The Fellowship of the Hand (16 page)

“We’re going in for a landing,” he said to the pilot. “Tell the other copter.”

Graham Axman peered over his shoulder, studying the gradually widening lake below. “How do we get into the place if the entrance is under water?”

“It won’t be. They’ll open it and come out before the water reaches it. And that’s when we go in.”

The twin rocketcopters settled onto the wet sand by the lake’s edge. Euler Frost was the first one out, carrying his stunner and waving for the others to follow. Sam Venray hopped down from the second copter, a backpack of small but deadly hydrobombs bouncing as he ran. In the close confines below ground, their concentrated destructive power would be most effective.

In that moment, with the eastern sun just breaking through the rain clouds to strike his face, Graham Axman looked a little like an avenging angel as he hefted a laser rifle and ran to join them. For just an instant Euler was sorry he’d won the battle and wondered if he really had.

He wondered if he dared turn his back on Graham Axman during the attack.

H
E AWAKENED TO FIND
Masha Blunt in his little cubicle, standing very close to the bed. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes and reaching for the contact pupils he wore, Crader was aware of a hum of activity that seemed foreign to the place.

“It’s raining up above.”

“Is that all?”

“Jason says it never rains here, at least not this much. It’s a regular cloudburst and he’s afraid it’ll fill the lake bottom and flood us.”

He rolled out of the narrow spring bed and stood up. “Strange. Sounds as if Climate Control may have bungled. Where’s your husband?”

“Gone to greet Stanley Ambrose. You’re to meet them in Jason’s office.”

He felt a hollow growling deep inside him. “What about breakfast?”

“They only serve capsule meals here. I guess that will have to do us.”

“I suppose so,” Crader grumbled, resigning himself to it.

He dressed quickly and met Masha at the little dining area. He was too old for things like capsule meals, but he supposed he would survive a single day of it. As they headed down the corridor toward Blunt’s office, he saw white-suited technicians operating a water pump along a wall where moisture was beginning to seep in. “That rain must really be heavy.”

“I told you so! Jason is worried.”

He had a sudden vision of a wall of water sweeping down upon them in some Biblical vengeance. Perhaps he should call Washington, notify Climate Control …

Suddenly Jason Blunt himself appeared ahead of them, crossing the corridor on the run. “Morning, Crader. Hope you slept well.”

“Anything I can do?”

“Nothing. The rain seems to be stopping. We only have to hope it doesn’t all drain into the lake. I’m having the entranceway opened as a safety measure, before the water reaches it and covers it over.”

“I could call Washington if you need to evacuate.”

“Washington is the last thing I need right now. It may have been Washington that caused it all in the first place!”

“What?”

“President McCurdy—remember? He’s always hated my guts. And climate control can be a most effective political weapon.”

“That’s fantastic!”

“Is it? Then how else do you explain a cloudburst in the desert?”

“I don’t know,” Crader admitted, and he wondered if perhaps this was President McCurdy’s way of striking out at Nova.

“Wait for me in the office, Blunt said, hurrying on. “I’ll bring Ambrose in there as soon as we inspect the water damage to our computers.”

Crader turned to Masha. “Then the mysterious Mr. Ambrose is really here.”

“Oh yes.”

They entered Jason Blunt’s private office and Masha seated herself in one of the foamfold chairs. Crader moved behind the console to study the shelves of video cassettes and rarely seen books.

“Your husband is a reader, I see.”

“Yes. He contends that all the world’s knowledge cannot be found on video cassettes.”

“He’s right there.” Crader let his eyes scan the shelf of books. Some were out-of-date, century-old titles like Ashby’s
Design for a Brain,
Adler’s
Thinking Machines,
Neville Moray’s
Cybernetics,
and Norbert Wiener’s
The Human Use of Human Beings.
Most were of a more recent vintage, though, and included Crankton’s
Machines Our Masters,
Blacksmith’s
Wonderland in Wires,
and Ongood’s
Toward a Programmed Tomorrow.
There was even a copy of Lawrence Friday’s book,
Animal Responsibilities in a Human Society,
the inventor’s first attempt to relate the nervous system of animals to the computer sciences.

He took down the book by Wiener, to refresh his memory of twentieth-century views on computers, and noticed something odd about the back of the yellowed dust jacket. The author’s picture had been defaced, scratched out and crossed over with a broad black marking pen. He was about to dismiss it as some century-old vandalism when he noticed that the more recent books were the same way. On each of them, the author’s picture had been defaced. He grunted and slipped the book back onto the shelf, wondering what it was about other men’s faces that Jason Blunt hated so much.

“Do you read much?” Masha asked from across the room.

“Not a great deal, I’m sorry to say. With cassettes, one gets out of the habit of reading. And I suppose people your age don’t read at all.”

She shrugged. “The telenews printouts. That’s about all. I sometimes wish I’d started reading books, but Stevro never wanted to bother with them.”

“Speaking of Stevro, where is he this morning?”

“With Jason and Stanley Ambrose, I suppose. I haven’t seen him.”

Crader grunted and stooped to inspect the console, wishing again that Washington could afford something like this for his office. “A beautiful piece of equipment. It must have cost”

His sentence was cut off by the silent sliding of the door, which opened to admit Jason Blunt and a slim, smiling man with an ashen face. “Hello again, Crader. I want you to meet the other half of Nova Industries—Stanley Ambrose.”

“A pleasure.”

Ambrose accepted his hand and bowed slightly. Close up, his face seemed drawn and unnaturally pale—the result, perhaps, of those years on Venus. “I have heard much of Carl Crader,” he said. “The Computer Investigation Bureau has an enviable reputation.”

“We try to live up to it.”

“You’ll forgive the confusion here this morning, but this rain was hardly to be expected.”

“I understand.”

Ambrose turned and bowed to Masha. “You have a charming wife, Jason.”

“I think so.”

He settled back into one of the white foamfold chairs, which only succeeded in making him appear even slimmer. “Now what was this business all of you had to discuss?”

Blunt held up a hand to Crader. “The government first.”

“It’s about this secret election which was held using the FRIDAY-404 election system. The President is most concerned that the system has been tarnished in such a manner, which you realize was against the law.”

“Was it, now?” Stanley Ambrose allowed his smile to grow a bit wider. “As a former government employee myself, I was under the impression that such tax-financed facilities belonged to all the people. Since we did no harm to the election computers, I don’t believe we violated any law.”

“But what did you hope to accomplish?”

The slender man shrugged. “The computer was sitting there, not in use, and we had an election to be held. Since Nova employees and families number over eighty thousand and are scattered throughout the world, this seemed like the perfect way to conduct our election. It was my idea and I take full responsibility—or blame—for it.”

“There are some reports that the entire Nova operation is a plot to overthrow the government and substitute a computer-dominated society programmed to the past.”

“Ridiculous!”

“I’ve been inspecting the wiring tunnels. The machines have learning and reasoning capabilities. They could easily be programmed to digest the facts and figures of our history and dictate the course of our future.”

“To what purpose?”

Crader shrugged. “A preservation of the American dream? You tell me.”

“There is no plot, Mr. Crader. We are a business like any other.”

“Not quite like any other,” Blunt interrupted.

Ambrose turned toward him. “What does that mean?”

“A year ago you came down from Venus and contacted me with your schemes. Of course Nova and this computer complex were already in existence, but when you bought into the business and we established a new corporation, things began to change. Learning capabilities were built into the computers. Sometimes I wonder myself what our real motives are. I wonder especially about this election we held for the new president of Nova.”

“What about it?” Ambrose asked.

“The Nova employees include the employees of my oil drilling operation, and something very odd has been happening with them.”

Crader sensed that this was a moment of confrontation between the two. He sat back and kept his mouth shut. Ambrose had gotten to his feet and was facing Jason Blunt now. “I care nothing about your oil drilling.”

“No? Then what about this?” Blunt pressed a button on his console and one of the doors along the far wall slid open. The bulky Stevro moved through the opening, looking like a wrestler in search of his opponent.

Stanley Ambrose blinked his pale eyes, as if trying to focus them on this sudden arrival. “I do not know this man,” he said finally. “Should I know him?”

“His name is Stevro. He’s from New Istanbul. Tell him what you told me, Stevro—about my drilling island in the Mediterranean.”

“Well,” Stevro began, “it happened like this. I run a sort of business in New Istanbul.” He paused to glance over at Masha. “Sometimes I get to meet the drilling crews in the bars when they copter in for a weekend’s rest.”

Masha snorted. “You call that rest!”

“Anyway, I was talking to some of them, and this Nova election came up. They told me something about it—about you, Mr. Ambrose.”

“I’ve never been to any drilling island.”

“You didn’t need to be. They’ve been diverting oil from the main pipeline, selling it to small companies in Greece and Italy. They told me you discovered it by means of the computer. You plotted the estimated yield against actual production, and ran a simulation on the computer to prove that the number of pump-hours reported on the generator record would have brought up more oil than the amount shipped.”

“That makes me a very clever man if it’s true,” Ambrose remarked.

“There’s more,” Stevro said. “You used this information to blackmail them into voting as you ordered. You spoke to them by vision-phone and warned them you’d reveal their whole scheme if the votes from the Mediterranean weren’t one hundred percent the way you ordered.”

“Is it true?” Jason Blunt demanded. “Is it?”

Stanley Ambrose spread his hands in a gesture of surrender. “You have me at a disadvantage. Yes, it’s true. Everything he says is true.”

Stevro looked pleased. “Convinced?” he asked Blunt. “Now give me the money.”

“But there’s one thing,” Ambrose said quietly. His right hand dipped into his pocket to extract an electric lighter. He kept them waiting while he lit a short cigar, and then he continued. “One thing. Did they tell you who I forced them to vote for?”

Stevro gave one of his jerky movements. “Yeah.”

“Who?”

Head down, he mumbled, “Blunt.”

“What?” Jason Blunt took a step forward, gripping the material of Stevro’s bodysuit. “What is this? You didn’t tell me this part before! You mean he blackmailed those men to vote
against
him in the election?”

“Well, yeah. That’s the story I got. But that part seemed so fantastic I left it out.”

They turned back to Stanley Ambrose, who was smiling just a bit smugly, in complete control of the situation. “Did you really think I’d try to fix the election in my favor, Jason?”

“Why did you do it?”

“I wanted you to win. I had enough responsibilities on Venus. Now is simply a time for relaxing.”

“But you
wanted
the election!”

“Yes.”

“Why, if you didn’t want to win?”

“Simply to have you elected in an official manner.

“I can’t believe it,” Jason Blunt said.

“It happened. It’s the truth.”

“You
forced
people to vote for me?”

Stanley Ambrose bowed slightly. “I tried to, in a few cases.”

“Who won the election?”

“I did,” Ambrose admitted. “But it was close. I came here today to show you the results, which you can verify in any way you wish.”

“I can verify them,” Crader said. “That’s what started my involvement in this whole business—when a technician named Rogers stumbled upon the final figures in the FRIDAY-404 unit.”

“Rogers? The one who was killed.”

“The
first
one who was killed,” Carl Crader reminded them. “Since then, a girl named Milly Norris has been murdered. And there’s also the matter of the skeleton I discovered in the wiring tunnel here.”

“Skeleton?” Ambrose’s head jerked up. “What skeleton?”

Crader told him about the find in the sealed tunnel. “We think it might be an employee of your Lexington plant. My men are investigating that possibility now.”

“Why Lexington?” Ambrose asked, truly puzzled.

“No one seems to be missing around here, and I found a shipping label from Lexington near the skeleton. I think the skeleton arrived here in a carton of computer parts and was hidden in the tunnel when it was sealed. A good place to hide a body, I suppose, in a dustproof, airtight tunnel that wasn’t supposed to be opened for a generation.”

“Not as good as the ground,” Masha pointed out. “Why didn’t they just bury the thing? Or throw it into a vacucinerator?”

“A good question,” Crader admitted.

“The fact remains that a killer is loose.” Jason Blunt moved in to take charge, as if this was his opportunity to best Ambrose. “If the killer is threatening Nova, then he’s a threat to both Stanley and myself.”