“Have you ever been there before?”
“Now and then. I get ideas for packets.”
“And before that. What were you doing?”
“I worked at the Agency most of the day. Then I got—bored.”
“You went from the Agency directly to Hokkaido?”
His patient started to nod. And then he stopped, and a dark, intricate expression crossed his face. “No. I walked around for awhile. I fogot [sic] about that. I remember visiting—” He paused for a long time. “A commissary. To get some 3.2 beer. But why would I want beer? I don’t particularly like beer.”
“Did anything happen?”
Mr. Coates stared at him. “I can’t remember.”
Malparto made a notation.
“I left the Agency. And then a haze closes over the whole d–n thing. At least half an hour is cut out.”
Rising to his feet Malparto pressed a key on his desk intercom. “Would you ask two therapists to step in here, please? And I’m not to be disturbed until further notice. Cancel my next appointment. When my sister comes in I’d like to see her. Yes, let her by. Thanks.” He closed the key.
Mr. Coates, agitated, said: “What now?”
“Now you get your wish.” Unlocking the supply closet he began wheeling out equipment. “The drugs and gadgetry. So we can dig down and find out what happened between the time you left the Agency and the time you reached Hokkaido.”
CHAPTER 9
The silence depressed him. He was alone in the Mogentlock Building, working in the center of a vast tomb. Outside, the sky was cloudy and overcast. At eight-thirty he gave up.
Eight-thirty. Not ten.
Closing his desk he left the Agency and went out onto the dark sidewalk. Nobody was in sight. The lanes were deserted; on Sunday evening there was no flood of commuters. He saw only the shapes of housing units, closed-up commissaries, the hostile sky.
His historical research had acquainted him with the vanished phenomenon of the neon sign. Now he would have wished for a few to break the monotony. The garish, blaring racket of commercials, ads, blinking signs—it had disappeared. Swept aside like a bundle of faded circus posters: to be pulped by history for the printing of textbooks.
Ahead, as he walked sightlessly along the lane, was a cluster of lights. The cluster drew him, and presently he found himself at an autofac receiving station.
The lights formed a hollow ring rising a few hundred feet.
Within the circle an autofac ship was lowering itself, a tubby cylinder pitted and corroded by its trip. There were no humans aboard, and there were none at its point of origin. Nor was the receiving equipment manual. When the robot controls had landed the ship, other self-regulating machines would unload it, check the shipment, cart the boxes into the commissary, and store them. Only with the clerk and the customer did the human element come into it.
At the moment a small band of sidewalk superintendents was gathered around the station, following operations. As usual, the bulk of watchers were teen-agers. Hands in their pockets, the boys gazed up raptly. Time passed and none of them stirred. None of them spoke. Nobody came and nobody went.
“Big,” one boy finally observed. He was tall, with dull red hair, pebbled skin. “The ship.”
“Yes,” Allen agreed, also looking up. “I wonder where it’s from,” he said awkwardly. As far as he was concerned the industrial process was like the movement of planets: it functioned automatically and that was as it should be.
“It’s from Bellatrix 7,” the boy stated, and two of his mute companions nodded. “Tungsten products. They been unloading light-globes all day. Bellatrix’s only a slave system. None of them habitable.”
“Nuts to Bellatrix,” a companion spoke up.
Allen was puzzled. “Why?”
“Because you can’t live there.”
“What do you care?”
The boys regarded him with contempt. “Because we’re going,” one of them croaked finally.
“Where?”
Contempt turned to disgust; the group of boys edged away from him. “Out. Where it’s open. Where something’s going on.”
The red-headed boy told him: “On Sirius 9 they grow walnuts. Almost like here. You can’t taste the difference. A whole planet of walnut trees. And on Sirius 8 they grow oranges. Only, the oranges died.”
“Mealy bug blight,” a companion said gloomily. “Got all the oranges.”
The red-headed boy said: “I’m personally going to Orionus. There they breed a real pig you can’t tell from the original. I defy you to tell the difference; I defy you.”
“But that’s away from center,” Allen said. “Be realistic—it’s taken your families decades to lease this close.”
“—-,” one of the boys said bitterly, and then they had melted away, leaving Allen to ponder an obvious fact.
Morec wasn’t natural. As a way of life it had to be learned. That was the fact, and the unhappiness of the boys was there to remind him.
The commissary, to which the autofac receiving station belonged, was still open. He stepped through the entrance, reaching, as he did so, for his wallet.
“Sure,” the invisible clerk said, as the buy card was punched out. “But only the 3.2 stuff. You really want to drink that?” The window displaying the beer bottles glowed along the wall of items. It’s made from hay.”
Once, a thousand years ago, he had punched the slot for 3.2 beer and got a fifth of scotch. God knew where it came from. Perhaps it had survived the war, had been discovered by a robot storekeeper and automatically placed in the single official rack. It had never happened again, but he continued to punch the slot, hoping in a wan, childish way. Evidently it was one of the implausible foul-ups that occurred even in the perfect society.
“Refund,” he requested, setting the unopened bottle on the counter. “I’ve changed my mind.”
“I told you,” the clerk said, and restored Allen’s buy card. Allen stood for a moment, empty-handed, his mind flat with futility. Then he walked outside again.
A moment later he was climbing the ramp to the tiny roof-top field used by the Agency for rush flights. The sliver was parked there, locked up in its shed.
“And that’s all?” Malparto asked. He clicked off the overhanging trellis of wires and lenses that had been focussed on his patient. “Nothing else happened between the time you left your office and the time you started for Hokkaido?”
“Nothing else.” Mr. Coates lay prone on the table, his arms at his sides. Above him the two technicians examined their meters.
“That was the incident you couldn’t remember?”
“Yes, the boys at the autofac station.”
“You were despondent?”
“I was,” Mr. Coates agreed. His voice lacked emotion; under the blanket of drugs his personality had receded to diffusion.
“Why?”
“Because it was unfair.”
Malparto saw no point involved; the incident meant nothing to him. He had expected a sensational revelation of murder or copulation or excitement or all three together.
“Let’s go on,” he said reluctantly. “The Hokkaido episode itself.” Then he lingered. “The incident with the boys. You genuinely feel it was crucial?”
“Yes,” Mr. Coates said.
Malparto shrugged, and signalled to his technicians to restart the trellis of paraphernalia.
Darkness lay all around. The sliver dropped toward the island below, guiding itself, speaking to itself mechanically. He rested his head against the seat and closed his eyes. The whoosh of descent lessened, and, on the signal board, a blue light blinked.
There was no field to locate; all Hokkaido was a field. He tripped the landing release, and the ship coasted of its own accord across the surface of ash. Eventually the pattern of
Sugermann’s transmitter was intercepted and the ship changed its course. The pattern led it in and brought it down. With a faint bump and a few rattles the ship eased to a stop. Now the only sound was the hum of batteries recharging.
Allen opened the door and stepped haltingly out. The ash sank under his feet; it was like standing on mush. The ash was complicated, a mixture of organic and inorganic compounds. A fusion of people and their possessions into a common gray-black blur. During the postwar years the ash had made good mortar.
To his right was an insignificant glow. He walked toward it, and ultimately it became Tom Gates waving a flashlight.
“Morec to you,” Gates said. He was a bony, pop-eyed shrimp with uncombed hair and a nose bent like a macaw’s.
“How’re things?” Allen asked, as he plodded after the gaunt shape toward the neck of the underground shelter. Built during the war, the shelter was still intact. Gates and Sugermann had reinforced and improved it, Gates pounding nails and Sugermann overseeing.
“I was expecting Sugie. It’s almost dawn on this side; he’s been out all night buying supplies.” Gates giggled, a nervous high-pitched twitter. “Trading big. We got a good hand, these days. Plenty of stuff people want; don’t kid yourself.”
The stairs brought them down to the shelter’s main room. It was a litter of books, furniture, paintings, cans and boxes and jars of food, carpets and bric-a-brac and just plain junk. The phonograph was blaring a Chicago version of “I Can’t Get Started.” Gates turned it down, grinning.