The Missing Man (v4.1) (8 page)

“We’re all going to be holing down
together. Turn left here.” The voice was odd.

George looked back and saw that the short teener
was wearing a gas mask. As he took a breath to ask why, the white fog rolled
down from a night-sky crevice above them. It smelled damp and slightly
alcoholic.

“Keep moving,” said the teener,
gesturing with his gun. George turned left, wondering what happened next when
you breathed that fog. A busy day, a busy night. An experience of symbolic
insight was often reported by people who had been flattened by police anti-riot
gas. What had the day meant? Why were such things happening?

Floating in white mist, George floated free of
his body over the city and saw a vast spirit being of complex and bitter logic
who brooded over the city and lived also in its future. George spoke to it, in
thoughts that were not words. “Ahmed uses the world view of his
grandmother, the gypsy. He believes that you are Fate. He believes you have
intentions and plans.”

It laughed and thought: The wheels of time grind
tight. No room between gear and gear for change. Future exists, logical and
unchangeable. No room for change in logic. When it adds up, it must arrive at
the same concluding scene. The city is necessity. The future is built. The
gears move us toward it. I am Fate.

George made a strange objecting thought.
“The past can change. So everything that adds up from the past can
change.”

There was a wail from the atmosphere. The vast
spirit that brooded over the city vanished, destroyed, dwindling to nowhere,
uncreated, never true, like the Wicked Witch of the West when Dorothy poured a
bucket of water over her, leaving behind the same dwindling wail. “But all
my beautiful disasters, the logic, the logic …

“No arithmetic;” George said firmly.
“If you can see the future, you can change it. If you can’t see the past,
it can change by itself and be anything. It won’t add up the same twice.”

All the crystallized visions of the city of the
future shattered and dissolved into white fog, a creative fog that could be
shaped to anything by thought. George stood at the center of creation and felt
stubborn. They were tempting him again, trying to get him into the bureaucratic
game of rules and unfreedom. “No,” he said. “I won’t fence
anyone in with my idea. Let them choose their own past.”

He came to consciousness lying on the floor in a
small tight room with the blond kid sitting on a bed pointing a gun at him.

“They got Carl Hodges back,” the kid
said. “You ruined everything. Maybe you are a cop. I don’t know. Maybe I
should kill you.”

“I just had a wild dream,” George said,
lifting his head, but not moving because he did not want to be shot. “I
dreamed I talked to the Fate of New York City. And I told Fate that the future
can change anytime, and the past can change anytime. In the beginning was the
middle, I said. And Fate started crying and boohooing and vanished. I mean, no
more Fate. Vanished.”

There was a long pause while the short blond kid
held the pistol pointed at George’s face and stared at him over the top of it.
The kid tried several tough faces, and then curiosity got the better of him. He
was basically an intellectual, even though a young one, and curiosity meant
more to him than love or hate. “What do you mean? The past is variable?
You can change it?”

“I mean, we don’t know what happened in the
past exactly. It’s gone anyhow. It’s not real anymore. So we can say anything
happened we want to have happened. If one past is going to make trouble, we can
change it just by being dumb, and everything will straighten out. Like, for
example, we just met, right now, right here, we just met. Nothing else
happened.”

“Oh.” The kid put away his gun,
thinking about that. “Glad to meet you. My name’s Larry.”

“My name’s George.” He arranged
himself more comfortably on the floor, not making any sudden moves.

They had a long philosophical discussion, while
Larry waited for the police outside to finish searching and go away. Sometimes
Larry took the gun out and pointed it again, but usually they discussed things
and exchanged stories without accepting any past.

Larry was serious and persuasive in trying to
convince George that the world had too many technicians. “They don’t know
how to be human beings. They like to read about being Tarzan, or see old movies
and imagine they are Humphrey Bogart and James Bond, but actually all they have
the guts to do is read and study. They make money that way, and they make more
gadgets and they run computers that do all the thinking and take all the
challenge and conquest out of life. And they give a pension to all the people
who want to go out into the woods, or surf, instead of staying indoors pushing
buttons, and they call the surfers and islanders and forestfarmers Free
Loaders, and make sure they are sterilized and don’t have children. That’s
genocide. They are killing off the real people. The race will be descended from
those compulsive button pushers, and forget how to live.”

It was a good speech. George was uneasy, because
it sounded right, and he was sure no man was smart enough to refute the killer,
but he tried.

“Couldn’t a guy who really wanted children
earn enough money to get a breeding permit for himself and an operation for his
wife?”

“There aren’t that many jobs anymore. The
jobs that are left are button-pusher jobs, and you have to study for twenty
years to learn to push the right button. They’re planning to sterilize everyone
but button pushers.”

George had nothing to say. It made sense, but
his own experience did not fit. “I’m not sterilized, Larry, and I’m a real
dope. I didn’t get past the sixth grade.”

“When did your childhood support run
out?”

“Last year.”

“No more free food and housing. How about
your family—they support you?”

“No family. Orphan. I got lots of good
friends, but they all took their pensions and shipped out. Except one. He got a
job.”

“You didn’t apply for the unemployable
youth pension yet?”

“No. I wanted to stay around the city. I
didn’t want to be shipped out. I figured I could get a job.”

“That’s a laugh. Lots of luck in getting a
job, George. How are you planning to eat?”

“Sometimes I help out around communes and
share meals. Everyone usually likes me in the Brotherhood communes.”
George shifted positions uneasily on the floor and sat up. This was almost
lying. He had a job now, but he wasn’t going to talk about Rescue Squad, because
Larry might call him a cop and try to shoot him. “But I don’t bum
meals.”

“When’s the longest you’ve gone without
meals?”

“I don’t feel hungry much. I went two days
without food once. I’m healthy.”

The kid sat cross-legged on the bed and laughed.
“Really healthy! You got muscles all over. You’ve got muscles from ear to
ear. So you’re trying to beat the system! It was built just to wipe out
muscleheads like you. If you apply for welfare, they sterilize you. If you take
your unemployable support pension, they sterilize you. If you are caught
begging, they sterilize you. Money gets all you muscleheads sooner or later.
It’s going to get you too. I’ll bet when you are hungry you think of the bottle
of wine and the big free meal at the sterility clinic. You think of the chance
of winning the million dollar sweepstakes if the operation gives you the right
tattoo number, don’t you?”

George didn’t answer.

“Maybe you don’t know it, but your
unemployable pension is piling up, half saved for every week you don’t claim
it. You’ve been avoiding it a year almost? When it piles high enough, you’ll go
in and claim your money and let them sterilize you and ship you out to the
boondocks, like everyone else.”

“Not me.”

“Why not?”

George didn’t answer. After a while he said,
“Are you going to let them sterilize you?”

Larry laughed again. He had a fox face and big
ears. “Not likely. There are lots of ways for a smart guy to beat the
system. My descendants are going to be there the year the sun runs down and we
hook drives to Earth and cruise away looking for a new sun. My descendants are
going to surf light waves in space. Nobody going to wipe me out, and nobody’s
going to make them into button pushers.”

“Okay, I see it.” George got up and
paced, two steps one way, two steps the other way in the narrow room. “Who
are you working for, Larry? Who are you crying over? People who let themselves
be bribed into cutting off their descendants? They’re different from you. Do
they have guts enough to bother with? Are they worth getting your brain wiped
in a court of law? You’re right about history, I guess. I’m the kind of guy the
techs are trying to get rid of. You’re a tech type of guy yourself. Why don’t
you be a tech and forget about making trouble?”

At the end of the room, faced away from Larry,
George stopped and stared at the wall. His fists clenched. “Kid, do you
know what kind of trouble you make?”

“I see it on television,” Larry said.

“Those are real people you killed.”
George still stared at the wall: “This afternoon I was giving artificial
respiration to a girl. She was bleeding from the eyes.” His voice knotted
up. Big muscles bulged on his arms and his fists whitened as he tried to talk.
“She was dead, they told me. She looked all right, except for her eyes. I
guess because I’m stupid.” He turned and his eyes glittered with tears and
with a kind of madness. He glanced around the small room looking for a thing to
use for a weapon.

Larry took out his gun and pointed it at George,
hastily getting off the bed. “Oh oh, the past is real again. Time for me
to leave!” Holding the gun pointed steadily and carefully at George’s
face, he used his other hand to put on black goggles and slung the gas mask
around his neck. “Hold still, George, you don’t want a hole through your
face. If you fight me, who are you working for? Not your kind of people. Think,
man.” He backed to the door. George turned, still facing him, his big
hands away from his sides and ready, his eyes glittering with a mindless
alertness.

Larry backed into the dark hall. “Don’t
follow. You don’t want to follow me. This gun has infrasights, shoots in the
dark. If you stick your head out the door, I might shoot it off. Just stand
there for ten minutes and don’t make any trouble. The gun is silenced. If I
have to shoot you, you don’t get any medal for being a dead hero. No one would
know.”

The short teener backed down the dark corridor
and was gone. George still stood crouched, but he shook his head, like a man
trying to shake off something that had fallen over his eyes.

He heard Larry bump into something a long way
down the corridor.

“I would know,” a voice said from the
ceiling. Ahmed let himself down from a hole in the ceiling, hung by both long
arms and then dropped, landing catlike and silent. He was tall and sooty and
filthy and covered with cobwebs. He grinned and his teeth were white in a very
dark face. “You just missed a medal for being a dead hero. I thought you
were going to try to kill him.”

He twiddled the dial of his wrist radio, plugged
an earphone into one ear and spoke into the wrist radio. “Flushed one.
He’s heading west on a cellar corridor from the center, wearing a gas mask and
infragoggles, armed and dangerous. He’s the kingpin, so try hard,
buddies.”

George sat down on the edge of the bunk,
sweating. “I get too mad sometimes. I almost did try to kill him. What he
said was probably right. What he said.”

Ahmed unplugged the speaker from his ear.
“I was mostly listening to you, good buddy. Very interesting philosophical
discussion you were putting out. I kept wanting to sneeze. How come you get
into philosophical arguments today and I just get beat up? Everything is
backward.”

“You’re the smart one, Ahmed,” said
George slowly, accepting the fact that he had been protected. “Thanks for
watching.” He looked at his own hands, still worrying slowly on an idea.
“How come everything the kid said made sense?”

“It didn’t,” Ahmed said impatiently.
“You made sense.”

“But Larry said that techs are wiping out
nontechs.”

“Maybe they are, but they aren’t killing
anybody. The kid kills.”

George pushed his hands together, felt them wet
with sweat wiped them on his shirt. “I almost killed the kid. But it felt
right, what he was saying. He was talking for the way things are and for the
way they’re going to be, like Fate.”

“Killing is unphilosophical,” Ahmed
said. “You’re tired, George Take it easy, we’ve had a long day.”

They heard a police siren wail and then distant
shots. Ahmed plugged the earphone into his ear. “They just dropped
somebody in goggles, gas didn’t work on him. They had to drop him with hypo
bullets. Probably Larry. Let’s try to get out of here.”

They put a wad of blankets out into the
corridor, head high. No shots, so they went out cautiously and started groping
down the long black hall, looking for an exit.

Ahmed said, “So you think Larry was the
fickle finger of Fate on the groping hand of the future. No power on Earth can
resist the force of an idea whose time has come, said somebody once. But, good
buddy, when I was listening to you whilst lying in the ceiling with the spiders
crawling on me, I thought I heard you a new metaphysics. Didn’t you just
abolish Fate?”