The Missing Man (v4.1) (2 page)

“Chief, I’m tired of taking a
vacation.”

“This morning Ahmed reported you walked
like a cripple. How late did you work last night?”

“Three-thirty.

“Find any clues to Carl Hodges?”

“Not exactly.” George looked at the
far, high planes and helicopters buzzing through the blue sky. He did not feel
like discussing the failure of last night.

“Where are you now?”

“In a painter’s crow’s nest on George
Washington Bridge.”

“Climbing George Washington Bridge is your
idea of a rest’?”

“It’s away from people. I like
climbing.”

“Okay, your choice. You are near
Presbyterian Medical Center. Report to the Rescue Squad station there and fill
out some reports on what you’ve been doing all week. Some of the things you’ve
been doing, we would probably like to pay you-for. The information girl there
will help you fill out the forms. You’ll like her, George. She doesn’t mind
paper work. Let her help you.”

Ahmed Kosavakats, George’s superior and
childhood friend, was ready to admit defeat. He had reasoned in trying to find
Carl Hodges and reasoned well.

Any commune which had Carl Hodges could ask him
how to bias the city services computer in their favor. Ahmed had been checking
the routine deliveries of repairs and improvements and rebuilding and projects
to each commune, by running a comparison check against the normal deliveries
through the statistics computer. Negative. There was no sign of a brilliant
manipulator changing the city services.

Ahmed stood up and stretched long arms,
thinking. Whoever had Carl Hodges was not using him. If Ahmed could rescue Carl
Hodges and become his friend, he would not miss the opportunity to use him. If
a man wanted to influence the future of his city …

If he could not use his own logic to find Carl
Hodges, then the kidnappers were not thinking logically, and could not be
predicted by logic. If they were thinking emotionally, then George Sanford
could probably tune to them and locate them. But Ahmed would have to tell him
what kind of people to tune to, and how they felt.

George Sanford’s intuition was a reliable
talent. Once, when George, was a fattish, obliging kid in Ahmed’s gang, Ahmed
had added up how often George’s simple remarks and guesses had turned out
right. George had guessed right every time. But George didn’t think. Half
envious, Ahmed had told the others that George’s head was like a radio; you
could tune his brain to any station and get the news and weather and the right
time in Paris, San Francisco and Hong Kong, but a radio isn’t going to add
anything up, not even two plus two; it works because it’s empty.

George Sanford had grown up to a big silent cat
of a man. Extremely strong, not caring apparently whether he ate, drank or
slept, a rather blank expression, but he still tuned in on people. His goals
were the simple ones of being with friends, helping out and being welcome, and
he had friends everywhere.

Behind the apparent low IQ there were untapped
abilities that could only be brought into action by demanding a lot of George
when you asked him to help. It was not certain yet how much George could do.
George did not know. He probably did not even think about it. He had no demands
on himself.

The thing to do, Ahmed thought, was to keep the
pressure on George. Keep him working.

Ahmed found George filling out reports by
dictating them to a pretty girl. The pretty office worker had her hands poised
over the typewriter and was listening to George with an expression of surprise
and doubt. George, with his brow knotted, was plodding through a narrative of
something he had done the day before. The girl rolled the report sheet through
the typewriter opposite a different blank and asked a question timidly; a tape
recorder showed its red light, recording the questions and answers. George
hesitated, looking at the ceiling desperately for inspiration, his brow more
knotted than before.

George always had trouble understanding the
reasoning behind red tape. He did not know why certain answers were wanted.
They both looked up with relief when Ahmed interrupted by turning off the tape
recorder.

“They told me to team up with you this
afternoon,” Ahmed said to George. “They give this job priority over
reports or any other job. Are you feeling okay now?”

“Sure, Ahmed,” George said, slightly
surprised.

“Let’s go outside and see if we can tune to
the subject. Okay?”

“Okay.” George got up, moving easily.
A bruise showed at his hairline on the side of his head, almost hidden by hair.
On George’s right arm were two blue bruises, and below his slacks on the right
ankle was a line of red dents with bruises. A left-handed assailant with a
club, or a right-handed assailant with a chain, swinging it left to right,
would bruise a man on one side like that.

Walking out of the Rescue Squad office, Ahmed
indicated with a gesture the bruise on George’s arm.

“May I ask?”

“No,” George replied and closed his
mouth tightly, staring straight ahead as they went through the double doors.

George didn’t want to talk about it, Ahmed
thought, because he had lost that fight. That meant he had been outnumbered.
But he was not dead or seriously hurt. The assailants then were not killers, or
he had escaped them. Probably a trespassing problem. Probably George had
trespassed onto some group’s territory or Kingdom last night while searching
for Carl Hodges by himself. Ahmed put the thought aside. They stopped on a walk
among the bushes and trees and looked up at the towering buildings of
Presbyterian Medical Center, like giant walls reaching to the sky. Helicopter
ambulances buzzed around landing steps like flies.

“Let’s not waste time, George, let’s get
you tuned into Carl Hodges,” Ahmed said, pilling out a notebook and pen.
“Do you have a picture of Hodges with you?”

“No.” The big young man looked uneasy.
“You going to do it that same way, Ahmed? If he’s sick, will I get
sick?”

“I’ve got a picture here.” Ahmed
reached for a folder in his pocket and passed a photo to George.

The ground jolted in a sort of thud that struck
upward against their feet.

Nine miles or more away, and two minutes
earlier, Brooklyn Dome, the undersea suburb, suddenly lost its dome. The heavy
ocean descended upon it, and air carrying a torrent of debris that had been
houses and people blurted upward through an air shaft. A fountain of wreckage
flung upward into the sky, falling in a circular rain of shattered parts to
float upon the sea.

All morning a mass wish to escape from the
enclosure of walls had driven George happily into the heights and winds and
free sky. Now that note in the blend of the mood of the city suddenly changed
and worsened to panic, helplessness, defeat and pain, and then an end. The
event telescoped in speed, compressed into a blow of darkness. The broadcast of
many thousand minds ended and their background hum in the vibes of the city
diminished.

Reaching out with his mind for information,
George encountered the memory of that impact. It went by like the thunder wave
of breaking the sound barrier, like a wave of black fog. He shut his eyes to
tune in, and found nothing, except that the world had lightened. A burden of
fear had been suddenly erased.

George opened his eyes and took a deep breath.
“Something big,” he said. “Something …”

Ahmed was watching the sweep-second hand on his
watch. “Fifty-five hundred feet, one mile,” he muttered.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s an explosion somewhere. I’m counting
the distance. Sound arrives first through the ground, second through the air.
I’m waiting for the sound. I’ll get the distance by the time lag.”

At thirty seconds the sound of the death of an
underseas city reached them, a strange sort of grinding roar, muffled, low and
distant.

George shut his eyes again, and felt the world
change around him to another place.

“Got something, George?” Ahmed asked
alertly. “That was about seven miles.”

“Someone knows what happened. I’m picking
him up. Brooklyn Dome just collapsed.”

“Twelve thousand inhabitants,” Ahmed
said, dialing his wrist radio grimly, his earphone plugged into his ear.
“No one answering at headquarters, just busy signals.”

George shut his eyes again, exploring the other
place. “Someone’s having a nightmare,” he said. “He can’t wake
up.”

“Don’t flip out, George, keep in touch with
facts. A lot of people just died, is all. Keep a grip on that. I’m trying to
get our orders.”

George stood with his eyes shut, exploring the
sensation inside his head. Somewhere a man was trapped in a nightmare, half
asleep in a dark prison or closet. It was some kind of delirium.

The real world was a cruel place that bright
day, but the black and coiling fragments of that man’s world were worse. There
was something important about the man’s thoughts. He had felt the explosion
thud at a distance, as they had, and he had known what it meant. He had
expected it.

“Can’t locate where he is,” George
said, opening his eyes and regaining his grip on the bright sunshine world
around him.

Ahmed squinted and tilted his head, listening to
the obscure and rapid voices on the earplugs of his radio.

“Never mind about that case, George. That’s
Carl Hodges probably. He’ll keep. Headquarters is broadcasting general orders
for the emergency. Repair and services inspection people are ordered to make
quick inspections at all danger points in the automatic services, looking for
malfunction and sabotage. Repair and inspection teams are ordered into Jersey
Dome, to check out every part of it and make sure it is not gimmicked to blow
the way Brooklyn Dome went. They are instructed to describe it as a routine
safety check.”

“What do we do? What about us?”

“Wait, I’m listening. They mentioned us by
name. We go to Jersey underseas and try to locate and stop a sabotage agent who
might have sabotaged Brooklyn Dome and might be preparing to use the same
method on Jersey Dome.”

“What method?”

“They don’t know. They don’t even know if
there is a saboteur. They’re sending us to make sure.”

“‘If there is a saboteur, he’s probably
working on it right now.” George walked, and then ran for the subway steps
down into the underground moving chair belts. Ahmed followed and they caught a
brace of abandoned chairs just as they slowed and accelerated them again out
into the fast lanes.

“Dirty dogs! Let me out of here. I’ll kill
you.” Furiously Carl Hodges kicked and thrashed and bit at restraining
straps, remembering at last, believing his conclusions about the group of
teeners that had him prisoner. “You decerebrate lizards. Let me out of
here, you fools! You killed Brooklyn Dome. I’ve got to get back to work and
level off the exchanges before something else happens. Let me out of
here!”

They backed off, their smiles fading at the
barrage of his anger. The tallest one answered with a trace of resentment.
“Don’t get upset, Pops. They weren’t real people, just technocrats and
objectivists and fascists and like that.”

“They were techs. This city needs techs.
People with tech jobs run the city, remember?”

The tall one leaned over him, glowering. “I
remember what my tapes tell me. The objectivists passed the law that the
compulsory sterility of women can’t be reversed without paying five hundred
dollars for the operation. That means if I ever want to get married I’ll have
to save five hundred dollars for my woman to have a kid. They’re trying to wipe
us all out. Nobody has that kind of money but techs. In the next generation
we’ll all be gone. We’re just getting back at them, wiping them out.”

“But faster,” chuckled a small kid.
“Like boon!”

“The objectivists got that law through
legally. Why don’t your people pull enough votes to get it wiped?” Carl
Hodges demanded.

“They ship us out to the boondocks. We
can’t vote. You’re talking like an objectivist. Maybe you believe everyone
without money should be wiped?”

“I believe anyone without brains should be
wiped!” Carl Hodges snarled suddenly. “Your mothers wouldn’t have
paid ten cents to have you. Too bad the law wasn’t passed sooner.”

“Genocide.” The tall one reached over
and hit him across the mouth. “We were nice to you. To you!” He
turned and spat in revulsion.

Others surged forward.

“Steady.” The leader spread arms and
leaned back against the pressure. He addressed Carl. “We don’t want to
hurt you. You tell us things, you’re a good teacher. We’ll let you have what
you want. Money for rights. Lie there until you have enough money to buy your
way out. It will cost you five dollars to get out. That’s cheaper than five
hundred dollars to be born. That’s a bargain.”

The kids crowding behind him laughed, and
laughed again, understanding the idea slowly. After a time of clumsy humor they
untied him and went off, leaving him locked in a narrow windowless bedroom.