The Shockwave Rider (13 page)

He formed a word silently and liked its taste.

Peace.

But—!

He sat up with a jerk. There was no peace—must be none—
could
be none! It was the wrong world for peace. At the G2S HQ someone from Tarnover must now be adding—correction, must already have added—two plus two. This person Sandy Locke “overlooked as kind of a national resource” might have been identified as the lost Nickie Haflinger!

He threw aside the blanket and stood up, belatedly realizing that Kate was nowhere to be seen and perhaps Bagheera had been left on guard and …

But his complicated thought dissolved under a wave of dizziness. Before he had taken as much as one pace away from the couch, he’d had to lean an outstretched hand against the wall.

Upon which came Kate’s voice from the kitchen.

“Good timing, Sandy. Or whatever your real name is. I just fixed some broth for you. Here.”

It approached him in a steaming cup, which he accepted carefully by the less-hot handle. But he didn’t look at it. He looked at her. She had changed into a blue and yellow summer shirt and knee-long cultoons also of yellow with the blue repeated in big Chinese ideograms across the seat. And he heard himself say, “What was that about my name?”

Thinking at the same time:
I was right. There is no room for peace in this modern world. It’s illusory. One minute passes, and it’s shattered.

“You were babbling in your sleep,” she said, sitting down on a patched old chair which he had expected her to throw out yet perversely had been retained. “Oh, please stop twitching your eyes like that! If you’re wondering what’s become of Bagheera, I took him downstairs; the girls said they’d look after him for a while. And if you’re trying to spot a way of escape, it’s too soon. Sit down and drink that broth.”

Of the alternatives open, the idea of obeying seemed the most constructive. The instant he raised the cup he realized he was ravenous. His blood-sugar level must be terribly debased. Also he was still cold. The warmth of the savory liquid was grateful to him.

At long last he was able to frame a one-word question.

“Babbling …?”

“I exaggerate. A lot of it made sense. That was why I told G2S you weren’t here.”

“What?
” He almost let go of the cup.

“Don’t tell me I did the wrong thing. Because I didn’t. Ina got them to call me when you didn’t show for your interview. I said no, of course I haven’t seen him. He doesn’t even like me, I told them. Ina would believe that. She’s never realized that men can like me, because I’m all the things she didn’t want her daughter to be, such as studious and intelligent and mainly plain. She never dug deeper into any man’s personality than the level she dealt with you on: looks good, sounds good, feels good and I can use him.” She gave a harsh laugh, not quite over the brink of bitterness.

He disregarded that comment. “What did I—uh—let slip?” he demanded. And trembled a little as he awaited the answer.

She hesitated. “First off … Well, I kind of got the impression you never overloaded before. Can that be true?”

He had been asked often by other people and had always declared, “No, I guess I’m one of the lucky ones.” And had believed his claim to be truthful. He had seen victims of overload; they hid away, they gibbered when you tried to talk to them, they screamed and struck out and smashed the furniture. These occasional bouts of shaking and cramp and cold, aborted in minutes with one tranquilizer, couldn’t be what you’d call overload, not really!

But now he had sensed such violence in his own body, he was aware that from outside his behavior must have paralleled that of a member of his Toledo congregation, and his former chief at the Utopia consultancy, and two of his colleagues at the three-vee college, and … Others. Countless others. Trapped in fight-or-flight mode when there was no way to attain either solution.

He sighed, setting aside his cup, and drove himself to utter an honest answer.

“Before, drugs have always straightened me in no time. Today—well, somehow I didn’t want to think of taking anything … if you see what I mean.”

“You never sweated it out before? Not even once? Small wonder this is such a bad attack.”

Nettled, he snapped back. “It happens to you all the time, hm? That’s why you’re so knowledgeable?”

She shook her head, expression neutral. “No, it never did happen to me. But I’ve never taken tranquilizers, either. If I feel like crying myself to sleep,. I do. Or if I feel like cutting classes because it’s such a beautiful day, I do that too. Ina overloaded when I was about five. That was when she and Dad split up. After that she started riding constant herd on my mental state as well as her own. But I got this association fixed in my mind between the pills she took and the way she acted when she broke down—which wasn’t pleasant—so I always used to pretend I’d swallowed what she gave me, then spit it out when I was alone. I got very good at hiding tablets and capsules under my tongue. And I guess it was the sensible thing to do. Most of my friends have folded up at least once, some of them two or three times beginning in grade school. And they all seem to be the ones who had—uh—special care taken of them by their folks. Care they’ll never recover from.”

Somehow a solitary fly had escaped the defenses of the kitchen. Sated, heavy on its wings, it came buzzing in search of a place to rest and digest. As though a saw blade’s teeth were adding an underscore to the words, he felt his next question stressed by the sound.

“Do you mean the sort of thing Anti-Trauma does?”

“The sort of thing parents hire Anti-Trauma to do to their helpless kids!” There was venom in her tone, the first strong feeling he had detected in her. “But they were far from the first. They’re the largest and best-advertised, but they weren’t the pioneers. Ina and I were having a fight last year, and she said she wished she’d given me that type of treatment. Once upon a time I quite liked my mother. Now I’m not so sure.”

He said with weariness born of his recent tormented self-reappraisal, “I guess they think they’re doing the right and proper thing. They want their kids to be able to cope, and it’s claimed to be a way of adjusting people to the modern world.”

“That,” Kate said, “is Sandy Locke talking. Whoever you are, I now know for sure that you’re not him. He’s a role you’ve put on. In your heart you know what Anti-Trauma does is monstrous … don’t you?”

He hesitated only fractionally before nodding. “Yes. Beyond any hope of argument, it’s evil.”

“Thank you for leveling with me at last. I was sure nobody who’s been through what you have could feel otherwise.”

“What am I supposed to have been through?”

“Well, in your sleep you moaned about Tarnover, and since everybody knows what Tarnover is like—”

He jerked as though he had been kicked. “Wait, wait! That can’t be true! Most people don’t know Tarnover exists!”

She shrugged. “Oh, you know what I mean. I’ve met several of their so-called graduates. People who could have been individuals but instead have been standardized—filed down—straitjacketed!”

“But that’s incredible!”

It was her turn to be confused and startled. “What?”

“That you’ve met all these people from Tarnover.”

“No, it’s not. UMKC is crawling with them. Turn any wet stone. Oh, I exaggerate, but there are five or six.”

The sensations he had been victim of when he arrived threatened to return. His mouth dried completely, as though it had been swabbed with cottonwool; his heart pounded; he instantly wanted to find a bathroom. But he fought back with all the resources at his command. Steadying his voice was as exhausting as climbing a mountain.

“So where are they in hiding?”

“Nowhere. Stop by the Behavioral Sciences Lab and—Say, Sandy!” She rose anxiously to her feet. “You’d better he down again and talk about this later. Obviously it hasn’t penetrated that you’re suffering from shock, just as surely as if you’d walked away from a veetol crash.”

“I do know!” he barked. “But there was someone from Tarnover sitting in with the G2S selection board, and if they think to make a physical check of this place … They thought of calling you up, didn’t they?”

She bit her lip, eyes scanning his face in search of clues that were not to be found.

“Why are you so afraid?” she ventured. “What did they do to you?”

“It’s not so much what they did. It’s what they will do if they catch me.”

“Because of something you did to them? What?”

“Quit cold after they’d spent thirty million on trying to turn me into the sort of shivver you were just describing.”

During the next few seconds he was asking himself how he could ever have been so stupid as to say that. And with surprise so terrific it was almost worse than what had gone before he then discovered he hadn’t been stupid after all.

For she turned and walked to the window to peer out at the street between the not-completely-closed curtains. She said, “Nobody in sight who
looks
suspicious. What’s the first thing they’ll do if they figure out who you are—deevee your code? I mean the one you’ve been using at G2S.”

“I let that out too?” he said in renewed horror.

“You let a lot out. Must have been stacking up in your head for years. Well?”

“Uh—yes, I guess so.”

She checked her watch and compared it with an old-fashioned digital clock that was among the few ornaments she had not disposed of. “There’s a flight to Los Angeles in ninety minutes. I’ve used it now and then; it’s one that you can get on without booking. By tonight we could be at—”

He put his hands to his head, giddy again. “You’re going too fast for me.”

“Fast it’s got to be. What can you do apart from being a systems rash? Everything?”

“I …” He took an enormous grip on himself. “Yes, or damn nearly.”

“Fine. So come on.”

He remained irresolute. “Kate, surely you’re not going to—”

“Forget about school next year, abandon friends and home and mother, and Bagheera?” Her tone was scathing. “Shit, no. But how are you going to make out if you don’t have a usable code to prop you up while you’re building another they don’t know about? I guess that must be how you work the trick, hm?”

“Uh—yes, more or less.”

“So move, will you? My code is in good standing, and the girls downstairs will mind Bagheera for a week as willingly as for an evening, and apart from that all I have to do is leave a note for Ina saying I’ve gone to stay with friends.” She seized the nearest phone and began to compose the code for her mother’s mail-store reel.

“But I can’t possibly ask you to—”

“You’re not asking, I’m offering. You damn well better grab the chance. Because if you don’t you’ll be as good as dead, won’t you?” She waved him silent and spoke the necessary words to mislead Ina.

When she had finished he said, “Not as good as. Worse than.” And followed her out the door.

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE HERD

At Tarnover they explained it all so reasonably!

Of course everybody had to be given a personal code! How else could the government do right by its citizens, keep track of the desires, tastes, preferences, purchases, commitments and above all location of a continentful of mobile, free individuals?

Granted, there was an alternative approach. But would you want to see it adopted here? Would you like to find your range of choice restricted to the point where the population became predictable in its collective behavior?

So don’t dismiss the computer as a new type of fetters. Think of it rationally, as the most liberating device ever invented, the only tool capable of serving the multifarious needs of modern man.

Think of it, for a change, as
him.
For example, think of the friendly mailman who makes certain your letters reach you no matter how frequently you move or over what vast distances. Think of the loyal secretary who always pays your bills when they come due, regardless of what distractions may be on your mind. Think of the family doctor who’s on hand at the hospital when you fall sick, with your entire medical history in focus to guide the unknown specialist. Or if you want to be less personal and more social, think of computers as the cure for the monotony of primitive mass-production methods. As long ago as the sixties of last century it became economic to turn out a hundred items in succession from an assembly line, of which each differed subtly from the others. It cost the salary of an extra programer and—naturally—a computer to handle the task … but everybody was using computers anyhow, and their capacity was so colossal the additional data didn’t signify.

(When he pondered the subject, he always found himself flitting back and forth between present and past tense; there was that sensitive a balance between what had been expected, indeed hoped for, and what had eventuated. It seemed that some of the crucial decisions were still being made although generations had elapsed since they were formulated.)

The movement pattern of late twentieth-century America was already the greatest population flow in history. More people moved annually at vacation time than all the armies led by all the world’s great conquerors put together, plus the refugees they drove from home. What a relief, then, to do no more than punch your code into a public terminal—or, since 2005, into the nearest veephone, which likely was in the room where you were sitting—and explain
once
that because you’d be in Rome the next two weeks, or surfing at Bondi, or whatever, your house should be watched by the police more keenly than usual, and your mail should be held for so many days unless marked “urgent,” in which case it should be redirected to so-and-so, and the garbage truck needn’t come by on its next weekly round, and—and so forth. The muscles of the nation could be felt flexing with joyous new freedom.