Manalone (12 page)

Finally he thought he detected the movement of lights ahead, and he knew the edge of the raft must be near. He hastened ahead and was cruelly intercepted by a submerged girder. The wash seized him and carried him up and over the obstruction, then pressed him face downwards into the coarse gravel. When attempting to rise he was again caught by the thrust, which
carried him forward. His head was thrown against a projecting overhang, and this was the last thing Manalone remembered.

‘Idiot! Pig!
You smell like a sewer. Oh, you filthy, horrible brute!’

Manalone woke up, staring up at his own ceiling with a scowl of non-comprehension.

‘Animal … animal … rotten slimy animal!’

He had a pain in his forehead which felt as though his skull had been split right across, and a burning sensation which seemed as though it was consuming his skin with slow fire. When he lifted his hand to explore his damaged temple he raised it no higher than his eyes before it was arrested in horror. The skin had been stained a disfiguring yellow-brown.

‘God, Manalone, this is the end … this is
the
end!’ Sandra’s voice was edged with sheer hatred.

In other circumstances the scene could have been funny. Coated with oil and filth from the beach, Manalone found he was lying on his own bed. The sleepspace was littered with soiled linen with which Sandra had been trying very ineffectually to clean him up. She herself was alternately crying with vexation and cursing with anger. Behind all her emotion there was more than a hint of genuine fright.

Manalone managed to sit up and view the mess. Sandra had cut away most of his clothes and had been using a household cleaning fluid to try and remove the tars from his body. Lacking method, she had spread the contamination broadly around the room, and even her own arms and face were blotchily irregular with yellow-brown patches.

‘How did I get here?’ asked Manalone, struggling to see himself in the mirror.

‘Get here? Get here?’ The question touched a vein of hysterical rage. ‘How the hell do you think you got here? The police fetched you. Brought you wrapped in sacking, and dumped you on the bed. Seemed to think it rather funny. I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life. I’ll never forgive you for this, Manalone – never.’

Alarm-bells
were ringing in Manalone’s head as he dragged himself to the bathspace.

‘Questions, Manalone. Always questions. Was it you the police wanted on the raft? If the answer is yes, then what are you doing home? And if the answer is no, what are you doing home? If you find a body washed up on the beach, half-drowned and with obvious concussion, you send him to hospital for a check-over. You don’t wrap him in sacking and laughingly leave him on a bed.

‘Not unless … unless … it’s all part of the same scheme of punishment … of harassment … the police and the MIPS working together …
’

There was no answer to this.

Manalone found some cleansing cream and managed to remove the more gross contamination before he had a bath. The final result was scarcely an improvement. His skin remained considerably and variously dyed, but at least he smelt less obnoxious. He returned to the wreck of the sleepspace where Sandra was still bitching as she tried to clean the rugs and the floor. Her eyes were full of hatred and loathing.

‘How the hell could you do this to me, Manalone?’

‘I didn’t do it to you. I did it to me.’ Manalone viewed the considerable mess she had made through her own ineptitude, and found himself unable to raise any sympathy for her. Her concern was not for his plight but for the plight of the bed-linen and carpets and clothes and for an abstraction called dignity. He honestly believed she would have been happier if the police had merely brought news of his death by drowning.

‘I suppose you were stinking drunk again? Is that how you came to fall in? Pig!’

‘Something like that.’ Manalone decided not to labour the point.

Sandra was on her knees on the floor, her hair awry, her face and hands streaked with tarry residues. Her exertions seemed to have cracked her customary brittle veneer, and suddenly she appeared soft and fragile and worth caring about. On impulse he dropped to his knees, and made to console her. But the impression she gave was external only; inside she remained the gloss-hard product of her times. She repulsed his advance and drew away without establishing any sort of rapport.

‘Vic Blackman
called round here earlier. He still wants you to do that job for him. He’s that desperate he says you can name your own price. A blank cheque. I told him you’d do it.’

‘Then you can untell him, San. I want nothing to do with Blackman or his shoddy and vicious manufacturing enterprises. And it isn’t a question of price.’

Sandra looked at him, and there was animal desperation in her attitude – a total inability to accept the importance of a principle other than monetary gain. She uttered a low cry, which might have been anger or might have been anguish, and fled from the sleepspace in despair.

‘Adam wants to see you right away.’

Maurine van Holt maintained a remarkably straight face considering the extent of the bruises and discolouration which Manalone had been unable to conceal on his hands and face. Her eyes, however, mirrored an appreciation of the situation.

Manalone shrugged and put down the work he was doing.

‘What’s the score, Mau?’

‘You’d better ask Adam. It’s serious for sure.’

Adam Vickers, Comptroller of Automated Mills, was obviously in a state of high agitation. His condition was not improved by his viewing of Manalone’s change of skin hue to an irregular khaki colour. However, he let the point pass without comment.

‘Manalone – we all appreciate that you’re the king pin of our operations here. You put this complex together, and you’re probably the only man alive who can comprehend it as a working whole. I intend to fight to see that nothing affects your situation at Automated Mills. But it’s only fair to warn you that you’ve gained some very powerful enemies.’

‘Enemies?’ Manalone scowled. ‘What sort of enemies?’

‘That’s for you to decide. Your private life’s no affair of mine. But the board of directors has instructed me that you should be dismissed immediately and replaced by a board appointee. They can’t hope to get away with it, of course.

Both they and I know they haven’t the slightest chance of finding anyone who can handle the job as competently as you. It would effectively close the Mills within three months, and then there wouldn’t be anything for them to be directors of. But I quote the point to show you the extreme pressure to which they themselves have been subjected.’

‘What’s
behind all this?’ asked Manalone.

‘I don’t know – but someone up in the corridors of power must be very displeased with you. But that’s your affair. My concern is that a lot of people’s jobs depend on your expertise, Manalone. So for God’s sake consider the consequences of whatever it is you’re doing. You may have very good reasons, but it’s the innocents who’re going to get hurt.’

Manalone shrugged. ‘I suppose it doesn’t do any good to say I’m not doing anything? I’m not a political animal, I’m a technical one. I solve problems for a living. If I’m guilty of anything, it’s that I’ve not solved a problem which somebody doesn’t want solved anyway.’

Vickers looked at Manalone’s bruised temple and discoloured skin and volunteered no further comment. His expression spoke for itself. Any senior technologist who managed to get himself in that condition overnight was obviously programmed for disaster.

‘Just watch it, Manalone! We can’t afford to lose you.’

Manalone left then, frustrated by an inability to explain his actions more explicitly. He sensed he would have a hard time trying to get the finer points of the matter over to Adam Vickers. As he passed through Maurine’s office she looked up from her desk and met his eyes quietly. The light behind the smile was not one of victory but of enjoyment of the game.

‘Well, are you going to give up, Manalone? Or is it like you told Kitten, you don’t even know what to give up?

‘The truth is, you’re trapped. You never know now, when you pick up a computer printout or a technical journal, whether you’ll find some other inconsistency glaring back at you from the face of the paper. You wouldn’t be human if you found the value of Planck’s constant had altered overnight and you didn’t wonder about it. If they repealed Ohm’s law you’d always be watching for the little man to come and rewind every coil and motor and rewire every damn circuit in the place. And you couldn’t rest until you’d found out what the hell was the nature of the alterations he had to make.

‘The
question is, do you go on looking for the holes in reality, or wait for them to come round looking for you. Answer: you’re going to go on looking, because like Paul Raper, there isn’t a damn thing else that you can do.’

Manalone went
back to his office then. He pulled out a blank sheet of paper, raised his stylus, and waited for the thoughts that ought to flow but did not.

‘How can you have a thousand answers to no problem, Manalone? There’s nothing wrong with reality that you can detect, yet there’s a national conspiracy designed to prevent you looking at it too closely. Probably you can’t see the disparity too clearly because this is the reality you were born into. But sure as hell something has changed. That’s the reason the past is being rubbed out. So that you can’t make comparisons.’

On impulse he went into the laboratory and again ran the computer programme containing the time and distance measurements he had taken from the film he had seen in London. He then extracted a printout of the set of physical constants for the theoretical reality which would be consistent with the effects he had observed. Taking the figures back to his desk, he laid them alongside the blank sheet and began a new consideration of the problem. The data on gravity and momentum was obviously wrong.

‘Let’s understand what we’re talking about, Manalone. Gravity by definition is an attractive force proportional to the product of two interacting masses, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Standard gravity has a value shading over nine-hundred-eighty centimetres a second squared, and that can’t change without the solar system flying apart. The precise value of gravity at the Earth’s surface is a local approximation, but it’s not going to vary much unless somebody slips a mascon under you or alters the speed of the Earth’s rotation. That hasn’t happened either. Therefore anything which suggests the contrary is the result of sloppy observation.’

The blank sheet refused to accept any constructive thoughts.

‘Right!
Examine the proposition that the data you obtained from the film was faulty. Probably the projection speed was a bit adrift, but that doesn’t explain why the effects of impact were so disastrous. A possible variable could be an alteration in the time scale against which the effects were observed. If somehow the second had been lengthened between then and now …’

His fingers shaking with excitement, he broke off and dialled the National Archive computer, calling up a section of critical tables and definitions. On the subject of time, the answers were unequivocal. The definition of the second had remained the same since the introduction of the ‘atomic’ time standard. Swallowing his disappointment he again returned to face the mockery of the blank sheet.

‘Damn you, Manalone! You must be getting old. You know the physical world has changed, even if you can’t define it. The MIPS know it too – because their main preoccupation is papering up the cracks so that the past won’t show through. Typical Establishment thinking: attending to the symptoms rather than the cause. But the cause of what? And what did it cause to happen?’

Unsullied, the virgin whiteness of the untouched sheet mirrored the impotence of his thinking. He stabbed at the paper viciously with his stylus, watching the way the droplets of colourless ink turned jet-black the instant they made contact with the surface. Even the formlessness of the blot seemed symbolic of his lack of success in wresting order out of a welter of random facts.

‘
Sure as hell something big has run off the rails. But what was it? And where has it run off to? Just as important – is it running away with us, or are we cowering in front of it waiting to be crushed?’

Giving up this line of speculation, Manalone searched for another route into the problem. He took out the list of titles which had been Paul Raper’s last contribution. In his desk drawer he still had the computerprint abstracts, and he now called up a printout of the full articles, and sat back to read.

The Myth of the Protein Famine.

Why the Pollution Doomsday Never Happened.

Sociology Beats the Overpopulation Bogy.

All the
articles were pop-technology, pointedly overwritten to illustrate the authors’ theme, and lavishly peppered with statistics. Manalone chose some of the population statistics on which the main case rested, and checked these out with the National Archive computer. Apart from the figures having been irresponsibly rounded off, the case stood up tolerably well. Nothing to quarrel about there.

He then re-worked the figures on the protein famine, and again reached a conclusion that left no room for argument. Living, as he did, on the edge of the pollution-dead English Channel, he was not convinced that the pollution doomsday had been anything but postponed, but all the figures were in reasonable agreement. In overall summary it appeared that the eco-crisis for humanity would not become critical for about a hundred and fifty years – a reasonable margin for an informed and aware society to reverse the trend. In fact, the current margin was considerably more optimistic than those obtained by earlier statisticians and ecologists whose pronouncements of doom were now being derided.

‘So how does that happen, Manalone? Since the old statistics were written, the population hasn’t decreased – it’s continued to increase. And this in turn must have increased both the pollution and the demand for protein. Yet in each case we appear to be in a more satisfactory situation than at any time in the past few hundred years. Either the old statisticians didn’t know how to read a slide-rule – which I decline to believe – or else our current statistics are themselves suspect. And that isn’t true either, because I’ve just checked them out.’