“It’s only that I think he was reading me at the same time I read him.”
“Oh, he was,” she said. “But he was slow and lame about it compared to us.”
“That’s how I read him. He was like a first reader, an amateur stumbling along, gaining confidence as he went.”
“He’s untrained,” she said. “That’s obvious. I was worried you’d read something in him that escaped me.”
“I guess you’re right.”
Across the park, dust had shattered the sunlight into countless pillars that stood up through an arboretum. Lizabeth stared at the scene as she answered, “No doubt of it, darling. He’s a natural, someone who’s stumbled onto the talent accidentally. They do occur, you know—have to. Nothing can keep us from communicating.”
“But they certainly try.”
“Yes,” she signaled. “They were very intent on it there today, probing and scanning us in that lounge. But people who think mechanically will never guess—I mean that our weapons are people and not things.”
“It’s their fatal blind spot,” he agreed. “Central’s carved out the genetic ruts with logic—and logic keeps digging the ruts deeper and deeper. They’re so deep now they can’t see over the edges to the outside.”
“And that wide, wide universe out there calling to us,” she signaled.
5.
Max Allgood, Central’s chief of Tachy-Security, climbed Administration’s plasmeld steps slightly ahead of his two surgeon companions as befitted the director of the Optimen’s swift and terrible hand of power.
The morning sun behind the trio sent their shadows darting across the white building’s angles and planes.
They were admitted to the silver shadows of the entrance portico where a barrier dropped for the inevitable delay. Quarantine scanners searched and probed them for inimical microbes.
Allgood turned with the patience of long experience in this procedure, studied his companions—Boumour and Igan. It amused him that they must drop their titles here. No doctors were admitted to these precincts. Here they must be pharmacists. The title “doctor” carried overtones which spread unrest among the Optimen. They knew about doctors, but only as ministers to the mere humans. A doctor became a euphemism in here, just as no one said death or kill or implied that a machine or structure would wear out. Only new Optimen in their acolyte apprenticeship, or meres of young appearance served in Central, although some of the meres had been preserved by their masters for remarkable lengths of time.
Boumour and Igan both passed the test of youthfulness, although Boumour’s face was of that pinched-up elfin type which tended to suggest age before its time. He was a big man with heavy shoulders, powerful. Igan looked lean and fragile beside him, a beaked face with long jaw and tight little mouth. The eyes of both men were Optimen color—blue and penetrating. They were probably near-Opts, both of them. Most Central surgeon-pharmacists were.
The pair moved restlessly under Allgood’s gaze, avoiding his eyes. Boumour began talking in a low voice to Igan with one hand on the man’s shoulder moving nervously, kneading. The movement of Boumour’s hand on Igan’s shoulder carried an odd familiarity, a suggestion to Allgood that he had seen something like this somewhere before. He couldn’t place where.
The quarantine probing-scanning continued. It seemed to Allgood that it was lasting longer than usual. He turned his attention to the scene across from the building. It was strangely peaceful, at odds with the mood of Central as Allgood knew it.
Allgood realized that his access to secret records and even to old books gave him an uncommon knowledge about Central. The Optiman demesne reached across leagues of what had once been the political entities of Canada and northern United States. It occupied a rough circle some seven hundred kilometers in diameter and with two hundred levels below ground. It was a region of multitudinous controls—weather control, gene control, bacterial control, enzyme control… human control…
In this little corner, the heart of Administration, the ground had been shaped into an Italian chiaroscuro landscape—blacks and grays with touches of pastels. The Optimen were people who could barber a mountain at a whim: “A little off the top and leave the sideburns.” Throughout Central, nature had been smoothed over, robbed of her dangerous sharpness. Even when the Optimen staged some natural display, it lacked an element of drama which was a general lack in their lives.
Allgood often wondered at this. He had seen pre-Optiman films and recognized the differences. Central’s manicured niceties seemed to him all tied up with the omnipresent red triangles indicating pharmacy outlets where the Optimen might check their enzyme prescriptions.
“Are they taking a long time about it or is it just me?” Boumour asked. His voice carried a rumbling quality.
“Patience,” Igan said. A mellow tenor there.
“Yes,” Allgood said. “Patience is a man’s best ally.”
Boumour looked up at the Security chief, studying, wondering. Allgood seldom spoke except for effect. He, not the Optimen, was the Conspiracy’s greatest threat. He was body and soul with his masters, a super puppet. Why did he order us to accompany him today? Boumour wondered. Does he know? Will he denounce us?
There was a special ugliness about Allgood that fascinated Boumour. The Security chief was a stocky little Folk mere with moon face and darting almond eyes, a dark bush of hair low on his forehead—a Shang-cut by the look of his overt gene markers.
Allgood turned toward the quarantine barrier and with a sudden feeling of awakening, Boumour realized the man’s ugliness came from within. It was the ugliness of fear, of created fear and personal fear. The realization gave Boumour an abrupt sensation of relief which he signaled to Igan through finger pressures on the man’s shoulder.
Igan pulled away suddenly to stare out across from the building where they stood. Of course Max Allgood fears, he thought. He lives in a mire of fears, named and nameless… just as the Optimen do… poor creatures.
The scene across from Central began to impress itself on Igan’s senses. Here, at this moment, it was a day of absolute Spring, planned that way in the lordly heart of Weather Control. Administration’s steps looked down on a lake, round and perfect like an enameled blue plate. On a low hill beyond the lake, plasmeld plinths stood out like white stones: elevator caps reaching down into the locked fastness of the Optimen quarters below—two hundred levels.
Far beyond the hill, the sky began to turn dark blue and oily. It was streaked suddenly with red, green and purple fires in a rather flat pattern. Presently, there came a low clap of contained thunder. Across the reaches of Central, some Upper Optiman was staging a tame storm for entertainment.
It struck Igan as a pointless display, lacking danger or drama… which he decided were two words for the same thing.
The storm was the first thing Allgood had seen this day to fit his interpretation of Central’s inner rhythms. Things of an ominous nature set the pattern for his view of Central. People vanished into here never to be seen again and only he, Allgood, the chief of Tachy-Security, or a few trusted agents knew their fate. Allgood felt the thunderclap keyed to his mood, a sound that portended absolute power. Under the storm sky now turning acid yellow and dispersing the air of Spring, the plinths on the hill above the lake became pagan cenotaphs set out against a ground as purple-green as camomile.