The Fellowship of the Hand (5 page)

“Oh! Sure, you do.” He dropped the tokens into the table slot and repeated the order.

“You’re not like him a bit, you know,” she said, studying Jazine.

“Like who?”

“Stanley Ambrose.”

“I hope not. I’m a quarter-century younger, for one thing.”

“I don’t mean just that. You’re a very down-to-earth person, aren’t you?”

“Sometimes.”

“Married?”

“No. My job takes me all over the world. It wouldn’t be fair to a wife.”

“An old bachelor’s excuse!”

“Maybe, but it really is dangerous. A man with a tattooed cheek tried to kill me just a few days ago.” He told her about it as the drinks arrived on their little cart. But he made the story short. If Milly Norris was preparing to seduce him, he wasn’t about to waste time with too many preliminaries.

Her apartment was neat and compact, something like the woman herself. It overlooked one of the community playgrounds scatter-sited throughout the town, but otherwise he could say little for the view. The land was flat in all directions, with only occasional trees to break up the rigid conformity of the structures.

As if reading his thoughts, she said, “The better homes are on the outskirts. This is a middle-income zone here.”

“Very nice,” he mumbled.

“It serves its purpose. A place to sleep and eat.”

He walked over to scan the video cassettes on her shelves. They were mostly romance and sex titles like
Girl in Free-Fall, Rocket Rendezvous, Twenty-first-Century Morals, Dressing to Attract a Man,
and
New Bedroom Techniques Illustrated.

“I used to watch those when I was young,” she said over his shoulder by way of explanation. “How about a drink?”

“Fine. Scotch’ll do, if you have it.”

She returned in a moment with the glass. “Here you are—poured by hand!”

“That’s the way I like it best. Do you have those letters handy?” He always believed in disposing of the business first.

Milly rummaged around in the closetier and came up with a thin packet of envelopes bearing the stamp of the Interplanetary Postal Service. Jazine glanced through them quickly, looking for the political comments he sought.

They were few and superficial for the most part, but in one of the last letters, written two years earlier, there was a paragraph that caught his eye:
“The videonews may have reported on our recent troubles here. A young prisoner named Euler Frost escaped from the colony and was living illegally in the Free Zone with some Russo-Chinese. But he’s been recaptured now, along with his friends, and things are peaceful once again.”

Euler Frost was one of the leaders of HAND, and though Jazine had never met him, he knew Crader had encountered the man twice during the transvection affair. After fleeing from the Venus Colony, Frost had joined Graham Axman in HAND’S attack on the Federal Medical Center. The paragraph in Ambrose’s letter wasn’t much, but it was at least a link between the missing man and someone in the HAND organization.

“This might help,” he told Milly. “Can I copy it?”

“Sure. He stopped the personal stuff long before that.”

Jazine spread the letter flat and photocopied it with his pocket microfilmer. “Thanks. This could prove helpful.”

“Helpful. That’s me.”

“What about his colleagues at the university? Might any of them know his whereabouts?”

“I doubt if he kept in touch with any of them.”

“And he has no family?”

She shook her head. “He was a man who believed in a small but intimate circle of friends. Want to see his hologram?”

“We have some on file, but I’d be interested in any candid shots you might have.”

“I tried to get him to sit for a formal hologram portrait, but he never would. These are just a few candids taken at a university picnic before he left for Venus.”

Earl Jazine stared at the shots of a well-built, ruddy man with wild white hair. There were the usual holograms of him drinking beer and eating, and even pitching a fine left-handed softball during a game. Jazine made quick two-dimensional copies of them all, because he never knew what Crader might want to see.

“You’ve been a great help to me,” he told Milly.

“You’re not going so soon!”

He grinned at the invitation in her eyes. “No, as a matter of fact I thought I might stay a bit longer if you’ve no objection.”

She turned on the video to a blank channel and the apartment filled with lush stereo music. “Romantic,” she said. “It’s the way people made love a hundred years ago.”

“Don’t they still do it to music today?”

“Maybe in New York, in the noise zones. Here in Sunsite it’s always quiet.” She touched a plastic zip-lock and her dress fell away. The bodysuit beneath it was a shimmer of radiance at the breasts and groin. Jazine had read about such suits, but this was his first personal experience with one.

“Very nice,” was all he could say. His mouth was quite dry.

“The bedroom’s in here, Earl.”

He followed her nude into the cycled bed and waited while she adjusted the speed in time with the music. Then, as he reached out to touch her smooth waiting skin, he felt her tense beneath his fingertips. “What is it?”

“The outer door—someone’s in the apartment!”

He started out of the bed, but it was already too late. Three men, masked and carrying stunners, crowded into the bedroom. “Don’t move,” the leader barked, pointing his weapon at Jazine’s groin, “or you won’t live to enjoy that!”

Tied and blindfolded, Jazine was quickly carried out of the apartment to a waiting car. He had no way of knowing whether Milly Norris was also a prisoner, but he suspected she was. He wasn’t ready to consider the possibility that she’d lured him into a trap.

The electric car purred silently along to its destination, coming to a smooth stop after what Jazine judged had been an hour’s drive. He was bundled roughly into a building of some sort, and the blindfold removed from his eyes.

“You are Earl Jazine of the Computer Investigation Bureau?” one of the masked men demanded.

“Yes,” he admitted, blinking his eyes against the glare of an arc light directed at his face.

They’d allowed him to dress, but somehow he still felt naked and helpless before their unseen faces. “Are you aware of your crimes against society?” a voice asked.

“What crimes are those?”

“You have been judged and found guilty by a people’s revolutionary court. The sentence is death.”

Jazine tried to rise, but several hands restrained him. His arms were still bound to his sides, and he knew he was helpless against the fate they’d prepared for him. “Then get it over with,” he said, spitting at the light.

“Your death will not be as fast as all that. You will be sealed in a plastic tube and dropped down a mine shaft with radioactive waste materials. There you will have some days to ponder your fate as the radioactivity eats away at your bones and blood.”

Mine shaft. He knew that must mean a salt mine, where such waste products were regularly disposed of. He tried to recall maps of the Sunsite area, and finally pinpointed a group of abandoned salt mines about an hour north of the city. Just then, he couldn’t imagine what good the knowledge would do him.

Rough hands seized him once again, and he was lifted into a smooth plastic tube about the size of a coffin. It was indeed a waste disposal tube for radioactive material, and for the first time Jazine felt the sting of fear. “Where’s the woman?” he managed to ask. “Is she safe?”

There was no answer, and then the lid was slammed shut on him. He tried to work his arms free of the straps, fighting now for his life, but it was useless. He felt the tube being attached to some conveyor belt, and in another moment he was sliding down a long chute into the bowels of the earth.

For some minutes after the disposal tube came to rest at the base of the mine shaft, Jazine was afraid to move. He imagined himself surrounded by deadly radioactive material which might somehow hasten his end if he exerted himself. Finally, when he decided that was foolish, he set to work freeing his arms. It took him a half hour of effort to achieve it, and even then his arms were so sore and limp as to be virtually helpless. His fingers clawed at the sealed plastic lid, but it failed to move. Freeing his hands had been no help at all.

He tried to feel around for some tool or weapon which might have been left inside the tube, but there was nothing. He was utterly alone with his fate. Feeling through his pockets he was surprised to find the little microfilm camera still intact, along with his money and credit cards. They were honest murderers, at least.

The air within the tube was beginning to grow stale, and the thought crossed his mind that he might easily suffocate before the radiation killed him. It would be a faster way, at any rate, if no more pleasant.

Then he heard a sound.

Only a nibble of sound at first, as if a rat had clawed at the plastic casing.

He heard it again, louder.

Something, or someone, was outside his plastic shell, gnawing at it. Suddenly he realized it was a drill of some sort, slipping as it sought to penetrate the smooth surface.

It took hold at last, humming and hewing, until a tiny hole appeared in the surface of his shell. He saw light from a torch, and he shouted encouragement. “I’m in here! Hurry up!”

More holes cut through the material, bracketing the door hinges, and in another few moments the lid fell away. Earl Jazine breathed a long sigh of relief and clambered out of his coffin.

The man with the torch and drill was young, with a handsome face and deep-set eyes. Jazine recognized him at once from a hologram he’d seen once in the Washington files.

“Euler Frost, isn’t it?” he said, holding out his hand. “I guess I owe you my life.”

P
ERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT
and formative event in Euler Frost’s thirty years on earth and Venus had been the death of his father, cut down by a rocket-copter’s exhaust blast as he attempted to prevent a mineral survey of Indian land in Manitoba. That event, when Euler was only fourteen, had turned him into a revolutionary. A passive revolutionary at first, but a revolutionary nonetheless. His father had taught him a fear and distrust of all machines, and had punctuated the lesson by the manner of his death.

Exiled to the Venus Colony for membership in a nameless, leaderless group opposed to the dehumanization of the individual in an increasingly machine-dominated society, Euler Frost had escaped from the domed city to live with outcasts like himself in the Free Zone between the USAC and Russo-Chinese sectors. There he encountered tragedy for the second time when raiding troops killed Fergana, a girl he’d grown to love. Frost had slain one of the soldiers in return, and been sentenced to a maximum-security prison on the planet.

His escape from the prison and his arrival back on earth at a time when the Computer Cops were investigating the murder of a cabinet member had made him a prime suspect in that killing. Alone and friendless, hunted by the police, he’d found a home with HAND, the revitalized organization to which he’d belonged in his youth. HAND’s leader, Graham Axman, wasted no talk on slogans or demonstrations. His goal was the utter destruction of the machine-oriented society, by whatever means possible.

The first blow struck by HAND had been a raid on the Federal Medical Center and the destruction of the nation’s largest known computer complex. Though Crader and Jazine blunted the force of the attack and captured Graham Axman, Frost and a few others made good their escape. Frost knew it was Carl Crader who allowed him to escape, and now as he reached out to shake the hand of Crader’s assistant he wondered if the director of the CIB might consider the debt paid.

“We’d better get out of here,” he told Earl Jazine. “The place is loaded with radioactivity.”

“How did you find me?”

“It wasn’t easy,” Frost said, shining his light on an emergency stairway that ran along the chute. “I followed them when they kidnapped you, but I lost them for a time out here at the mines.”

“Then it wasn’t HAND that tried to kill me?”

“No more than it was the first time, at the zooitorium.”

“You seem to know everything.”

“I know a great deal. Come on now—up these stairs.”

There was no time for further talk until they’d made the climb and regained their breath. Then, in Frost’s car, Jazine said, “I was with a woman—Milly Norris. We have to find her.”

“They released her on a country road, unharmed. You’re the one they were after.”

“Why me?”

“Because you stumbled onto the election computer and the names of Blunt and Ambrose. Let me tell you a story. It may sound fantastic, but I can assure you every word is true.”

“I’m listening.”

“After HAND’S raid on the Federal Medical Center I went into hiding. There were still a few of us left, but with Graham Axman sentenced to a long prison term we were like a body without its brain. I tried to take over, holding the group together, and before many months I discovered we had a foe every bit as deadly as the federal government and the Computer Cops.”

“Who would that be?” Jazine asked, his curiosity obviously aroused.

“There exists in this country a well-financed conspiracy to overthrow the government of President McCurdy or his successor, and to replace it with a super-government run by computers.”

“Fantastic!”

“Of course. But the men behind the plan really believe in it. They have assembled the largest network of computers in the nation—far more than those we destroyed at the Federal Medical Center—and into these computers they have fed every available fact and statistic on American life and history. One whole memory bank is given over to the stock market, another to elections, a third to foreign policy, and so forth. These computers, by weighing past performance against present conditions, will regulate every aspect of our lives.”

“But why? To what purpose?”

“The men behind this—wealthy and powerful in their own right—believe such a computerized government is the only way to preserve our American way of life. You see, the computers will elect new presidents, and regulate the stock market’s ups and downs, and even write treaties with other nations—but all this will be within the limits pre-programmed into the machine, limits carefully established by the past. The super-government wants us merely to relive that past—with only minor computerized variations to make it interesting.”