The Shockwave Rider (6 page)

Odds, though, were poor on that sector of the board, except ten-to-one against the adoption of the proposed new amendment to the Constitution which would redefine electoral zones in terms of professions and age groups rather than geographical location. It might make sense, but people were scarcely ready for it yet. Next generation, maybe.

He turned his attention to social analysis, which was offering many double and a few treble figures. He put a thousand on the chance that the mugging-per-adult rate in New York City would break ten percent this year; it had been hovering around eight for an improbably long time and people were losing their enthusiasm, but there was a new police chief in the Bronx with a get-tough reputation and that ought to sew the matter up.

And the technical breakthrough odds were also nice and fat. For old time’s sake he put another thousand on the introduction of an Earth-Moon gravislide before 2025. That was a perennial disappointment. The idea was to haul cargo off the Moon on a cable stretching past the neutral point and spill it direct into Earth’s gravity-well so it could coast to a landing free of charge. It had failed twice already. But someone in New Zealand was on the track of mile-long single-crystal filaments. Given those …

A couple of hungry-faced old men, one black and the other white, who clearly were not here to travel but merely to pass the time, noticed him placing the wager. They studied his expensive clothes, assessed his air of financial well-being, and after some argument agreed to risk fifty apiece.

“It beats horse racing,” he heard one of them say.

“I used to like the horses!” the other objected, and they moved on, their voices querulous as though both craved the tension discharge of a quarrel but dared not start one for fear of losing an only friend.

Hmm! I wonder whether the Delphi systems in Russia, or East Germany, are patterned on stock markets and totalizators the way ours obviously are. One knows that in China they—

But at that moment he caught sight of odds being quoted which he simply didn’t believe. One gets three in favor of genetic optimization becoming a commercial service by 2020, instead of a privilege reserved to government officials, hypercorp execs and billionaires? Last time he saw a board it had been up around 200, regardless of the fact that the public was clearly hungry for it. Such a violent crash in the odds must surely be due to inside information. One of the thousand-and-some staff and “students” at Tarnover must have yielded to the temptation to go sell his headful of data, and company scientists somewhere must be busily trying to turn a vague hope into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Unless …

Oh, no! It can’t be that they know somebody did get away? After all this time, after these six mortal, hateful years, has the precious secret of my escape leaked out?

There couldn’t possibly be a connection! Even so—!

The world swam around him for the space of half a dozen thumping heartbeats. Some one jostled him roughly; he was barely able to perceive that it was an economist, wearing a sewn-on badge in bright green and white saying underpower!—one of the people who on principle declined to use up their full power allotment and did their utmost to prevent others from using theirs. There were alleged to be a great many economists at KC.

Then a bright voice was saying, “Sandy, good to see you—Is something wrong?”

Vast effort pulled him back together, smiling, calm, in a condition to note how changed Ina was from the image she’d presented at the resort. She wore a light but severe coverall in plain black and white, and her long hair was in a snood. She was very much the head-of-dept doing a special favor to this recruit who was slotting into a higher-than-average level of the hierarchy.

Therefore he didn’t kiss her, didn’t even take her hand, simply said, “Hello. No, nothing’s wrong. Except I just saw what the odds are on my favorite long shot. One of these mornings I’ll wake to find my credit well and truly docked.”

As he spoke, he started toward the exit. Ina, and the autoporter, kept pace.

“You have baggage?” she inquired.

“Just this. I sent the rest direct. I hear you have a great settlement block.”

“Oh, yes. It has a fine record. Been in use for ten years and so far not one environmental psychosis. Speaking of accommodation, I should have asked if you plan to bring a house with you. Currently we have room for one on site; we don’t start building our next factory until September.”

“No, I’ve had my house four years so I decided to trade it in. Matter of fact, I might get my next built here. I’m told there are good architects around KC.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know. I prefer to plug into an apt, but someone at the party might advise you.”

“I’ll ask around. What time is it set for?”

“Eight o’clock. The welcome suite is right on the entrance floor. All your signifying colleagues will be there.”

PARADOX, NEXT STOP AFTER THE BOONDOCKS

“It’s not because my mind is made up that I don’t want you to confuse me with any more facts.

“It’s because my mind isn’t made up. I already have more facts than I can cope with.

“So shut up, do you hear me? shut up!”

YOU’RE BEING FRAMED

Although this was strictly transient accommodation, it differed subtly from a hotel suite. He noted with approval the touches that made it more like a smart private apartment. Retractable textured walls could subdivide the main room in half a dozen ways, according to taste. The decor on his arrival was in neutral shades: beige, pale blue and white. He made use at once of the switch by the door to change that to rich dark green, russet and old gold. It was done with lights behind translucent paneling. The conveniences, such as the three-vee, the polarity-reversal clothing cleaner and the electrotoner attached to the bathtub, were not the basic hotel-chain type but the more expensive home-use version. Perhaps most important of all, you could not only draw back the curtains but even open the windows. That was a facility not found in hotels nowadays.

Out of curiosity he did open one, and found he was looking over treetops toward the source of a roaring noise which a moment ago had been inaudible thanks to superefficient soundproofing.

What in the world—?

Followed a moment later by the wry contradiction:
What out of this world—?

A brilliant light, dazzling as a magnesium flare, rose into sight above the trees and to the roar was added the impact of blast. He just managed to discern the needle-form of a one-man orbital ship before the glare compelled him to shut his eyes and turn away, groping for the window-closure again.

No doubt that would be one of G2S’s troubleshooters on his way to orbit. The company was proud of its prompt and efficient after-sales service, and since even now three out of four orbital factories were one-off projects—new industries kept deciding to jump up there every other week—that was an essential element in preserving its field-leader rating.

Which was not, in fact, as stable as the G2S board wished the public to believe. He’d investigated. Among the tasks he expected to be assigned, even though Ina hadn’t mentioned it, was penetration of a rival corporation’s research into so-called olivers, electronic alter egos designed to save the owner the strain of worrying about all his person-to-person contacts. A sort of twenty-first-century counterpart to the ancient Roman nomenclator, who discreetly whispered data into the ear of the emperor and endowed him with the reputation of a phenomenal memory. G2S was badly in need of diversification, but before picking up the option it had on a small independent company’s work in this area, it wanted to make certain nobody else had reached the stage of commercial launching.

It would be a good-sized feather in his cap if he produced the answer within a few days of starting work.

Continuing his tour of inspection he discovered, neatly tucked away under the bed, a tension reliever with a reversible proboscis which a woman could let stand out and a man could simply push inward … or not, according to taste. Above it was a small but fine-detail screen, the images fed to which were changed—said a little label—on an eight-day rota; there were also headphones and a mask offering twenty odors.

Replacing the instrument in its sanitizing case, he decided he’d have to experiment with it at least once or twice; it was appropriate to the plug-in life-style, after all. But at most two or three times. Corporations like G2S were wary of people who relied excessively on machines in place of person-to-person contact. They would be watching.

He sighed. To think that some people were (had to be?) content with mechanical gratification. … But maybe it was best in certain special cases: for instance, for those who had to establish deep emotional attachments or none at all, who suffered agonies when a change of employment or a posting to another city shattered their connections, who were safest when keeping their chance colleagues at a distance.

Not for the first time he reflected on the good fortune—heavily disguised—which had stunted his own capacity for intense emotional involvement to the point where he was content with mere liking. It was so much superior to the transitory possessiveness he had been exposed to in childhood, the strict impersonality maintained during his teener years at Tarnover.

Best not to think about Tarnover.

Showering down, he relished his new situation. Much would depend on the personalities of the people he was about to meet at the welcome party, but they were bound to be good stable plug-in types, and certainly the nature of the job was ideal for his talents. Most commercial systems were sub-logical and significantly redundant, so he’d have no trouble tidying up a few tangles, saving G2S a couple of million a year, by way of proving he really was a systems rash. They’d regard him within weeks as an invaluable recruit.

Meantime, taking advantage of the corporation’s status, he could gain access to data-nets that were ordinarily secure. That was the whole point of coming to KC. He wanted—more, he needed—data that as a priest he’d never have dared to probe for. Six years was about as far ahead as he’d been able to plan when he escaped from Tarnover, so …

He was stepping out of the shower compartment, dried by blasts of warm air, when he heard the sound of his circulation enormous in his ears: thud, thud, thud-thud-thud-thud, faster with each passing second. Giddy, furious, he clutched at the rim of the hand-basin to steady himself and caught a glimpse of Sandy Locke’s face in the mirror above it—haggard, aged by decades on the instant—before he realized he wasn’t going to make it to the tranquilizers he’d left in the main room. He was going to have to stay right here and fight back with yoga-style deep breathing.

His mouth was dry, his belly was drum-taut, his teeth wanted to chatter but couldn’t because his jaw muscles were so tense, his vision wavered and there was a line of cramp as brutal as a knife-cut all the way up his right calf. And he was
cold.

But luckily it wasn’t a bad attack. In less than ten minutes he was able to reach his inhalers, and he was only three minutes late joining the party.

BETWEEN 500 AND 2000 TIMES A DAY

Somewhere out there, a house or an apartment or a hotel or motel room: beautiful, comfortable, a living hell.

Stonkered or clutched or quite simply going insane, someone reaches for the phone and punches the most famous number on the continent: the ten nines that key you into Hearing Aid.

And talks to a blank though lighted screen. It’s a service. Imposing no penances, it’s kinder than the confessional. Demanding no fees, it’s affordable where psychotherapy is not. Offering no advice, it’s better than arguing with that son (or daughter) of a bitch who thinks he/she knows all the answers and goes on and on and
on
until you want to scream.

In a way it’s like using the I Ching. It’s a means of concentrating attention on reality. Above all, it provides an outlet for all the frustration you’ve struggled to digest for fear that, learning of it, your friends would brand you
failure.

It must help some of the unhappy ones. The suicide rate is holding steady.

FLESHBACK SEQUENCE

Today, said the impersonal instruments, it would be advisable to waken the subject fully; too long spent in the trance-like state of recall that he had endured for the past forty-two days might endanger his conscious personality. The recommendation was not unwelcome to Paul Freeman. He was growing more and more intrigued by this man whose past had been mapped along so improbable a course.

On the other hand there was a diktat in force, straight from the Federal Bureau of Data Processing, which instructed him to produce a full report in the shortest possible time. Hence Hartz’s flying visit. And that had lasted a whole working day, moreover, when one might have expected the typical “hello-how-interesting-goodbye” pattern. Someone in Washington must have a hunch … or at any rate have gone out so far on a limb as to need results regardless of what they were.

He compromised. For a single day he would talk person-to-person instead of merely replaying facts from store in a living memory.

He quite looked forward to the change.