The Metallic Muse (19 page)

Paul Holbertson shrugged indifferently and gestured with his cigar. “Everything that obvious was tried long ago. It didn’t help. I’ll tell you one more thing that won’t work. I got the foggy notion that the Tank was involved in some way, so I closed it down for a month. It damned near ruined us. Production dropped almost to zero. Things spurted a little when I opened it up again, but not for long, and production has been dropping ever since. Well—get to work on it, and remember this: No tampering with the Tank, and don’t expect the solution to be childishly simple. We have some highly capable people on our staff, and none of them have to been able to cope with this. The trouble is that we’re dealing with writers. I haven’t decided whether they’re superhuman or subhuman, but I know they aren’t functioning normally even when they act normally. The only thing I can do to help you is wish you luck.”

“Thank you,” Kalder said.

It was an opportunity, but it was also a test. The Holbertsons were a hard-boiled family, and none of its members would experience a twitch of conscience over handing him a problem that had stumped Solar Productions for years. He suspected a conspiracy. Either he would show the family that he was worthy of June, or the family would show June how incompetent he was. It would applaud his success, but no tears would be shed over his failure, and few fingers would be raised to help him. He perhaps should have been grateful that June’s father was willing to wish him luck.

“I’d like to talk with some writers,” Kalder said.

“So would I,” Paul Holbertson said grimly. “If you find out where they’re hiding, let me know.”

In three days Kalder learned his way about the executive and editorial offices and gained a passing familiarity with the files. On the fourth day he decided to visit the Tank. The company ran a swing train between its office and its production center, but gainful employment was depriving Kalder of his accustomed daily exercise in tennis and swimming, and he decided to walk.

He ran into trouble immediately. Q tunnel, which was the direct route to the Main, was blocked off. A guard waved him away as he started to enter it. The last of the Q tunnel population was moving out, and Kalder stood aside to let it pass: men, women and children who slouched along absently, each man cradling a TV set preciously in his arms. The women and children carried small bundles of belongings. A few women also carried sets—lucky families, to have two!

“What’s up?” Kalder asked the guard.

“Radiation seepage,” the guard said shortly.

A short distance further on Kalder turned off into a narrow passageway, thinking he might find his way through to the Main without going all the way to R tunnel. There were numbered doorways along the passage but few doors. In each room clusters of people sat around TV sets watching intently.

The passage divided, divided again, and gradually became narrower. Whenever two people met they had to edge past each other sideways. Abruptly he left the area of living quarters behind him, and he paused in amazement to contemplate the unfinished walls. He vaguely recalled rumors of a critical housing shortage, and the number of TV sets he had seen in some of the rooms could only mean that several families were living there; and yet this unused space could accommodate dozens of apartments. It only wanted someone to do the digging.

Eventually he found his way through to the Main. The huge, brightly lighted tunnel swarmed with humanity. Government swing trains passed at regular intervals, moving slowly as the tractor drivers shouted people out of the way. Many factory shifts were changing, the men of the new shift reporting with glum faces for their hour’s labor. Long, slow-moving lines of women marked the locations of supply depots.

Kalder stepped into the doorway of a medical clinic and stood for a few minutes watching housewives jostle for position in a fresh meat queue. He had passed this way many times, but always blindly and in a swing train or private car. Now it occurred to him that those lower classes politely referred to as the people were customers of Solar Productions—his customers—and as such they were important to him.

As he continued to watch he discovered that they were human beings like himself; and in some way that he did not precisely understand, that made them much more important.

At the production center he went to the executives dining room for an early lunch before he rode the elevator down to the Tank. Barney Fulton, the Tank’s manager, was a kindly old man who’d been with Solar in one capacity or another all of his working life. “The boss said you’d be around,” he told Kalder. “I’ll give you any help I can, but hell, I haven’t got any answers.”

“I’ll have to ask some foolish questions, because all of this is new to me. Now—just what is the Tank?”

“It used to belong to Production,” Barney said. “They still use it when they need it, but that’s only for the big scenes. Even then the writers kick up a fuss about it. Most of the time the writers have the Tank to themselves, and they’re supposed to use it to give them ideas and for research on problems they’ve encountered in the scripts they’re working on. What they actually use it for no one knows, maybe because no one knows how a writer thinks. Jeff Powell, he writes nothing but romances, but when he comes in here he goes on an adventure jag. Maybe that gives him ideas for love stories. Who knows?”

“Maybe you’d better let me look at it,” Kalder said doubtfully.

“Sure.” Barney strode to the door of his office. “Pete this is Mr. Kalder, the new vice-president. Take him through the Tank and don’t get him killed.”

Pete gave Kalder a broad grin and led him away.

They signed in at one of the Tank’s entrances and stepped through a doorway into a scene of overwhelming grandeur. One glance at the spaciousness, at the vast, limited vistas, took Kalder’s breath away. Accustomed all his life to rooms and passageways, he could only stare disbelievingly.

Ahead of them was a tangled jungle. Beyond it a hill rose steeply, and beyond that, other hills. There were glimpses of forests, of distant mountains. Overhead the ceiling arched upward and upward and away to a far distant, brightly lit dome.

“Pretty big, eh?” Pete said proudly.

“It’s tremendous,” Kalder said.

“We have it on a twenty-four-hour day, meaning we got both day and night. At night we turn off the lights and turn on the stars. We got a moon, too. Come on. We’ll have to stay clear of that jungle. They’re shooting a jungle scene this afternoon.”

They skirted the jungle, climbed a tall hill, and stood looking down on the lovely, still blueness of a lake.

“Where to?” Pete asked.

Kalder consulted his notebook. “I’d like to look around and see what the place is like. And then—do you know a writer named Walter Donald?”

“Sure. Big fellow, with blond hair. I know all the older ones. Not many of the new ones have been using the Tank.”

“I’d like to talk with Donald.” “I’ll call in.”

Pete went over to a control point to make his call, and he came back shaking his head. “Donald’s in the Tank, but they don’t know where he is. He probably didn’t make any special request. Sometimes a writer just looks around until he finds something that interests him.”

“I see,” Kalder said. He’d studied the writers’ production records with care, and he had a hunch that Donald could give him a clue as to what was wrong. Donald had been the most prolific man on the staff, even though his output had fallen along with that of the others. A month before, his work had suddenly stopped altogether. Kalder tried to get in touch with him and found that he had entered the Tank and stayed there. He had signed in, and he had not signed out. Kalder wanted to know what he was doing.

“Donald has been in here for a month,” he said to Pete. “Isn’t that a little long to be just looking around?”

“Well,” Pete said, “he’s a writer.”

An elephant trumpeted in the jungle, and a rifle shot rang out. Down on the lake a rowboat came into view rounding a point. Pete handed Kalder his binoculars. “It’s Jeff Powell,” he said.

Kalder watched the awkward movements of the man rowing the boat. “Where would be a good place to look for Donald?” he asked.

“Couldn’t say. If he hasn’t asked for anything special, he could be anywhere. It’s a big place.”

“I think I’d better talk with Barney,” Kalder said.

He went to the control point and asked Barney to have his men keep a lookout for Walter Donald. Barney said he’d check with the concessionaires; if Donald had been in the Tank for a month he had to be getting food from somewhere or he was dead.

Kalder returned to the hilltop, sat down in the thick, simulated grass, and watched the man in the boat. Jeff Powell was getting ready to fish. Kalder had seen enough films to vaguely understand the process. In fact, he thought he could have given Powell a few pointers.

After several timid gestures, Powell managed a feeble cast. As his lure hit the water the lake boiled and erupted. Powell knelt in the boat, pole bent double, and battled the monstrous fish.

A trio of shark fins crossed the lake in precise formation and circled the boat. Powell hauled valiantly on his line. The fish sounded, returned to the surface, and suddenly shot away under the boat. Powell spun, lost his balance, and toppled overboard.

“Damn,” Pete said. “There he goes again.”

Kalder raised his binoculars and watched Powell drown.

It was a drawn-out process. He gurgled and threshed, and his pathetic cries were frightening. Finally he sank out of sight.

“Barney said one more time would be the end of it,” Pete said. “We’re not going to let him near the water again until he learns how to swim. The Board is complaining about our resuscitation bills.”

Two men came hurrying along the shore. They splashed into the water, hauled out Powell, and carried him away.

“We ought to leave him be dead,” Pete said. “He don’t write nothing but romances anyway.”

“If he writes anything at all, we need him,” Kalder said.

An airplane roared overhead. Kalder watched it curiously, saw a man jump, saw a parachute billow out. The man floated down toward the lake, and the shark fins headed for him the moment he hit the water. He got a raft inflated and pulled himself in just as the sharks made their rush.

Pete chuckled. “If Barney ever put teeth in them sharks, you’d be missing a lot of writers.”

Kalder continued to watch the airplane, which cut its motors abruptly and was lowered to the ground behind the trees on the other side of the lake.

Another shot rang out in the jungle. “Ready to move on?” Pete asked. Kalder got to his feet obediently, and they circled the lake.

At the next control point Kalder called Barney. “Donald is hanging out around Area Five,” Barney said. “You can probably see it from where you are. It’s the big forest.”

“What’s he doing there?”

“Don’t know. That’s where he’s been eating. One of the concession men knows him. If you want to find him, tell Pete. He’ll help you look.”

Beyond the lake they came to a desert. They plodded onward, sinking deeply into loose sand, and in a small ravine they happened on a dying writer. His clothing was ragged, his figure emaciated. He croaked after them, “Water! Water!”

They walked on. “That’s Bill Morris,” Pete said. “He asked Barney what it felt like to die of thirst, and Barney told him to go out in the desert and find out.”

Kalder nodded. Some of the writers used the Tank as a direct source of information. Others seemed to use it as a diversion—Jeff Powell, for example, coming in for adventure but never writing about it. Bill Morris would be getting an excellent idea of what it would be like to die of thirst in a desert, but it seemed to Kalder that there must be quicker ways of discovering what a writer would need to know. Morris certainly had been there for several days, and that was a big investment in time to acquire the background for one short scene in an hour film.

They left the desert and crossed gently rolling farm land. Cattle grazed by a small, meandering stream. Oddly enough, they were real cattle. Never having seen any, Kalder stopped to stare and discovered that they weren’t grazing. They were eating cakes of something or other that had been dyed green to match the synthetic grass.

Pete guided Kalder to the right, and they entered the forest. “Area Five,” Pete announced. “Shouldn’t be hard to find him.”

They examined the forest from one end to the other. The large synthetic trees were widely spaced, short synthetic grass covered the ground, and there was no undergrowth. Neither was there any sign of Donald.

They retraced their steps. This time Kalder stopped in a central clearing to examine what looked like an enormous post. He thumped on metal. “What’s this?”

“Vent,” Pete said. “Or maybe it’s an air intake or a solar power inlet. They’re all over the place.”

“What’s inside?”

“Machinery and stuff.”

Kalder started around the enormous circumference. Because he was watching the surrounding forest, he was completely surprised when his hand came in contact with a door handle.

He opened the door and staggered backward, hands clasped to his eyes. The vent stretched upward an interminable distance and ended in a blaze of light. It was a moment before Kalder’s vision returned to him, and when it did he saw, a couple of feet below the door, a metal grating that spanned the vent. On the grating lay a man. Pete had caught up with him, and he looked in and exclaimed, “That’s Donald!”

It was a big man with blond hair, but his skin was burned black. Kalder said in alarm, “Donald?”

“Leave me alone,” Donald said. “Get the hell out of here.”

He lay face down on the grating. He was nude, and he did not move when he spoke.

“Maybe he’s sick,” Pete said. “He don’t look so good. Shall we take him out?”

Donald sat up. “Sick?” The dark skin of his face twisted with convulsive bitterness. “You’re the sick ones. The dead Ones. I’m getting some sunshine. This is one of the few places on this cursed planet where any can be had. Care to join me? Then get out!”

Kalder introduced himself, explaining that he was concerned because Donald had been in the Tank for a month and because he wasn’t writing. Would Donald mind telling Kalder what he was trying to do?