Manalone (7 page)

‘Don’t
worry!’ said Manalone, grasping the nature of the man’s alarm. ‘I won’t compromise you. I can guess the situation. But what the hell brings you to this?’

Oman cast him a despairing look. ‘Where else could I be? Only here, watching the rape of history.’

Manalone approached him closely, sensing that his presence was an acute embarrassment to the old man.

‘Look, Professor, is there somewhere we could talk?’

‘No!’ Oman’s frail reply was almost a cry of agony. ‘Manalone, go away before they see us talking.’

Manalone stood his ground. This old and waxen man with coveralls ripped by the thickset hawthorn undoubtedly held clues to many of the answers he was seeking. To make a visual play for the benefit of the watcher, he pointed first right and then left along the main road, and Pierce Oman, divining his intention, made a similar play of giving directional advice.

‘I’ll go when you give me an answer, Professor. I know what they’re destroying here – all I need to know is why.’

On impulse Oman fished in a coverall pocket and pulled out a crumpled paper bag containing something hard. Manalone transferred it straight to his own pocket without looking at it. The thing inside the paper bag felt like a twisted bone …

‘The answer’s there,’ said Oman. ‘Don’t look back, don’t come back. If they find what I’ve given you, they’ll kill me.’

Manalone kept walking. The incident had shaken him severely. His acquaintanceship with Pierce Oman had been short and a long time ago, but sufficient to leave him with a considerable respect for the old historian’s academic ability. To see the same man now forced to the point of labouring with his hands in order even to remain near to the site of the elimination of history, was something that stirred Manalone in bitter resentment of the Establishment.

‘But don’t start tilting at windmills, Manalone. If they could break a man like Pierce Oman, don’t be too sure they can’t break you too. Better first find out whom you’re fighting and what you’re fighting for.’

The package in his pocket worried him. His leisurewear did not carry the voluminous pockets of his cloak, and he felt the bulge was conspicuous. He longed to take the package out and examine it, but he was sure the old man’s life might be jeopardized if he was discovered with the forbidden object near the site. He restrained his curiosity until he had completed the long walk home. Once inside his own walls he breathed a sigh of relief to find that Sandra was not home. Then he pulled out the packet, and with trembling fingers he took out the enigmatic object which Pierce Oman had valued as being equal to his life.

It was a perfectly
unremarkable glazed earthenware handle, presumably broken from a cheap teapot …

He could have wept with disappointment.
‘Try again, Manalone! They don’t kill Professors of history for giving away pieces of broken teaset. Or do they? Is Oman mad? Or are you mad … or is it the rest of the world that’s come unhinged? Impossible films, unlikely statistics, improbable conspiracies, illegal disciplines … and teapot handles. Alice in Wonderland would have loved this!’

For a long time he turned the broken ceramic fragment over with his fingers, trying to draw more information from it. When its cheap, cracked glaze and dirty fracture refused to give him any more than a sense of frustration, he dropped the article into a filing cabinet. Then he went to the leisure-space and turned on the television to relax the pressures on his mind.

He tuned in to a party political broadcast, part of the campaign series before the imminent election. Alex Stormtrop, leader of the New Party in opposition to the governing United Technocrats, was outlining the tenets of his policy. Manalone was singularly unimpressed.

‘Jupiter! To hear him talk you’d think that politicians actually controlled things. The poor idiots in reality are merely a baffled rearguard trying to legislate changes in the social environment brought about by advances in technology made anything from ten to a hundred years ago. Henry Ford had a greater impact on the shape of society than all the politicians who ever lived.

‘Which brings us to an interesting conclusion, Manalone. The current rash of problems with which you’re involved may be nothing more than manifestations of the Establishment groping to deal with the effects of a major technical advance. The question is: which technology, and where did it advance to?’

Six hours
later an autram brought Sandra home. From the narcotic glaze of her expression she must be judged to have had a good day. Manalone helped her into bed, then stood for a long while marvelling at the perfect form of her features and the glorious gold of her hair. Objectively he was trying to analyse his own feeling towards her. He loved her, yes, but there was something else – pride of possession. As Victor Blackman had suggested, she was an ultra-expensive pet. Finally Manalone came very close to tears.

Manalone’s notion
that the root cause of the mystery was related to a technological rather than political phenomenon received no further support for several days. However, the suspicion hardened into a certainty the more he thought about it. No amount of political discourse could possibly affect either gravity or momentum in the way he had seen it displayed in the film.

‘Could it be, Manalone, not that the film was impossible but that it was truly representative of its time? What if it’s the physical world itself that has changed?’

The question was easy to refute. Physical laws were not amenable to repeal by committee. The acceleration due to gravity was as reasonably constant as one could expect from the dynamic nature of its origin, and science was not going to have much new to say on momentum for quite a few years yet.

‘But if the physical world has changed, why are they going to so much trouble to obscure the past to prevent comparison? Manalone, this is becoming insane! How do you fit teapot handles into an equation?’

The concept of teapot handles gave him an idea. He was beginning to appreciate now both the reality and the scale of Raper’s postulated national conspiracy. A conspiracy of such magnitude must certainly involve the government – and now, on the eve of a general election, that particular government might easily be put out of office. Manalone began to haunt the television channels, listening to the currently dominant United Technocrats trying to defend their past actions, and hearing the counterclaims of the powerful New Party promising economic and sociological miracles. It was all very superficial and banal.

This in itself was surprising. He had anticipated being able to detect a veiled apprehension in the ranks of the Technocrats, who, if their bid for continuing power failed, must surely leave the bones of the conspiracy exposed to the new administration. He had also expected to find concealed anticipation in the leaders of the New Party, who must surely have stumbled at some time against the web of Security, and would be eager for the opportunity to peer behind the curious screens to see what mysteries they contained. Manalone found no trace of anxiety or anticipation in their political manoeuvres, and, no matter how he searched, the great conspiracy could not be observed to exist.

‘Which is
ridiculous, Manalone! You’re a complete political non-runner, yet given half an hour of national television coverage you could damn the Technocrat administration permanently by simply reciting what you know. It doesn’t seem possible that the New Party is unaware of what is going on. Yet they decline to make political capital out of it.’

Almost unbelievingly he listened to the old political tirades, the excuses, the allegations, whilst knowing with a dreadful certainty that nearby an ex-professor of history was in the centre of a situation which should have been a political bomb. The expenditure on Security forces alone could have been an issue which would have fetched down the existing government. This glossing-over of the really vital areas of government administration mainly confirmed his suspicions of the communal value of the political animal, and left him with a cold and helpless anger. If the free-election system could not protect the public from gross abuse – then what, in the name of creation, could?

In the past Manalone had always automatically voted Technocrat, on the vague theory that the party hierarchy, declaredly all senior technologists in their own right, had the most competent understanding of the needs of a highly technical society. This time, when the Computer-poll centres were open, Manalone voted early and in favour of the New Party, in the forlorn hope that a potential change of government might throw some new factors into relief. Then he returned home and sat by the television all day watching the on-line results being declared, and gratified to see that his new allegiance was gaining heavily. When the final count had been taken and verified, the New Party had a comfortable lead. Minutes later a recorded voice on the autophone informed him that Paul Raper was already on his way.

Raper arrived
one hour later, very hot and angry. He drew Manalone aside and came swiftly to the point.

‘Did you see that fiasco?’

‘You mean the election?’

‘Yes. The New Party – this morning they didn’t stand a chance.’

‘How do you calculate that, Paul?’

‘All the free opinion polls showed that the Technocrats had at least thirty percent majority.’

‘Not the ones that I saw.’

‘You could have seen only interpretations of the Information Ministry’s official survey – which was devious, to say the least. The free opinion poll’s results never got through to the press. They were censored out of existence.’

‘What are you saying, Paul?’

‘I’m saying, Manalone, that the election was rigged. It was an elective non-event. The Technocrats deliberately threw the election.’

‘But why the hell?’

‘I don’t know, but I suspect it’s something to do with the maintenance of the great conspiracy.’

Manalone remained unconvinced.

‘Surely the maintenance of the conspiracy would be better served by the continuance of the old government?’

‘I think they’re being cleverer than that. I suspect that Alex Stormtrop and members of his New Party cabinet are already in the conspiracy. Change of government would appear to be a refutation of the idea that a conspiracy existed – whilst at the same time ensuring that it was carefully maintained.’

‘This is all rather wild,’ said Manalone doubtfully. ‘If it were true, the logical inference would be that maintenance of the conspiracy is more important than any political issue.’

‘I think that’s true. This affair has all the elements of a continuing major crisis, but the nature of the crisis is being carefully obscured. But we can judge its magnitude by the fact that it now overrides all other political considerations.’

‘You’re building too much on too little evidence, Paul. There’s nothing positive to prove that the way the election ran was anything other than a natural swing. The feature of on-line computer vote registration is that the floating voter has the opportunity to know which way the majority trend is going before he records his own vote. He tends to follow the majority lead.’

‘Another feature
of on-line computer vote registration is that it’s possible to put a bias into the computer to predetermine the end result. Isn’t that so?’

‘Possible, but unlikely. The standard test programmes are extremely thorough and would render any such bias painfully obvious. Remember that all parties at an election have to certify that they’ve seen the test-programme run and are satisfied with the results.’

‘Which would still apply if both parties were in collusion before the election took place. What does it take to convince you, Manalone?’

‘I’d need a fair sample of sequential printout from the polling computer, marked up against time. It wouldn’t take much computing to determine whether the swing to the New Party was the random pattern of individual decisions or whether a deliberate bias had been inserted.’

‘I can get you an actual sample of the autofax on-line press release, which contains just that information. Could you really prove anything from that?’

‘If a bias shows up, the evidence will be quite positive. If no bias is apparent, there’ll still be an element of doubt, because they could be biasing using a nucleonic random generator, the output of which is indistinguishable from pure chance. Let me have the autofax printout, and I’ll let you know what I find.’

‘I know just what you’ll find,’ said Raper morosely. ‘You’ll find a bias, and I doubt if it’ll be too heavily disguised. There aren’t many like you with the knowledge or the facilities to run a check like that. Anyway, they don’t need to be too subtle. Even if you can prove the bias, there’s still nothing you can do about it. Open your mouth once too often, and you’ll meet with a tidily arranged accident.’

Raper lapsed into silence, suddenly aware of his responsibility towards the somewhat unworldly Manalone. Academics had no business getting involved with real life. His problem now was whether to let Manalone out gently or whether to involve him further in the hope that Manalone’s brain would begin to provide some of the answers.

‘Say it, Paul,’ said Manalone, after a period of unbroken silence. ‘There’s something else you haven’t told me.’

‘It’s only
a rumour, Manalone. But it’s a dangerous rumour, because on present evidence it stands every chance of being true.’

‘What does it say?’

‘It says that all national governments have surrendered their autonomy to a single group of people who now effectively control the world. I can’t get any hint of names, faces or nationalities, but they’re said to be operating from this country. For want of a better name they’re being called the Masterthinkers.’

‘That figures!’ said Manalone, suddenly alert. ‘I wonder …’

‘You mean it makes sense?’

‘At least it adds a connecting thread of logic. As I see it, something incredible has happened to the world, some sort of technological threat or crisis which, though we personally can’t see it, is on such a scale that even national governments are unable to contain it. The logical move would be for governments to combine resources and appoint a group to spearhead the attack on the problem. Your Masterthinkers could well be just that group.’