Suitably armed now, he replaced everything he had disturbed, tapped the computer board one more time to activate the final part of the program he had left in store, and left the room. Dutifully, the machines remote-locked the cabinet again, and the door of the office, and then undertook such other tasks as deleting their record of either having been unlocked during the night, and making a note of the “fact” that a temporary ID card had been accidentally spoiled so the stock in hand was one fewer than could be accounted for by recent visitors.
The door at the extreme end of the corridor gave into the open air, at the head of a flight of stairs leading to a dark concrete parking bay where an electric ambulance was standing. Its driver, who wore army uniform with Pfc’s badges, gave an uncertain salute, saying, “Major … ?”
“At ease,” the newcomer said briskly, displaying his ID card and duplicate forms. “Sorry to have kept you. Any trouble with the girl?”
The driver said with a shrug, “She’s out, sir. Like a busted light-tube oh-you-tee.”
“That’s how it should be. They gave you your route card?”
“Sure, they brought it when they delivered the girl. Oh, and this as well. Feels like her code card, I guess.” The soldier proffered a small flat package.
Peeling off the cover proved him half right. Not one code card, but two.
“Thanks. Not that she’ll have much use for it where she’s going.”
“I guess not.” With a sour grin.
“You already changed your batteries, did you? Fine—let’s get under way.”
Dark roads thrummed into the past to the accompaniment of a rattling of numbers, not spoken. He had memorized both codes before starting his veephone-mediated sabotage, but there was a lot more to this escape than simply two personal codes. He wanted everything down pat before the ambulance first had to stop for electricity, and the range of this model was only about two hundred miles.
Best if the driver didn’t have to get hurt. Though having been fool enough to volunteer for army service, of course, and worse still, having been fool enough to accept orders unquestioningly from a machine …
But everybody did that. Everybody, all the time. Otherwise none of this would have been possible.
Similarly, none of it would have had to happen.
FOR PURPOSES OF DISORIENTATION
At present and with luck from now on and forever regardless of what code I wear I am being Nicholas Kenton Haflinger. And whoever doesn’t like it will have to lump it.
PRESIDING AT AWAKE
“What the—? Who—? Why, Sandy!”
“Quiet. Listen carefully. You’re in an army ambulance. We’re about two hundred miles east of Tarnover supposedly on the way to Washington. The driver believes I’m a Medical Corps major escorting you. There was no convincing story I could invent to justify clothing fit for you to cross a public street in. All you have is that issue cotton gown. What’s more they shaved your head. Do you remember anything about this, or did they keep you all the time in regressed mode?”
She swallowed hard. “I’ve had what seem like dreams since they—they kidnaped me. I don’t know what’s true and what isn’t.”
“We’ll sort that out later. We’re laying over to change batteries. I sent the driver for coffee. He’ll be back any moment. I’ll find some other excuse to make him hang around, because I’ve seen an automat where I can buy you a dress, shoes and a wig. At the next stop be ready to put them on and vanish.”
“What—what are we going to do? Even if it comes off?”
Cynically he curled his lip. “The same as I’ve been doing all my adult life. Run the net. Only this time in more than one sense. And believe you me, they aren’t going to like it.”
Shutting the ambulance’s rear door again, he said loudly to the returning driver, “Damn monitors up front! Showed the sedative control had quit. But she’s lying like a log. Say, did you spot a men’s room? I guess before we get back on the road I ought to take a leak.”
Over the hum of the many steam and electric vehicles crowding the service area the driver answered, “Right next to the automat, sir. And—uh—if we’re not pulling out at once, I see they got Delphi boards and I’d kinda like to check out a nervous ticket.”
“Sure, go ahead. But keep it down to—let’s say five minutes, hm?”
TEMBLOR
“What do you mean, he can’t be reached? Listen again and make sure you know who I’m asking for. Paul—T-for-Tommy—Freeman! Want I should spell it?
“His new code? What about his—? Are you certain?
“But they don’t have any goddamn right to snatch him out from—Oh, shit. Sometimes I wonder who’s in charge around this country, us or the machines. Give me the new code, then.
“I don’t care what it says in back of its head listing. Just read it over to me. If you can, that is!
“Now you listen to me, you obstructive dimwit. When I give an order I expect it to be obeyed, and I won’t be talked back to by a self-appointed shithouse lawyer. You’re addressing the Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Data Processing Services, and—That’s more like it. Come on.
“It begins with what group? No, don’t bother to repeat it. I heard you. Oh my God. Oh my God.”
SPELLED “WEEKEND” BUT PRONOUNCED “WEAKENED”
A highway line drawn from Tarnover to Washington: a line to connect tomorrow with yesterday, via today. …
The most mobile population in all of history, the only one so totally addicted to going for the sake of going that it had deeveed excessive cost, energy crises, the disappearance of oil, every kind of obstacle in order to keep up the habit, was as ever on the move, even though half the continent was overlaid by end-of-fall weather, strong winds, low temperatures, rain turning to sleet. It was notoriously the sort of season that urged people to stop looking for and start finding.
He thought about that a lot during the journey.
Why move?
To choose a place right for sinking roots.
Go faster in order to drop back to a lower orbit? Doesn’t work. Drop back to a lower orbit; you go faster!
Even Freeman had had to have that pointed out to him. He knew obscurely he wouldn’t have to explain it to Kate. And she couldn’t be the only person who understood the truth by instinct.
Washington: yesterday. The exercise of personal power; the privileges of office; the individualization of the consensus into a single spokesman’s mouth, echo of an age when communities did indeed concur because they weren’t assailed with a hundred irreconcilable versions of events. (These days the typical elected representative is returned with fewer than forty percent of the votes cast; not infrequently he’s detested by four-fifths of those he purports to speak for, because the population of the state or district has turned over. They’ll surple him at the next opportunity, chafe until it arrives. Meanwhile his old supporters have scattered to upset another applecart. Voting registers are maintained by computers nowadays; all it takes to enter you on the roll at your new address is one, count it one, veephone call.)
Tarnover: tomorrow, sure. But hopefully the wrong tomorrow. Because it’s planned and controlled by people who were born the day before yesterday.
How do you cope with tomorrow when (a) it may not be like the real tomorrow but (b) it’s arrived when you weren’t ready for it?
One approach is offered by the old all-purpose beatitude: “blessed are they who expect the worst …” Hence reactions like Anti-Trauma Inc. Nothing worse can happen in later life than what was done to you as a child.
(Wrong tomorrow.)
Another is inherent in the concept of the plug-in life-style: no matter where you go, there are people like the ones you left behind, furniture and clothes and food like the ones you left behind, the same drinks available across any bar: “Say, settle a bet for us, willya? Is this the Paris Hilton or the Istanbul Hilton?”