Manalone (23 page)

His next task was to try and blur the magnetic data sufficiently so that the credit computer would, hopefully, misidentify the card’s holder and place the charge for the journey on some other account. This happened not infrequently at transport stations, where the over-worked card readers were assisted by equipment designed to tolerate a percentage of missing information from worn and damaged cards. This equipment would go into a coincidence-seeking mode in a microsecond effort to match the faulty input to details already held in the credit registers. Manalone had to gamble that he could remove sufficient of the information to confuse the card reader, but not so much as to cause the card to be rejected altogether.

Slightly fearfully,
he stroked the card over the recorder’s erase head so as to cause a pattern of erasure to cross the magnetized stripes diagonally. Most of the original information would still be there, but it would now have gaps in it which he hoped the equipment would interpret incorrectly. He managed to fill the perforations in the card with little pellets of masticated paper. With the writing styli from his pocket he made a careful job of blurring some of the optical details on the face of the card. Then with his heart thumping hard, he walked towards the Hover-rail Terminal.

As he neared the Terminal,
Manalone became more careful. Even from a distance he had detected the presence of police at several of the Terminal gates. Although a couple of the gates appeared unguarded, these did not lead to the section of the building in which he was interested. He regarded it as prudent to wait and watch for an opportunity to slip past. Then the sound of approaching sirens warned him that police action in the area was being intensified. The sudden swoop of half a dozen yellow manu-drives into the road junction fronting the Terminal, sent the crowds scattering. In the thick of the crush, Manalone was carried with them, and finished up pressed against the Terminal wall.

The new arrivals began setting up a road block across the junction. This was a vital intercept point both for the Terminal and the main transport routes in and out of the suburb. Fortunately their activities distracted the attention of their comrades on the Terminal gates; and holding his breath as he pushed through the press of the crowd, Manalone turned sharply and slipped behind one of the guardians, and walked straight on to the concourse without looking back. From the lack of reaction behind him, he knew his move had been a success.

His next difficulty would be the card reader at the auto-barrier. Here he had the choice of three machines, and he chose the one which appeared to be the oldest and the most used. Setting the cursor to indicate his destination station, he inserted the doctored ComCredit card into the slot, and hoped. The machine faltered, then rejected the card back into his hand. A metallic, recorded voice reminded him: ‘Your credit details cannot be resolved. Kindly consult the station Marshal about your journey, and have your ComCredit card renewed immediately at any Credit Centre.’

Manalone had no intention of approaching the station Marshal. He took his card to the next autobarrier and tried again. This time he was lucky. The charge was accepted and placed on some unspecified account. Because of this, Manalone knew that the computers had not detected his real identity. As far as the machines were concerned, Manalone was still confined to Bognor. To those who might be searching for him, reference to the computers could now prove actively misleading.

The Hover-rail services on
the cross-country routes were less frequent than those on the main line, and there was no car waiting when he arrived on the ramp. He felt particularly exposed and conspicuous standing out on the empty boarding stage, especially because of the fact that he could easily have been seen by any of the police entering the Terminal concourse. Even when the car did arrive, it was not scheduled to leave for a further ten minutes. Manalone entered it and shrugged low in a seat, trying to avoid attention. All of this conspired to make his transit through the Terminal seem the longest and most apprehensive wait for transport that he had ever known.

Finally the insistent chime of the door alarms was the signal for the vehicle to start. The mechanical drive took hold and the car swung off along the feeder-rail, inflated its air cushion, and waited obediently for its insertion place on the high-speed line. There being no hostess on a cross-country route, nor any other passengers, the car was travelling light. The insertion punch, when it came, nearly shook Manalone from his seat, despite the belt strapped across his lap. Surprised at first, he swiftly analysed the sensation, and panic and anger ran strange fingers up the back of his neck. Knowing the routes, he had automatically braced himself for an insertion to the left. This car had inserted on the right. He was now being carried in the wrong direction.

The improbability of this was so immense in view of the automatic nature of the system, that he immediately suspected human intervention. He may have successfully eluded the police, but it appeared that the MIPS had been much cleverer. Because of the following cars, emergency stops were not possible on the Hover-rail high-line, and he knew he had no course available other than to wait and see where he was delivered. There being nobody else in the car, there was no means by which he could verify his fears that he had entered another trap.

Very shortly
the car slipped the high-line and transferred to a slower rail. Finally it halted at a very minor station. Fearful about the nature of his reception, Manalone got out and looked about him. Several waiting passengers got into the car, and with the scream of starting jets it swooped away down the line leaving Manalone the sole occupant of the ramp. He stood there for a moment or two experiencing a vague sense of anticlimax, and feeling very foolish and alone. His imagined trap had proved to be no trap at all.

‘You idiot, Manalone! You’re so obsessed by the idea of persecution that you even ascribe your own mistakes to the MIPS. But it was you who forgot to re-set the cursor on the second autobarrier.’

Smiling ruefully to himself, he trailed down the ramp to the deserted station-hall below, found a card reader at the barrier, and carefully set his destination on the dial. The machine took his ComCredit card with a measure of hesitation, but nonetheless accepted the charge, whilst issuing a printed warning that the card needed replacement. Manalone then climbed back up the steps to the high ramp and sat behind the transparent weatherscreens to await the next car going in his direction.

It was while he was at this vantage point that he noticed an interesting thing. Looking down, he could see part of a major trunk road for heavy vehicles. Instead of the monotonously regular fast flow of traffic which the lanes normally carried, the vehicles on it were jammed nose to tail and moving forward only in short, spasmodic bursts, as though being cleared through some checkpoint a few vehicles at a time.

There were several other roads in Manalone’s field of view. When he looked carefully, he could see that on each the situation was substantially the same. This conjured up a picture that most of the roads leading from the south were being intercepted by a mammoth series of road-blocks. This impression was reinforced by the number of yellow police manu-drives he could see patrolling the service strips.

‘Seriously, Manalone – could they be looking for you? Or is it megalomania to think so? You’re only a lone individual, whose crime appears to be that of understanding something he was always expected to understand anyway. So where’s the danger? Perhaps you might cause anger and discontent if you shouted what you know loudly enough and in the right ears. But that would never be permitted. Yet it was Colonel Shears who brought you to the point of understanding. Where’s the gain in educating a man, then persecuting him for what he knows?’

There was no answer
to this. Nor was there much sense in approaching the nearest police patrol and asking if and why he was wanted. The variety of answers such an action could produce was too ridiculous to be contemplated. Manalone decided that his only reasonable course of action was to continue as he had already planned.

Fortunately he had not too long to wait. The next car on his section was the one that he required. He climbed aboard, and was thankful to feel the punch of the motors accelerating the car. He had no idea of what to expect when he reached his destination, but he sensed it was the climacteric of years of unwitting involvement. For good or evil, it would be a good thing to face it, and get the matter done.

His destination was the
fringe of a suburb of a country town. Typical of such locations, the high-density housing units ended with an unnatural suddenness when they came to the invisible barrier of planning limits. Here was no gentle decline of metropolis into countryside, but a brutal severance of function; a barbarous reminder of the critical balance between the need for shelter and the need to eat.

The ‘hole’ in Manalone’s map lay almost due east of his present position. This led him directly away from the fringes of the town and out into the farming lands beyond. It was a depressing situation. The ugly, purely functional blocks and units of the super-intensive farms were like gaunt, dirty factories, standing in seas of black, unrelenting mud. Only occasionally did the scene give way to green fields with soil-grown crops and free-range animals. As he passed these boundaries he began to know for certainty that the old ecologists had been exactly right. The population level was well above saturation point for the capacity of the land. Mechanization and technology had been able to offer only a palliative, not a solution. Now the final breakdown of the ecology was very near.

‘Mankind hanged by its own necktie, Manalone. Struggling to support a continuously increasing population until the quality of life has been destroyed and the earth sucked dry. Almost as though we thought we could go on taking more and more from less and less, and go on doing it indefinitely. Even an elementary look at the energy equation must have shown that Man was living on a fallacy. The collective psychology of the human race is that of a big, daft beast, bent on self-destruction.’

The road he had chosen was ideally suited to the direction he wished to go. The thought occurred to him that this was probably the main route into the forbidden area from the west. The fact that the district he was seeking had no published autram address had not prevented the route sense cables from being laid under the road surface. His perceptive eyes could easily determine the cable’s position by the tyre-shine on the road where many successive vehicles had followed in the self-same traffic lanes.

The
composition of the traffic using the road struck him as curious. He would have expected it to consist mainly of heavy autofreight vehicles from the farms with occasional contract autrams for personnel movement. Certainly the farm freight was adequately represented, but an unusually high proportion of official autotraffic was also using the road. The point was significant. He was now certain that somewhere ahead he would find the forbidden place. He was nearing the home of the Masterthinkers.

‘So what do you think you’re looking for, Manalone? A fortress – or an ivory tower? And when you find it, what then? And do you expect to fight them, join them, disdain them, or try to show them the error of their ways? In short, what the hell do you think you’re doing here? Answer: you’re here because there’s nowhere else you can sensibly go.’

So occupied was he by these considerations that he initially failed to notice something which he should have seen immediately. The character of the surroundings through which he was passing had subtly altered. Most people would have been unaware of the change, or at least not have seen its significance. To Manalone, whose habit of observation extended down to a subconscious level, the point became insistent.

‘Large fields, Manalone. Open grazing. Not a trace of super-intensive farming methods. This land must be part of a private estate. Part of the old world. You seem to have arrived.’

When he studied the situation carefully, the fields through which his road made its way appeared to be part of the home-farm of some secluded residence which itself was tucked away behind a line of trees which broke the skyline on a nearby hill. A stout breed of cattle of a type unfamiliar to him, was being extensively grazed across the broad areas of land. The scale alone was impressive. At current prices the farm alone must have been worth considerably more than one individual’s fortune. Here, if he needed it, was ample proof of the hand of governments in the affairs of the Masterthinkers. Besides which, the setting had the right sort of ‘feel’ for the home of an organization whose deliberations controlled the future of Mankind.

Past the
farm he chanced upon a broad drive, sealed from the road by tall, iron gates and overseen by a lodge. The evidence of the road was that many autovehicles entered and left by this route. This was obviously the main entrance to the house tucked away on the hill, but it was no consolation for Manalone. A notice on the gates made the facts quite plain.

GOVERNMENT SECURITY ESTABLISHMENT
STRICTLY NO ADMISSION

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

‘There’s nothing, Manalone, like finding “Welcome” written on the mat … and that’s nothing like finding “Welcome” written on the mat.’

He did not dare to loiter by the gates or appear too interested, because he had a suspicion that the spot was probably being viewed by concealed television cameras. Although no guards were visible, the lodge had an air of military orderliness, and he had no doubt that its occupants were armed and alert.