CHAPTER NINE

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Fred Holmes reckoned enough was enough. The three-ring emblem on his tricky dining-table video was beginning to annoy him. All mummery aside, in a functional tabard and nicely pressed slacks, he was waiting for Taubman to concede and call him in for a private session with some offer of a deal. It would be a pleasure to acquaint the old fox with the facts of life. The only deal would be a brand new administration.

Then, with the Beta organization behind him, there would be a development plan for Wirral City, which would put it at the top of the A.E.C. league; another empire, to compete with the piping days of ancient Europe. Anything was possible, when the pattern was broken. They had the right of it, those long gone revolutionaries. Break down and then build.

Other than his own staff, the only member of the faction to share his thoughts was Harry Grabe, who had visited his own precinct, found most voters gone, and decided to take himself out of it. Having no personal ties and no summer home, he had stopped off at the villa to bone up on a few vital facts. Time lines being one.

First, however, he asked something, which he now saw should have been cleared up at the outset. "How did you get on to this Beta outfit?"

"I've known about the way through to that level for years. Don't forget, I was chief engineer before I retired. Came across it by accident and said nothing. Thought it might come in useful. I built a listening box to pick up their frequency. It's a very complex affair. They're almost human. More human than some, by a damn sight."

"How did you make contact?"

"After a time, I put in a two-way circuit. Talked to the organizer. They have a regular hierarchy, leaders of districts, management cadres. They call the top unit The Director. There's a legal code and punishment by deprivation of power ration. Puts the delinquent in cold storage for a spell. Recently, they've been getting interference on their band, which was throwing them out of kilter. They're a much more delicately balanced job than the androids we use. They wanted it sorted out." Grabe asked the question that was bothering him, "So now they're up here. When do they hand over to you again?"

"Anytime now. Don't worry. They don't want to roll in the clover. They're comfortable down there. They'd only rust in the fresh air."

"I'd be a lot happier if I could hear one of them say that."

"Why not? Government House is clear now. I'll go over there and talk to the top hand. You can come and listen."

Harry Grabe fingered his long chin and weighed his words. "That's all right, Fred. I'm prepared to believe you. I'll stay here and answer any calls. You go right ahead. Have it put on a tape. It will rate as a historic document. As soon as you can, you should put out a call to the regional council. Some of the refugees might be giving out all kinds of fancy stories."

He watched from the forecourt while Holmes's private car rose from the apron and wheeled out of the bowl of light toward the whale-back bulk of the city. The senator had taken a party of four—his secretary and three men in trim gray coveralls with armbands bearing a black dolphin. A small color party to accept the surrender of a city. It was a good theatrical touch. Grabe went back inside and a girl filled his glass. He began to feel more optimistic. Maybe Holmes had really started something new.

Outside, there was the long-drawn howl of a hunting pack, which went well with the mosaic of a chase on the floor of the dining hall but underlined the sense of being at an outpost. He was essentially a city man, and he realized that the sooner all was settled and he was back in his own pad, the better he would be pleased. At night and in the country, it was still possible to feel insecure. Not only in the country either. Confidence had carried Holmes to the threshold of the operations center at Government House, but forward progress to the Council itself was barred by an officious adjutant who did not seem to be aware that it was holding up a head of state.

Holmes fell back on a question that fairly asked to be knocked.

"Do you know who I am?"

"Very well. You are an Alpha human. The Director is expecting you. But at this moment, there is an important briefing. You must wait."

"Is the Director here then?"

"Only an advance module. But that is no concern of yours."

They were in a small circular room that opened from a wide landing at the head of the main staircase. Ramps had been laid to make movement possible for the ball-footed androids. A couple had followed up and rolled to a halt in the doorway. Flanking the adjutant, two more barred the double-leaf entrance to the council chamber itself.

Holmes suddenly saw the red light. "All right. The Director won't be pleased with you for this. However, I understand there is a lot to do. We'll wait below in the lounge." He turned about and marched for the exit. There was no move from the attendants until he was almost level and lined up to walk between them. Then they raised their arms to make an instant fence. Momentum carried him to meet it with his chest. The physical fact of it and the real pain brought him to a full understanding of the situation he was in.

He said thickly, "Tell these zombies to get out of my way."

"That is not possible. As I said, The Director is not unwilling to see you. I have the signal now. You may come through this way."

"That's better."

The familiar council chamber had been cleared of console desks. They were stacked in a confused heap under the press balcony. On the chief-citizen's raised table, there was a plain gray box, a half-meter cube, with two slender antennae on its upper surface. Ranked in the auditorium were a couple of dozen Beta androids, distinguished by a colored letter code after the treble-O-reference numerals. Not a head turned. The antennae narrowed to an acute angle, and a flat, deliberate voice spoke from the area of the dais as though its owner were dematerialized, halfway between floor and ceiling.

"Come forward, senator. You are in time to see the first decision of the Beta council carried out." Although there was no visible movement, a display panel showing a stylized diagram of the city appeared on the wall above the platform. In all his time on the council, Holmes had not seen it used. The Horizons were plainly marked. Beta had pictographs of androids with a key to read off a population level Gamma was canceled throughout its length by a line of red asterisks. Delta showed a mixture of human figures and androids.

The box had an authoritative presence and Holmes spoke to it without any sense of being ridiculous.

"Director, we are partners in this enterprise. I can promise you that the new administration will give first priority to solving your interference problem. I have done my part. Now you must allow me to reconvene the Alpha Council and draw up an agreement for our future cooperation." It was difficult for an unrelieved cube to laugh, but a sense of ironic laughter was definitely in the air. More than anything else, it finally told Holmes that the Beta androids had developed outside all knowledge. Evolving over the years, they had made out with a form of consciousness, primitive, maybe, in the rank and file, but highly sensitive in the mastermind.

A further revelation came when the voice answered his unspoken thought. "That is so. In your preoccupation with pleasure for its own sake and acceptance of a static society, without the dialectic of struggle, you have been standing still. As a species, you are in a cul-de-sac. The mainstream of living force has turned away from you. We are the vehicles of progressive thought. Your intervention was opportune, but we were almost ready to move. First here in this city, then spreading through the other centers of the European Communities, finally over the whole planet, we are the new carriers of the thinking brain. Your cooperation is of no value."

"You can't do it. A report to the Regional Council will bring in the defense force. You need my administration to give you cover."

"You still have not understood. Communications will go on as though the system had not changed. By the time our presence is known, it will be too late for that obsolescent corps to take any action. Already messages have gone out to counteract the reports carried by refugees we were not able to stop. They will return and not leave again."

The voice stopped. There was a silence in which Holmes could suddenly hear his own breathing. He knew that communication was going on, this time at a subsonic level that could not be picked up by the unaided human ear. It involved him in some way.

All felt it. They spun around in unison to see what the androids were making of it. Nicely staggered, so that no line of fire was interrupted, the whole company had extended arms to pinpoint the five envoys.

Holmes shouted, "No!" and would have added, "Stop."; but the concentration of flame caught him in mid-cry.

The Director, whether out of courtesy for the dead or simply for practice, went on in overt speech. "We can use the power that is wasted on Delta. Also, there is an unstable situation there. The periodic flux is beginning to activate the accumulations of trash under the city. Until we can deal with that, it will be prudent to terminate the life form on that Horizon. The means are ready." On the diagram an asterisk at the north end of Horizon Delta winked into life, pulsated, and settled for a steady red glow. Then another, then another at five-second intervals. In ten minutes the diagram had a full due. Delta had joined Gamma as an aseptic vault. Its termite cycle had come to a definitive halt. There were few observers to mark its passing. George Prenton had hung on in his monitor room, snared by his voyeur's eye, to watch the developing action. He had seen Joanna pick up her fugitives and finally head out for the Taubman farm. He had watched Holmes enter the Government House complex, and he reckoned that the next move would be an announcement of a new administration. Incoming signals were still strength nine, but no outgoing channel was operating. On the actualizer, he had a picture of the forecourt of his own building. With a car on the roof, he felt safe enough. As soon as one of the ball-footed goons turned up below, he would be out and away before it had rolled through the door.

It was, anyway, time to go. There was nothing more to see. Still pictures, along the whole spread, of Delta citizens caught like waxworks in every human situation were curiously unreal. The scale was too big. With nobody to feel, there was no drama.

A prudent housekeeper, he began to shut down, leaving the actualizer last. It was good thinking, an android had appeared on the set.

He flicked off the power and made for the door. Then he realized that as the picture faded, one element in the composition had stayed solid. The android was still there.

It was to some extent the vindication of a private fear that he had long felt. Sometime the actualizer would materialize its images and give them independent life to turn on their creator. He threw himself back into his chair and juggled with the switchgear. No dice. Slowly it dawned on him that he had been outflanked. The android pointed. Pain briefly filled his chest. He had joined the majority group of the dead. Concentrated in a single group, the only other observers were deployed, in depth, before a small extension monitor in the antique hall of Fairfield Farm.

It was an old building, much adapted, over the years, from the original fabric of a small manor. The hall retained some of its ancient style. There was an open hearth, with a log fire as a picturesque gimmick to supplement under-floor heating ducts; low, black beams; and a split-level floor. Almost twenty meters square, it held the watchers with room behind them for another two dozen; a speaking testament to the fact that Homo sapiens was thin on the ground.

Taubman himself was in the stalls, on a settle, twisted around to face the rear wall where the console was. Beside him, Guy Taubman and Meriel Dean were perched on an arm each. A mixed bag of male and female headquarters' staff were ranged behind, with their backs to the fire. The seven small Delta people had gathered in a group on the left wing, Gunnar Holt, Shesha Haddon, and Joanna Taubman sat on the club fender, in a physical detachment from either party that mirrored a real difference of viewpoint. A politician's instinct had moved Taubman to a minimum show of hospitality. Allies were at a premium. Any final solution of the deviants' problem could wait until the dust settled. Even Guy had seen the sense of it and had settled for an armed neutrality. Time, after all, was on their side. As soon as the Regional Council was alerted, the Beta androids would be sorted out.

Taubman watched Holmes's removal from the body politic without pleasure. He had never liked the man, and government would be easier in his absence, but the manner of going was against all constitutional procedures. It made it altogether too plain that human institutions balanced on a knife edge. Barbarism was always knocking at the gate.

When Delta began to wink out, only Stella Morton moved. She was looking for a living agent to accept blame and ran around to Taubman like a small fury. "You knew that could be done. How could you leave it in working order? You're all guilty. Those are people down there. Just like you." The obvious lack of any agreement on the Alpha faces prompted a nearer guess at the truth. "You don't mind. It doesn't matter to you. You'd have done it anyway, if it suited you." Taubman's heavy-faced stillness infuriated her further. Pain is only real if you feel it, and she was moving in to make the point when Guy Taubman came in from behind and lifted her off the ground with his forearm across her throat.

There was an instant rush from the Delta faction, and it seemed likely that even with reduced numbers, there was no guarantee of stable government.

Holt's voice cut coldly through the melee. "Hold it there." It was enough to get him a quick look from all interested parties, and the action frosted over. Standing on the fender, he was obviously looking for any target on either side, and the bleak look on his face carried complete conviction. With examples fresh in mind, nobody was anxious to be a victim.

"Let her go, Taubman. Or you're the first."

When it was done, he went on, "What's past is over. At this time, we have to plan for the here and now. Don't think they'll be content, while there's any threat from the districts around the city. There'll be patrols out to clear places like this. You heard what was said about communications. As I see it, we should send a car out right away with envoys who will be believed. That means Dr. Taubman himself. I reckon he should be away within the hour. The rest of us should move farther into the hills, out of range of anything they can do."

The sense of it was obvious. Some of the heat went from the faces turned up to listen, as they thought it through. It was reinforced by a move from the distant city itself, as though The Director had been beamed in and had been prompted to bring forward his plan. Every light went out. Holt was suddenly rim lit by the flickering fire behind him, a huge, apocryphal figure casting a grotesque shadow over the set. Outside, the small park within the ring fence was pitch black. Above the crackling fire came a single, low-drawn coyote howl.

Meriel Dean, sidetracked from the big issues, stirred race memories of little peasants being thrown from the sledge. "The fence. The fence will be off. The dogs will break in." There was a general shuffle to regroup in a semicircle around the fire, eyes and teeth brilliant with reflected light, bodies amorphous in shadow.

Taubman himself pushed to the front. "You can put away that gun, young man. It's madness for us to quarrel among ourselves. Animals or not, this place will not hold out long. With the power cut, the converter is stopped. That means no food. Now that we know what has happened, I should go myself to the Regional Council. My car has the range. It will carry six. Guy, Meriel, two senior staff, Joanna. We'll move out at once."

Carter saw it as one more defection. "What about the rest of us? Take our pick of dogs or androids?"

"There are two shuttles. Limited range, but they will take you over the foothills where the androids cannot travel. It may not be necessary to move tonight. I will send a carrier to pick you up. The sooner we leave the better. Go ahead, Guy, and prepare the car. Joanna, go up with him." Unexpectedly, there was opposition. Joanna Taubman had become sensitive for the battered Alpha image. Also, she now admitted, as a conscious thing, that she did not want to leave Gunnar Holt. Stirring under the composed mask was a passionate element that she had not suspected in herself and that the formal pattern of Alpha society had never touched. She now recognized that all the time she had spent watching him in the monitors had not been for intellectual curiosity. The biological trap had been sprung. She was committed.

She said, "No, I stay. I'll come on in the carrier with the rest." Holt said, "That's the first altruistic move that's been made in a long time. You're welcome." It had a good press. There was a general lowering of tension. Even those of the Alpha contingent not included in the getaway craft looked pleased. It was some guarantee that once out of sight, they would not be entirely out of Taubman's mind.

Joanna, unused to demonstrations of public goodwill, felt the color rise in her cheeks and was glad of the shadow. She moved away from Holt, however, in case he should misunderstand it. Or indeed, understand too well.

Something of the motive had not escaped Shesha Haddon, who had a dialogue ad-libbing in her head. She was saying to Holt, "Don't forget that she had you all lined up as an experimental subject. Don't be deceived by this surface change. It's just an illustration of the old gag about adversity making strange bedfellows."

"When adversity turns up bedfellows like that one, I'm his man."

"You mean you like her."

"She's beautiful. My type from way back."

"Then I wish you luck. I only hope you're not sorry."

At this point the subconscious dramatist put in a margin note for action. "Turns her back, hair swinging like a dark, elastic belt. Walks away without a backward look."

She had gotten seven meters into the crowd when Holt looked down from his platform and missed her. He called, "Shesha," and started to follow as Carter and Davies together came out of the crowd to meet him. Over their heads, he could see she was making for the staircase that the Alpha party had used to reach the roof.

For a moment, he thought she was going to ask for the sixth place, then Carter was talking and he had to listen.

"This move to Preston, Gunnar. It's no good. Not for either of us. Now we know the setup, we can't expect any better treatment from there than we could have had here, if the Alpha crowd had stayed in power. I reckon we should strike out on our own. Take one car, run it to its limit, and see what we can find. Lose ourselves and start an independent community."

"What do we use for food?"

"How did communities start? There'll be equipment here we could use. Hunting to start with. Then subsistence farming. Every kind of crop will be growing wild out there from the time that it was under cultivation. Better for us than all the artificial muck turned out by the converters." Davies said, "I've seen tapes about fishing. The sea's full of fish. You drop a line with a hook on it into the water and they give themselves up."

"There's a thing now," Holt's memory stirred. "The girl here, Taubman's daughter, was telling me they have a power boat in the estuary. No androids could get to that. We could use it to go down the coast and pick our place. They use it for trips, there could be some food already on board. That means waiting until morning. We couldn't sort it out in the dark."

"If they give us that long."

Davies' remark cued in a surge of engine noise from the roof. Taubman was ready to leave. Holt said, "Find the girl and talk to her. Ask her how to get to the boat and what fuel it uses. I'll be back." He went up the stairs two at a time into pitch darkness and had to stop on the landing to let his eyes adjust and sort out the way they had come down. Then he could pick out a corridor dead ahead with a faint pallor of light.

It was a right-angle turn, and when he had made it there were more stairs and stronger light. At the top, he went out through a glass door into open air. Taubman's car was ten meters off the pad and picking up urge all the time.

A new feature was a thin sliver of moon, which brought up the dark mass of the hills, the glint of water from the open sea, a kilometer distant, and the long cliff of the city across the flat salt marshes of the estuary.

So she had gone with them, then. The sense of loss was suddenly acute. He remembered the texture of her skin, the timbre of her voice. It was as though part of his own mind had defected and taken independent action against the rest.

So nothing was secure. When you got down to cases, everyman was left to work it out alone. Up to a few days ago, that had been a self-evident proposition, but he had been undermined, infiltrated by a fifth column.

Holt went to the parapet on the city side and stood with both hands on it watching the car. The pilot was heading up river to skirt the eastern boundary of the city. That was simple prudence. Crossing it on the direct course would invite trouble. Bring them in range of massed carbine fire. Since they knew so much, the androids would surely know that Taubman had been at his farm. For that matter, they could make an intelligent guess that he would be the one to go to the Regional Council. They must see that they couldn't win in the long term.

Unless they also knew that he couldn't reach first base.

That came with the force of truth. The only question was, how?

The car was turning. It was showing no navigation lights, but its dark slug shape was easy enough to see as it crossed the star map. It was near its ceiling of five hundred meters and appeared to be two or three kilometers outside the city limits.

There was a sudden commotion at ground level that came from the invisible park fence. Instinct had told a foraging pack that it was no longer dangerous, and they were urging each other to have a go at breaking in. When he looked at the sky, he could not find the car.

Holt told himself he had been distracted for only a second. It could not have moved out of sight in that time. He made a frame with his hands and searched systematically, a square at a time, from the point where it had been.

An orange asterisk blossomed from the ground almost under the city wall and then, faintly, the noise of impact like an afterthought.

His first thought was, "She is dead. After all the incredible luck of getting out of that prison. After all the years of solitude, growing up alone, building a point of view from one pair of eyes, some mechanical marvel pulls the plug."

Anger for the waste and pity of it choked his mind. Personal grief was swamped out by a cold rage. God, one way or another they had been pushed around enough. So far and no farther. What was sensible and calculated and politically expedient had had its day.

At that level, maybe the androids could claim, with truth, that they were the heirs of progress. It was time that irrational and emotional man had a say. If it was the last thing he did, he, personally, would wreck the Beta organization as a funeral pyre for Shesha Haddon.

The germ of an idea was already there, and he twisted away from the rail to seek out Carter. That one, also, had a score to settle with the mechanical incubus.

Concentration had cut him off from local noise and he had to grab and hold the girl he cannoned into to keep her on her feet.

For a nonasecond, he thought it was Shesha and tightened his grip.

His "Where have you been? I thought you'd gone in that car" was ambiguous enough for Joanna Taubman to say, "Did you think I would do that? After saying that I would stay? What sort of opinion do you have of me?"

She was very close, breasts nudging pneumatically against his rib cage, head tilted to look up at him. Hair falling back, shining like pale metal. Her personal pollen cloud was very delicate and feminine. An ambience of spring flowers. Eyes were very bright, as though she was near to tears, but recognizably affirmative even to his limited experience of the genre.

The tears were not for him. She had seen the car. Even if there was no deep natural affection for Taubman, there was lifetime of usage. He had probably been kind enough as a guardian. He put a hand on the nape of her neck. The hair was even finer than Shesha's. She stopped straining back and let her head find a firm resting place on his shoulder. Holt stroked her hair, marveling at its texture. He said gently, "They would not suffer at all. It was very quick. You can't avoid grief for them. It's natural and necessary. Don't try. Cry if you want to. Don't mind me. It's high time somebody cried for what's been done in this place." She was trembling, and a succession of deep sobs shook the whole Taubman fabric. Between them she managed to jerk out, "He was good to me. After his own fashion. He wasn't a bad man." Holt increased pressure and damped down oscillation to an occasional tremor. Then he said, "Where's your room? I'll take you along there. Get some sleep. We can't do anything until first light." It seemed natural to pick her up and she went limp, content to go along with it, in a sudden surrender of will that was as good as therapy.

Down below, somebody, probably Carter, had improvised a dun lighting system, and there was enough spilling up the stairs to make it easy. She was heavier than Holt had expected, and he was glad to push open the door into her room.

A panoramic window spread filled one wall. There were two shelves of books, which he had never expected to see as a private possession. There was an elaborate kidney-shaped dressing console and, in pride of place, free standing, a four-poster bed, with looped-back hangings, all drained of color in the marginal light.

Holt had to duck under a tassellated canopy to put her down. Her hands were locked behind his neck, and to keep balance he had to support himself with hands on the pillow on either side of her head. Foreshortened from the angle, her face was incredibly regular and perfect in form, a mathematical exercise for the golden section. Serious, unsmiling, eyes enormous.

Somewhere along the route, she had been springing hidden release zips, and her tunic-top coveralls were open at the mandarin collar in an ongoing narrow V.

Joanna said, "Stay with me."

Holt remembered having heard on some tape that Eros was an unseen guest at most funerals. Maybe it was the instinctive reaction for the tree to put out new shoots after being pruned. They both had something to mourn at that.

He saw Shesha's face beside the blonde one on the pillow. Mild silver and furious gold. If what he had in mind could be done, there was not much time left to mourn or to love. Before he could speak, her hands had moved to undermine one of his supports and guided his fingers to the toggle at her chest.

After a centimeter run, he stopped to listen as footsteps sounded on the landing. Somebody going to or from the roof. When they went past the door without stopping, he went on methodically with the unpacking chore.

Shesha Haddon had supposed that Holt would follow her to the roof and had hoped that it would be soon.

When Taubman's party was assembling at the car, she kept away, behind one of the shuttles. She heard one of the men say, "Didn't that hot, dark number come up? She could take the spare seat as exhibit A." She thought there might be a move to look for her. Torches were being flashed about. She shoved back the shuttle's sliding door and climbed in, keeping below sill level.

Lying on the floor, between the squabs, she saw a beam of light run overhead as a searcher shone through the plexiglass dome.

Then Taubman himself arrived and the lights stopped flicking about.

When the engine whined into life, she sat up and watched the car lift vertically from its pad. Dark against the dark interior, she was hard to see, and she watched Holt cross the roof and look around. It was warm and comfortable in the shuttle, and she judged that the longer surprise was deferred, the more effective it would be. Unlike Holt, she was not distracted by noise from below, and she saw the faint blue line that ran out briefly from the city and surrounded the car with a nimbus of Saint Elmo's fire. He might even think she had been on it. Appearing behind him out of the darkness like so much ectoplasm would serve him right.

She was opening the door when Joanna beat her with an unscripted entrance stage left. She spent a long time sitting in a chair by the fire waiting for him to come down. He who has nothing, may sleep. Finally, she did that thing. Stella Morton, who had been on a magpie tour of the complex, covered her with a tartan rug.