The Postman (20 page)

Gordon stroked his beard. The longer he examined the map, the more puzzled he grew. Cyclops had to know what it was doing. Yet the winding path looked anything
but
efficient to him.

Against his will he began to suspect it was designed instead to take him far
out
of his way. To waste his time, rather than save it.

But
why
would Cyclops want to do such a thing?

It couldn’t be that the super machine feared his interference. By now Gordon knew just the right pitch to ease such anxiety … emphasizing that the “Restored U.S.” had no wish to meddle in local matters. Cyclops had appeared to believe him.

Gordon lowered the map. The weather was turning as the clouds lowered, obscuring the tops of the ruined buildings. Drifts of fog flowed along the dusty street, pushing puffy swirls between him and a surviving storefront windowpane. It brought back a sudden, vivid recollection of other panes of glass—seen through scattered, refracting droplets.

Death’s head … the postman grinning, his skeletal face superimposed on mine
.

He shivered at another triggered recognition. The foggy wisps reminded him of superchilled vapor—his reflection in the cool glass wall as he met with Cyclops back in Corvallis—and the strangeness he had felt watching the rows of little flashing lights, repeating the same rippling pattern over and over.…

Repeating …

Suddenly Gordon’s spine felt very cold.

“No,” he whispered. “Please, God.” He closed his eyes and felt an almost overwhelming need to change his thoughts to another track, to think about the weather, about pesterous Dena or pretty little Abby back in Pine View, about anything but …

“But who would
do
such a thing?” he protested aloud. “Why would they do it?”

Reluctantly, he realized he knew why. He was an expert on the strongest reason why people told lies.

Recalling the blackened wreckage behind the House of Cyclops, he found himself all at once wondering how the techs could possibly have accomplished what they claimed to have done. It had been almost two decades since Gordon had thought about physics, and what could or could not be achieved with technology. The intervening years had been filled with the struggle to survive—and his persistent dreams of a golden place of renewal. He was in no position to say what was or was not possible.

But he had to find out if his wild suspicion was true. He could not sleep until he knew for sure.

“Excuse me!” he called to one of the farmers. The fellow gave Gordon a gap-toothed grin and limped over, doffing his hat. “What can I do for you, Mr. Inspector?”

Gordon pointed at a spot on the map, no more than ten miles from Buena Vista as the crow might fly. “This place, Sciotown, do you know the way?”

“Sure do, boss. If you hurry, you can get there tonight.”

“I’ll hurry,” Gordon assured the man. “You can bet your ass I’ll hurry.”

“Just a darn minute! I’m coming!” the Mayor of Sciotown hollered. But the knock on his door went on insistently.

Herb Kalo carefully lit his new oil lantern—made by a craft commune five miles west of Corvallis. He recently had traded two hundred pounds of Sciotown’s best pottery work for twenty of the fine lamps and three thousand matches from Albany, a deal he felt was sure to mean his reelection this fall.

The knocking grew louder. “All right! This had better be damn important!” He threw the bolt and opened the door.

It was Douglas Kee, the man on gate duty tonight. Kalo blinked. “Is there a problem, Doug? What’s the—”

“Man here to see you, Herb,” the gateman interrupted. “I wouldn’t’ve let him in after curfew, but you told us about him when you got back from Corvallis—and I didn’t want to keep him standin’ out in the rain.”

Out of the dripping gloom stepped a tall man in a slick poncho. A shiny badge on his cap glittered in the lamplight. He held out his hand.

“Mr. Mayor, it’s good to see you again. I wonder if we could talk.”

Gordon had never expected to forsake an offer of a bed and a hot meal to go galloping off into a rainy night, but this time he had no choice. He had commandeered the best horse in the Sciotown stables, but if he had had to, he would have run all the way.

The filly moved surefootedly down an old county road toward Corvallis. She was brave, and trotted as fast as Gordon considered marginally safe in the darkness. Fortunately, a nearly full moon lit the ragged, leaky clouds from above, laying a faint lambence across the broken countryside.

Gordon was afraid he must have put the Mayor of Sciotown in a state of utter confusion from the first moment he stepped into the man’s home. Sparing no time for pleasantries, he had come straight to the point, sending Herb Kalo hurrying back to his office to retrieve a neatly folded fan of paper.

Gordon had taken the printout over to the lamp, and as Kalo watched, he carefully pored over the lines of text. “How much did this advice cost you, Mr. Mayor?” he asked without looking up.

“Only a little, Inspector,” the man answered nervously. “Cyclops’s prices have been dropping as more villages have joined the trade pact. And there was a discount because the advice was kinda vague.”

“How
much?
” Gordon insisted.

“Uh, well. We found about ten of those old hand-held
vid’ games, plus about fifty old rechargeable batteries, of which maybe ten were good enough to use. And oh yes, a home computer that wasn’t too badly corroded.”

Gordon suspected that Sciotown actually had much more salvage than that, and was hoarding it for future transactions. It was what he would have done.

“What else, Mr. Mayor?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The question is clear enough,” he said severely.

“What—
else
—did—you—pay?”

“Why
nothin’
else.” Kalo looked confused. “Unless, of course, you include a wagon of food and pottery for the Servants. But that’s got hardly any value compared to the other stuff. It’s just added on so’s the scientists have somethin’ to live off while they help Cyclops.”

Gordon breathed heavily. His pulse didn’t seem to want to slow down. It all fit, heartbreakingly.

He laboriously read aloud from the computer printout. “… incipient seepage from plate tectonic boundaries … groundwater retention variance …” Words he had not seen—or thought of—in seventeen years rolled off his tongue, tasting like old delicacies, lovingly remembered.

“… variation in aquifer sustenance ratios … tentative analysis only, due to teleological hesitancy.…”

“We think we’ve got a line on what Cyclops meant,” Kalo offered. “We’ll start digging at the two best sites come dry season. Of course if we didn’t interpret his advice right, it’ll be our fault. We’ll try agin’ in some other spots he hinted at.…”

The Mayor’s voice had trailed off, for the Inspector was standing very still, staring at empty space.

“Delphi,”
Gordon had breathed, hardly above a whisper.

Then the hasty ride through the night began.

Years in the wilds had made Gordon hard; all the while the men of Corvallis had suffered prosperity. It was almost ludicrously easy to slip by the guardposts at the city’s edge.
He made his way down empty side streets to the OSU campus, and thence to long-abandoned Moreland Hall. Gordon spared ten minutes to rub down his damp mount and fill her feedbag. He wanted the animal to be in shape in case he needed her quickly.

It was only a short run through the drizzle to the House of Cyclops. When he got near, he made himself slow down, though he wanted desperately to get this over with.

He ducked out of sight behind the ruins of the old generator building as a pair of guards walked past, shoulders hunched under ponchos, their rifles covered against the dank. As he crouched behind the burned-out shell, the wetness brought to Gordon’s nose—even after all these years—the scent of burning from the blackened timbers and melted wiring.

What was it Peter Aage had said about those frantic early days, when authority was falling apart, and the riots raged? He’d said that they had converted to wind and water power, after the generator house was torched.

Gordon didn’t doubt it would have worked, too, if it were done in time. But
could
it have been?

When the guards had moved off, he hurried to the side entrance of the House of Cyclops. With a prybar he had brought for the purpose, he broke the padlock in one sharp snap. He listened for a long moment, and when nobody appeared to be coming, slipped inside.

The back halls of the OSU Artificial Intelligence Lab were grimier than those the public got to see. Racks of forgotten computer tapes, books, papers, all lay under thick layers of dust. Gordon made his way to the central service corridor, almost stumbling twice over debris in the darkness. He hid behind a pair of double doors as someone passed by, whistling. Then he rose and peered through the crack.

A man wearing thick gloves and the black-and-white robe of a Servant stopped by a door down the hall and put down a thick, battered, foam picnic chest.

“Hey, Elmer!” The man knocked. “I’ve got another
load of dry ice for our lord ’n’ master. Come on, hurry it up! Cyclops gotta eat!”

Dry ice
, Gordon noted. Heavy vapor leaked around the cracked lid of the insulated container.

Another voice was muffled by the door. “Aw, hold your horses. It won’t hurt Cyclops any to wait another minute or two.”

At last the door opened and light streamed into the hall, along with the heavy beat of an old rock and roll recording.

“What kept you?”

“I had a run going! I was up to a hundred thousand in Missile Command, and didn’t want to interrupt—”

The closing door cut off the rest of Elmer’s braggadocio. Gordon pushed through the swinging double doors and hurried down the hallway. A little farther, he reached another room whose door was slightly ajar. From within came a narrow line of light, and the sounds of a late-night argument. Gordon paused as he recognized some of the voices.

“I still think we ought to kill him,” said one; it sounded like Dr. Grober. “That guy could wreck everything we’ve set up here.”

“Oh, you are exaggerating the danger, Nick. I don’t really think he’s much of a threat.” It was the voice of the oldest woman Servant—he couldn’t even remember her name. “The fellow really seemed rather earnest and harmless,” she said.

“Yeah? Well did you hear those questions he was asking Cyclops? He’s not one of these rubes our average citizen has become after all this time. The man is
sharp!
And he remembers an awful lot from the old days!”

“So? Maybe we should try to recruit him.”

“No way! Anyone can see he’s an idealist. He’d never do it. Our only option is to kill him! Now! And hope it’s years before they send someone else to take his place.”

“And I still think you’re crazy,” the woman answered. “If the act were ever traced to us, the consequences would be disastrous!”

“I agree with Marjorie.” It was the voice of Dr. Taigher himself. “Not only the people—our people of Oregon—would turn on us, but we would face the retribution of the rest of the country, if it were found out.”

There was a long pause.

“I’m
still
not all that convinced that he’s really—” But Grober was interrupted, this time by the soft voice of Peter Aage.

“Haven’t you all forgotten the biggest reason why nobody should touch him, or interfere with him in any way?”

“What’s that?”

Peter’s voice was hushed. “Good lord, man. Hasn’t it occurred to you who this fellow is? And what he represents? How low have we sunk, to even consider doing him harm, when we really owe him our loyalty and any help we can give him!”

Without conviction: “You’re just biased because he rescued your nephew, Peter.”

“Perhaps. And perhaps it’s what Dena has to say about him.”

“Dena!” Grober sniffed. “An infatuated child with wild ideas.”

“All right. But even if I grant you that, too, there are the flags.”

“Flags?” Now there was puzzlement in Dr. Taigher’s voice. “What flags?”

The woman answered, pensively. “Peter is referring to the flags the townsmen have been putting up in all the local boroughs. You know, Old Glory? The Stars and Stripes? You should get out more, Ed. Get a feel for what the people are thinking. I’ve never seen anything stir the villagers up like this, even before the war.”

There was another long silence before anyone spoke again. Then Grober said, softly, “I wonder what Joseph thinks of all this.”

Gordon frowned. He recognized all the voices inside as senior Servants of Cyclops whom he had met. But he didn’t remember being introduced to anyone named Joseph.

“Joseph went to bed early, I think,” Taigher said. “And that’s where I’m headed now. We’ll discuss this again later, when we can go about it rationally.”

Gordon hurried down the hall as footsteps approached the door. He didn’t much mind being forced to leave his eavesdropping spot. The opinions of the people in the room were of no importance, anyway. No importance at all.

There was only one voice he wanted to hear right now, and he headed straight to where he had listened to it last.

He ducked around a corner and found himself in the elegant hallway where he had first met Herb Kalo. The passage was dim now, but that did not keep him from picking the conference room lock with pathetic ease. Gordon’s mouth was dry as he slipped into the chamber, closing the door behind him. He stepped forward, fighting the urge to walk on tiptoes.

Beyond the conference table, soft light shone on the gray cylinder on the other side of the glass wall.

“Please,” he wished, “let me be wrong.”

If he was, then surely Cyclops itself would be amused by his chain of faulty deduction. How he longed to share a laugh over his foolish paranoia.

He approached the great glass barrier dividing the room, and the speaker at the end of the table. “Cyclops?” he whispered, stepping closer, clearing his tight throat. “Cyclops, it’s me, Gordon.”

The glow in the pearly lens was subdued. But the row of little lights still flashed—a complex pattern that repeated over and over like an urgent message from a distant ship in some lost code—ever, hypnotically, the same.