Manalone (3 page)

The doors of the car closed with a whisper of air, and the car moved off on its slow mechanical drive down the slightly curved feeder-rail to its pre-insertion position near the highspeed line. Manalone knew that the computers were phasing the car to pick up a vacant position on the high-line as soon as one became available. They did not have long to wait.

With a sudden
boost of the air-cushion, the car rose sharply and lost contact with the feeder-rail. This was the point which always fascinated Manalone. Here they were buoyed on a low-thrust air blanket ready to be inserted on to the high-speed Hover-line which was already carrying speeding cars at a probable interval of twenty seconds. Only computers could make the split-second decisions as to when and how fast the car must accelerate over the rest of the pre-entry section so as to make a safe insertion on to the high-line. For this reason the cars needed no drivers. There was no aspect of the high-speed Hover-line operation which was still amenable to human judgement.

Then he felt the punch of the acceleration forcing him back into his seat as the car’s jets screamed with the urgency of trying to insert it accurately into a safe position on the high-line between a series of already speeding cars. The car, travelling now like an ambitious bullet, left the pre-entry section and climbed straight into position astride the highspeed rail, its jet-scream dying as the linear motors took hold and wound them up to their final speed. The insertion had been accomplished.

As terminal velocity was reached, the acceleration pressures ceased. Manalone undid his safety belt and waited for the hostess to make her round. He ordered black coffee, because he needed to think, then settled down to review the evening in detail, utilizing his capacity for almost total recall.

As before, he was unable to explain the photo-play which he had seen. He had the feeling that even when he had analysed the data, he would still be no nearer an answer. He had developed that acute technological sense of knowing intuitively what an answer should look like, and was beset by a feeling that a great many pieces were missing from the puzzle. The problem was not that there were missing pieces, but exactly what was the nature of the puzzle from which they were missing.

Paul Raper was a journalist and scientific editor of a national daily newsfax. The latter post he held largely due to Manalone’s ability as a part-time scientific sleuth. Raper decided the line of enquiry, and Manalone ghosted a lot of the best copy. The journalist had the contacts and the ideas, whilst Manalone patiently supplied the facts and the interpretation. Alone, neither of them would have achieved much notice, but together they had achieved new standards in scientific reporting.

This time,
Manalone felt he had drawn a blank. Unless analysis revealed something that his trained intuition had failed to find, the result of his evening’s work was due to be relegated to the ever increasing store of background material which provided the fund of insight from which he worked. No information gained was ever wasted – but a great many things, of themselves, would produce no copy.

The request to re-fasten seat belts meant they had slipped the coastal highline and begun to decelerate into Bognor Terminal. At first this was manifest as a gradual lessening of the linear motor’s thrust, but as they reached the station the car’s jets went into retro to positively arrest their momentum and fetch the car to a safe halt precisely on the exit ramp.

Outside the Bognor Terminal he hurried to a tramcall post and signalled for an autram. Long gone were the days when private individuals could find roadspace to operate their own vehicles. Now only a few trades and essential services were permitted autonomous vehicles. For the rest of the population there was no alternative to the speedy, economic autrams, whose small size and integrated computer control made the best use of the available roadspace in a traffic situation which would otherwise have congested itself to a complete standstill a century ago.

In less than a minute a small driverless tramcar, diverging from the mainstream traffic to follow the particular sub-loop wire buried beneath the surface of the road, drew up before him. He climbed in, tended his ComCredit card to the card reader, and dialled his destination code. The route-box muttered to itself uncertainly, then rejected his figures and displayed a sequence of its own devising.

Surprised, Manalone checked the new readout against the area map, and saw that the vehicle was proposing to set him down at the end of his turning, rather than deliver him to his door. It was then that he remembered that due to the massive clearance for re-building in the area adjacent to his home, the local street sub-loops became inoperative from two hundred thirty hours till dawn to enable the necessary circuit alterations to be made. His watch confirmed the vehicle’s correct assessment of the situation – or rather the correct assessment of the city’s transport computer which the vehicle had interrogated. He punched the ‘accept’ button, watched the revised fare become accepted by the credit register, then sank back in the cushions as the autram accelerated out expertly into the traffic lines.

Even at
this late time the traffic density was high and progress on the town’s main routes was slow. Almost without seeing them he watched the pyramids of coloured codes and anticipatory signals crawling up the backs of the preceding vehicles. Some of the lights had meaning for him, being indications of the previous vehicle’s speed and directional intentions to which his own vehicle responded. The rest of the lights, he surmised, were computer route codings, though why they were displayed he was at a loss to guess.

The photo-play still worried him. It was obviously the work of a few enthusiasts operating on a cheap budget; yet either the major scenes of violence had been achieved with expensively authentic mock-ups, or something incredible had happened to reality during the filming. Neither of these alternatives seemed possible. It was another incident in the curious sequence which Paul Raper had latterly been asking him to investigate. It could be that Paul had some idea of the underlying causality, but Manalone felt it more likely that it was the result of Paul’s newshound instinct coupled with an inability to explain the items for himself.

‘Manalone, you’re getting neurotic! How can you get worried about missing pieces … when you didn’t have a problem to start with?’

The autram finally drew out of the traffic-stream at its predetermined point on the Chichester Road. Manalone shrugged and prepared to walk the remaining distance to his house. On his emergence at Toad Hall, however, he chanced to glance along the way to Elbridge, where the massive house-clearance operation was in progress. He stopped, entranced by the lights of the clearance machinery weaving in the darkness, and walked along the road to obtain a better view from the high bank.

As he did so,
a second autram drew up to the place where his own vehicle had left him. Anticipating the possible arrival of a neighbour, Manalone watched for the descending occupant. However, the man who stepped out and began to search the darkness was not a local figure, nor did he appear to have any clear idea of his eventual destination.

‘In fact, Manalone, he has an uncanny resemblance to the man who was last into the Hover-rail car. Could it just possibly be that you’re being followed?’

Manalone
stood stock-still at the top of the high bank watching the new arrival fruitlessly searching the darkness. The scientist’s present location was sufficiently unlikely that the man on the roadway did not once think to turn in his direction. There came a buzz of conversation as the man employed a wrist-transceiver, then, as if in receipt of new instructions, the searcher set off down the turning which was also Manalone’s route home.

Lips compressed with slight amusement, Manalone followed him. Manalone was not really convinced that his quarry, whom he now felt certain was a police agent, was in any way connected with himself. He was certain, however, that apart from this evening’s minor indiscretion of seeing an illegal film, he had done nothing to warrant police attention. Nevertheless the game made an interesting diversion to an otherwise irksome walk, and enabled him to play out a few of his untried theories on how to shadow a man without the possibility of being detected. He was mildly disappointed when, at a diversion of the ways, the agent started down the right fork whilst Manalone’s own route took him to the left. The game over, Manalone walked thoughtfully home by himself, his adventure, as ever, ended in anticlimax.

‘You’re a misfit, Manalone. Bit of an oddball really. You even play games by yourself. In fact you’re quite a humorous character … in your own creepy little way.’

As he entered his front door, Sandra, his wife was waiting for him in the mainspace. As usual, she was annoyed and critical. Her hair, a glorious golden fountain falling in rivulets over her shoulders, framed a face made irritable by broken sleep.

‘Damn you, Manalone! You might have told me you were staying out all night.’

‘It isn’t all night,’ said Manalone defensively. ‘Only half. And I did tell you, five days ago.’

‘Well
you should have reminded me.’

‘Why, were you worried?’ This was irony. The union had long since deteriorated past the stage where she cared much about his movements. She sensed the thrust, but could not be bothered to return it.

‘If you think I’m going to sit up all night taking your vidiphone messages, you’re wildly mistaken. Either you have vi’tape put in or else you can get the whole lot out of my house. I’m sick to death of it.’

She flounced off towards the sleepspace while Manalone looked first at the offending instrument and then at the message pad. The vidiphone was silent and eyeless, and the pad was empty. Shaking his shoes off, he followed her into the sleepspace.

‘Were there any messages for me, San?’

‘Messages!’ She struggled down into the bed. ‘As usual, everyone with a problem was asking for you. I don’t know what the hell it is you’ve got, Manalone, but there’s plenty of people after it. It beats me!’

‘But specifically…?’ said Manalone patiently.

‘Specifically, Blackman was asking you to write that computer programme for him again. He’s been on twice. Then Gross, that even shadier partner of his, came on trying to find out from me if you didn’t think their money was good enough. He’s a right snake! Then Paul Raper called in a hell of a hurry because he couldn’t contact you anywhere. Then finally there was the police. Are you in some sort of trouble, Manalone?’

‘Only with you,’ said Manalone, taking off his shirt. ‘What on earth did the police want?’

‘He didn’t say it was the police… it was just a man in street-clothes making an enquiry to see if you were at home. But somebody opened a door behind him and I could see past his head right into the station. You
are
in trouble, aren’t you?’

‘For God’s sake!’ said Manalone. ‘I can find problems enough without breaking the law. You know that, San.’

‘I reasoned you hadn’t got the guts for it. But it’s not you I’m worried about. It’s the big boys you play with – Blackman, Raper, Gross – they’re all chancers. They’re all using you, and if the way goes sour for them, there isn’t one who wouldn’t leave you to take the fall.’

‘I wasn’t
born yesterday,’ said Manalone. ‘I know Blackman and Gross sail near to the wind, but my end of the affair is strictly legal. As for Paul, all our copy is approved by the censor anyway … and Paul’s private life is no concern of mine. Hell, with you to keep, I can’t afford ethics too!’

Sandra laughed at this, then became suddenly serious. ‘God, but you’re a fool, Manalone. They’re all making money out of your brains. Even Vickers at the plant – you’re carrying him. You know damn well you should have had Vickers’ job.’

‘I’m a technologist, not a manager,’ said Manalone wearily. ‘Machines I can handle, but people just aren’t on my wave-length.’

‘You can say that again!’ said Sandra scathingly. ‘When’s the last time you got tuned in to me? When’s the last time you even touched me in bed? As a computer you’re so brilliant it hurts, but as a man you’re a bit of a joke.’

She turned her back on him and pulled the coverdown closely around her body. Her rejection of him merely amplified his isolation and made him even less able to claw down the barriers between them. Though after four years of marriage her physical attractiveness still dazzled him, he had long become reconciled to the fact that mentally they were strangers – even foreigners. With her encouragement he used to be able to break out of his shell and share something with her which was what he imagined others meant by the verb ‘to love’. Now in the face of her critical and continual hostility he no longer had the heart even to try.

‘San,’ he said after a while of thinking about the problem in the darkness, ‘did you ever think any more about what I suggested – about us having a baby?’

She made a noise, but whether it was laughter or annoyance he was not able to be sure.

‘Isn’t that just like you, Manalone! Is that what you are – tired of me? You want to get rid of me?’

‘I know there’s a risk, San, but …’

‘Risk!’ The force of her anger made her sit up, the better to contain it. ‘Do you know how high that risk is? Don’t you realize it kills one woman in twenty?’

‘I’m sure that’s not right, San. I …’

‘It
is right. When I did that job for the clinic I saw the figures.’

‘But San, in these days of medical science it’s ridiculous!’

‘I’m not arguing with you, Manalone. I’m telling you. No baby – and if you keep pressuring me I’ll pack up and go somewhere I’m wanted. Babies … what the hell will you think of next?’

Manalone dropped the subject and tried to get to sleep. Somewhere, somehow, Sandra had slipped a decimal place or two in her statistics.

‘Which in itself is odd. Mathematics was one of the subjects she took for her degree.’

He recognized that it mattered little whether what she thought was right; it only mattered that she believed it.