Alternating Currents (17 page)

Groden swung his feet down, sat up. ‘Who’s a hero? I just didn’t want to trade what I have now for what I used to have, that’s all.’

‘Meaning what?’ asked Broderick.

‘It’s more than seeing. Want to know how many Sol-type systems there are within five thousand light-years of here ? I can tell you. Want to know what the Universe looks like in hyperspace ? I can tell you that, too, only I can’t describe it. It makes
sense,
captain! The whole thing is as orderly and chart-able as our own space. And I could see it, all of it. And you offer me
eyes!’

‘But why don’t I see it, Groden?’ the captain puzzledly wanted to know. ‘Surely we’ve all closed our eyes for a moment in hyperspace - why didn’t we see it then ?’

‘Sleep and death are alike, but they’re not the same. Neither is closing your eyes and being blind. I’m blind in normal space; you’re blind in hyperspace - that isn’t much of an answer, but the medics will work it out.’

The surgeon looked piercingly at Groden’s bandaged face. ‘Then the odds are that
any
blind person can see in hyperspace?’

‘I think so,’ Groden agreed. ‘In fact, I’m practically certain.’

‘Then,’ said the captain, ‘it’s our duty to return to Earth and let them know. They can equip each mapmaking ship with a blind person.’

Groden gave his head a shake. ‘Plenty of time for that, Skipper. We have a quadrant of hyperspace to chart. With me on hand to “see” during the jumps, we’ll finish up fast. Then we can go back and tell them. But I think we should get on with the job we’ve been assigned.’

‘Right,’ said the captain after a pause. ‘We’ll bring the ship to stand-by for takeoff.’

~ * ~

The rockets thundered and
Terra II
split the atmosphere on its way to deeper space.

As soon as they were clear, the ship readied for the jump and the captain said, ‘Good luck, Groden. It’s all yours - give us our course.’

Groden felt the quiver of the generators, far below, and at once the Universe lay spread before him.

No more darkness, no blind fumblings. An end to basket-weaving and the dreary time-passing fingering of Braille for Earth’s incurable blind. They would be the eyes of the proud new hyperspace fleet that was yet to come!

‘It’s all yours, Groden,’ the captain repeated.

Groden cleared his throat, issued his course vectors.

Captain, you don’t know how right you are, he thought. Only it won’t be just mine - it’ll be the blind leading the sighted!

Now there, he chuckled, was a switch. But he’d have to wait until he was back on Earth, among the blind, for it to be appreciated.

<>

~ * ~

Rafferty’s Reasons

It was the year of the Projects, and nearly Election time.
Vote for Mudgins!
screamed the posters.
He put us back to work!

Even Rafferty was back at work, taken off the technological dole, and he sat there in his boss’s office, looking at him and hating him. Fat old John Girty, his boss. A Mudgins man from the old Fifth Precinct days, a man with the lowest phase number in the state.

‘Riffraff!’ Girty stormed. ‘A good job is wasted on a bum like you. You wish you were back on relief?’

Rafferty only nodded, his face full of misery, his heart black murder.

‘Mark my words, you’ll wreck the whole project!’ Girty said ominously. ‘And when the Projects go, the Machine will come back.’

Rafferty nodded again. He wasn’t listening, although he appeared to be. He was watching his hand on the desk. The hand was moving, crawling slowly over the chipped plastic top like a thick-legged spider. It was crawling towards a letter opener.

‘Take warning, Rafferty,’ said Girty. ‘You’re a troublemaker. Thank heaven I’ve got a few loyal workers in the Project, to tell me about skunks like you! Don’t let me hear about any complaints from you again. If you don’t like your job, you can quit.’ Of course, he couldn’t, and Girty knew it. But it was a way to end the conversation, and he turned and stalked out of the room.

Rafferty sat there, watching his hand, but it was only a hand again. His hand, weak and helpless like himself; and the letter opener was only a letter opener. He got up after a while and leaned absently against the hooded computer that could have unemployed them all - if it weren’t for Mudgins and his New Way. You couldn’t say he was thinking, exactly, although there was a lot to think about in the silent computer under its sealed plastic cover. But he couldn’t be doing that.

Not under the New Way.

It was half an hour before Rafferty opened his books again, before he dipped his pens in the red ink and the black ink and wrote down the figures. If Rafferty was capable of pride, he was proud of the way he kept the Project’s books. Machines had taught him how to keep books, and even Mudgins granted that machines were useful for that sort of thing. The dark fever inside him slowly receded, and the artist that lived in Rafferty, the creator inside of every man, admired the cool neat numbers that he made.

He lived with the cool numbers all the long afternoon.
(Vote for Mudgins and the Ten-Hour Day!
the slogans said.) And they calmed him. But when the end of the day came and fat John Girty came out of his office and took down his black hat and walked out, without a smile, without a word -

Then it was that the black heat inside Rafferty surged up again, and the smoke of it bit his nostrils. Not for ten minutes did he get up to leave himself, not until all the others had gone and no one was there to see him tremble as he walked out with a look of utter desperation in his eyes.

~ * ~

Rafferty walked past the lines of tables, walked up the slide-way, and to the far corner of the balcony before he put down his tray. All by himself he sat there, as far as he could get from the other people who were eating their Evening Issue meal. He sat down and ate what was before him, not caring what it was or how it tasted, for everything tasted alike to Rafferty. All bitter with the bitterness that is the taste of hatred.

‘I hate him,’ Rafferty said woodenly. ‘I would like very much to kill him. I think it would be nice to kill him. Fat Girty, some day I will kill you.’

Rafferty talked to himself, hardly making a sound, never moving his lips. It wasn’t thinking out loud, because it wasn’t thinking, only talking, and it was not out loud. Wherever he was, Rafferty talked to himself. No one heard him, no one was meant to hear him.

‘I hate your lousy guts,’ Rafferty would say, and the man beside him would smile and bob his head and never know that Rafferty had said anything at all.

He would talk to people who weren’t there. When he first went on the Projects, Rafferty thought that some day he would say those things to people. Now he knew that he would never say them to anyone but himself.

‘You are a cow,’ Rafferty said. He was talking to Girty, who wasn’t anywhere near the New Way Caféteria where the Projects personnel ate. ‘You say I’m a trouble-maker, when I only want them to leave me alone. You think I make mistakes with the numbers in the books. I don’t. I never make mistakes when I write down numbers and add them. But you think I do.’

If Girty had been there, he would have denied it - because how could Rafferty make mistakes after the machines had taught him? Girty wasn’t there, and the rest of the people around Rafferty in the Caféteria went on eating and talking and reading, except for a few as silent and solitary as Rafferty himself. None of them heard him.

Rafferty picked up the big dish and put it away from him, picked up a smaller dish and put it down in front of him, touched a fork to the soggy but vitamin-rich and expertly synthesized pie.

‘Your secretary,’ said Rafferty in his silent voice, ‘she makes mistakes, though. Perhaps I should kill her too, cow.’

Rafferty finished the pie and went down the stairs.

‘You blame me for everything,’ Rafferty said, pushing silently through the crowd at the coffee-beverage urn. He put a Project slug in the slot and held the lever down while his cup filled with three streams of fluid, one black, one white, one colourless. ‘You don’t treat me right, cow,’ he said, and turned away.

A man jostled him and scalding pain ran up Rafferty’s wrist as the hot drink slopped over.

Rafferty turned to him slowly. ‘You are a filthy pig,’ he said voicelessly, smiling.,’ Your mother walked the streets.’

The man muttered,’ Sorry,’ over his shoulder.

Rafferty sat down at another table with a party of three young Project girls who never looked at him, but talked loudly among themselves.

‘I’ll kill you, Girty,’ Rafferty said, as he stirred the coffee-beverage and drank it.

‘I’ll kill you, Girty,’ he said, and went home to his dormitory bed.

~ * ~

John Girty said peevishly: ‘I want you all to try to act like human beings this morning. We have an important visitor from Phase Four.’

The Project nodded respectfully and buckled down to work, and when the important visitor arrived and stood with Girty, looking over the busy room, not even Rafferty looked up.

But the visitor looked at Rafferty, and said something in an undertone to Girty. ‘Oh, well, of course,’ said Girty. ‘We get all kinds here. That one has a bad record. He was some kind of an artist, or picture painter, or something like that under the Old Way. They take a lot of work, those marginal ones, and, as you see, they’re likely to turn out sullen.’           

~ * ~

The visitor said something again and Girty laughed.
‘He
might not like it,’ he said with heavy, angry humour. ‘Heaven help us all if we ran this Project the way
he
likes. But come on into my private office. You’ll be interested in our overtime schedule -’

They were gone, and Girty was right, Rafferty did not resent the way they talked about him, no more than St Lawrence, roasting on his grid, would have resented a sneering word from his torturers. Rafferty hadn’t the scope left to resent small injuries.

The electronic call-me-up whispered on old Miss Sandburg’s desk, and she limped into Girty’s office, clutching her stenographer’s pad as though it might bite. She was a sour one. too, for all she was second in command of the Project office. She had been a wife and a mother once, and they said that she didn’t really
want
to work. But she worked, of course.

Rafferty sat hunched over his books, looking at John Girty’s door without turning his head. He saw old Ellen Sandburg go in, and saw her come out again ten minutes later, with the spider-web lines sharper around her eyes, and the white lips pressed hard together. ‘You are a slave,’ Rafferty said without a sound. ‘You let him bully you because you like to be a slave. But I don’t.’

But he was working with the cool numbers then, and he lost himself. The zeroes and fives and decimals moved in orderly progression, and there was no hate in them, nothing but chill straightness that never changed.

Only at three o’clock in the afternoon when he had to take the Saturday payroll into fat John Girty’s office to be checked and verified, did the coolness fall away and leave him burning. ‘I won’t kiss your foot,’ said Rafferty, and opened the door without knocking. ‘I’m as good as you are, cow,’ said Rafferty, and dumped the carton of pay envelopes silently on Girty’s desk.

But Girty hardly looked at him, only grunted with his fat, angry cow’s grunt and thumbed irritably through the envelopes. But when Rafferty went back to his desk the numbers would not go right. They were hot red and smouldering black, and they swirled and bloated before his stinging eyes. He sat there and watched them swirl and swell as fat as fat John Girty. He just sat there, Rafferty did, holding his pen over the ledger, moving his fingers as though he were writing, but never touching pen to paper until five o’clock, early Saturday quitting time.

Then fat John Girty came out of his office and dumped the pay envelopes on Rafferty’s desk again, and took his hat and left. The clerks and the girls put away their papers, and took their coats from where they had hidden them behind the sheeted bookkeeping machines and lined up before Rafferty’s desk to get their pay.

‘The Project pays you to work, not to collect money.’ That was what Girty said. ‘On the Project’s time you work. You get paid on your own time. You get off early on Saturdays anyhow.’

It wasn’t fair. But all Rafferty could do when Girty went out of the office was to stare after him for a second, with his own hot, black heart showing in his eyes, and try to rush through handing out the payroll.

‘You’re a coward, Girty,’ he said without a sound, and handed a fat yellow envelope of Project vouchers and Project slugs to Ellen Sandburg.

‘You know that I hate your guts, so you run away,’ he said. ‘But it won’t help you, cow. You can run away. But I can catch you.’

~ * ~

Fifteen minutes’ start John Girty had. No more. But it took Rafferty over an hour to make it up. An hour of looking in all the expensive, free-market restaurants where Girty might be, pressing his forehead against the glass like an urchin on Christmas Day, only with the blackness coming out of no urchin’s eyes.

The streets were packed, and crowds bumped against Rafferty, some careless and impolite, some doddering and apologetic, and once or twice a man as bleak and frozen as Rafferty himself.