“No time, I’m always on the road.”
“Of course. I say, exactly where is this planet? We’re strangers here ourselves.”
“Supposed to be in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Where are you from?”
“Uh, nice truck you have there,” Dalton said.
“Thanks. I’m behind in the payments.”
“Who’s the manufacturer?”
“GP Technologies. They make a flashy rig.”
“Impressive.”
“It’s seen a lot of road.”
A beautiful face appeared at the window. Its owner had short dark hair and cool blue eyes.
“Hi,” she said. “Are you fellows starhiking?”
“No, ma’am,” Dalton said. “We’re playing golf.”
“Didn’t know there was a course on this world,” the driver said. “Didn’t think there was any life on it at all.”
“There may not be life,” Thaxton said, “but there’s death on the tenth hole.”
“Tough course, huh?”
“Rather,” Thaxton said. “Tell me, where does this road go?”
“Oh, it goes all over. From star to star, world to world.”
“More balmy worlds. All we need, really. Another thing — rather strange, perhaps it’s the heat. But is there any reason for the road making a sort of buzzing noise?”
“Oh, that’s roadbuzz. You should always listen to roadbuzz, but never believe any of it.”
“Yes, but why does it make that sound?”
“Nobody knows. The road’s a living thing. It conforms with the changing terrain over eons. How it does that, only the Road-builders know, and they’re not talking.”
Bemused, Thaxton nodded. “Right. Well, we’d best be off. Very nice to talk with you.”
Dalton said, “By the way, you didn’t happen to spot the thirteenth tee, did you?”
“Afraid not,” the driver said. “If I see it, though, I’ll double back and let you know.”
“Appreciate it,” Dalton said, stepping back. “Take care, now.”
The driver nodded. “Don’t take any wooden kilocredits.”
“Listen, if you see any castles off the side of the road,” Dalton said, then thought better of it. “Uh, never mind.”
The driver grinned. “Ain’t the universe a wacky place?”
The beautiful woman waved at them, smiling.
The engine howled and the truck swung out onto the smooth pavement. It roared off down the road.
They watched it become a silver dot again, then vanish.
“Charming fellow, wasn’t he?” Dalton said.
“As truck drivers go, I suppose.”
“I bet someone could write a great novel about the sort of life he leads.”
“Oh, I rather doubt it.”
Nineteen
City
They assigned him to a hospital to work as an orderly.
The place was different from the “hospital” where he’d been incarcerated. The atmosphere was decidedly low-tech. The floor he was assigned to was a cardiac unit, but there were no continuous monitoring instruments in use. Nurses wheeled bulky EKG machines around from patient to patient to get periodic readings. Doctors (if that’s what they could be called, though they were probably more on the order of highly trained paramedics) relied on tried-and-true devices and methods: stethoscopes, pulse taking, and so forth.
The place was dingy, plaster cracking on ill-painted walls. It was clean, though, because he cleaned it, pushing brooms and slapping mops around. The patients wore pasted smiles but were generally miserable, as the medical care was terrible and the food was worse than in the cafeterias.
He kept trying to come up with a plan, to find a way of exploiting the glitches, the defects in the system. InnerVoice’s control was marginally less than total. The system was essentially a technological approach to totalitarianism. While political methods of repression could approach complete efficiency, no technology could. The anguished note on the bulletin board proved that things could go awry. Either the control system could not penetrate to the forebrain and control thoughts, or the tiny controlling computers could malfunction. He did not know which was the case; either way it was a ray of hope.
He could still think, but there was no telling for how long. The people around him seemed to be under more complete control than he was, but this could have been an illusion. He had quickly learned to curb his tongue, to act the part. Speech was behavior, and here behavior was controlled by a quickly responding mechanism of “reinforcements,” to use Behaviorist jargon, most of which were “negative.” But some were positive in the sense that compliance with accepted modes of behavior was just as quickly rewarded with surcease from psychic and physical pain.
Perhaps his thoughts would continue to be his own, but thoughts wouldn’t help his body, which was dangling like a marionette on biochemical strings.
The contrastingly backward technology of the hospital led him to think. He watched nurses take oral temperatures with old-fashioned liquid-lead thermometers, the standby of home medicine chests for ages. Even with the dumb technology, minimum sanitary measures were followed. Those thermometers were sterilized, and for a thermometer the only way to do that was immersion in alcohol; for oral purposes that meant ethyl alcohol, ethanol. Methanol, wood alcohol, was poisonous.
If his unconscious bodily mechanisms were being monitored internally, was there something he could ingest that would suppress those mechanisms? Drugs, maybe. Drugs were here, and he could get to them, but what sort of drugs would suppress autonomic responses? Tranquilizers? Maybe, but he doubted that any in use here would be effective enough. Narcotics? Possibly. But he was naturally wary of those. After all, overdosing was as easy as falling off a ghetto stoop.
Narcotics were easily available, in the sense that there were no physical barriers. The drug cabinets had no lock. In this society locks were unneeded. And for that reason he couldn’t touch them. He couldn’t approach the cabinets with the intention of stealing drugs without risking intervention by InnerVoice.
But the thermometers made him think. He had seen no taverns, no liquor stores. As far as he knew, this society was teetotal. Why? Perhaps because the effects of booze could thwart InnerVoice.
There was probably a bottle of ethanol in the drug cabinet, and if not there, in the supply lockers. But the question was, could he steal the alcohol?
No. The same constraints applied, or would be applied. He couldn’t even risk thinking about it too much.
Back to square one. He ruefully half entertained thoughts of sidling up to the bottle, eyes averted, whistling innocently, then grabbing it and chugging as much as he could before InnerVoice grabbed his gut and squeezed. But the ploy was absurd. He couldn’t very well plan to do something without knowing he was going to do it. There was no one to fool but himself.
Was there no way out besides hoping for his internal police force to go on the fritz?
He might have to face up to the possibility that there was no way out of this. The thought of it was numbing. An eternity here?
What about the castle? They surely had missed him by now. Surely they’d send out a search party.
The thought of castle folk in doublets and tights wandering around in this universe was incongruous. But Linda was smart enough to know that a strange universe would call for caution.
Maybe that was the reason for the delay in finding him. Just how would they go about it, anyway? This was a big world, a complex society, and a very dangerous one. He couldn’t know for sure that the rescuers had not also been abducted and injected with InnerVoice.
If so, there was no hope. The portal could close, if it hadn’t already, and he’d be stuck here forever.
He went home after his first day, made himself boiled potatoes, ate, and sat down to log screen time. While he watched, he thought. At length he resolved on a course of action. Absurd idea though it was, tomorrow he would try stealing the bottle and downing as much alcohol as he could, neat, before the shakes got to him. He wouldn’t try to fool himself or InnerVoice, he would just do it. He simply could not think of anything else to try.