The Shockwave Rider (30 page)

Tarnover: tomorrow, sure. But hopefully the wrong tomorrow. Because it’s planned and controlled by people who were born the day before yesterday.

How do you cope with tomorrow when (a) it may not be like the real tomorrow but (b) it’s arrived when you weren’t ready for it?

One approach is offered by the old all-purpose beatitude: “blessed are they who expect the worst …” Hence reactions like Anti-Trauma Inc. Nothing worse can happen in later life than what was done to you as a child.

(Wrong tomorrow.)

Another is inherent in the concept of the plug-in life-style: no matter where you go, there are people like the ones you left behind, furniture and clothes and food like the ones you left behind, the same drinks available across any bar: “Say, settle a bet for us, willya? Is this the Paris Hilton or the Istanbul Hilton?”

(Wrong tomorrow. It offers the delusive hope that tomorrow will be pretty much like today, but it got here and it isn’t.)

Yet another lies in preparing for it: using public Delphi boards, for example, to monitor what people are ready to adapt to, yearn to adapt to, and won’t adapt to at any price.

(Wrong tomorrow. They decided to let traditional market forces flywheel the weight of decision. The favorite who started at odds-on broke his leg at the first fence and the race is far from over.)

Yet another lies in the paid-avoidance areas: you trade in your right to the latest-and-greatest against an allowance of unearned credit, enough to keep body and soul together.

(Wrong tomorrow. It’s going to overtake you anyway, and city-smashing quakes are part of it.)

While still another consists in getting good and clutched by some heavy brand of dope, so things that happen can’t really hurt.

(Wrong tomorrow. Ash longer,
vita brevis.
)

And so forth.

Religion?

Change cities, by order. Last place it was a Catholic framework; here it’s Ecumenical Pentecostal and the minister is kind of into the Tao.

Chemicals?

Almost everybody is high like troops on the way to battle. Shaking! You hear tension sing in the air you breathe. The only way you want awareness shifted is back to normal.

Trust in authority?

But it’s your right as a free and equal individual to be as authoritative as anybody else.

Model yourself on a celebrity?

But you were celebrated last week, you had a record-breaking Delphi ticket or your kid was on three-vee defying ’gators or you notched up one full year in the same house and the reporter called in from the local station. For ten whole minutes you’ve been famous too.

Collapse into overload?

That’s already happened, nearly as often as you’ve been to bed with a head cold.

And patiently, from every single one of these possible pathways, they’ve turned you back to where you were with a smile of encouragement and a pat on the shoulder and a bright illuminated certificate that reads no exit.

Therefore the world keeps turning, the ads keep changing, there are always programs to watch when you switch on the three-vee, there’s always food in the supermarket and power at the socket and water at the sink. Well, not quite always. But near as dammit.

And there’s nearly always a friend to answer the phone.

And there’s nearly always credit behind your code.

And there’s nearly always some other place you can go.

And when the night sky happens to be clear, there are invariably more stars in it, moving faster, than were put there at the Creation. So that’s okay.

Pretty well.

More or less.

HELP!

For these and sundry other reasons, at their next battery stop he gave the driver the slip and Kate her dress and shoes and wig and melted into the mass of people boarding a shuttle bus bound for the nearest veetol port. For the driver, who was sure to be puzzled, he left a note saying:

Thanks, soldier. You were very helpful. If you want to know how helpful, punch this code into the nearest phone.

The code, naturally, being his own new acquisition.

PRECEPT DINNED INTO TRAFFIC PATROL OFFICERS DURING TRAINING

Someone is apt to swoop on you from a great height if you ticket a vehicle with a heavy federal code behind the wheel.

MOUSING AROUND UNDER THE FEET OF ELEPHANTS

“Where are we going?” Kate whispered.

“I finally located my place to stand.”

“Precipice?” she suggested, half hopefully, half anxiously. “Surely that’s where they’ll head for straight away.”

“Mm-hm. Sorry, I don’t mean place. I mean
places.
I should have figured this out long ago. No one place could ever be big enough. I have to be in a hundred of them, all at the same time, and a thousand if I can manage it. It’s bound to take a while to put my insight into practice, but—oh, maybe in a couple of months we shall be able to sit back and enjoy the fireworks.”

“I always did like fireworks,” she said with the ghost of a smile, and took his hand.

FOUR-WAY INTERSECTION WITH STOP SIGNS

These days it was easy to lose track of what features belonged with what names. Therefore there were captions under each of the faces on the four-station secure link, names and offices. Hartz gazed at the split-screen array before him, reading from left to right.

From Tarnover, its chancellor: Admiral Bertrand Snyder, ascetic, gray-haired, short-spoken, who had been famous under the sobriquet of “Singleminded Snyder” during the Hawaiian Insurrection of 2002 … but that was before he entered the Civil Service and a cloud of secrecy.

From the Southern White House, the president’s special adviser on security, plump and bespectacled Dr. Guglielmo Dorsi, no longer known even to his intimates (though it had not proved possible to eradicate the nickname entirely from his dossiers) as Billy the Shiv.

And from another floor of this same building, his own superior, the Full Director of the Bureau, Mr. Aylwin Sullivan, tall, beak-nosed, shock-haired, and deliberately shabby. It had been the style for those working with computers when he launched out on his rocket-like career. Nonetheless it was odd to look at his open-neck shirt, pocketful of old pens, five-o’week shadow, black-rimmed nails.

As though the past had stepped into the present.

All three of the faces on the screen frowned at Hartz: Snyder with annoyance, Dorsi with suspicion, Sullivan with impatience. They let pecking order decide who should speak. Highest in the hierarchy Sullivan said, “Are you insane? Only a few days ago you insisted we deevee all the 4GH codes assigned to FBI, CIA, Secret Service—and now here you are claiming that the U-group codes must be junked too! You couldn’t cause more trouble if you were a paid subversive.”

Dorsi said, “Let me remind you of this, too. Upon my asking what to use when we replaced the 4GH, you personally advised me that there was no known means of leeching any code from the reserve and assigning it to U-group status without that fact being revealed in your own bureau’s computers. No record of such action can be found, can it? I can just see the president’s face if I were to go to him with such a crazy story.”

“But when I said that I didn’t know—” Hartz began. Snyder cut him short.

“What’s more, you’ve made a direct attack on my integrity and administrative efficiency. You’ve said in so many words that the person you claim to have carried out this act of sabotage is a graduate of Weychopee who moved to Tarnover at my special request and who was cleared by me in person for essential work here. I wholly agree with Mr. Sullivan. You must have taken leave of your senses.”

“Therefore,” Sullivan said, “I’m requiring you to take leave of absence as well. Preferably indefinite. Are we through with this conference? Good. I have other business to attend to.”

FOR PURPOSES OF OBFUSCATION

I know damn well I am Paul Thomas Freeman, aged thirty-nine, a government employee with scholars’ degrees in cybernetics, psychology and political science plus a master’s in data processing. Similarly I know that if as a kid I hadn’t been recruited much as Haflinger was, I’d probably have wound up as a petty criminal, into smuggling or dope or maybe running an illegal Delphi pool. Maybe I might not have been as smart as I imagine. Maybe I’d be dead.

And I also know I’ve been brilliantly maneuvered into a corner where I sacrificed everything I’ve gained in life on a spur-of-the-moment impulse, threw away my career, let myself in—quite possibly—for a treason trial … and with no better excuse than that I like Haflinger better than Hartz and the buggers at his back. A corner? More like a deep dark hole!

So why the hell do I feel so goddamn
happy?

FULCRUM

When he finished explaining how he had contrived their escape, Kate said incredulously, “Was that all?”

“Not quite. I also made a call to the ten nines.”

“Ah. I should have guessed.”

A MATTER OF HYSTERICAL RECORD

When the short-lived Allende government was elected to power in Chile and needed a means of balancing that unfortunate country’s precarious economy, Allende appealed to the British cybernetics expert Stafford Beer.

Who announced that as few as ten significant quantities, reported from a handful of key locations where adequate communications facilities existed, would enable the state of the economy to be reviewed and adjusted on a day-to-day basis.

Judging by what happened subsequently, his claim infuriated nearly as many people as did the news that there are only four elements in the human genetic code.

LIKE THEY SAY, IT’S BOUNCE OR BREAK

At Ann Arbor, Michigan, research psychologist Dr. Zoë Sideropoulos had house guests for a week. She was an expert in hypnosis and had written a well-known study of the regression effect which, in suitable cases, makes possible the recovery of memories ordinarily lost to conscious awareness without such crude physical aids as electrodes planted in the subject’s brain.

During the week she made exceptionally intensive use of her home computer terminal. Or rather, that was what the machines believed.

When he was able to take a break from using Dr. Sideropoulos’s terminal—a new and extremely efficient model—Kate brought him omelets and the nearest surviving commercial equivalent of “real beer.”

“Eat before it’s cold,” she commanded. “Then talk. In detail and with footnotes.”

“I’m glad you said that. We’re going to have a lot of time to fill. I need to scramble some circuitry at Canaveral, or wherever, rather more completely than you scrambled these eggs, and I know for sure I’m going to have to make the computers do things they’re specifically forbidden to. But not to worry. When they built their defenses they weren’t reckoning on somebody like me.”

He set about demolishing the omelet; it lasted for a dozen hungry bites.

“But I do worry,” Kate muttered. “Are you
certain
you can trust Paul Freeman?”

He laid aside his empty plate. “Remember how at Lap-of-the-Gods you upbraided me because I wouldn’t believe anyone else was on my side?”

“
Touchée.
But I want my answer.”

“Yes. There’s an honest man. And finally he’s figured out what constitutes evil in the modern world.”

“So what’s your definition?”

“One that I already know you agree with, because we talked about Anti-Trauma Inc. If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.”

In a dry voice she said, “I won’t argue.”

At Boulder, Colorado, Professor Joachim Yent of the School of Economics and Business Administration had house guests for a few days. During that time, it was duly recorded that he made exceptionally frequent use of his home computer terminal.

“Kate, when you take a liking to somebody, do you speed up or slow down?”

“Do I what—? Oh, got it. Slow down, I guess. I mean to get where we can talk to each other I quit skipping for a while.”

“And
vice versa?
”

“Most times, no. In fact you’re the only person I ever met who could work it the other way—uh … Sandy? What is your name, damn it? I just realized I still don’t know.”

“You decide. Stick with Sandy if you like, or switch to what I started out with: Nicholas, Nickie, Nick. I don’t care. I’m myself, not a label.”

She puckered her lips to blow him a kiss. “I don’t care what you’re called, either. I only know I’m glad we slowed down to the same speed.”

At Madison, Wisconsin, Dean Prudence McCourtenay of the Faculty of Laws had house guests for a long weekend. It was’ similarly recorded that during their visit she made more than averagely frequent use of her domestic computer terminal.