Gordon R. Dickson (3 page)

She
pressed a stud on her desk, a narrow slot opened in the wall of the cubicle,
and one of the guiding devices she had mentioned rolled out. It was nothing
more than a slender antenna sprouting from a small box-like receiver mounted
on a floton—not a wheel, but a sort of underinfiated sausage-shaped bag which
could manage to go almost anywhere, short of up the side of a vertical wall.
The girl reached down and made a setting on the box.

"Follow
the wand," she said. Kil rose, then turned back to thank her, but she was
looking at him with such a strange, curious expression in her eyes that he
turned away again without a word and followed the wand into the hallway, for
the first time since Ellen had gone, disturbed by something beyond the
immediate problem of finding her again.

The
wand trundled ahead of him, leading him down the hallway, off a branching
corridor to a disk elevator. It rolled onto the first descending disk to come
level with the floor of the corridor. Kil stepped hurriedly on beside
it,
and they dropped down to the next level.

Emerging
into a new hallway, the wand went on, guiding him through a complicated route
that ended eventually before a plain door, no different from many others they
had passed. Kil faced his Key into the cup and the door opened to show a
square, middle-sized room, whose only remarkable feature was a window opening
on the lake, on a level less than a dozen feet above the surface of the water
itself. This, a desk and a few chairs, broke up the monotony of the place.

The
room was empty and Kil, his gaze drawn irresistibly to the window, felt a
sudden wild and powerful wave of feeling sweep through him, staggering him. The
sight of the lake had at one sweep brought back his memory of the sea in the
moment when Ellen had left him. He swayed, putting out a hand to the antenna of
the wand, to steady himself, and at that second, the door of the room opened
behind him and a man's voice spoke to him.

"Mr. Bruner?"

Kill
took his hand from the. wand and turned to confront a short, dark, wiry-looking
man perhaps a dozen years older than himself, in grey kilt and tunic with a
small oval framing the Police emblem on each piece of clothing. The man did
not wait to hear Kil acknowledge himself, but walked around Kil with a springy,
athletic stride, to seat
himself
behind the desk.

"Sit
down," he said, waving Kil to a facing chair.

Kil
sat.

"You're
McElroy?" he asked.

"That's
right. Now—" McElroy leaned forward, putting both elbows on the desk. His
thin, dark features were intense. "Suppose you run through it once more
for me. Just what happened when your wife left you?"

Kil
told him. McElroy listened without interrupting, elbows on the desk, hands
clasped,
his head a little on one side and eyes
noncommitally on Kil's face.

When
Kil had finished, McElroy nodded, straightened up and put his slim hands flat
on the desk.

"Yes,"
he said. He looked across at Kil with an expression in which curiosity and
sympathy were somehow mixed. "You know," he said softly, "we
can't help you."

Kil stared at him, stunned.

"Can't help me?" The words seemed
to be perfectly nonsensical noises with no meaning whatsoever. "No."
McElroy still regarded him.

"But
you know where she is! I mean—Files will know the next time she checks her Key.
And you—"

"Yes.
We can get the information from Files." McElroy still spoke softly.
"But we won't." He seemed to be walking on eggs, verbally, tiptoeing
around some delicate subject.

"It's
that business of the stopping!" said Kil suddenly. He stared furiously at
the other man. "You don't believe me."

"No.
Yes," said McElroy. "I mean it could have been true for you. You
could have been hypnoed."

"I'm a bad hypnotic subject!"

"Still—with drugs?
No, that's not the trouble. The trouble is
,
it's not our job."

"Not
your job! You're public servants. You're—"
"No!"
said McElroy, with such hard, sudden violence in his voice that it
checked Kil. There was a small second of silence,
then
the Policeman went on in quieter tones. "We're set up to keep the peace.
That's our job.
To be the strong right arm of Files.
That's why they started us, a hundred and fourteen years ago." He raised
his eyes, suddenly, bumingly, to Kil. "What do you know about it? You're
Class A."

"What's
Class A got to do with it?" demanded Kil, his ready anger flaring up to
matching heat. A thought occurred to him. "Aren't you?"

"Yes,
but
I
know!"
said
McElroy. "I've been in this business since Files recommended me for training
school at thirteen. You don't. No Class A does. They're the cream of the crop,
with six full months before they have to move from one location to another.
What if you were Class B and had to move every three months? What if you were
Class C and had to move every month? What if you were Unstab?"

"
What's that
got to do with it, I say?" snapped Kil.
"I'm not Unstab."

"No,"
said McElroy, settling back in his chair. "You're not Unstab. You live
almost the way they did in the old days. You don't sneak glances at your Key
every fifteen minutes to see how many hours—
hours,
not days, are left before you have to catch a rocket or a mag ship and
move again. You don't lie awake nights hating the world, hating Files, hating
us, hating everything until you end up dreaming, staring into the darkness and
dreaming, of somehow getting your hands on a CH bomb just so you can blow us
and the rest of the world, and even your own sick and tortured self to hell and
end the whole damn sorry mess!"

McElroy
ended suddenly on a high note of violence. The silence after his words seemed
to rock and swirl like torn-up water.

"You
sound like an Unstab yourself," said Kil, looking steadily at him.

"I'm
not. If I were I couldn't be in the Police, of course." McElroy ran a hand
wearily through his hair. "I'm just trying to make you understand. You
class A's live in a fool's paradise. Just because you've been able to adjust
to the world, you forget the other nine-tenths of humanity who haven't. You
forgot there ever was a Lucky War—"

"I
don't!" Kil cut sharply in on him. "I had it pounded into me when I
was young, just like everybody else. I know about the fifty million dead in
twenty-four hours; and how it was just by the smallest chance the cobalt
fallout didn't finish off the whole race. I know. What of it? What's that got
to do with what
happened
to Ellen?"

"Your wife left of her own free
will."

Kil stared at him.

"What do you mean?"

"I
mean," said McElroy, patiently, "that forgetting this idea about
things stopping, as being unimportant one way or another, you've told us only
that your wife stood up and walked out on you. If requested to do so, well
interfere where crimes of violence are concerned. In the case of unexplained
disappearances we'll investigate because these might have something to do with
an attempt to break the peace. Neither applies in your case. A check on your
wife would only be a violation of her privacy."

"But
she didn't want to gol I tell you she was crying when she left me!"

"This
old man—did he grab her, use any kind of physical force?"

"No, but-" McElroy shrugged.

"You
see," he said. "All she's done is
leave
you
of her own free will. She's perfectly within her rights as an individual to do
that. No,
there's no grounds
for us to interfere, to
divert trained time and energy from our more important job of keeping the
world from blowing up. I couldn't recommend a check on your wife, and I
wouldn't if I could."

"Wait—"
cried Kil, remembering suddenly.
"The old man.
He
wasn't wearing a Key!"

McElroy
sat for a second, looking across the table at him. The policeman's eyes had
hardened. They were even a little contemptuous.

"That's impossible."

"I saw it!"

McElroy softened. He sighed.

"And
you saw everything stop while nobody else did." He stood up and walked
around the desk. "No. If you don't mind my offering some advice, register
a divorce. If you don't hear from her in six months, it'll be final and you can
put her out of your mind. If you don't hear from her in six months, you
should
put her out of your mind. This is all new and a shock to you; but this
sort of thing happens a lot nowadays. One partner gets tired of the
other—"

"No!
She would have told me!" burst out Kil. "We didn't have anyone but
each other, don't you understand? My parents are dead, and she was raised by
grandparents who died before I met her." He glared at McElroy. "Don't
think I'm stopping just because you tell me to. I'll appeal this to
Files."

"If you want.
But," said McElroy, going toward the door, "you'll just get a
reaffirmation of what I've told you. I'm just giving you Files decision now.
You see," he laid his hand on the inner knob of the door and pulled it
open. "That's why you were referred to me. That's my job—turning people
down."

And
he went out. The wand rolled forward from its position in a corner of the
room, up to Kil's chair, and stood waiting.

CHAPTER THREE

The
Policemen in charge of the gate passed Kil
out with a nod, and he emerged into a little paved area occupied by some
loungers and a rank of air-cabs. Gratefully, he went across to the first of the
waiting line of cabs, stepped through its door and literally fell into the
seat. On the panel before him a red light glowed suddenly into life; and the
mechanical voice asked: "Destination?"

"Nearest Class A hotel," answered
Kil.

The
cab stirred, on the verge of rising; but before it could take off, a small
hunchbacked man came darting out of the crowd around the gate and grabbed at
the door handle. The cab's safety checks arrested it. It settled back on the
ground.

"Chief!" yelled the little man.

Kil
turned and looked into a narrow, pointed face under straight black hair,
grimacing at him through the cab's win
clow. He leaned over and pressed the button that slid the window aside.

"What?" he asked.

"Chief!"
cried the small man. "Chief, you need a runny? I'm a good one for any need
you got. Go anywhere; handle anything."

"No!"
growled Kil, stabbing the button and sending the window back again. "Take
off!" he ordered the cab.

The
cab lit up its
passenger's
responsibility,
unblocked
its safety checks and rose skyward. Kil saw the pointed face draw away below
him and the cries of "Chief!
Chief!"
dwindle
in
the distance. Kil leaned back against the cushions of the cab and closed his
eyes.

Exhaustion
chilled him like a clammy hand, a giant's hand enclosing, and the world swam
about him.

Later, he hardly remembered getting out at
the hotel and taking a room. Once he touched the bed, he sank into sleep like a
man drowning in its dark waters. When he woke again, it was night,
The
automatics of the room had opaqued the window against
the stars and the city lights; and the only illumination came from the faintest
of glows in the ceiling corners, where the room's sunbeams maintained a
night-light intensity. Kil sat up, diumbed the window to clear, and lighting a
cigaret, sat smoking and staring out at the nightime city.

The streets and biuldings stretching away up
the shoreline of the lake shone with their own lights. Only off to his right,
in an area close to the traffic terminal, did the lighting falter and give way
to patches of dimness and shadow. This would be the Slums—Slums of the World,
as they were occasionally called—the
area which, in any city,
normally house
the greater portion of the Unstabs currently in residence
there. The buildings in the area were not, of course, shims in the old sense of
the word. In construction and quality they were in every way the equal of the
hotel Kil was in right at the moment (its class rating did not refer to the
quality of a hotel, but the Stab rating of the majority of people using it). It
was not the physical environment of these areas that caused
them to be called Slums, but the mental.
Full of psychological misfits and outcasts and downright criminals, their
internal lawlessness winked at by World Police and local authorities as well,
the Slums were a breeding place of vice and violence. Away in the opposite direction,
in brilliant contrast, the clearly defined area of the World Police
Headquarters was a blaze of light. It ran up the shoreline of the lake until it
was lost in the distance, the public, unofficial areas of the city clustered
inland from it and following along the outskirts.