The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (72 page)

“Because of this unique roving ego, the Pan-Spechi have a more communal attitude toward fellow sentients than do most other species admitted to the concourse of humanity,” McKie said. “This translates as a sense of responsibility toward all life. They're not necessarily maudlin about it. They oppose where it's necessary to build strength. Their creche life demonstrates several clear examples of this which I'd prefer not to describe.”

“I see,” Dooley said, but he had to admit to himself that he did not. McKie's allusions to unspeakable practices were beginning to annoy him. “And you feel that this Bildoon-Bolin act of sabotage qualifies him, provided this court rules they are one and the same person?”

“We are not the same person!” Bolin cried. “You don't dare say I'm that … that shambling, clinging…”

“Easy,” McKie said. “Ser Bolin, I'm sure you see the need for this legal fiction.”

“Legal fiction,” Bolin said as though clinging to the words. The multi-faceted eyes glared across the courtarena at McKie. “Thank you for the verbal nicety, McKie.”

“You've not answered my question, Ser McKie,” Dooley said, ignoring the exchange with Bolin.

“Sabotaging Ser Watt through an attack on the entire Bureau contains subtlety and finesse never before achieved in such an effort,” McKie said. “The entire Bureau will be strengthened by it.”

McKie glanced at Watt. The acting Secretary's Medusa tangle had ceased its writhing. He was staring at Bolin with a speculative look in his eyes. Sensing the quiet in the courtarena, he glanced up at McKie.

“Don't you agree, Ser Watt?” McKie asked.

“Oh, yes. Quite,” Watt said.

The note of sincerity in Watt's voice startled the judge. For the first time, he wondered at the dedication which these men brought to their jobs.

“Sabotage is a very sensitive Bureau,” Dooley said. “I've some serious reservations—”

“If Your Honor please,” McKie said, “forbearance is one of the chief attributes a saboteur can bring to his duties. Now, I wish you to understand what our Pan-Spechi friend has done here this day. Let us suppose that I had spied upon the most intimate moments between you, Judge, and your wife, and that I reported them in detail here in open court with half the universe looking on. Let us suppose further that you had the strictest moral code against such discussions with outsiders. Let us suppose that I made these disclosures in the basest terms with every four-letter word at my command. Let us suppose that you were armed, traditionally, with a deadly weapon to strike at such blasphemers, such—”

“Filth!” Bolin grated.

“Yes,” McKie said. “Filth. Do you suppose, Your Honor, that you could have stood by without killing me?”

“Good heavens!” Dooley said.

*   *   *

“Ser Bolin,” McKie said, “I offer you and all your race my most humble apologies.”

“I'd hoped once to undergo the ordeal in the privacy of a judge's chambers with as few outsiders as possible,” Bolin said. “But once you were started in open court…”

“It had to be this way,” McKie said. “If we'd done it in private, people would've come to be suspicious about a Pan-Spechi in control of…”

“People?” Bolin asked.

“Non Pan-Spechi,” McKie said. “It'd have been a barrier between our species.

“And we've been strengthened by all this,” McKie said. “Those provisions of the Constitution that provide the people with a slowly moving government have been demonstrated anew. We've admitted the public to the inner workings of Sabotage, shown them the valuable character of the man who'll be the new Secretary.”

“I've not yet ruled on the critical issue here,” Dooley said.

“But Your Honor!” McKie said.

“With all due respect to you as a saboteur extraordinary, Ser McKie,” Dooley said, “I'll make my decision on evidence gathered under my direction.” He looked at Bolin. “Ser Bolin, would you permit an agent of this court to gather such evidence as will allow me to render verdict without fear of harming my own species?”

“We're humans together,” Bolin growled.

“But terranic humans hold the balance of power,” Dooley said. “I owe allegiance to law, yes, but my terranic fellows depend on me, too. I have a…”

“You wish your own agents to determine if Ser McKie has told the truth about us?”

“Ah … yes,” Dooley said.

Bolin looked at McKie. “Ser McKie, it is I who apologize to you. I had not realized how deeply xenophobia penetrated your fellows.”

“Because,” McKie said, “Outside of your natural modesty, you have no such fear. I suspect you know the phenomenon only through reading of us.”

“But all strangers are potential sharers of identity,” Bolin said. “Ah, well.”

“If you're through with your little chat,” Dooley said, “would you care to answer my question, Ser Bolin? This is still, I hope, a court of law.”

“Tell me, Your Honor,” Bolin said, “would you permit me to witness the tenderest intimacies between you and your wife?”

Dooley's face darkened, but he saw suddenly in all of its stark detail the extent of McKie's analogy and it was to the judge's credit that he rose to the occasion. “If it were necessary to promote understanding,” he rasped, “yes!”

“I believe you would,” Bolin murmured. He took a deep breath. “After what I've been through here today, one more sacrifice can be borne, I guess. I grant your investigators the privilege requested, but advise that they be discreet.”

“It will strengthen you for the trials ahead as Secretary of the Bureau,” McKie said. “The Secretary, you must bear in mind, has no immunities from sabotage whatsoever.”

“But,” Bolin said, “the Secretary's legal orders carrying out his Constitutional functions must be obeyed by all agents.”

McKie nodded, seeing in the glitter of Bolin's eyes a vista of peeping Tom assignments with endless detailed reports to the Secretary of Sabotage—at least until the fellow's curiosity had been satisfied and his need for revenge satiated.

But the others in the courtarena, not having McKie's insight, merely wondered at the question:
What did he really mean by that?

 

MARY CELESTE MOVE

Martin Fisk's car, a year-old 1997 Buick with triple turbines and
jato
boosters, flashed off the freeway, found a space between a giant mobile refueling tanker and a commuter bus, darted through and surged into the first of the eight right-hand lanes in time to make the turnoff marked “NEW PENTAGON ONLY—Reduce Speed to 75.”

Fisk glanced at his surface/air rate-of-travel mixer, saw he was down to 80 miles per hour, close enough to legal speed, and worked his way through the press of morning traffic into the second lane in plenty of time to join the cars diverging onto the fifth-level ramp.

At the last minute, a big official limousine with a two-star general's decal-flag on its forward curve cut in front of him and he had to reduce speed to 50, hearing the dragbar rasping behind him as his lane frantically matched speed. The shadow of a traffic copter passed over the roadway and Fisk thought:
Hope that general's driver loses his license!

By this time he was into the sweeping curve-around that would drop him to the fifth level. Speed here was a monitored 55. The roadway entered the building and Fisk brought his R-O-T up to the stated speed watching for the code of his off-slot: BR71D
2
. It loomed ahead, a flashing mnemonic blinker in brilliant green.

Fisk dropped behind an in-building shuttle, squeezed into the right-hand lane, slapped the turn-off alert that set all his rim lights blinking and activated the automatics. His machine caught the signal from the roadway, went on automatic and swerved into the off-slot still at 55.

Fisk released his control bar.

Drag hooks underneath the Buick snagged the catch ribbands of the slot, jerked his car to a stop that sent him surging against the harness.

The exit-warning wall ahead of him flashed a big red “7 SECONDS! 7 SECONDS!”

Plenty of time,
he thought.

He yanked his briefcase out of its dashboard carrier with his right hand while unsnapping his safety harness with his left and hitting the door actuator with his knee. He was out onto the pedestrian ramp with three seconds to spare. The warning wall lifted; his car jerked forward into the down-elevator rack to be stored in a coded pile far below. His personal I-D signal to the computer-monitored system later would restore the car to him all checked and serviced and ready for the high-risk evening race out of the city.

Fisk glanced at his wrist watch—four minutes until his appointment with William Merill, the President's liaison officer on the Internal Control Board and Fisk's boss. Adopting the common impersonal discourtesy, Fisk joined the press of people hurrying along the ramp.

Some day,
he thought,
I'll get a nice safe and sane job on one of the ocean hydroponic stations where all I have to do is watch gauges and there's nothing faster than a 40 m.p.h. pedestrian ramp.
He fished a green pill out of his coat pocket, gulped it, hoped he wouldn't have to take another before his blood pressure began its down-slant to normal.

By this time he was into the pneumatic lift capsule that would take him up in an individual curve to easy walking distance from his destination. He locked his arms on the brace bars. The door thumped closed. There was a distant hiss, a feeling of smooth downward pressure that evened off. He stared at the familiar blank tan of the opposite wall. Presently, the pressure slackened, the capsule glided to a stop, its door swung open.

Fisk stepped out into the wide hall, avoided the guide-lanes for the high-speed ramp and dodged through thinning lines of people hurrying to work around him.

Within seconds he was into Merill's office and facing the WAC secretary, a well-endowed brunette with an air of brisk efficiency. She looked up from her desk as he entered.

“Oh, Mr. Fisk,” she said, “how nice that you're a minute early. Mr. Merill's already here. You can have nine minutes. I hope that'll be enough. He has a very full schedule today and the Safety Council subcommittee session with the President this afternoon.” She already was up and holding the inner door open for him, saying: “Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could invent a forty-eight hour day?”

We already have,
he thought.
We just compressed it into the old twenty-four hour model.

“Mr. Fisk is here,” she said, announcing him as she stepped out of his way.

*   *   *

Fisk was through to the inner sanctum then, wondering why his mind was filled with the sudden realization that he had driven out of his apartment's garage lift one hundred miles away only thirty-two minutes before. He heard the WAC secretary close the door behind him.

Merill, a wiry redhead with an air of darting tension, pale freckled skin and narrow face, sat at a desk directly opposite the door. He looked up, fixed his green eyes on Fisk, said: “Come on in and sit down, Marty, but make it snappy.”

Fisk crossed the office. It was an irregular space of six sides about forty feet across at its widest point. Merill sat with his back to the narrowest of the walls and with the widest wall at an angle to his right. A computer-actuated map of the United States covered that surface, its color-intensity lines of red, blue and purple showing traffic density on the great expressway arteries that criss-crossed the nation. The ceiling was a similar map, this one showing the entire western hemisphere and confined to the Prime-1 arteries of twenty lanes or greater.

Fisk dropped into the chair across the desk from Merill, pushed a lock of dark hair back from his forehead, feeling the nervous perspiration there.
Blast it!
he thought.
I'll have to take another pill!

“Well?” Merill said.

“It's all here,” Fisk said, slapping the briefcase onto Merill's desk. “Ten days, forty thousand miles of travel and eighteen personal interviews plus fifty-one other interviews and reports from my assistants.”

“You know the President's worried about this,” Merill said. “I hope you have it in some kind of order so I can present it to him this afternoon.”

“It's in order,” Fisk said. “But you're not going to like it.”

“Yeah, well I was prepared for that,” Merill said. “I don't like much of what comes across this desk.” He glanced up suddenly at a strip of yellow that appeared on the overhead map indicating a partial blockage on the intercontinental throughway near Caracas. His right hand hovered over an intercom button, poised there as the yellow was replaced by red then blue shading into purple.

“Fourth problem in that area in two days,” Merill said removing his hand from the button. “Have to work a talk with Mendoza into this morning's schedule. Okay” He turned back to Fisk. “Give me your economy model brief rundown. What's got into these kooks who're moving all over the landscape?”

“I've about twenty interlocking factors to reinforce my original hunch,” Fisk said. “The Psych department confirms it. The question is whether this thing'll settle into some kind of steady pattern and even out. You might caution the President, off the record, that there are heavy political implications in this. Touchy ones if this leaks out the wrong way.”

Merill pushed a recording button on his desk, said: “Okay, Marty, put the rest on the record. Recap and summate. I'll listen to it for review while I'm reading your report.”

Fisk nodded. “Right.” He pulled sheaves of papers in file folders out of the briefcase, lined them up in front of him. “We had the original report, of course, that people were making bold moves from one end of the country to the other in higher than usual numbers, from unlikely starting places to unlikelier destinations. And these people turned out to be mostly mild, timid types instead of bold pioneers who'd pulled up their roots in the spirit of adventure.”