“That’s when you came up here?”
“That’s when I came up here. It cost me a fortune in bribes.”
“And you brought Melissa.”
“She wanted to come. At the time I thought it would be only for a matter of months—a vacation in the sky—but things turned out differently. We both were lucky.”
“Melissa too?”
“I said both of us were lucky.” Latham leaned forward in the bed, and pain dragged his mouth out of shape. “My daughter is a real person. Did you meet any others down there?”
Stirling shook his head slowly and waited until the judge’s breathing became easier. “I ask too many questions —it’s an occupational disease.”
“That’s all right, son. This isn’t one of my official interviews. I’m too old and sick now to play any real part in the village life; but I keep up the pretense just to annoy that so-called Council.”
“That’s a good enough reason, Ford.” Stirling hesitated, judging his ground. “You know, it would really annoy them if I got away from here.”
Latham let the words hang in the air for a few seconds before he shook his head. “You can put that idea right out of your head. This is a squalid, pointless little community in many ways, but I wouldn’t betray it. Nobody goes back.”
“Those words are beginning to stick in my throat,” Stirling said tiredly. Then his interest revived. “You knew what I was going to ask you?”
Latham pushed his nose around delicately, as though molding putty, and his eyes narrowed significantly. “I had an idea you might be developing an interest in the automatic cultivators.”
“Well, they are fascinating machines.”
“Have they any feature which particularly catches your interest?”
Stirling rubbed the heavy stubble on his chin, aware he was about to gamble. “I’m puzzled by the fact that machines designed for fully automatic operation on the lies seem to have some kind of override circuit, making it possible for a human operator to give them arbitrary directions. Even from a distance.”
“Now there’s a thought.” Latham toyed with the watch strapped to his narrow wrist. “If that were the case, you’d have five hundred getaway cars standing out there. All in a row. Believe me, son, there are no provisions on the robots for manual overriding; and if there were, I wouldn’t tell you. Nobody …”
“… goes back,” Stirling completed the phrase and stood up. “Talking about going back, I think I should get to work. Have to make a good impression on the first day, you know.”
Latham nodded wearily, but he held up one hand. “I like you, Victor. Possibly it’s an indictment of our community that the only new member I have liked in ten years is the one who got here by mistake, but that’s by the way … This is the only talk we’ll ever have; yet there are so many things I’m not free to say. Melissa can’t make her mind up about your brother. I have tried to help her come to a decision, but there are too many contradictions on both sides. It will take time … and that’s something I’m running out of. … You must forgive my incoherency, but the circumstances. … I would put Melissa before Heaven itself. …”
“You must rest, Judge.”
“My name is Ford.”
“Yes, but ‘Judge’ suits you better. You’ve got to rest.”
“How right. . . you are.”
“I’ll come and see you tomorrow, Judge.” Stirling was uneasily aware that the old man had been trying to say something without putting it into words.
“No!” Latham’s voice became stronger “I’m receiving no more visitors. You journalists … money for nothing. Victor, take that thing with you. I’ve finished reading.” Latham pointed to the gray box in the corner, then turned his face to the wall.
“Yes, sir.” Stirling lifted the box and carried it out into the sunlight. It was a micro-library and, judging by its weight, a well-stocked one. He began walking back to the storage hut where the bird traps were kept, and at once the stick-like man stepped out of the shade to follow him.
The idea came so suddenly that it almost jolted Stirling into looking at the library’s index panel in full view of his shadow. He waited, instead, until he was back at the heaps of traps and was squatting in the dust—ostensibly giving his full attention to the archaic mechanisms. While leaning over to scoop another handful of the evil-smelling goose grease, Stirling ran his eye down the printed plastic strips of the index.
One of them bore the words, American Encyclopedia, Stirling nodded in satisfaction. Had he been carrying out a routine research job back in the Record’s office, that was the book he would have chosen to give him information about the International Land Extensions and the design of their robots.
With his concentration on the traps broken, ‘the hot hours of the afternoon dragged by like geological ages; and he received several rust-stained grazes on his fingers before someone came to let him know he had earned his food for the day. It was the man he knew as Paddy.
“You’ve been to the judge’s place,” he said, as Stirling stood up. “Yes. Is it out of bounds?”
“Nope. Not out of bounds, but Jaycee won’t like it much.”
“Does it matter?” Stirling recalled his original walk to the village and how Paddy had been objecting to Johnny’s new regime.
Paddy shrugged. “What have you got there?”
“The Judge gave me his library. I presume I’ll be permitted to read?”
“I used to be quite a reader myself,” Paddy said reflectively. “Read a lot in the old days.”
“I’m glad to hear it. It’s always a pleasure to meet a fellow booklover.”
Paddy gripped Stirling’s arm, sinking his lean fingers into the muscle. “Keep the library, Stirling,” he whispered, “but don’t look down your nose at me. You and that brother of yours—you’re great ones for using people.”
Stirling watched the black figure stalking away through the village, somehow managing to look dignified in its flapping plastic wrappings; and then he realized he had been guilty of forgetting that the villagers were still members of the human race. He called out his thanks and took the micro-library into the stockade. The model was an unfamiliar one; and it took him several minutes to fit the reading glasses, connect up the flexible light-guides, and master the volume selection system. When he had the instrument working properly, he called up the encyclopedia. Perfect images of its microfilmed pages were carried through the corded light-guides from the enclosed projection system. Stirling adjusted the focus and worked through the index until he had the access coordinates for an article entitled: International Land Extensions, automatic cultivation, engineering considerations.
He punched in the article’s coordinates and waited for the designated pages to appear. Instead of the expected closely printed page of text, an oblong of white brilliance sprang into view. In the center of the field of light—looking crude and misshapen because of the magnifications concerned—somebody had printed three letters by hand. They were: “N.G.B.”
After a moment’s thought, Stirling decided they could stand for only one phrase. Nobody goes back.
Chapter Ten
“Where is Heaven? I cannot tell. Even to the eye of faith, Heaven looks much like a star to the eye of flesh. Set there on the brow of night, it shines most bright, most beautiful; but it is separated from us by so great a distance as to be raised above our investigations as above the storms and clouds of earth.”
Stirling took off the reading glasses and lay in the resultant pitch darkness. Judge Latham had marked many passages like that in the strange collection of books that made up his library. In the five months that had passed since his attempt to escape, Stirling had spent most of his spare time flicking through the micro-library, hoping to find that the judge had slipped the missing frames from the encyclopedia into some other volume. All he had achieved was the discovery that Latham had a mystical streak in his nature, and in choosing the He as the place to die had been pursuing a vision, perhaps one more vivid than that which had activated both Johnny and himself. The Judge had even written one quotation on the inside of the micro-library’s lid: