The Shockwave Rider (11 page)

AMONG THE MOST HIGHLY PRAISED OF ALL THREE-VEE COMMERCIALS

1
: Dead silence, the black of empty space, the harsh bright points of the stars. Slowly into field orbits the wreckage of a factory. Obviously an explosion has opened it like a tin can. Spacesuited figures are seen drifting around it like fetuses attached to the umbilical cords of their regulation life lines. Hold for a beat. Pan to a functioning factory operating at full blast, glistening in the rays of the naked sun and swarming with men and women loading unmanned freight capsules for dispatch to Earth. Voice over: “On the other hand …
this
factory was built by G2S.”

2
: Without warning we are plunging through the outer atmosphere, at first on a steady course, then vibrating, then wobbling as the ablation cone on the capsule’s nose starts to flare. It spins wildly and tumbles end-for-end. Explosion. Cut to half a dozen men in overalls staring furiously at a dying streak of brightness on the night sky. Cut again, this time to a similar group walking across a concrete landing pan toward a smoking capsule that targeted so close to home they don’t even need to ride to reach it. Voice over: “On the other hand …
this
capsule was engineered by G2S.”

3
: Deep space again, this time showing a bulky irregular mass of asteroid rock drifting toward a smelting station, recognizable by its huge mirror of thin mylar. Jets blaze on the asteroid’s nearer side, men and women in suits gesticulate frantically. Sound over, faint, of confused yells for help and angry orders to “do something!” But the asteroid rock plows its solemn way clear through the mirror and leaves it in shreds that float eerily on nothing. Cut to another smelting station whose mirror is focused on an even larger chunk of ore. Magnetic vapor-guides tidily collect the gas as it boils off, separators—each shining with a different shade of reddish white—deliver valuable pure metals into cooling chambers on the shadow side of the rock. Voice over: “On the” other hand …
this
orbit was computed at G2S.”

THE KINGDOMS OF THE WORLD

“How did you enjoy working at G2S?” Freeman inquired.

“More than I expected. Being a sort of export agency for frontline technology, it attracts top men and women from every field, and lively minds are always fun to have around. I was most closely in contact with Rico Posta, and in fact it was because of what I did under his instructions that G2S didn’t lay an enormous egg by going into Olivers at the same time as National Panasonic. Their model would have been twice the price with half the advantages,
and
they wouldn’t have wanted to amortize their research over twenty-seven years, either.”

“Something to do with the structure of Japanese society,” Freeman said dryly. “Nipponside, the things must be invaluable.”

“True!”

Today the atmosphere was comparatively relaxed. There was an element of conversation in the dialogue.

“How about your other colleagues? You began by disliking Vivienne Ingle.”

“Began by being prepared to dislike them all. But though in theory they were standard plug-in types, in practice they were the cream of the category, moving less often than the average exec and prepared to stay where interesting research was going on rather than move from sheer force of habit.”

“You investigated them by tapping the data-net, no doubt.”

“Of course. Remember my excuse for getting hired.”

“Of course. But it can’t have taken you long to find out what you originally intended to confirm: your 4GH was still usable. Why did you stay, even to the point of their offering you tenure?”

“That … That’s hard to explain. I guess I hadn’t encountered so many people functioning so well before. In my previous personae I chiefly contacted people who were dissatisfied. There’s this kind of low-grade paranoia you find all the time and everywhere because people know that people they don’t know can find out things about them they’d rather keep quiet. Are you with me?”

“Naturally. But at G2S the staff were different?”

“Mm-hm. Not in the sense of having nothing to hide, not in the sense of being superbly secure—witness Ina, for one. But in general they were enjoying the wave of change. They groused pretty often, but that was a safety valve. Once the pressure blew off, they went back to using the system instead of being used by it.”

“Which is what you find most admirable.”

“Hell, yes. Don’t you?”

There was a pause, but no answer.

“Sorry, next time I’ll know better. But you exaggerate when you say they were set to offer me tenure. They were prepared to semi-perm me.”

“That would have evolved into tenure.”

“No, I couldn’t have let it. I was tempted. But it would have meant slipping into the Sandy Locke role and staying in it for the rest of my life.”

“I see. It sounds as though role-switching can become addictive.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Tell me what you did to make such a good impression.”

“Oh, apart from the Oliver bit I sorted out some snarls, saved them a few million a year. Routine stuff. Anybody can be an efficient systems rash if he can mouse around in the federal net.”

“You found that easy?”

“Not quite, but far from difficult. A G2S code heading the inquiry was a key to open many doors. The corp has a max-nat-advantage rating at Canaveral, you know.”

“Did you do as you promised for Ina Grierson?”

“Pecked away at it when I remembered. I lost my enthusiasm when I realized why she hadn’t turned freelie already, cut loose and left her daughter to her own devices. So long as she was in reach of her ugly duckling, her confidence was reinforced. Knowing she was far the more conventionally beautiful of the two … She must have hated her ex-husband.”

“You found out who he was, of course.”

“Only when I got tired of her pestering and finally dug deep into her file. Poor shivver. It must have been a horrible way to die.”

“Some people would call it a lesson in nemesis.”

“Not at Tarnover.”

“Maybe not. However, you were saying you enjoyed yourself at G2S.”

“Yes, I was amazingly content. But for one problem. It was spelt k-a-t-e, as if you hadn’t guessed.”

STALKED

The university was closed for summer vacation, but instead of taking off for a remote corner of the world or even, like some students, going on a package tour to the Moon, Kate stayed in KC. Next after the welcomefest he met her at a coley club patronized by the more frameworked execs of G2S.

“Sandy, come and dance!” Seizing his arm, almost dragging him away. “You haven’t seen my party trick!”

“Which is—?”

But she was doing it, and he was genuinely startled. The ceiling projectors were invisible; it took fantastic kinaesthetic sensibility to dance one chorus of a simple tune without straying off key, and more still to come back and repeat it. That though was exactly what she did, and the clamorous discord generated by the other dancers was overriden by her strongly-gestured theme, mostly in the bass as though some celestial organ had lost all its treble and alto couplers but none of its volume: the
Ode to Joy
in a stately majestic tempo. From the corner of his eye he noticed that four European visitors sitting at a nearby table were uneasy, wondering whether to stand in honor of their continental anthem.

“How in the—?”

“Don’t talk! Harmonize!”

Well, if the last note was from
that
projector and the one adjacent is now delivering
that
note … He had never taken much interest in coley, but Kate’s enthusiasm was infectious; her face was bright, her eyes sparkled. She looked as though some other age might have judged her beautiful.

He tried this movement, that one, another different … and suddenly there was a chord, a true fifth. Which slipped a little, and had to be corrected, and—
got it!
A whole phrase of the melody in two meticulously harmonizing parts.

“I’ll be damned,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “I never met anyone before over about twenty-five and capable of proper coley. We should get together more often!”

And then someone on the far side of the floor who looked no more than fifteen wiped the music of Beethoven and substituted something new, angular, acid—probably Japanese.

After the madrigal concert where he also met her, and the lakeside fish fry where he also met her, and the target-archery meet where he also met her, and the swimming gala where he also met her, and the lecture on advances in the application of topology to business administration where he also met her, he could hold back his challenge no longer.

“Are you following me or something?”

Tonight she was wearing something sexy and diaphanous, and she had had her hair machine-coiffed. But she was still plain, still bony, still disturbing.

“No,” was her answer. “Pre-guessing you. I don’t have you completely pegged yet—I went to the wrong place last night—but I’m closing in fast. You, Sandy Locke, are trying far too hard to adhere to a statistical norm. And I hate to see a good man go to waste.”

With which she spun on her heel and strode—one might almost have said marched—to rejoin her escort, a plump young man who scowled at him as though virulently jealous.

He simply stood there, feeling his stomach draw drumhead-tight and sweat break out on his palms.

To be sought by federal officials: that was one thing. He was accustomed to it after six years, and his precautions had become second nature. But to have his persona as Sandy Locke penetrated with such rapidity by a girl he barely knew …!

Got to switch her off my circuit! She makes me feel the way I felt when I first quit Tarnover—as though I was certain to be recognized by everyone I passed on the street, as though a web were closing that would trap me for the rest of my life. And I thought that poor kid Gaila had problems … STOP STOP STOP! I’m being Sandy Locke, and no child ever came sobbing out of the night to beg his help!

SEE ISAIAH 8:1-2

Make speed to the spoil, for the prey hasteneth.

YEARSHIFT

“I thought you’d never show,” Kate said caustically, and stood back from the door of her apartment. He had caught her wearing nothing but shorts, baggy with huge pockets, and a film of dust turning here and there to slime with perspiration. “Still, you picked a good time. I’m just getting rid of last year’s things. You can give me a hand.”

He entered with circumspection, vaguely apprehensive of what he might find inside this home of hers: the upper floor of what at the turn of the century must have been a desirable one-family house. Now it was subdivided, and the area was on the verge of ghettohood. The streets were deep in litter and tribe-signs were plentiful. Bad tribes at that—the Kickapoos and the Bent Minds.

Four rooms here had been interconnected by enlarging doorways into archways; only the bathroom remained isolated. As he glanced around, his attention was immediately caught by a splendidly stuffed mountain lion on a low shelf at the end of the hallway, warmed by a shaft of bright sunlight—

Stuffed?

It came back in memory as clear as though Ina were here to speak the words: “She blames it all on that cat her father gave her. …”

Regarding him almost as steadily as her unlikely pet, Kate said, “I wondered how you would react to Bagheera. Congratulations; you get full marks. Most people turn and run. You’ve just gone a trifle pale around the gills. To answer all your questions in advance—yes, he is entirely tame except when I tell him to be otherwise, and he was a present from my father, who saved him from being used up in a circus. You know who my father was, I presume.”

His mouth very dry, he nodded. “Henry Lilleberg,” he said in a croaking voice. “Neurophysiologist. Contracted degenerative myelitis in the course of a research program and died about four years ago.”

“That’s right.” She was moving toward the animal, hand outstretched. “I’ll introduce you, and after that you needn’t worry.”

Somehow he found himself scratching the beast behind his right ear, and the menace he had originally read in those opal eyes faded away. When he withdrew his hand Bagheera heaved an immense sigh, laid his chin on his paws and went to sleep.

“Good,” Kate said. “I expected him to like you. Not that that makes you anything special. … Had you heard about him from Ina, by the way? Is that why you weren’t surprised?”

“You think I wasn’t? She said you had a cat, so I assumed—Never mind. It all comes clear now.”

“Such as what?”

“Why you stay on at UMKC instead of sampling Other universities. You must be very attached to him.”

“Not especially. Sometimes he’s a drag. But when I was sixteen I said I’d accept responsibility for him, and I’ve kept my word. He’s growing old now—won’t last more than eighteen months—so … But you’re right. Dad had a license to transport protected species interstate, but I wouldn’t stand a hope in hell of getting one, let alone a permit to keep him on residential premises anywhere else. I’m not exactly tied hand and foot, though. I can take vacations for a week or two, and the girls downstairs feed and walk him for me, but that’s about his limit, and eventually he gets fretful and they have to call me back. Annoys my boyfriends … Come on, this way.”