Manalone (6 page)

Raper brushed
the hair back from his forehead. ‘Thanks, but I have to return to London tomorrow to start the election coverage. I promised Kit I’d spend the night with her on the raft. Come to think of it, the raft is probably a very good place to be. They don’t use ComCredit in that territory, and now I can see a very good reason why.’

Manalone walked with him, selecting the darker, quieter streets until the lights of the raft came into view spreading far out across the sea. By evening the raft, with its wilful jumble of coloured lights and enigmatic darkness, seemed almost an enchanted scene – a window on to another world which had never heard of straightedge or design. The mornings, however, spoke of a different reality, and Manalone had no stomach to venture nearer than the strand of tidal sand which marked the raft’s perimeter. He watched Raper venture out across a crazily roped walkway, then himself turned again inland, heading for the bright lights and the centre of the town.

‘So what the hell’s happened, Manalone? Where went your nice quiet, ordered world of yesterday? It’s not really that history’s being re-drawn which is important. That’s only symptomatic – the part you can see. The real problem’s much deeper … and much bigger.

‘So what the hell could it be? It involves the manipulation of history, the suspension of human rights, and the creation of a secret police organization comparable with that needed to maintain a totalitarian State. Yet one thing is certain – this is no mere political manoeuvre. This is the Establishment up against a problem which has a basis in altered physical values, and seems to have reference to the present as contrasted with the past. So far all you’ve got are answers … to a problem so obscure that it doesn’t seem to exist.’

The next day
was Saturday, and Manalone, rising late, had nothing particular to do. In his studyspace he tidied up his filing, dictated a few notes into the autotype, and then found himself free to consider his new range of problems. Sandra had gone off early announcing she was going to a festiv – whatever that might be. Manalone had no liking for her continual round of parties and happenings, but he recognized her need for the excitement she found in them. At the same time he wondered what strange twist of nature had produced this insatiable craving for titillation.

‘Keep moving, little lotus-eaters – because if ever the volume of music drops and the lights fail and the hypnotics and the alcohol don’t work and even the sensations bore you, you’re liable to wind up having to face the thing you’re most afraid of – having time to think. When God failed to respond reliably to on-line access, Mankind had to turn elsewhere to unload the burden of its own responsibility. It invented the computer – which is far more accessible than God and just as satisfying – providing you never give yourself time to think about it.’

Realizing that he was becoming bitter, Manalone turned back to his deliberations. A call on the vidiphone stopped him before he really got started. The caller was Victor Blackman, whose mocking bull-moose face grinned derisively from the screen.

‘Hullo, Manny boy! You’ve been playing pretty hard to get. Not trying to keep out of my way are you?’

‘I don’t give a damn about your way, so why should I bother to keep out of it?’

‘Didn’t that delicious pet wife of yours give you my message? I’ve got another job for you.’

‘I’m not interested, Victor. I told you after the last job that I’m through preparing computer software for you. If you haven’t got the right equipment, you can’t get consistent results.’

‘Have I ever
complained, Manny boy? Have I ever? Tell you what I’ll do – I’ll double your last-time fee.’

‘You should get so lucky!’ said Manalone. ‘The programme’s three times the length for a start. Get lost, Victor! I don’t want to know any more about your fifth-rate operations. If you want a programme, go hire yourself a programmer from the labour pool.’

Blackman’s mocking smile was completely undeterred. ‘Programmers I already have. What I need is production programme expertise – and that’s what you’ve got. I know you’re the best man in the country because my old Sigma Eleven is producing things now that even its manufacturers never claimed for it.’

‘Whatever the scrap-yard charged you for your Sigma Eleven, you were cheated. They should have paid you to take it away. And that goes for the rest of the junk you operate. You don’t want production expertise – far kinder you have a damn good fire.’

‘Harsh words, Manny boy. Fortunately I know you don’t mean them. I’ll offer you five thousand for the full set of new software. That’s my last offer, and I may go broke because of it.’

‘Do that small thing,’ said Manalone. ‘Can’t you get it through your thick skull that it isn’t a matter of the price.’

‘Six thousand.’

‘You don’t listen to a damn thing I say!’

‘What are you saying, Manny? You don’t like money? You can’t tell me you can keep an ultra-expensive pet like Sandra happy on peanuts. She must be costing you a fortune.’

‘All I’m saying is I don’t like your organization or your methods. No programme, Victor, and that’s final. So stay out of my hair!’

Manalone cut the connection and decided it was time to go out for a stroll before Blackman thought up a new line of approach. As usual, his exchange with Blackman had put him in a good humour, and, leaving his cape on the rack, he walked out into the soft sunshine dressed only in his informal leisurewear. At the Chichester Road he had intended turning right, but a glance towards Elbridge gave him an idea and set him on a different course of action. The sight of the huge excavators in action on the site made him again curious about the past and its systematic prohibition.

Watching
the progress on the site was a common pastime for many of those dispossessed of work either partly or completely by high-level automation. Manalone had been to the site a few times before, watching the gigantic machines churning the soil like feverish moles driven by an inescapable compulsion to reduce every feature of the landscape to a common muddy plain. Later, when the deeply milled ground had settled, the builders would come and cover everything with concrete and erect their close-planned and incredibly unimaginative spires of steel and ceramic. Maximum-population-density housing was a soul-destroying concept, but it now occurred to Manalone that the exercise might also have a second function. Where the great machines had dug and where the concrete had been poured – there the elements of the past had been irretrievably shattered and then locked down certainly beyond the reach of the next three generations.

As he approached the excavators, Manalone found himself viewing their function in a very different way from hitherto. Formerly he had marvelled at the vast cutting wheels, the diamond-tipped teeth, and the tremendous motors which drove the cutters unhesitatingly through bricks, rock, soil and stones alike to the depth of several men. Now he was watching only the way the teeth pulverized and broke the raised material, allowing no fragment to remain which was larger than a clenched fist. The cutters were currently working down to a bed of wet flints and sand. The hundred or so workers attending the operation paid no attention to him as he worked his way to the very edge of the trench to obtain a better view. To the workmen, it was just simply a job; only Manalone read any significance into the rasp and rattle of the flintstones as they were shattered by the diamond teeth.

‘Manalone, could the past have been so terrible that they need deliberately grind it down before they cover it with concrete? Or is it here and now that’s so terrible that they daren’t allow comparison?’

There was no
answer to the question. The former housing estate on the area had been demolished to make way for the maximum-population-density housing which was now to be established, and traces of even older roads and tracks were being dredged up and destroyed by the remorseless wheels.

‘The past is usually buried by Mankind’s inability to communicate it accurately from one generation to the next – and by geological events and atmospheric fallout. But here the process is a deliberate one: the suppression of knowledge, rendering illegal the investigation of the past – and making its future interpretation impossible by grinding and attrition. If this policy goes to completion, the human race might as well have achieved spontaneous gestation yesterday.

‘Somebody is working desperately hard to conceal something which doesn’t appear even to exist. You’re a problem-solver, Manalone, and you’re watching clues being actively destroyed by the minute. Today you’ve a chance to get the answers: tomorrow this will be the site of nothing.’

Manalone watched as the wheels bit into an area of ancient, buried tarmac on a rubble base. On impulse he glanced at the sweep-hand on his watch and he timed the measured progress of the cutters whilst he paced out the distance. Casually the answer was not informative, since the excavator had apparently struck an old road at an oblique angle, and the cross-cut took far longer than he had supposed. Filing the results into a mnemonic key for future reference and subsequent evaluation, he turned his consideration to the site as a whole, afraid that in his attention to detail he might be missing the obvious. There were four other excavators working and a total of about five hundred men, but the only thing he saw which was worthy of note was a distant observer with field-glasses apparently watching the operations from the vicinity of the Chichester Road. Or was it himself who was being so carefully observed?

‘Watch it, Manalone! You’re developing a persecution complex!’

He dismissed the idea of being watched, mainly because he could do little about it anyway, and followed the sight-seers’ usual route on past the excavators to the levellers, and from the levellers to the compactors, and finally along the rutted track which led past the wire-protected compounds and back towards
the Chichester Road. It would be an exceptional pair of field-glasses, he reasoned, which could tell the nature of the thoughts which were churning through his mind.

Now that he
looked closely he could see that the site compounds were more heavily protected than he had assumed. They were three in number: the one he was approaching being a parking place for the excavators and similar large machines, and the second and third were the store compound and site barracks respectively. Whilst the outer fences were made of conventional welded mesh, he discerned now an inner fence containing steel barbs of more than usual spitefulness. However, the thing which stopped Manalone in his tracks lay between the two boundaries – a thin rail of exposed high-tension cable supported on long, green, insulating stakes.

The shock of the realization hit him almost with the force of a physical blow. Since the compound was merely a machine park and had otherwise only a few rough wooden huts inside the enclosure, such precautions seemed to be taking security to rather a wild extreme. Protection against vandals and the clumsily curious was a legitimate endeavour, but to insert an unmarked death-trap into the defences betrayed a zealousness not usually associated with civil engineering.

He was still puzzling over this feature when he came abreast of the gateway leading into the parking enclosure. A small hut functioned as a gatehouse, and he glanced into it casually as he passed the entry spur. Instead of the civilian gatekeeper he had expected, the trim grey lines of a uniform caused him to look away lest he should attract attention, but his glance was not so brief that he missed the short carbine hanging from the shoulder.

‘Armed police, indeed, to guard a civil engineering site. Keep walking, Manalone. You seem to be playing in the wrong league!’

Prudence dictated that he did not pass the remaining compounds too closely on his way back to the road. Closer observation could have told him nothing that he had not already guessed. He had heard of the establishment of CALF, the Civil Auxiliary Labour Force, much heralded by the Ministry of Reconstruction as a scheme for providing work for many thousands of unemployed and hastening the housing reconstruction programme. What had not come over well on the recruiting posters was the fact that CALF was a paramilitary if not a military organization.

‘So much
for civil engineering, Manalone! The problem is not that CALF have armed police and electrified fences. The question is why do they need them.’

His new route took him across a wide tract of recently milled ground to the very edge of the Chichester Road, where a solitary labourer was clearing hedge-shrubs and small trees from the bank in preparation for the entry of a new road to the site. Since the results of these labours also provided the only reasonable exit, it was towards this gap that Manalone directed his path.

The solitary labourer was the thing that next took his attention. The fellow was using a self-powered tool to cut through what had once been a thickset hedge. However as he cut, he turned constantly to examine the ground he had cleared, and to probe it with a stick. As Manalone approached he noted that the labourer was even more unlikely than his curious activity suggested. A shock of silvery hair surrounded the pallid whiteness of an old and truly aristocratic face, and the bearing and approach were those of an academic hobbyist.

Manalone noted these things with half an eye and had actually gained footing on the main road before an intuitive association stopped him dead and made him turn again. From the expression on the labourer’s face he could see that the fellow had recognized him before his own mental processes had put together the unlikely web of circumstance and features which made identification possible.

He went back, hesitantly.

‘Professor Oman – you remember me? Manalone?’

‘I don’t know you. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Pierce Oman, one-time professor of history, cast a frantic glance in the direction of the watcher on the road.