Nourse and Calapine stood, ordered the carrier beams into position.
“Efficiency,” Nourse said. “We must seek more efficiency in our minions. Things must be made to run more smoothly.”
Schruille looked up at them waiting for the beams. He wanted only to be free of the wanton rambling of their voices. They missed the point, insisted on missing it.
“Efficiency?” Calapine asked. “Perhaps you’re right.”
Schruille no longer could contain the emotions at war within him. “Efficiency’s the opposite of craftsmanship,” he said. “Think on that!”
The beams came. Nourse and Calapine slid down and away without answering, leaving Schruille to close the segment. He sat alone at last within the green-blue-red winking of the control center—alone except for the glittering eyes of scanners activated along the upper circle of the globe. He counted eighty-one of them alive and staring at him and at the responses of the globe. Eighty-one of his fellows… or groups of his fellows were out there observing him and his work as he observed the Folk and their work.
The scanners imparted a vague uneasiness to Schruille. Before the Tuyere’s service, he could never remember watching the control center or its activities. Too much that was painful and unthinkable occurred here. Were the former masters of the control center curious about how the new trio dispatched its duties? Who were the watchers?
Schruille dropped his attention to the instruments. In moments like this he often felt like Chen Tzuang’s “Master of Dark Truth” who saw the whole world in a jade bottle. Here was the jade bottle—this globe. A flick of the power ring on the arm of his throne and he could watch a couple making love in Warsopolis, study the contents of an embryo vat in Greater London or loose hypnotic gas with taming suggestions into a warren of New Peking. The touch of a key and he could analyze the shifting motives of an entire work force in the megalopolis of Roma.
Searching within himself, Schruille could not find the impulse to move a single control.
He thought back, trying to remember how many scanners had watched the first years of the Tuyere’s service. He was sure it had never exceeded ten or twelve. But now—eighty-one.
I should’ve warned them about Svengaard, he thought. I could’ve said that we shouldn’t rely on the assumption there’s a special Providence for fools. Svengaard is a fool who disturbs me.
But Nourse and Calapine would have defended Svengaard. He knew it. They’d have insisted the man was reliable, honorable, loyal. They’d wager anything on it.
Anything? Schruille wondered. Is there something they might not wager on Svengaard’s loyalty?
Schruille could almost hear Nourse pontificating, “Our judgment of Svengaard is the correct one.”
And that, Schruille thought, is what disturbs me. Svengaard worships us… as does Max. But worship is nine-tenths fear.
In time, everything becomes fear.
Schruille looked up at the watching scanners, spoke aloud: “Time-time-time…”
Let that chew at their vitals, he thought
7.
The place was a pumping station for the sewage reclamation system of Seatac Megalopolis. It lay at the eleven hundred foot level on the spur line that sent by-product irrigation water into Grand Coulee system. A four-story box of sampling pipes, computer consoles and access catwalks aglow with force-buoyed lights, it throbbed to the pulse of the giant turbines it controlled.
The Durants had come down through the personnel tubes during the evening rush hour, moving in easy random stages that insured they weren’t followed and that they carried no tracer devices. Five inspection tubes had passed them as clean.
Still, they were careful to read the faces and actions of the people who jostled past. Most of the people were dull pages, hurried, intent on their own business. Occasionally, they exchanged a mutual reading-glance with another courier, or identified sub-officials with the fear goading them on Optiman errands.
No one noticed a couple in workman brown, their hands clasped, who emerged onto Catwalk Nine of the pumping station.
The Durants paused there to survey their surroundings. They were tired, elated and more than a little awed at having been summoned into the control core of the Parents Underground. The smell of hydrocarbons filled the air around them. Lizbeth sniffed.
Her silent conversation through their clasped hands carried overtones of tension, Harvey worked to reassure her.
“It’s probably our Glisson we’re to see,” he said.
“There could be other Cyborgs with the same name,” she said.
“Not likely.”
He urged her out onto the catwalk, past a hover light. They took a left branching past two workmen reading Pitot gauges, their faces in odd shadows created by the lights from below.
Lizbeth felt the lonely exposure of their position, signaled, “How can we be sure they aren’t watching us here?”
“This must be one of our places,” he said. “You know.”
“How can it be?”
“Route the scanners through editing computers,” he said. “The Opts see only what we want them to see then.”
“It’s dangerous to feel sure of such things,” she said. Then, “Why have they summoned us?”
“We’ll know in a few minutes,” he said.
The walk led through a dust-excluding lock port into a tool bunker, gray walls punctured by outlets for transmission tubes, the inevitable computer controls blinking, ticking, chuckling, whirring. The place smelled of a sweet oil.
As the port clanged shut behind the Durants, a figure came from their left and sat on a padded bench across from them.
The Durants stared silently, recognizing and repelled by the recognition. The figure’s outline suggested neither man nor woman. It looked planted there in the seat, and as they watched, it pulled thin cables from pockets in its gray coveralls, plugged the cables into the computer wall.
Harvey brought his attention up to the square, deeply seamed face and the light gray eyes with their stare of blank directness, that coldly measured observation which was a trademark of the Cyborg.
“Glisson,” Harvey said, “you summoned us?”
“I summoned you,” the Cyborg said. “It has been many years, Durant. Do you still fear us? I see that you do. You are late.”
“We’re unfamiliar with this area,” Harvey said.
“We came carefully,” Lizbeth said.
“Then I taught you well,” Glisson said. “You were reasonably good pupils.”
Through their clasped hands, Lizbeth signaled “They’re so hard to read, but something’s wrong.” She averted her eyes from the Cyborg, chilled by the weighted stare. No matter how she tried to think of them as flesh and blood, her mind could never evade the knowledge that such bodies contained miniaturized computers linked directly to the brain, that the arms were not arms but prosthetic tools and weapons. And the voice—always such a clipped-off unemotional quality.
“You should not fear us, madam,” Glisson said. “Unless you are not Lizbeth Durant.”
Harvey failed to repress the snap of anger, said, “Don’t talk to her that way! You don’t own us.”