thought of
pleading weakness to Regan was unbearable. He could try. Staggering, he
got Lee Falcaro over his shoulder and through the door. Regan
courteously stood aside and murmured: "Straight ahead and up the ramp.
I'm giving you my own cabin. We'll be docking soon enough; I'll make
out."

Charles dropped her onto a sybaritic bed in a small but
lavishly-appointed cabin. Regan whistled up a deckhand and a ship's
officer of some sort, who arrived with a medicine chest. "Do what you
can for her, mister," he told the officer. And to the deckhand: "Just
watch them. They aren't to touch anything. If they give you trouble,
you're free to punch them around a bit." He left, whistling.

The officer fussed unhappily over the medicine chest and stalled by
sponging off Lee Falcaro's face and throat. The deckhand watched
impassively. He was a six-footer, and he hadn't spent days inhaling
casing-head fumes. The trip-hammer pounding behind Charles's eyes seemed
to be worsening with the fresher air. He collapsed into a seat and
croaked, with shut eyes: "While you're trying to figure out the
vomiting, can I have a handful of aspirins?"

"Eh? Nothing was said about you. You were in Number Three with her? I
suppose it'll be all right. Here." He poured a dozen tablets into
Charles' hand. "Get him some water, you." The deckhand brought a glass
of water from the adjoining lavatory and Charles washed down some of the
tablets. The officer was reading a booklet, worry written on his face.
"Do you know any medicine?" he finally asked.

The hard-outlined, kidney-shaped ache was beginning to diffuse through
Charles' head, more general now and less excruciating. He felt
deliciously sleepy, but roused himself to answer: "Some athletic trainer
stuff. I don't know--morphine? Curare?"

The officer ruffled through the booklet. "Nothing about vomiting," he
said. "But it says curare for muscular cramp and I guess that's what's
going on. A lipoid suspension to release it slowly into the bloodstream
and give the irritation time to subside. Anyway, I can't kill her if I
watch the dose...."

Charles, through half-opened eyes, saw Lee Falcaro's arm reach behind
the officer's back to his medicine chest. The deckhand's eyes were
turning to the bed--Charles heaved himself to his feet, skyrockets going
off again through his head, and started for the lavatory. The deckhand
grabbed his arm. "Rest, mister! Where do you think you're going?"

"Another glass of water--"

"_I'll_ get it. You heard my orders."

Charles subsided. When he dared to look again, Lee's arm lay alongside
her body and the officer was triple-checking dosages in his booklet
against a pressurized hypodermic spray. The officer sighed and addressed
Lee: "You won't even feel this. Relax." He read his setting on the spray
again, checked it again against the booklet. He touched the syringe to
the skin of Lee's arm and thumbed open the valve. It hissed for a moment
and Charles knew submicroscopic particles of the medication had been
blasted under Lee's skin too fast for nerves to register the shock.

His glass of water came and he gulped it greedily. The officer packed
the pressurized syringe away, folded the chest and said to both of them,
rather vaguely: "That should do it. If, uh, if anything happens--or if
it doesn't work--call me and I'll try something else. Morphine, maybe."

He left and Charles slumped in the chair, the pain ebbing and sleep
beginning to flow over him. Not yet, he told himself. She hooked
something from the chest. He said to the deckhand: "Can I clean the lady
and myself up?"

"Go ahead, mister. You can use it. Just don't try anything."

The man lounged in the door-frame of the lavatory alternately studying
Charles at the wash-basin and Lee on the bed. Charles took off a heavy
layer of oily grease from himself and then took washing tissues to the
bed. Lee Falcaro's spasms were tapering off. As he washed her, she
managed a smile and an unmistakable wink.

"You folks married?" the deckhand asked.

"No," Charles said. Weakly she held up her right arm for the washing
tissue. As he scrubbed the hand, he felt a small cylinder smoothly
transferred from her palm to his. He slid it into a pocket and finished
the job.

The officer popped in again with a carton of milk. "Any better, miss?"
he asked.

"Yes," she whispered.

"Good. Try to drink this." Immensely set up by his success in treatment,
he hovered over her for a quarter of an hour getting the milk down a sip
at a time. It stayed down. He left trailing a favorable prognosis.
Meanwhile, Charles had covertly examined Lee's booty: a pressurized
syringe labeled _morphine sulfate sol_. It was full and ready. He
cracked off the protective cap and waited his chance.

It came when Lee grimaced at him and called the deckhand in a feeble
murmur. She continued to murmur so indistinctly that he bent over trying
to catch the words. Charles leaned forward and emptied the syringe at
one inch range into the taut seat of the deckhand's pants. He scratched
absently and said to Lee: "You'll have to talk up, lady." Then he
giggled, looked bewildered and collapsed on the floor, staring, coked to
the eyebrows.

Lee painfully sat up on the bed. "Porthole," she said.

Charles went to it and struggled with the locking lugs. It opened--and
an alarm bell began to clang through the ship. _Now_ he saw the
hair-fine, broken wire. An alarm trip-wire.

Feet thundered outside and the glutinous voice of Jimmy Regan was heard:
"Wait, you damn fools! You in there--is everything all right? Did they
try to pull something?"

Charles kept silent and shook his head at the girl. He picked up a chair
and stood by the door. The glutinous voice again, in a mumble that
didn't carry through--and the door sprang open. Charles brought the
chair down in a murderous chop, conscious only that it seemed curiously
light. There was an impact and the head fell.

It was Regan, with a drawn gun. It had been Regan. His skull was smashed
before he knew it. Charles felt as though he had all the time in the
world. He picked up the gun to a confused roar like a slowed-down sound
track and emptied it into the corridor. It had been a full automatic,
but the fifteen shots seemed as well-spaced as a ceremonial salute.
Regan, in his vanity, wore two guns. Charles scooped up the other and
said to Lee: "Come on."

He knew she was following as he raced down the cleared corridor and down
the ramp, back to the compartment in which they had been locked. Red
danger lights burned on the walls. Charles flipped the pistol to
semi-automatic as they passed a red-painted bulkhead with valves and
gages sprouting from it. He turned and fired three deliberate shots into
it. The last was drowned out by a dull roar as gasoline fumes exploded.
Pipe fittings and fragments of plate whizzed about them like bullets as
they raced on.

Somebody ahead loomed, yelling querulously: "What the hell was that,
Mac? What blew?"

"Where's the reactor room?" Charles demanded, jamming the pistol into
his chest. The man gulped and pointed.

"Take me there. Fast."

"Now _look_, Mac--"

Charles told him in a few incisive details where and how he was going to
be shot. The man went white and led them down the corridor and into the
reactor room. Three white-coated men with the aloof look of reactor
specialists stared at them as they bulled into the spotless chamber.

The oldest sniffed: "And what, may I ask, are you crewmen doing in--"

Lee slammed the door behind them and said: "Sound the radiation alarm."

"Certainly not! You must be the couple we--"

"_Sound the radiation alarm._" She picked up a pair of dividers from the
plot board and approached the technician with murder on her face. He
gaped until she poised the needle points before his eyes and repeated:
"_Sound the radiation alarm._" Nobody in the room, including Charles,
had the slightest doubt that the points would sink into the technician's
eyeballs if he refused.

"Do what she says, Will," he mumbled, his eyes crossing on the dividers.
"For God's sake, do what she says. She's crazy."

One of the men moved, very cautiously, watching Charles and the gun, to
a red handle and pulled it down. A ferro-concrete barrier rose to wall
off the chamber and the sine-curve wail of a standard radioactivity
warning began to howl mournfully through the ship.

"Dump the reactor metal," Charles said. His eyes searched for the exit,
and found it--a red-painted breakaway panel, standard for a hot lab.

A technician wailed: "We _can't_ do that! We can't _do_ that! A million
bucks of thorium with a hundred years of life in it--have a heart,
mister! They'll crucify us!"

"They can dredge for it," Charles said. "Dump the metal."

"Dump the metal," Lee said. She hadn't moved.

The senior technician's eyes were still on the bright needle points. He
was crying silently. "Dump it," he said.

"Okay, chief. Your responsibility, remember."

"Dump it!" wailed the senior.

The technician did something technical at the control board. After a
moment the steady rumbling of the turbines ceased and the ship's deck
began to wallow underfoot.

"Hit the panel, Lee," Charles said. She did, running. He followed her
through the oval port. It was like an open-bottomed diving bell welded
to the hull. There were large, luminous cleats for pulling yourself
down through the water, under the rim of the bell. He dropped the pistol
into the water, breathed deeply a couple of times and began to climb
down. There was no sign of Lee.

He kicked up through the dark water on a long slant away from the ship.
It might be worse. With a fire and a hot-lab alarm and a dead chief
aboard, the crew would have things on their mind besides looking for
bobbing heads.

He broke the surface and treaded water to make a minimum target. He did
not turn to the ship. His dark hair would be less visible than his white
face. And if he was going to get a burst of machine-gun bullets through
either, he didn't want to know about it. Ahead he saw Lee's blonde hair
spread on the water for a moment and then it vanished. He breathed
hugely, ducked and swam under water toward it.

When he rose next a sheet of flame was lightening the sky and the oily
reek of burning hydrocarbons tainted the air. He dove again, and this
time caught up with Lee. Her face was bone-white and her eyes blank.
Where she was drawing her strength from he could not guess. Behind them
the ship sent up an oily plume and the sine-curve wail of the
radioactivity warning could be faintly heard. Before them a dim shore
stretched.

He gripped her naked arm, roughened by the March waters of Lake
Michigan, bent it around his neck and struck off for the shore. His
lungs were bursting in his chest and the world was turning gray-black
before his burning eyes. He heaved his tired arm through the water as
though each stroke would be his last, but the last stroke, by some
miracle, never was the last.




XIX


It hadn't been easy to get time off from the oil-painting factory. Ken
Oliver was a little late when he slid into the aseptic-smelling waiting
room of the Michigan City Medical Center. A parabolic mike in the
ceiling trained itself on the heat he radiated and followed him across
the floor to a chair. A canned voice said: "State your business,
please."

He started a little and said in the general direction of the mike: "I'm
Ken Oliver. A figure man in the Blue Department, Picasso Oils and
Etching Corporation. Dr. Latham sent me here for--what do you call
it?--a biopsy."

"Thank you, please be seated."

He smiled because he was seated already and picked up a magazine, the
current copy of the _Illinois Sporting News_, familiarly known as the
Green Sheet. Everybody in Mob Territory read it. The fingers of the
blind spelled out its optimism and its selections at Hawthorne in
Braille. If you were not only blind but fingerless, there was a talking
edition that read itself aloud to you from tape.

He riffled through the past performances and selections to the articles.
This month's lead was--_Thank God I am Dying of Throat Cancer_.

He leaned back in the chair dizzily, the waiting room becoming gray mist
around him. _No_, he thought. _No._ It couldn't be that. All it could be
was a little sore on the back of his throat--no more than that. Just a
little sore on the back of his throat. He'd been a fool to go to Latham.
The fees were outrageous and he was behind, always a little behind, on
his bills. But cancer--so much of it around--and the drugs didn't seem
to _help_ any more.... But Latham had almost promised him it was
non-malignant.

"Mr. Oliver," the loudspeaker said, "please go to Dr. Riordan's office,
Number Ten."

Riordan was younger than he. That was supposed to be bad in a
general practitioner, good in a specialist. And Riordan was a
specialist--pathology. A sour-faced young specialist.

"Good morning. Sit here. Open your mouth. Wider than that, and relax.
_Relax_; your glottis is locked."

Oliver couldn't protest around the plastic-and-alcohol taste of the
tongue depressor. There was a sudden coldness and a metallic _snick_
that startled him greatly; then Riordan took the splint out of his mouth
and ignored him as he summoned somebody over his desk set. A young man,
even younger than Riordan, came in. "Freeze, section and stain this
right away," the pathologist said, handing him a forceps from which a
small blob dangled. "Have them send up the Rotino charts, three hundred
to nine hundred inclusive."

He began to fill out charts, still ignoring Oliver, who sat and sweated
bullets for ten minutes. Then he left and was back in five minutes more.

"You've got it," he said shortly. "It's operable and you won't lose much
tissue." He scribbled on a sheet of paper and handed it to Oliver. The
painter numbly read: "... anterior ... epithelioma ... metastases ...
giant cells...."

Riordan was talking again: "Give this to Latham. It's my report. Have
him line up a surgeon. As to the operation, I say the sooner the better
unless you care to lose your larynx. That will be fifty dollars."

"Fifty dollars," the painter said blankly. "But Dr. Latham told me--" He
trailed off and got out his check book. Only thirty-two in the account,
but he would deposit his paycheck today which would bring it up. It was
after three so his check wouldn't go in today--he wrote out the slip
slowly and carefully.

Riordan took it, read it suspiciously, put it away and said: "Good day,
Mr. Oliver."

Oliver wandered from the Medical Center into the business heart of the
art colony. The Van Gogh Works on the left must have snagged the big
order from Mexico--their chimneys were going full blast and the reek of
linseed oil and turps was strong in the air. But the poor beggars on the
line at Rembrandts Ltd. across the square were out of luck. They'd been
laid off for a month now, with no sign of a work call yet. Somebody
jostled him off the sidewalk, somebody in a great hurry. Oliver sighed.
The place was getting more like Chicago every day. He sometimes thought
he had made art his line not because he had any special talent but
because artists were relatively easy-going people, not so quick to pop
you in the nose, not such aggressive drunks when they _were_ drunks.

Quit the stalling, a thin, cold voice inside him said. Get over to
Latham. The man said "The sooner the better."

He went over to Latham whose waiting room was crowded with irascible
women. After an hour, he got to see the old man and hand him the slip.

Latham said: "Don't worry about a thing. Riordan's a good man. If he
says it's operable, it's operable. Now we want Finsen to do the
whittling. With Finsen operating, you won't have to worry about a thing.
He's a good man. His fee's fifteen hundred."

"Oh, my God!" Oliver gulped.

"What's the matter--haven't you got it?"

To his surprise and terror, Oliver found himself giving Dr. Latham a
hysterical stump speech about how he didn't have it and who did have it
and how could anybody get ahead with the way prices were shooting up and
everybody gouged you every time you turned around and yes, that went for
doctors too and if you did get a couple of bucks in your pocket the
salesmen heard about it and battered at you until you put down an
installment on some piece of junk you didn't want to get them out of
your hair and what the hell kind of world was this anyway.

Latham listened, smiling and nodding, with, as Oliver finally realized,
his hearing aid turned off. His voice ran down and Latham said briskly:
"All right, then. You just come around when you've arranged the
financial details and I'll contact Finsen. He's a good man; you won't
have to worry about a thing. And remember: the sooner, the better."

Oliver slumped out of the office and went straight to the Mob Building,
office of the Regan Benevolent Fund. An acid-voiced woman there turned
him down indignantly: "You should be ashamed of yourself trying to draw
on the Fund when there are people in actual want who can't be
accommodated! No, I don't want to hear any more about it if you please.
There are others waiting."

Waiting for what? The same treatment?

Oliver realized with a shock that he hadn't phoned his foreman as
promised, and it was four minutes to five. He did a dance of agonized
impatience outside a telephone booth occupied by a fat woman. She
noticed him, pursed her lips, hung up--and stayed in the booth. She
began a slow search of her hand-bag, found coins and slowly dialed a new
number. She gave him a malevolent grin as he walked away, crushed. He
had a good job record, but that was no way to keep it good. One black
mark, another black mark, and one day--bingo.

General Advances was open, of course. Through its window you could see
handsome young men and sleek young women just waiting to help you,
whatever the fiscal jam. He went in and was whisked to a booth where a
big-bosomed honey-voiced blonde oozed sympathy over him. He walked out
with a check for fifteen hundred dollars after signing countless papers,
with the creamy hand of the girl on his to help guide the pen. What was
printed on the papers, God and General Advances alone knew. There were
men on the line who told him with resignation that they had been paying
off to G.A. for the better part of their lives. There were men who said
bitterly that G.A. was owned by the Regan Benevolent Fund, which must be
a lie.

The street was full of people--strangers who didn't look like your
run-of-the-mill artist. Muscle men, with the Chicago style and if
anybody got one in the gut, too goddamned bad about it. They were
peering into faces as they passed.

He was frightened. He stepped onto the slidewalk and hurried home,
hoping for temporary peace there. But there was no peace for his frayed
nerves. The apartment house door opened obediently when he told it:
"Regan," but the elevator stood stupidly still when he said: "Seventh
Floor." He spat bitterly and precisely: "_Sev-enth Floor._" The doors
closed on him with a faintly derisive, pneumatic moan and he was whisked
up to the eighth floor. He walked down wearily and said: "Cobalt blue"
to his own door after a furtive look up and down the hall. It worked and
he went to his phone to flash Latham, but didn't. Oliver sank instead
into a dun-colored pneumatic chair, his 250-dollar Hawthorne Electric
Stepsaver door mike following him with its mindless snout. He punched a
button on the chair and the 600-dollar hi-fi selected a random tape. A
long, pure melodic trumpet line filled the room. It died for two beats
and than the strings and woodwinds picked it up and tossed it--

Oliver snapped off the music, sweat starting from his brow. It was the
Gershwin _Lost Symphony_, and he remembered how Gershwin had died. There
had been a little nodule in his brain as there was a little nodule in
Oliver's throat.

Time, the Great Kidder. The years drifted by. Suddenly you were
middle-aged, running to the medics for this and that. Suddenly they told
you to have your throat whittled out or die disgustingly. And what did
you have to show for it? A number, a travel pass, a payment book from
General Advance, a bunch of junk you never wanted, a job that was a
heavier ball and chain than any convict ever wore in the barbarous days
of Government. Was this what Regan and Falcaro had bled for?

He defrosted some hamburger, fried it and ate it and then went
mechanically down to the tavern. He didn't like to drink every night,
but you had to be one of the boys, or word would get back to the plant
and you might be on your way to another black mark. They were racing
under the lights at Hawthorne too, and he'd be expected to put a couple
of bucks down. He never seemed to win. Nobody he knew ever seemed to
win. Not at the horses, not at the craps table, not at the numbers.

He stood outside the neon-bright saloon for a long moment, and then
turned and walked into the darkness away from town, possessed by
impulses he did not understand or want to understand. He had only a
vague hope that standing on the Dunes and looking out across the dark
lake might somehow soothe him.

In half an hour he had reached the deciduous forest, then the pine,
then the scrubby brushes, then the grasses, then the bare white sand.
And lying in it he found two people: a man so hard and dark he seemed to
be carved from oak and a woman so white and gaunt she seemed to be
carved from ivory.

He turned shyly from the woman.

"Are you all right?" he asked the man. "Is there anything I can do?"

The man opened red-rimmed eyes. "Better leave us alone," he said. "We'd
only get you into trouble."

Oliver laughed hysterically. "Trouble?" he said. "Don't think of it."

The man seemed to be measuring him with his eyes, and said at last:
"You'd better go and not talk about us. We're enemies of the Mob."

Oliver said after a pause: "So am I. Don't go away. I'll be back with
some clothes and food for you and the lady. Then I can help you to my
place. I'm an enemy of the Mob too. I just never knew it until now."

He started off and then turned. "You won't go away? I mean it. I want to
help you. I can't seem to help myself, but perhaps there's something--"

The man said tiredly: "We won't go away."

Oliver hurried off. There was something mingled with the scent of the
pine forest tonight. He was half-way home before he identified it: oil
smoke.




XX


Lee swore and said: "I can get up if I want to."

"You'll stay in bed whether you want to or not," Charles told her.
"You're a sick woman."

"I'm a very bad-tempered woman and that means I'm convalescent. Ask
anybody."

"I'll go right out into the street and do that, darling."

She got out of bed and wrapped Oliver's dressing gown around her. "I'm
hungry again," she said.

"He'll be back soon. You've left nothing but some frozen--worms, looks
like. Shall I defrost them?"

"Please don't trouble. I can wait."

"Window!" he snapped.

She ducked back and swore again, this time at herself. "Sorry," she
said. "Which will do us a whole hell of a lot of good if somebody saw me
and started wondering."

Oliver came in with packages. Lee kissed him and he grinned shyly.
"Trout," he whispered. She grabbed the packages and flew to the
kitchenette.

"The way to Lee Falcaro's heart," Charles mused. "How's your throat,
Ken?"

"No pain, today," Oliver whispered. "Latham says I can talk as much as I
like. And I've got things to talk about." He opened his coat and hauled
out a flat package that had been stuffed under his belt. "Stolen from
the factory. Brushes, pens, tubes of ink, drawing instruments. My
friends, you are going to return to Syndic Territory in style, with
passes and permits galore."

Lee returned. "Trout's frying," she said. "I heard that about the
passes. Are you _sure_ you can fake them?"

His face fell. "Eight years at the Chicago Art Institute," he whispered.
"Three years at Original Reproductions, Inc. Eleven years at Picasso
Oils and Etchings, where I am now third figure man in the Blue
Department. I really think I deserve your confidence."

"Ken, we trust and love you. If it weren't for the difference in your
ages I'd marry you _and_ Charles. Now what about the Chicagoans? Hold
it--the fish!"

Dinner was served and cleared away before they could get more out of
Oliver. His throat wasn't ready for more than one job at a time. He told
them at last: "Things are quieting down. There are still some strangers
in town and the road patrols are still acting very hard-boiled. But
nobody's been pulled in today. Somebody told me on the line that the
whole business is a lot of foolishness. He said the ship must have been
damaged by somebody's stupidity and Regan must have been killed in a
brawl--everybody knows he was half crazy, like his father. So my friend
figures they made up the story about two wild Europeans to cover up a
mess. I said I thought there was a lot in what he said." Oliver laughed
silently.

"Good man!" Charles tried not to act over-eager. "When do you think you
can start on the passes, Ken?"

Oliver's face dropped a little. "Tonight," he whispered. "I don't
suppose the first couple of tries will be any good so--let's go."

Lee put her hand on his shoulder. "We'll miss you too," she said. "But
don't ever forget this: we're coming back. Hell won't stop us. We're
coming back."

Oliver was arranging stolen instruments on the table. "You have a big
order," he whispered sadly. "I guess you aren't afraid of it because
you've always been rich and strong. Anything you want to do you think
you can do. But those Government people? And after them the Mob? Maybe
it would be better if you just let things take their course, Lee. I've
found out a person can be happy even here."

"We're coming back," Lee said.

Oliver took out his own Michigan City-Chicago travel permit. As always,
the sight of it made Charles wince. Americans under such a yoke! Oliver
whispered: "I got a good long look today at a Michigan City Buffalo
permit. The foreman's. He buys turps from Carolina at Buffalo. I
sketched it from memory as soon as I got by myself. I don't swear to it,
not yet, but I have the sketch to practice from and I can get a few more
looks later."

He pinned down the drawing paper, licked a ruling pen and filled it, and
began to copy the border of his own pass. "I don't suppose there's
anything I can do?" Lee asked.

"You can turn on the audio," Oliver whispered. "They have it going all
the time at the shop. I don't feel right working unless there's some
music driving me out of my mind."

Lee turned on the big Hawthorne Electric set with a wave of her hand;
imbecillic music filled the air and Oliver grunted and settled down.

Lee and Charles listened, fingers entwined, to half an hour of slushy
ballads while Oliver worked. The news period announcer came on with some
anesthetic trial verdicts, sports results and society notes about which
Regan had gone where. Then--

"The local Mobsters of Michigan City, Indiana, today welcomed Maurice
Regan to their town. Mr. Regan will assume direction of efforts to
apprehend the two European savages who murdered James Regan IV last
month aboard the ore boat _Hon. John Regan_ in waters off Michigan City.
You probably remember that the Europeans did some damage to the vessel's
reactor room before they fled from the ship. How they boarded the ship
and their present whereabouts are mysteries--but they probably won't be
mysteries long. Maurice Regan is little-known to the public, but he has
built an enviable record in the administration of the Chicago Police
Department. Mr. Regan on taking charge of the case, said this: 'We know
by traces found on the Dunes that they got away. We know from the logs
of highway patrols that they didn't get out of the Michigan City area.
The only way to close the books on this matter fast is to cover the city
with a fine-tooth comb. Naturally and unfortunately this will mean
inconvenience to many citizens. I hope they will bear with the
inconveniences gladly for the sake of confining those two savages in a
place where they can no longer be a menace. I have methods of my own and
there may be complaints. Reasonable suggestions will be needed, but with
crackpots I have no patience.'"

The radio began to spew more sports results. Oliver turned and waved at
it to be silent. "I don't like that," he whispered. "I never heard of
this Regan in the Chicago Police."

"They said he wasn't in the public eye."

"I wasn't the public. I did some posters for the police and I knew who
was who. And that bit at the end. I've heard things like it before. The
Mob doesn't often admit it's in the wrong, you know. When they try to
disarm criticism in advance ... this Regan must be a rough fellow."

Charles and Lee Falcaro looked at each other in sudden fear. "We don't
want to hurry you, Ken," she said. "But it looks as though you'd better
do a rush job."

Nodding, Oliver bent over the table. "Maybe a week," he said hopefully.
With the finest pen he traced the curlicues an engraving lathe had
evolved to make the passes foolproof. Odd, he thought--the lives of
these two hanging by such a weak thing as the twisted thread of color
that feeds from pen to paper. And, as an afterthought--I suppose mine
does too.

       *       *       *       *       *

Oliver came back the next day to work with concentrated fury, barely
stopping to eat and not stopping to talk. Lee got it out of him, but not
easily. After being trapped in a half dozen contradictions about feeling
well and having a headache, about his throat being sore and the pain
having gone, he put down his pen and whispered steadily: "I didn't want
you to worry friends. But it looks bad. There is a new crowd in town.
Twenty couples have been pulled in by them--_couples_ to prove who they
were. Maybe fifty people have been pulled in for questioning--what do
you know about this, what do you know about that. And they've begun
house searches. Anybody you don't like, you tell the new Regan about
him. Say he's sheltering Europeans. And his people pull them in. Why,
everybody wants to know, are they pulling in couples who are obviously
American if they're looking for Europeans? And, everybody says, they've
never seen anything like it. Now--I think I'd better get back to work."

"Yes," Lee said. "I think you had."

Charles was at the window, peering around the drawn blind. "Look at
that," he said to Lee. She came over. A big man on the street below was
walking, very methodically down the street.

"I will bet you," Charles said, "that he'll be back this way in ten
minutes or so--and so on through the night."

"I won't take the bet," she said. "He's a sentry, all right. The Mob's
learning from their friends across the water. Learning too damned much.
They must be all over town."

They watched at the window and the sentry was back in ten minutes. On
his fifth tour he stopped a young couple going down the street studied
their faces, drew a gun on them and blew a whistle. A patrol came and
took them away; the girl was hysterical. At two in the morning, the
sentry was relieved by another, just as big and just as dangerous
looking. At two in the morning they were still watching and Oliver was
still hunched over the table tracing exquisite filigree of color.

       *       *       *       *       *

In five days, virtually without sleep, Oliver finished two Michigan
City-Buffalo travel permits. The apartment house next door was hit by
raiders while the ink dried; Charles and Lee Falcaro stood waiting
grotesquely armed with kitchen knives. But it must have been a tip
rather than part of the search plan crawling nearer to their end of
town. The raiders did not hit their building.

Oliver had bought clothes according to Lee's instructions--including two
men's suits, Oliver's size. One she let out for Charles; the other she
took in for herself. She instructed Charles minutely in how he was to
behave, on the outside. First he roared with incredulous laughter; Lee,
wise, in psychology assured him that she was perfectly serious. Oliver,
puzzled by his naivete, assured him that such things were not
uncommon--not at least in Mob Territory. Charles then roared with
indignation and Lee roared him down. His last broken protest was: "But
what'll I do if somebody takes me up on it?"

She shrugged, washing her hands of the matter, and went on trimming and
dying her hair.

It was morning when she kissed Oliver good-bye, said to Charles: "See
you at the station. Don't say good-bye," and walked from the apartment,
a dark-haired boy with a slight limp. Charles watched her down the
street. A cop turned to look after her and then went on his way.

Half an hour later Charles shook hands with Oliver and went out.

Oliver didn't go to work that day. He sat all day at the table, drawing
endless slow sketches of Lee Falcaro's head.

Time the Great Kidder, he thought. He opens the door that shows you in
the next room tables of goodies, colorful and tasty, men and women
around the tables pleasantly surprised to see you, beckoning to you to
join the feast. We have roast beef if you're serious, we have caviar if
you're experimental, we have baked alaska if you're frivolous--join the
feast; try a little bit of everything. So you start toward the door.

Time, the Great Kidder, pulls the rug from under your feet and slams the
door while the guests at the feast laugh their heads off at your painful
but superficial injuries.

Oliver slowly drew Lee's head for the fifteenth time and wished he dared
to turn on the audio for the news. Perhaps he thought, the next voice
you hear will be the cops at the door.




XXI


Charles walked down the street and ran immediately into a challenge from
a police sergeant.

"Where you from, mister?" the cop demanded, balanced and ready to draw.

Charles gulped and let Lee Falcaro's drilling take over. "Oh, around,
sergeant. I'm from around here."

"What're you so nervous about?"

"Why, sergeant, you're such an exciting type, really. Did anybody ever
tell you you look well in uniform?"

The cop glared at him and said: "If I wasn't in uniform, I'd hang one on
you sister. And if the force wasn't all out hunting the lunatics, that
killed Mr. Regan I'd pull you in for spitting on the sidewalk. Get to
hell off my beat and stay off. I'm not forgetting your face."

Charles scurried on. It had worked.

It worked once more with a uniformed policeman. One of the Chicago
plain-clothes imports was the third and last. He socked Charles in the
jaw and sent him on his way with a kick in the rear. He had been
thoroughly warned that it would probably happen: "Count on them to
over-react. That's the key to it. You'll make them so eager to assert
their own virility, that it'll temporarily bury their primary mission.
It's quite likely that one or more pokes will be taken at you. All you
can do is take them. If you get--_when_ you get through, they'll be
cheap at the price."

The sock in the jaw hadn't been very expert. The kick in the pants was
negligible, considering the fact that it had propelled him through the
gate of the Michigan City Transport Terminal.

By the big terminal clock the Chicago-Buffalo Express was due in fifteen
minutes. Its gleaming single rail, as tall as a man crossed the far end
of the concourse. Most of the fifty-odd people in the station were
probably Buffalo-bound ... safe geldings who could be trusted to visit
Syndic Territory, off the leash and return obediently. Well-dressed, of
course, and many past middle-age, with a stake in the Mob Territory
stronger than hope of freedom. One youngster, though--oh. It was Lee,
leaning, slack-jawed, against a pillar and reading the Green Sheet.

Who were the cops in the crowd? The thickset man with restless eyes, of
course. The saintly-looking guy who kept moving and glancing into faces.

Charles went to the newsstand and put a coin in the slot for _The Mob--A
Short History_, by the same Arrowsmith Hunde who had brightened and
misinformed his youth.

Nothing to it, he thought. Train comes in, put your money in the
turnstile, show your permit to the turnstile's eye, get aboard and
that-is-that. Unless the money is phony, or the pass is phony in which
case the turnstile locks and all hell breaks loose. His money was just
dandy, but the permit now--there hadn't been any way to test it against
a turnstile's template, or time to do it if there had been a way. Was
the probability of boarding two to one?

The probability abruptly dropped to zero as a round little man flanked
by two huge men entered the station.

_Commander Grinnel._

The picture puzzle fell into a whole as the two plainclothesmen
circulating in the station eyed Grinnel and nodded to him. The big one
absent-mindedly made a gesture that was the start of a police salute.

Grinnel was Maurice Regan--the Maurice Regan mysteriously unknown to
Oliver, who knew the Chicago police. Grinnel was a bit of a lend-lease
from the North American Navy, called in because of his unique knowledge
of Charles Orsino and Lee Falcaro, their faces, voices and behavior.
Grinnel was the expert in combing the city without any nonsense about
rights and mouthpieces. Grinnel was the expert who could set up a
military interior guard of the city. Grinnel was the specialist
temporarily invested with the rank of a Regan so he could do his job.

The round little man with the halo of hair walked briskly to the
turnstile and there stood at a military parade rest with a look of
resignation on his face.

How hard on me it is, he seemed to be saying, that I have such dull damn
duty. How hard that an officer of my brilliance must do sentry-go for
every train to Syndic Territory.

The slack-jawed youth who was Lee Falcaro looked at him over her Green
Sheet and nodded before dipping into the Tia Juana past performances
again. She knew.

Passengers were beginning to line up at the turnstile, smoothing out
their money and fiddling with their permits. In a minute he and Lee
Falcaro would have to join the line or stand conspicuously on the
emptying floor. The thing was dead for twenty-four hours now, until the
next train--and then Grinnel headed across the floor looking very
impersonal. The look of a man going to the men's room. The station cops
and Grinnel's two bruisers drifted together at the turnstile and began
to chat.

Charles followed Grinnel, wearing the same impersonal look, and entered
the room almost on his heels.

Grinnel saw him in a wash-bowl mirror; simultaneously he half turned,
opened his mouth to yell and whipped his hand into his coat. A single
round-house right from Charles crunched into the soft side of his neck.
He fell with his head twisted at an odd angle. Blood began to run from
the corner of his mouth onto his shirt.

"Remember Martha?" Charles whispered down at the body. "That was for
murder." He looked around the tiled room. There was a mop closet with
the door ajar, and Grinnel's flabby body fitted in it.

Charles walked from the washroom to the line of passengers across the
floor. It seemed to go on for miles. Lee Falcaro was no longer lounging
against the past. He spotted her in line, still slack-jawed, still
gaping over the magazine. The monorail began to sing shrilly with the
vibration of the train braking a mile away, and the turnstile "unlocked"
light went on.

There was the usual number of fumblers, the usual number of "please
unfold your currency" flashes. Lee carried through to the end with her
slovenly pose. For her the sign said: "incorrect denominations." Behind
her a man snarled: "for Christ's sake, kid, we're all waiting on you!"
The cops only half noticed; they were talking. When Charles got to the
turnstile one of the cops was saying: "Maybe it's something he ate.
How'd _you_ like somebody to barge in--"

The rest was lost in the clicking of the turnstile that let him through.

       *       *       *       *       *

He settled in a very pneumatic chair as the train accelerated evenly to
a speed of three hundred and fifty miles per hour. A sign in the car
said that the next stop was Buffalo. And there was Lee, lurching up the
aisle against the acceleration. She spotted him, tossed the Green Sheet
in the Air and fell into his lap.

"Disgusting!" snarled a man across the aisle. "Simply disgusting!"

"You haven't seen anything yet," Lee told him, and kissed Charles on the
mouth.

The man choked: "I shall certainly report this to the authorities when
we arrive in Buffalo!"

"Mmm," said Lee, preoccupied. "Do that, mister. Do that."




XXII


"I didn't like his reaction," Charles told her in the anteroom of F. W.
Taylor's office. "I didn't talk to him long on the phone, but I don't
like his reaction at all. He seemed to think I was exaggerating. Or all
wet. Or a punk kid."

"I can assure him you're not that," Lee Falcaro said warmly. "Call on me
any time."

He gave her a worried smile. The door opened then and they went in.

Uncle Frank looked up. "We'd just about written you two off," he said.
"What's it like?"

"Bad," Charles said. "Worse than anything you've imagined. There's an
underground, all right, and they are practicing assassination."

"Too bad," the old man said. "We'll have to shake up the bodyguard
organization. Make 'em de rigeur at all hours, screen 'em and see that
they really know how to shoot. I hate to meddle, but we can't have the
Government knocking our people off."

"It's worse than that," Lee said. "There's a tie-up between the
Government and the Mob. We got away from Ireland aboard a speed boat and
we were picked up by a Mob lakes ore ship. It had been running gasoline
and ammunition to the Government. Jimmy Regan was in charge of the deal.
We jumped into Lake Michigan and made our way back here. We were in Mob
Territory--down among the small-timers--long enough to establish that
the Mob and Government are hand in glove. One of these day's they're
going to jump us."

"Ah," Taylor said softly. "I've thought so for a long time."

Charles burst out: "Then for God's sake, Uncle Frank, why haven't you
_done_ anything? You don't know what it's like out there. The
Government's a nightmare. They have slaves. And the Mob's not much
better. Numbers! Restrictions! Permits! Passes! And they don't call it
that, but they have taxes!"

"They're mad," Lee said. "Quite mad. And I'm talking technically.
Neurotics and psychotics swarm in the streets of Mob Territory. The
Government, naturally--but the Mob was a shock. We've got to get ready,
Mr. Taylor. Every psychotic or severe neurotic in Syndic Territory is a
potential agent of theirs."

"Don't just check off the Government, darling," Charles said tensely.
"They've got to be smashed. They're no good to themselves or anybody
else. Life's a burden there if only they knew it. And they're holding
down the natives by horrible cruelty."

Taylor leaned back and asked: "What do you recommend?"

Charles said: "A fighting fleet and an army."

Lee said: "Mass diagnosis of the unstable. Screening of severe cases and
treatment where it's indicated. Riveredge must be a plague-spot of
agents."

Taylor shook his head and told them: "It won't do."

Charles was aghast. "It won't _do_? Uncle Frank, what the hell do you
mean, it won't do? Didn't we make it clear? They want to invade us and
loot us and subject us!"

"It won't do," Taylor said. "I choose the devil we know. A fighting
fleet is out. We'll arm our merchant vessels and hope for the best. A
full-time army is out. We'll get together some-kind of militia. And a
roundup of the unstable is out."

"Why?" Lee demanded. "My people have worked out perfectly effective
techniques--"

"Let me talk, please. I have a feeling that it won't be any good, but
hear me out.

"I'll take your black art first, Lee. As you know, I have played with
history. To a historian, your work has been very interesting. The
sequence was this: study of abnormal psychology collapsed under
Lieberman's findings, study of abnormal psychology revived by you when
you invalidated Lieberman's findings. I suggest that Lieberman and his
followers were correct--and that you were correct. I suggest that what
changed was the makeup of the population. That would mean that before
Lieberman there were plenty of neurotics and psychotics to study, that
in Lieberman's time there were so few that earlier generalizations were
invalidated, and that now--in our time, Lee--neurotics and psychotics
are among us again in increasingly ample numbers."

The girl opened her mouth, shut it again and thoughtfully studied her
nails.

"I will not tolerate," Taylor went on, "a roundup or a registration, or
mass treatment or any such violation of the Syndic's spirit."

Charles exploded: "Damn it, this is a matter of life or death to the
Syndic!"

"No, Charles. Nothing can be a matter of life or death to the Syndic.
When anything becomes a matter of life or death to the Syndic, the
Syndic is already dead, its morale, is already disintegrated, its credit
already gone. What is left is not the Syndic but the Syndic's dead
shell. I am not placed so that I can say objectively now whether the
Syndic is dead or alive. I fear it is dying. The rising tide of
neurotics is a symptom. The suggestion from you two, who should be
imbued with the old happy-go-lucky, we-can't-miss esprit of the Syndic
that we cower behind mercenaries instead of trusting the people who made
us--that's another symptom. Dick Reiner's rise to influence on a policy
of driving the Government from the seas is another symptom.

"I mentioned the devil we know as my choice. That's the status quo, even
though I have reason to fear it's crumbling beneath our feet. If it is,
it may last out our time. We'll shore it up with armed merchantmen and a
militia. If the people are with us now as they always have been, that'll
do it. The devil we don't know is what we'll become if we radically
dislocate Syndic life and attitudes.

"I can't back a fighting fleet. I can't back a regular army. I can't
back any restrictive measure on the freedom of anybody but an
apprehended criminal. Read history. It has taught me not to meddle, it
has taught me that no man should think himself clever enough or good
enough to dare it. _That_ is the lesson history teaches us.

"Who can know what he's doing when he doesn't even know why he does it?
Bless the bright Cromagnon for inventing the bow and damn him for
inventing missile warfare. Bless the stubby little Sumerians for
miracles in gold and lapis lazuli and damn them for burying a dead
queen's hand-maidens living in her tomb. Bless Shih Hwang-Ti for
building the Great Wall between northern barbarism and southern culture,
and damn him for burning every book in China. Bless King Minos for the
ease of Cnossian flush toilets and damn him for his yearly tribute of
Greek sacrificial victims. Bless Pharaoh for peace and damn him for
slavery. Bless the Greeks for restricting population so the well-fed few
could kindle a watch-tower in the west, and damn the prostitution and
sodomy and wars of colonization by which they did it. Bless the Romans
for their strength to smash down every wall that hemmed their building
genius, and damn them for their weakness that never broke the bloody
grip of Etruscan savagery on their minds. Bless the Jews who discovered
the fatherhood of God and damn them who limited it to the survivors of a
surgical operation. Bless the Christians who abolished the surgical
preliminaries and damn them who substituted a thousand cerebral
quibbles. Bless Justinian for the Code of Law and damn him for his
countless treacheries that were the prototype of the wretched Byzantine
millenium. Bless the churchmen for teaching and preaching, and damn,
them for drawing a line beyond which they could only teach and preach in
peril of the stake.

"Bless the navigators who, opened the new world to famine-ridden Europe,
and damn them for syphillis. Bless the red-skins who bred maize, the
great preserver of life and damn them for breeding maize the great
destroyer of topsoil. Bless the Virginia planters for the solace of
tobacco and damn them for the red gullies they left where forests had
stood. Bless the obstetricians with forceps who eased the agony of labor
and damn them for bringing countless monsters into the world to
reproduce their kind. Bless the Point Four boys who slew the malaria
mosquitoes of Ceylon and damn them for letting more Sinhalese be born
then five Ceylons could feed.

"Who knows what he is doing, why he does it or what the consequences
will be?

"Let the social scientists play with their theories if they like; I'm
fond of poetry myself. The fact is that they have not so far solved what
I call the two-billion-body problem. With brilliant hindsight some of
them tell us that more than a dozen civilizations have gone down into
the darkness before us. I see no reason why ours should not go down into
the darkness with them, nor do I see any reason why we should not
meanwhile enjoy ourselves collecting sense-impressions to be remembered
with pleasure in old age. No; I will not agitate for extermination of
the Government and hegemony over the Mob. Such a policy would
automatically, inevitably and immediately entail many, many violent
deaths and painful wounds. The wrong kind of sense-impressions. I shall,
with fear and trembling, recommend the raising of a militia--a purely
defensive, extremely sloppy militia--and pray that it will not Involve
us in a war of aggression."

He looked at the two of them and shrugged. "Lee, so stern, Charles so
grim," he said. "I suppose you're dedicated now." He looked at the desk.

He thought: _I have a faint desire to take the pistol from my desk and
shoot you both. I have a nervous feeling that you're about to embark on
a crusade to awaken Syndic Territory to its perils. You think the fate
of civilization hinges on you. You're right, of course. The fate of
civilization hinges on every one of us at any given moment. We are all
components in the two-billion-body problem. Somehow for a century we've
achieved in Syndic Territory for almost everybody the civil liberties,
peace of mind and living standards that were enjoyed by the middle
classes before 1914--plus longer life, better health, a more generous
morality, increased command over nature; minus the servant problem and
certain superstitions. A handful of wonderfully pleasant decades. When
you look back over history you wonder who in his right mind could ask
for more. And you wonder who would dare to presume to tamper with it._

He studied the earnest young faces. There was so much that he might
say--but he shrugged again.

"Bless you," he said. "Gather ye sense impression while ye may. Some
like pointer readings, some like friction on the mucous membranes. Now
go about your business; I have work to do."

He didn't really. When he was alone he leaned back and laughed and
laughed.

Win, lose or draw, those two would go far and enjoy themselves mightily
along the way. Which was what counted.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Transcriber's Note: No Chapter II header in original. All pages
present.]





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