Manalone (22 page)

There followed a period of hiatus; with nobody sure how the situation was going to be resolved. Then within an hour there came a rumour that the government had intervened and that the raft had been granted a reprieve. This was no consolation for the former occupants of the fifth of the raft which had been destroyed, but it was still a notable victory. At least it meant that the police cordon was withdrawn, and that people could again legally enter and leave the raft. Manalone felt that he was at last free to continue his search for Kitten, though he had not the faintest idea of where to begin.

Seeing the crowds returning to the raft, Manalone joined them. He went back to the area of Kitten’s shack to look for her former neighbours. He found some. Fortunately the man he first approached had been one of his companions during the fight along the seafront. The fellow’s recognition was immediate. He drew Manalone into his hut with enthusiasm, and produced ample food when Manalone asked for something to eat.

The man, whose name was Louis Stein, conferred with his family.

‘Kitten had visitors during the night. Police we think. Men came and moved her things out and threw them into the sea.’

‘Into the sea?’

‘Everything. She
took nothing as far as we know. Only the children. She left shortly before you came along.’

‘Don’t you have any idea where she went?’

‘No, but my wife thinks she was glad to go. She seemed to be laughing a lot. I don’t think she was under arrest, although she went with the police. Somebody said she’d found a rich lover, but it may be only talk.’

‘Do you know of anyone who might know where she is?’

‘If there is anyone, we’ll find them, Manalone. There’s a lot of people on the raft owe you a great deal for this morning’s work. You wait here, and I’ll ask around.’

Stein thrust more food into Manalone’s hands, and went out, calling for his family to assist. In the next ten minutes no less than seven people came to the hut to congratulate Manalone on his performance against the police. Many of the fires he had started still burned on the landward side of the front. To the inhabitants of the raft, this was tangible evidence of revenge for their own losses. For a brief moment the introverted Manalone had become a local hero.

Finally Louis came back.

‘We found where Kitten went. She was taken to a hotel on the front, fortunately not one of those you burned today. She may still be there. Nobody seems to have seen her since. I could send one of the boys to check.’

‘Thanks!’ said Manalone. ‘But better they don’t get involved. It’d be safer if nobody appeared too interested.’

‘Sure! Have it your way.’ Louis’s admiration was evident. This stranger, whose intervention had effectively routed the police, now seemed to be continuing an equally dangerous game. Manalone, remembering his sorry condition when he came to the raft during the night, felt vaguely fraudulent. Nevertheless, it did his ego good to have somebody think, if only for a moment, that he was a man of action.

He said good-bye to several of his comrades of the morning’s fray who had gathered, and followed a young boy who had been given the task of guiding him to the hotel where Kitten was thought to be staying. Despite the disruptions of the day, the part of the raft they had to cross was swiftly returning to normal. Manalone was glad to see that Kitten’s shack had already been taken over by some of the refugees whose own homes had been burnt by the firing of the far end of the raft. He wondered what they would make of the book, then realized that he had been carefully and deliberately brought to the point where understanding flowed from its pages. To most others, it would just be an item of idle curiosity.

As he
followed the lad towards the mainland, people were busy on the random walkways re-sorting the possessions they had abandoned in the morning, and trying to reestablish their sorry homes. Manalone, who carried in his head the knowledge of an even greater crime against them, felt both sorry and, in a way, responsible. He would have found it difficult to explain the paternal instinct which he felt, but nevertheless the feeling persisted all the way to the water’s edge.

Along the seafront, many of the buildings were still burning. The whole scene was cluttered with fire appliances, hoses, fire-crews, and flossy heaps of extinguisher foam stained black with the residues of charcoal and soot. The smell of burning was salty and offensive, and where the fires had been brought under control, various agencies and assessors were already at work trying to estimate the damage and the extent of the repairs which would be necessary. Manalone’s guide prudently took a route which led around the more immediate damage and re-joined the seafront at a point where the effect of the fight had been only slight. Even so, Manalone was amazed by the sight of the havoc he had caused. Shorn of the heat of battle, the sight of such destruction was a terrifying thing.

‘Yet you don’t feel any conscience about it, do you, Manalone? Which is curious, because you’re usually a creature of great conscience. But morally, the Establishment had no right to burn the raft. If their machine was turned against them, they’ve only themselves to blame.

‘Truth is, you can see a larger picture than they can. You know that prestige and convenience count for nothing in the face of the trouble that’s coming. Live and let live is the only creed that counts, because we’ve some tomorrows coming where people are going to become extremely rare. And those who can best adapt to live without the props of civilization will stand the best chance of survival.’

He kept a wary eye open for the police. Despite the apparent truce there was no doubt that the constabulary would still be looking for the morning’s fire-raisers. He doubted if any of the police had come near enough to be able to recognize him, but he could not be certain, and this fact made the seafront potentially dangerous territory on which to linger.

Having had
the hotel building pointed out to him, Manalone dismissed the lad. He walked on alone, adopting as near as possible the stance and mannerisms of the groups of sightseers gathered in the street. As he approached the hotel he could see there were no manu-drives in the parking bays, but one magnificent autocar took his attention. It was larger and more luxurious than any autovehicle he had ever seen before, and on its side it bore the official government crest. He dared not enter the bays to examine it closely, because of the presence of a uniformed official standing by its side as if waiting to welcome an important guest about to depart from the hotel.

Manalone walked past the parking bays and on to the hotel entrance. Being unshaven and in a general state of disarray, he felt disinclined to approach the register desk direct, especially as he did not know Kitten’s surname. To give himself time to devise a good approach, he crossed the road and turned slowly back on the other side.

As he did so, the big autocar swung out of the parking bays, and passed him, going in the opposite direction. Through the tinted window glass, Manalone could see the occupants quite plainly. Colonel Shears was there, with Kitten seated at his side. They were talking earnestly together. On the front seats, Kitten’s children, more neatly dressed than hitherto, peered excitedly from the windows. Manalone saw this much before the weight of his own predicament stunned him with its seriousness.

‘Manalone, if you lose that vehicle, you’ve lost Kitten – and if you lose her, you’ve lost your route through to the Masterthinkers.’

Starting to run, he glanced wildly up and down the road, but there was nothing he could acquire which would have helped him to follow. It was only as he stopped and helplessly watched the back of the receding vehicle as it negotiated the traffic lanes, that he saw serious possibilities in the patterns of coloured signal lights that crawled across the rear panels.

‘Signals,
Manalone! The top set are mandatory instructions to following autotraffic. The second group are anticipatory warnings But the bottom set could well be a presentation of the destination route code. Memorize the sequence, blast you! Your life could depend on it.’

He watched until the vehicle was out of sight. A trained habit of observation had enabled him to immediately perceive the sequence, but it was too long for his memory to reliably retain for any period of time. He searched desperately for something on which to write it. Then he remembered the tape-recorder which he still carried in his pocket. With a sigh of relief he transposed the precious sequence safely into sound.

The sequence he had
recorded had no direct meaning for him. His knowledge of the technology of autotraffic was limited, and based more on a comprehension of computer method than on any acquaintance with transport technique. Therefore he turned inland towards the public library where more definite information could be obtained. He saw no immediate danger in using the library facility, because, in contrast to ComCredit, the library services were prepaid from the rates and no charges were recorded for normal use.

In the library he acquired a reader’s terminal and called up information on autotraffic route codes. Nothing in the data he received seemed to fit in with the sequence he had recorded. Disheartened, he turned to search for more fundamental information. Then he realized that the sequence he had thought of as a binary number was probably a binalcoded octal figure. With this information he quickly obtained an answer which seemed consistent with the system, even though he could not verify its accuracy.

The only detailed route-code map available was a purely local one, and the figure he had deduced was obviously not a local code. He found a countryside map giving area prefixes, but nothing on it agreed with the prefix of his own string of figures. When he checked the countrywide map more carefully, he discovered that several logical prefixes had been omitted from it, and that a few small areas appeared to have no code prefix at all.

‘Holes in the map, Manalone. Little areas to which only the initiated can travel. One of them has to be what you’re looking for.’

Sure enough, the prefix he had deduced was one of those omitted from the map. But which of the several blank areas did it represent? Methodically he wrote out the prefixes in logical sequence, then marked the positions off on the map. Soon he saw the pattern forming, and was able to derive a definite point to which the prefix referred.

From the reader’s
terminal he dialled the National Archive computer and asked for further details of the area. He was not surprised when the screen told him that information was not currently available. He regarded this as a simple fiction, a discreet way of maintaining security without arousing the curiosity which would have resulted from a blank refusal. In any case, the hypothesis should be self-verifying. If he had asked for information about a classified area, the fact would automatically be reported by the Archive computer. He left the library building hurriedly and crossed the street to where he could watch the entrance from a safe distance. Within two minutes the police arrived.

Even though he had anticipated the arrival of the police, Manalone was still shaken by the realization of the extent and scope of the traps which had been set in the computer network. Even such apparently innocent enquiries as his own had been signalled to the police because it suggested the enquirer was someone interested in prohibited areas of knowledge. Alarm indications of this kind were easily programmed into computer systems, but he had never before paused to think of the tyrannical power it gave to the Executive. Suddenly it was little wonder to Manalone that the great conspiracy had remained so effectively concealed. The computers could detect areas in which a man was speculating, long before the thought became a deed.

He did not hang around waiting for the police to leave. They would have known of the fact of his enquiry, but not the identity of the enquirer. If the MIPS shared their information, however, they would probably guess who was behind it, and search the district specifically for Manalone. Because their operatives wore plain clothes, they would be impossible to spot. Distance was his main safeguard against their attentions.

He turned and walked rapidly away, pondering now on the problem of how he could reach his forbidden destination. The distance was such that walking was out of the question. He had somehow to devise a way of travelling the majority of the way by one of the autotransport systems. His recent experience with an autram left him dubious about entering one of these vehicles. The only alternative was one of the cross-country Hover-rail routes which had a station serving the adjacent area. Considering the question carefully, he doubted whether the Hover-rail system could be primed to form as selective a trap as the autram had proved to be.

The next problem
was how to gain access to the Hover-rail system. In a quiet part of the town he found a public bench and took out his ComCredit card and examined it. It was a conventional plastics card containing a ferrite filler, on which his credit identification details had been impressed magnetically. As a cross-check, the same details had been printed and fused into the glazed surface for comparison by an optical reader. Along one edge of the card was a row of holes which the bank autocashier had punched into it, presumably as a gross warning to other credit instruments that the card was unbacked by available funds. It was the position of these holes which was critical. If they had cut away any of the vital magnetic data stored in the card, then the card itself was useless; but if they had merely interfered with the optical and physical characteristics, then he might be able to restore it to a condition where attempting to use it for one journey would be a reasonable risk. Given the facilities he had possessed at Automated Mills, Manalone could have run a full evaluation of the magnetic imprint. In his present situation he had no more to work with than what he could find in his pockets.

After a short pause for thought, he took out his pocket tape-recorder. Filing the end of a key flat by rubbing it on the concrete arm of the bench, he made a tool which enabled him to unscrew the recorder’s reading head. Passing the ComCredit card experimentally over the face of the reading head produced a slight burst of noise from the speaker. His heart quickened. Although he could identify none of the details he could confirm that all the magnetic information was contained in three transverse stripes across the card, and that the perforated area had been magnetically inactive.