The Jagged Orbit (16 page)

"How do you decide which are the usable ones?"

"My usual baseline is eighty-plus in favor of it being true. That works. Once I used something comped at seventy-eight and I had to apologize and pay damages, but I never got caught on anything with a rating over eighty on this equipment. Though being cautious was what cost me a beat on the Lenigo story yesterday; it was five points below the likeliest alternative."

"Which was?"

"That the Gottschalks were spreading alarm and despondency again. Something there wasn't much point in using, of course. Everyone's known for years that that's how they jack their sales levels up: they're ghouls, growing fat on people's hates and fears, and the human species being what it is they're apt to go on growing fat until they collapse under their own weight."

"That's something we don't get in the enclaves," Diablo said. "Gottschalk sales campaigns, I mean. We're an automatic market—islands in a sea of hostility."

"Mm-hm." Flamen's eyes were on the screen as he brought up subject after subject for intensive analysis. "I have something on the Gottschalks, by the way. Here it is. I don't think that'll mean too much to you at the moment, though."

Diablo stared at the screen. "IBM $375,000, Honeywell $233,000, Elliot- No, it doesn't."

"They've been buying high-order data-processing equipment. Lots of it. That was yesterday's record of bills met."

"One
day's
record?" Diablo said incredulously.

"It says here. Care to—ah—suggest an explanation?"

Diablo's beard-clawing evolved into a series of tugs that threatened to haul out the roots. "Hmm! I never paid much attention to the Gottschalks, I'm afraid. Bad policy in a place like Blackbury to risk offending people who prop us up the way they do. But I thought they used one of the Iron Mountain banks."

"They do." Flamen hesitated. Then, at long last conceding that he had overnight been frightened of this encounter with a man whose reputation exceeded his own in spite of all the drawbacks—lack of funds, lack of resources, lack of made-to-order support from wealthy blanks at the top of the planetary totem-pole—he gave way to the impulse to impress him again with casual inside knowledge. "But apparently one of the security codes is up for sale with a price not much over a million. If they're at that stage, they're obviously ready to pull out of Iron Mountain altogether, aren't they?"

"In favor of their own private equipment?"

"Seems likely, I'd say."

"Maybe they know something," Diablo said after a moment for thought. "Did you check the current list of Iron Mountain clients to see if there's someone on it who's on the Gottschalk blacklist?"

"Ah . . ." Flamen bit his lip. "Damn it, I didn't think of that. Thank you. I'll see if anything comes of it, but it may take me a while to get hold of the client list." He tapped his keys again, on the adjacent board this time, thinking about the idea of the whole of Iron Mountain being blown up, say by a smuggled nuke. That would wreck the organization of at least a thousand major corporations.

And it was a possibility he certainly should have considered.

"Now!" he resumed. "We have some tape already from a special item, so we can afford to pick and choose today. We'll start, I think, with a subject of personal interest to yourself. What's Herman Uys doing in Black-bury and how did he con Mayor Black into firing his key vu-man?"

"Now just a—!" Diablo tensed instantly; just as quickly he canceled the reaction under Flamen's level gaze.

"You
approve
of a South African blank being allowed to sabotage the American knee community's propaganda channels?" Flamen said silkily.

"I—ah . . ." Diablo drew a deep breath and finally contrived a headshake.

"Very well then. Let's find out what stock we have available for Uys. I don't have to ask about Mayor Black; he's vain, and we have tape on him we could lasso the moon with." Flamen moved to a computer on the wall at right angles to the first one.

"More or less what I thought," he muttered when the data were screened in response to his question. "Practically nothing! Black-and-white 2-D material and that's it Well, we can make do with that. This is a recent one, comparatively speaking." The screen blurred, cleared, showed Uys coming down the steps from a plane door, presumably at home in South Africa, being greeted by his family and gesturing away a group of reporters.

"Let's have color . . . holographic depth . . . yes, that's better . . . good ... we can abstract from that and blend it with Mayor Black and let's see now . . . American location and b.g., better have some macoots . . . Ah, that's not bad for a start, is it?"

This was the part of his job which was genuinely creative, and he always enjoyed it very much: the adaptation of the most unpromising raw materials to generate a full-color, three-dimensional construct so convincing that only a person who had actually been on the scene of the event could point to inaccuracies.

"Christ, it's like magic," Diablo muttered, making no attempt to appear blase. The screened image had evolved through a period of chaotic confusion into a fixed picture of Uys at a laboratory bench—unquestionably in America, not Africa, though it was the total impression and not any specific detail which made that plain—turning to speak to Mayor Black as the latter walked in accompanied by a pair of armed macoots.

"Nothing magical about it," Flamen said offhandedly. "I just had the right data to draw on—typical genetic lab design, the proper computer printouts, the proper material in jars and dishes lying around, that kind of thing. The scenes are automatically weighted for weather conditions, clothing, angle of sunlight, and so on, and all we have to do now is add the sound." He struck codes on the keyboard. "Voices—we're bound to have something on tape, I guess, even for Uys, and even if we haven't the machines will fake a South African accent. Characteristic phrase-weighting—let's spice it with a few choice Afrikaner slogans .. . And here we go."

The fixed image moved. Voices emerged from a concealed speaker. Mayor Black said, "An' how you gettin' on with cleanin' house for us?"

Uys flinched, colored a little, controlled himself and answered in a dead voice that no one could have failed to assign to an Afrikaner, "If you mean how is the campaign developing to purify the melanist heredity of this city, I have located several impure lines which need to be discontinued. In particular there's a mongrel called Pedro Diablo who—"

Flamen flicked a control and the sound faded, though the images continued. "How does that strike you?" he inquired.

Diablo passed his hand over his forehead, looking dazed. "It's fantastic," he admitted. "The detail, I mean. Like Uys's reaction to the suggestion that he'd been hired like a Bantu houseboy, to clean house for a knee-blank . . . it's in character, damn it! Christ, if I'd been allowed this kind of equipment instead of studio sets and actors—!"

"Allowed?"

"I mean if the budget had run to it." Diablo overcame his excitement with an effort. "So what sort of answer are you going to propose for the question you started with—why is Uys in Blackbury?"

Flamen turned back to the keyboard he had used first. "That's still being comped," he said when the screen lit. "The little arrow—see it?—indicates the rating is still going up as fresh data are assessed. I'll leave that to cook for a moment and get the special item out of the way. That's some tape I made yesterday at the Ginsberg Hospital; there was a pythoness performing and I recorded her trance. It'll make a nice ground-softener for something which may eventually turn out to be rather big."

"One of the items you screened earlier?" Diablo inquired.

"No, something new which is only at the tentative stage. We have this offer of free Federal computer time, as you know, and one of the things I want to do with it is have . . . Well, have someone padded—it doesn't matter who." Flamen had almost forgotten that Prior was in the room; he gave him an uneasy glance.

"You see, I suspect that the treatment patients in the Ginsberg are getting may sometimes make them worse instead of better, but the director is Elias Mogshack, and he's got such a planetary reputation I'd need absolutely unquestionable authority to back a challenge to him. Let's just ask what would happen if my suspicions were well-founded, though." He stretched one arm out and struck a code again. The figure which appeared on the screen provoked an exclamation of approval.

"Ninety-plus! I can't recall when I last had such a high reading!"

"In favor of what?" Diablo asked.

"Of his being tossed on the garbage pile. In which case I literally don't dare not soften the ground—let's allot that pythoness's trance the most we can give a single subject according to our contract with Holocosmic. That's four minutes. There! Are we ready for anything else yet? Still not? You picked a good day, Diablo —we seem to have tapped a gang of very deep subjects. Never mind, there's one other point I'd like comped before I start compiling the tape for the show and we still have about ninety minutes in hand. Let's see what our chances are of curing the sabotage trouble I told you about, given unlimited free Federal computer time. Of course, faced with that Holocosmic is bound to cave in right away, but I believe in doublechecking."

He leaned over the board and carefully composed the question. At his shoulder, watching every move, Diablo said, "This sabotage thing—have your employers given way to pressure from someone you offended?"

"I wish people did get sufficiently offended to react like that," Flamen muttered. "But it's been two years since an advertiser tried to have me taken off the beams because I said something he didn't like. Out here people just don't seem to care very much any more. Most likely, Holocosmic themselves want to move me over for another all-advertising slot. .."

The words died. On the screen, in response to his coded inquiry, there was a single large digit: an incontrovertible, inexplicable, incomprehensible zero.

FIFTY-NINE REPRINTED FROM THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN OF 2ND MARCH 1968

US looks to a long, violent summer

From Richard Scott, Washington

It is generally accepted as inevitable that the racial riots in American cities this summer will exceed in violence and number even those of last year.

And because their causes, as analysed in the National Advisory Committee's report, are so basic, so deep-rooted, so much a product of the pattern of American life, they will be eradicated only after a major national effort and over a long period of time.

Meanwhile the national Government, the State and city police forces, and the ordinary citizens, both black and white, are already preparing themselves for what may well be the most riotous summer in the nation's history.

Forces standing by

Although Federal troops have been used to suppress civil riots only twice since 1923, a force of 15,000 men is reported to have been earmarked by the Pentagon for such use should State and city forces prove inadequate. They have been formed into seven task forces and housed near the cities most likely to experience major rioting. The Government has also been stockpiling anti-riot equipment in key sites.

But riot control devolves in all but the last resort on city or State law enforcement officers. And throughout the country there are reports of considerable efforts to increase and modernise their equipment for riot control.

In some cities the police are being issued with a controversial new high-powered rifle, with ammunition with some of the characteristics of the dum-dum bullet. Others are acquiring armed helicopters or armoured cars which can fire either tear gas or machine-gun bullets ...

Volunteer deputies

Detailed planning is already being undertaken by city authorities. In some cities the police are reported to be improving their intelligence machinery so that they may obtain earlier and more accurate information of impending riots. In one Chicago county, the sheriff is trying to organise a force of a thousand volunteer deputies who would provide their own arms and receive 40 to 60 hours of special riot-control training. This seems to be approaching perilously close to the groups of vigilantes of past ill fame.

On the other side of the coin are the private preparations of American citizens for the long, hot summer ahead. Both whites and Negroes are arming themselves. There have been recent reports of a steep rise in the purchases of firearms—and it is a fairly rare American family which has no pistol or shotgun in the house. Housewives are reported to be attending police courses of instruction in the firing of revolvers.

SIXTY
ASSUMPTION CONCERNING THE FOREGOING MADE FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS STORY

It was done but it didn't work.