Stand on Zanzibar (35 page)

“Broadly, at all events, you’re to be sent in openly as a freelance scientific reporter accredited to SCANALYZER and Engrelay Satelserv. It’s perfectly authentic, and before you raise the point I’ll say that your lack of experience is of no consequence. You need only ask the kind of questions legitimate journalists will be asking about the eugenics programme. You’ll be given a certain amount of additional information, however. Most importantly, you will be the only foreign reporter in Yatakang with facilities for contacting Jogajong.”

Donald stiffened and his scalp began to crawl.

I didn’t know he was back there! If he’s what they claim him to be I’m liable to walk into a civil war!

Mistaking Donald’s dismay for incomprehension, the colonel rasped, “Don’t you know who I mean?”

“Yes, sir,” Donald muttered. Nobody who had had to learn contemporary idiomatic Yatakangi could have avoided mention of Jogajong. Jailed four times by the Solukarta government, banned titular head of the Yatakangi Freedom Party, leader of an abortive revolt after which he had had to flee the country, author of books and pamphlets which still circulated despite police seizures and public burnings …

“Any questions?” the colonel said suddenly, sounding bored.

“Yes, sir. Several.”

“Hah! Very well, let’s hear them. But I warn you, I’ve told you as much as you’re supposed to know at this stage.”

That disposed of about four questions immediately. Donald hesitated.

“Sir, if I’m going to be sent openly to Yatakang, why was I told to come to Boat Camp? Won’t they be suspicious if they find out I’ve been at a military establishment?”

The colonel thought that over. He said at length, “I believe that’s answerable on current terms of reference. It’s a question of security. Boat Camp
is
secure. Land-based installations often aren’t. Come to think of it, I’ll tell you an educational story which may drive home what you’re up against.

“A certain base on shore was overlooked from a hillside which was good for flying kites. One boy about fourteen or fifteen used to go up there to fly a specially fine box-kite he’d built himself, about five feet high. And he’d been doing this daily for two mortal months before one of the base officers wondered how come he never spent his vacation from school doing anything
but
play with a kite. He went up and on the end of that kite’s cord he found a recorder, and on the kite itself a miniature TV camera. And this kid—no more than fifteen, mind—threw a knife, took him in the thigh, and tried to strangle him. Point made?”

Donald agreed with a slight shudder.

“And there’s a further reason, of course. It’s the best place to eptify you for your mission.”

“Major Delahanty told me about that,” Donald said slowly. “It’s still not quite clear to me.”

“Eptification is derived from an acronym—EPT stands for ‘education for particular tasks’. Most softasses don’t take the idea seriously. To them it’s just one more among a horde of commercial panaceas which conmen are using to part the marks from their money. And that’s partly true, of course, because to use the technique properly you more or less have to have had it done to you, and we don’t turn many people we’ve done it to back into civilian life.”

“You mean that afterwards I’m not going to—?”

“I’m not talking about you specifically,” the colonel cut in. “I’m saying that in principle there’s not much application for it outside the service!”

“But if I’m going to be required to pose as a reporter—”

“What’s that got to do with it? You only need to feed back facts. They’ll be monitored and edited in this country. Engrelay Satelserv has a staff of experts to look after that end of the problem.”

Confused, Donald said, “I seem to have missed the point somewhere. When you said lack of experience as a reporter didn’t matter, I naturally assumed…”

He broke off. The colonel was regarding him with mingled amusement and contempt.

“Yes, you do make a lot of assumptions, don’t you? We’re not in business to provide the beam agencies with star talent, though—as you’d have figured out if you’d stopped to think! Anyhow, that’s not what you need eptification in.”

“What, then?”

“In four short days,” the colonel said, “you’re going to be eptified to kill.”

tracking with closeups (14)

LIGHT THE TOUCHPAPER AND RETIRE

There were still a few openings left for one-man businesses even in this age of automation, computers and the grand cartel. Jeff Young had found one.

Whistling, he limped down the narrow alley between two rows of tape-controlled machine-tools, a lean man in his early forties with receding dark hair and heavy rings under his eyes suggesting a slight, not socially reprehensible habit—possibly a stimulant like Procrozol with a strong insomniac side-effect. He did in fact get less sleep than most people; furthermore he acted as though he was always a trifle pepped. But it wasn’t due to any kind of drug.

He carried a small plastic sack. At one of the whining lathes he halted and set the neck of the sack against the swarf-hopper. From it he spilled half a pound of fine magnesium chips and curls.

Then he crossed to a sander which was buffing the grey surface of a piece of cast iron into mirror smoothness and added a dredging of iron filings.

Still whistling, he hobbled out of the machine-shop and closed the doors. The lighting went off automatically—tape-controls didn’t need to see what they were doing.

The only other member of his staff, a shiggy who sometimes struck customers as too stupid even to act as mouthpiece for a gang of lathes and mills, had already left the front office for home. Nonetheless he called her name and listened for a reply before approaching a row of shallow aquaria ranged along the room’s rear wall. Small bright fish gazed uncomprehendingly as he dipped a hook into the water of each in turn and withdrew from concealment in the fine white sand at the bottom a series of plastic globes half-full of something cloudy and brown.

Satisfied, he replaced the globes, set the burglar alarms, and turned on the lumino sign identifying this as the home of
Jeff Young Custom Metalwork—Functional and Artistic Designs Executed.

The sack dangling from his fingers, he locked up and headed for the rapitrans.

*   *   *

Having eaten a leisurely meal watching his new but not ostentatiously expensive holographic TV, he left home again at eleven-ten poppa-momma, carrying the sack in a small black satchel. He took the rapitrans to a station where very few people stopped after sunset, a beach stop favoured by sunners and surfers, isolated between the sprawling tentacles of the city because here the ground was too weak to bear the weight of buildings of economic height. He had established the habit of a nightly constitutional along the beach over several years. It was one of the things that kept his sleeping-time down.

He wandered at a leisurely pace until he was out of sight of the rapitrans. Then, with sudden swift purpose, he dodged into the total shadow of some ornamental bushes and opened the satchel. From it he withdrew a mesh mask and put it on. Then he sprayed the plastic sack with an aerosol which would destroy both the greasy trace of fingerprints and the giveaway epidermal cells which might have rubbed off on it.

Finally he took out a bolt-gun—legitimately owned, licensed by the fuzzy-wuzzies as suitable for a man owning a valuable machine-shop—and moved on along the beach.

He came to the prearranged rendezvous and stopped, checking his watch. He was two minutes early. Shrugging, he stood in silence, and waited.

Shortly a voice addressed him out of the darkness. It said, “Over here—this way.”

He turned towards the sound. The voice had been male, but beyond that he could tell nothing about the owner. Dealing with partisans, that was the way he preferred things to be. Almost certainly he was in the field of a black-light projector, so he acted as though the invisible speaker could watch every movement he made.

With his gun he indicated a point on the sand near his feet. A small package arced through the air and landed with a thud. Dropping on one knee, putting down the satchel but not the gun, he felt its contents and gave a nod. He exchanged the package for the plastic sack, rose, and took a couple of paces backward. By now his vision had adjusted fully to the dimness, and he could see that the person who emerged from shadow to collect the sack was not the one who had spoken, but a shiggy, probably young, certainly with a good figure.

Bending—slowly, so as not to alarm the man waiting in the background—he selected a stick and with it wrote upside-down words on the sand.

WHAT FOR?

A muted chuckle. The man said, “It’ll be in the news tomorrow.”

THINK I’D SELL YOU OUT?

“I’ve stayed free for eighteen months,” the man said. “It wasn’t by advertising my movements.”

ME—8 YEARS.

By now the shiggy had withdrawn to the company of her man. He scuffed over what he had written with his bad foot, and substituted GT ALUMINOPHAGE.

“You’ve got that?” the partisan said, startled.

BREEDING NOW.

“How much?”

CHEAP. TELL ME WHAT THERMITE FOR.

Then he crossed that through, and wrote EXPENSIVE.

“I catch. Name some figures.”

Once more he scuffed over the letters.

$150 PER 1000. BREED 1,000,000—6 DAYS.

“Are they as good as GT claims?”

12 HR BROKE INCH MONOFILAMENT ROPE.

“Christ! That’s the stuff they hang suspension bridges on!”

RIGHT.

Scuffed over again. Expectant waiting.

“We could use that,” the man said finally. “Okay, I’ll gamble. We’re going to put out the Bay Bridge rapitrans.”

TRACK WELL GUARDED.

“We’re not going to put it on the track. There’s a stretch where the vacuum parcels tube parallels the monorail. If we time it right it should melt through and short the power cables.”

PHOS-ACID IGNITER?

“No, we have a timer with an HT arc.”

NOT MINE.

Another chuckle, this one with a wry inflection. “Thanks, when I can afford your standards I’ll send to Switzerland. Okay, I’ll let you know when we need the aluminophage.”

NIGHT.

“Good night.”

From the direction of the voice there came soft scuffling sounds. He waited till they were over, then found a bit of flotsam and stirred up the sand where he had written his part of the conversation.

He turned for home with as brisk a step as his short leg allowed, leaving the last of his footprints to be wiped out by the night’s tide.

*   *   *

Instead of going to bed in his apt, he did as he often did on fine nights and carried an inflatable mattress up to the roof of the block. He also took a pair of binocs, but these were well concealed inside the mattress-roll.

A boy and a shiggy were enjoying themselves up there when he arrived, but that was a customary hazard. He would have plenty of privacy where he wanted to be, on the far side of the ventilator stacks. Contentedly he spread the mattress, calculating in his head how long to wait before beginning his watch. He estimated an hour, and that was close. It was sixty-six minutes before a brilliant glow bulged and dripped through the Bay Bridge parcels tube and sagged sections of it into contact with the monorail power leads.

He gave a nod of professional approval. That little lot would take all night to sort out. Not bad for amateurs, not bad at all. Though when he expanded his services to handle the requirements of partisans as well as ordinary hobby-type saboteurs, he had hoped they’d target on something more ambitious. Nuisance-value was all right in its place, but …

It wasn’t that he shared the partisans’ political convictions. He was neither a nihilist nor a little red brother, which were the two polar-opposed factions that kept them as busy quarrelling among themselves as attacking the established society around them. There was simply no other outlet for his greatest talent. The army had eptified him as a saboteur, and after the incident which bequeathed him his bad leg they had refused to re-enlist him.

What else can a hungry man do but eat the food he finds in front of him?

They hadn’t yet had the presence of mind to cut the power feeding the shorted cables on the bridge, and the display of sparks was making the struts and girders glow like the pillars of hell. Jeff Young felt the heat of the thermite bomb seem to penetrate his belly and move downwards, and with the hand not holding his binocs he began rhythmically to afford himself relief from it.

continuity (15)

DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT

Some corporations still maintained the traditional table for meetings of the board. Not GT, a modern product. The boardroom on the presidential floor of the tower was a place of soft pearly lights under an arched ceiling, punctuated by thrones consisting in a comfortable padded seat surrounded with electronic equipment. Every place had a holographic projection screen, a sound-recorder, a computer readout, and phones giving direct access to any of GT’s forty-eight subsidiary plants and better than nine hundred local offices in fifteen countries, some of them by satellite relay.

The thrones for the officers were upholstered in genuine leather, those for senior VP’s in woven fabric, and those for junior VP’s and specialist staffers called in to give advice in resilient plastic. Two extra thrones in leather had been installed today, one for Elihu Masters—one could hardly accord less to an ambassador—the other for the scarecrow-gaunt synthesist from State whom Norman had met during their preliminary discussions, Dr. Raphael Corning. It was the first time Norman had had to work in direct co-operation with a synthesist, and the man’s range of immediately available knowledge had depressed him, making him feel he had wasted the whole of his earlier life.

But that was not the only thing which was bringing him down. He felt hollow, as though he was about to crumple under intolerable strain. On all previous occasions since he was promoted to board status he had relished the fact that he was the only Afram who attended these meetings and looked forward to the day when he would inherit first a fabric-, then a leather-covered throne. Accident had kicked him ahead of his plans. The whole Beninian venture would turn on him as a pivot, regardless of what rank they officially allotted him.