The Fellowship of the Hand (13 page)

Axman was, to some extent, an unknown quantity. But Crader was willing to put his trust in Euler Frost. Even a few bombed machines now might be preferable to a society that would awaken one morning to find its free will programmed into the memory unit of a computer.

So he worried very little about the escape that weekend. Even on Monday, when one of the presidential advisers reached him by vision-phone, inquiring about it, Crader only referred him to another department. Certainly the escape itself was not a matter for the CIB. What might come after the escape, once Axman and Euler Frost joined forces again, was another matter.

During the week that followed, his mind was taken up with other matters. A complex scheme to swindle a midwestern bank through the use of forged voice-print commands to the bank’s computer had been uncovered, and it took a full two days of staff work to sort out just what happened. Then too, there was the matter of the FRIDAY-404 system, with President McCurdy still expressing concern about the election only a few weeks away.

By week’s end, Earl Jazine brought in a favorable report on the election system. “Professor Friday has gone over every component, chief. It’s working perfectly. You can tell the President he doesn’t have a thing to worry about.”

Crader was pleased to hear it. “Fine!”

“A funny thing, though, chief.”

“About the computer?”

“No, something else.” He sank into the foamfold chair opposite Crader’s desk. “I thought I should check on that girl I was with when HAND pulled off the kidnap hoax.”

“Milly Norris?”

“Yeah. If she was in on it, I figured she might tell me something about HAND. If she wasn’t, I wanted to see if she was all right.”

“And complete your business with her?” Crader asked with a grin.

“No. Hell, it was just a loose end.”

“I know.”

“Anyway, she’s not there.”

“Not where?”

“In Sunsite. She’s been away from work since Tuesday, and she’s not at her apartment either.”

“A vacation, perhaps.”

“Without telling them at work? She just called Wednesday morning and told her boss she had to go away for a few days.”

“You think it’s tied in with Axman’s escape?”

“I think so, chief.”

Crader thought about it. “If she’s with HAND, then she’s the one who’s been supplying Frost his information. But where is the information coming from? Has she been seeing Stanley Ambrose after all?”

“Nobody else has, that’s for sure!”

“Well, keep checking on her. If she comes back, try to find out where she’s been.”

Earl Jazine nodded. “Meanwhile, what are we doing about Jason Blunt’s underground city?”

“Not enough,” Crader admitted ruefully. “I’m glad you asked me before the President did. I think I’ll try to reach Blunt on the vision-phone.”

But Masha only told him that Jason Blunt was away on another of his frequent journeys. He might be back on Sunday, or Monday. And so it was the first of the week before Crader finally reached him, and Tuesday before he flew out for another meeting at the underground city.

By that time, Jazine had brought word of Milly Norris’s murder by laser gun, in the amusement area at Sunsite.

For a time Crader considered postponing his flight to Utah and going to Sunsite instead, but finally he agreed that Jazine could handle things with the local police.

“Check on any strangers who might have arrived in town,” he told Earl. “And especially check for anyone answering Graham Axman’s description.”

“You really think Axman killed her?”

“No, but someone’s sure to raise the possibility. I just don’t want to miss anything.”

Jazine thought about it. “She was pretty easy to get into bed. It might have been a crime of passion—jealousy, something like that.”

“With a laser gun? Maybe, but I doubt it.”

“When will you be back from Utah?”

“Who knows?” Crader said with a dry chuckle. “They might kidnap me and seal me up in a computer.”

“If that happens I’ll call out the army and come rescue you.”

“Good! I’ll be relying on that.”

They shook hands as if departing for distant planets and Crader went up the stairs to the rocketcopter pad.

The flight west was pleasantly relaxing, and he spent the time reviewing staff reports on the Utah facility and its history. The government in Washington had all but forgotten the existence of the underground city, supposing after its sale to Nova Industries that the space was being used for the storage of natural gas. Even the shipment of computer components and vast supplies to the site from Nova’s eastern plants had apparently passed unnoticed.

As for Nova Industries itself, the government reports had little to offer. Originally a wholly owned subsidiary of Blunt’s underwater oil-drilling company, Nova had been reorganized a year ago as a separate corporation whose major stockholders were Jason Blunt and Stanley Ambrose. There the record stopped.

Crader grunted and put away the files. Below him, on the transcontinental expressway, he could see the tiny dots of electric cars moving like ants through the tan and sandy stretches of desert. He was almost there, almost back to the dry lake bed that concealed the entrance to Nova’s underground city.

Jason Blunt was already there, and he greeted Crader at the elevator. “I hardly expected to see you back here so soon,” he said, shaking hands. “Do you have a message from our President?”

“In a way,” Crader replied, improvising. “He’s very much interested in your computer center here, but somehow he’s not reassured about your motives. He’d like me to inspect the place a little more carefully.”

“Inspect? You mean search it? Do you think we have little men hidden inside the machines?”

“Hardly, but you may have something else hidden there. It’s one thing to computerize past events in a memory unit. It’s quite another to program your machines with a learning power by which they could control future events. A close examination of the wiring can show me just what you’ve done.”

“I’m certain you’ll find nothing, but come down to my office and we’ll talk about it,” Blunt said.

They descended by elevator to a room Crader had only glimpsed on his first visit. It was a luxuriously appointed office, with high, radiant ceiling, foamfold chairs, a white shag rug, and a console desk that looked like the keyboard of a giant organ. On one wall hung a chart of the underground city, color-coded for seven different zones of activity.

“Quite a place,” Crader marveled. “I wish the government could afford something like this for me!”

“I can control input from here, and also get readouts on any of the programmed information. Though of course in actual practice our computer specialists do all the work.”

Crader slipped into an especially comfortable chair and watched Blunt pass a comb through the fringes of his black beard. “But you do exercise some control over input.”

Blunt shrugged. “Stanley Ambrose has a great deal to do with it too. I can’t swear that his people haven’t set up an entire program that’s unknown to me.”

“Has Ambrose been here recently?”

“He’s in and out.”

“Strange that you’ve seen him and no one else has.”

“That’s his way when he’s working on a project.”

“Just what is the project?”

“You know—this election business.”

Crader nodded. “How many employees did you say Nova had?”

“I didn’t, but there are two hundred here. Counting employees, stockholders and their families, there are over eighty thousand. My oil drilling people are included too. All of them voted in our election.”

“And of those stationed here, how many would you say are loyal to you and how many to Ambrose?”

“The split is about even.”

“The figures we found in the FRIDAY-404 computer showed some forty-five thousand votes for Ambrose and thirty-six thousand for you.”

Jason Blunt shrugged and did not seem surprised. “I had already assumed I lost the election.”

“If Ambrose is around so little, how did he attract such a following?”

“The computer programmers got to know him, of course. And the others know him by reputation. He had a good deal of publicity during his years on Venus.”

“But the programmers who supported him—certainly they would have done anything he ordered, even without your knowledge.”

“I suppose so,” he admitted.

“Then it’s more important than ever that I be allowed to run my check on the wiring and circuits.”

“Do you have any idea of the enormity of the task? We have miles of tunnels and conduits, holding enough wiring to reach the moon and back. It would take your entire bureau a month to inspect it all.”

“I know where to look for what I want,” Crader assured him.

“Very well,” Blunt said after a moment’s hesitation. “I’ll show you whatever you want. Believe me, if you find the sort of evidence you’re talking about, I’ll confront Stanley with it. It’s time we had a few things out anyway.”

“It may be too late to confront him, if he’s grown as powerful as I suspect.”

“He’s not that powerful.”

Crader thought of something. “In such a highly computerized operation as this, surely your own employees are rated and assigned by computer too.”

“Of course.”

“If Ambrose was in control, what would prevent him from rigging the computer to have employees loyal to him transferred here, and employees loyal to you moved elsewhere?”

Jason Blunt frowned at the words. “There have been a number of transfers lately. I thought nothing of it, but …”

“Ambrose had a mistress, a woman named Mildred Norris.”

“Oh?”

“Did he ever mention her to you?”

“He might have.”

“She was murdered last night.”

Blunt’s hand jerked away from his beard. “My God!”

“You’re startled. Did you know her?”

“No!”

“Then why does the news of her murder affect you like that? You’re trembling, man!”

Blunt brought himself under control. “Violent death always affects me. Who killed her?”

“We don’t know. It happened at an amusement park near her home. Somebody shot her with a laser gun.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because she’s the second person to die during this investigation. A technician named Rogers was murdered too. Any of us could be next—you or me or anybody. If you know anything …”

Jason Blunt turned his back. “I knew the woman. I knew Milly. I met her a few times.”

“When did you see her last?”

“A week or so ago. Maybe ten days.”

“When did Ambrose see her last?”

“Not for years. She was in his past.”

Something clicked for Crader. “Then you were her source of information. You told her about Nova and she passed the information on to HAND.”

“HAND?”

Crader nodded. “Milly Norris had a great many friends, it seems.”

“If I’d known she was passing information to HAND …”

“You’d have killed her?”

“No!”

“I was just completing the sentence for you. Somebody killed her, and the most likely suspects now seem to be you or Ambrose or one of the HAND people.”

“That one who escaped from prison last week—Axman.”

“Perhaps. We’re looking into that possibility. Meanwhile, the best thing you can do is take me around your underground city. Not the tourist show like last time, but behind the scenes.”

The bearded man sighed. “Very well. Follow me.”

But the task of inspecting the wiring was not as simple as Crader had imagined. Behind the first bank of computers they entered a dim, narrow tunnel that led to a mass of exposed wiring. The various systems were easily recognizable, but the sheer bulk of it was enough to stagger him.

“It might take another man after all,” he admitted.

“Or ten or twelve.”

“But this isn’t what I wanted anyway. These are memory cores. I want the reasoning capabilities—the game-playing, if you will.”

Blunt led the way down another long corridor, past white-suited men and women working silently at their tasks. Except for the occasional hum of an electronic keyboard, there was very little noise deep down here in the earth.

“These are the units you want,” Blunt said at last, stopping before a metal door with weld-bolts in place. “But the door has a twenty-year seal on it.”

“What’s that?”

“Certain units must be dustproofed and protected from human radiation. When they’re units which will never need servicing, we place a twenty-year seal on the door to safeguard them.”

“Break the seal,” Crader said. “I want to look in there.”

“All you’ll find is a maze of wiring tunnels and socketboards running for miles. You could get lost in there.”

“I won’t get lost. Open up.”

“I can’t go with you. One’s bad enough. Two of us could generate a dangerously high level of body heat.”

Crader nodded. “I have a wrist-light. Break the seal and I’ll go alone.”

Jason Blunt hesitated another moment. Then he did as Crader asked and the door slid open on well-oiled tracks. Crader peered into the soft transitube glow ahead and snapped on his wrist-light. He had gone about ten feet into the tunnel when he heard the door slide closed behind him. The implication didn’t bother him. He hardly believed that Blunt was prepared to seal him in here forever, and he could certainly create enough damage with these circuits to get himself freed in time if that move became necessary.

He went on down the tunnel, pausing here and there to remove and inspect a memory bank or relay system. The thing was complex in the extreme, but before long he found what he wanted. He recognized the configuration of circuits he’d studied many times before. Here was definite evidence of an attempt to duplicate the behavior and reasoning abilities of man. This was no mere storehouse of the past, but an artefact constructed to learn, to show homeostasis, and ultimately to rule.

Crader backed away, letting his wrist-light sweep farther along the passageway. Then, as he was about to start back toward the closed door, the light picked out a flicker of white. It was something low, near the floor …

He walked on a few paces, hardly believing the trick his eyes were playing on him. Something white …