The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories (22 page)

“Even if you come from the area? Even if the people are friends and former neighbors of yours?”

“It’s my job,” Sharp said. “I have to do it without regard for my feelings or anybody else’s.”

“You’re not a bad fellow,” Humphrys said involuntarily. “I’m sorry—” He broke off.

“Sorry what?” Sharp moved mechanically toward the exit door. “I’ve taken enough of your time. I realize how busy you analysts are. When shall I come back.
Can
I come back?”

“Tomorrow.” Humphrys guided him outside and into the corridor. “About this same time, if it’s convenient.”

“Thanks a lot,” Sharp said, with relief. “I really appreciate it.”

As soon as he was alone in his office, Humphrys closed the door and strode back to his desk. Reaching down, he grabbed the telephone and unsteadily dialed.

“Give me somebody on your medical staff,” he ordered curtly when he had been connected with the Special Talents Agency.

“This is Kirby,” a professional-sounding voice came presently. “Medical research.”

Humphrys briefly identified himself. “I have a patient here,” he said, “who seems to be a latent precog.”

Kirby was interested. “What area does he come from?”

“Petaluma. Sonoma County, north of San Francisco Bay. It’s east of—”

“We’re familiar with the area. A number of precogs have showed up there. That’s been a gold mine for us.”

“Then I was right,” Humphrys said.

“What’s the date of the patient’s birth?”

“He was six years old when the war began.”

“Well,” Kirby said, disappointed, “then he didn’t really get enough of a dose. He’ll never develop a full precog talent, such as we work with here.”

“In other words, you won’t help?”

“Latents—people with a touch of it—outnumber the real carriers. We don’t have time to fool with them. You’ll probably run into dozens like your patient, if you stir around. When it’s imperfect, the talent isn’t valuable; it’s going to be a nuisance for the man, probably nothing else.”

“Yes, it’s a nuisance,” Humphrys agreed caustically. “The man is only months away from a violent death. Since he was a child, he’s been getting advanced phobic warnings. As the event gets closer, the reactions intensify.”

“He’s not conscious of the future material?”

“It operates strictly on a subrational level.”

“Under the circumstances,” Kirby said thoughtfully, “maybe it’s just as well. These things appear to be fixed. If he knew about it, he still couldn’t change it.”

Dr. Charles Bamberg, consulting psychiatrist, was just leaving his office when he noticed a man sitting in the waiting room.

Odd, Bamberg thought. I have no patients left for today.

Opening the door, he stepped into the waiting room. “Did you wish to see me?”

The man sitting on the chair was tall and thin. He wore a wrinkled tan raincoat, and, as Bamberg appeared, he began tensely stubbing out a cigar.

“Yes,” he said, getting clumsily to his feet.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No appointment.” The man gazed at him in appeal. “I picked you—” He laughed with confusion. “Well, you’re on the top floor.”

“The top floor?” Bamberg was intrigued. “What’s that got to do with it?”

“I—well, Doc, I feel much more comfortable when I’m up high.”

“I see,” Bamberg said. A compulsion, he thought to himself. Fascinating. “And,” he said aloud, “when you’re up high, how do you feel? Better?”

“Not better,” the man answered. “Can I come in? Do you have a second to spare me?”

Bamberg looked at his watch. “All right,” he agreed, admitting the man. “Sit down and tell me about it.”

Gratefully, Giller seated himself. “It interferes with my life,” he said rapidly, jerkily. “Every time I see a flight of stairs, I have an irresistible compulsion to go up it. And plane flight—I’m always flying around. I have my own ship; I can’t afford it, but I’ve got to have it.”

“I see,” Bamberg said. “Well,” he continued genially, “that’s not really so bad. After all, it isn’t exactly a fatal compulsion.”

Helplessly, Giller replied: “When I’m up there—” He swallowed wretchedly, his dark eyes gleaming. “Doctor, when I’m up high, in an office building, or in my plane—I feel another compulsion.”

“What is it?”

“I—” Giller shuddered. “I have an irresistible urge to push people.”

“To push people?”

“Toward windows. Out.” Giller made a gesture. “What am I going to do, Doc? I’m afraid I’ll kill somebody. There was a little shrimp of a guy I pushed once—and one day a girl was standing ahead of me on an escalator—I shoved her. She was injured.”

“I see,” Bamberg said, nodding. Repressed hostility, he thought to himself. Interwoven with sex. Not unusual.

He reached for his lamp.

The machine was a foot wide and two feet long; it looked like an oversized box of crackers. Silently, with great caution, it climbed the side of a concrete building; it had lowered two rubberized rollers and was now beginning the first phase of its job.

From its rear, a flake of blue enamel was exuded. The machine pressed the flake firmly against the rough concrete and then continued on. Its upward path carried it from vertical concrete to vertical steel: it had reached a window. The machine paused and produced a microscopic fragment of cloth fabric. The cloth, with great care, was embedded in the fitting of the steel window frame.

In the chill darkness, the machine was virtually invisible. The glow of a distant tangle of traffic briefly touched it, illuminated its polished hull, and departed. The machine resumed its work.

It projected a plastic pseudopodium and incinerated the pane of window glass. There was no response from within the gloomy apartment: nobody was home. The machine, now dulled with particles of glass-dust, crept over the steel frame and raised an inquisitive receptor.

While it received, it exerted precisely two hundred pounds pressure on the steel window frame; the frame obediently bent. Satisfied, the machine descended the inside of the wall to the moderately thick carpet. There it began the second phase of its job.

One single human hair—follicle and speck of scalp included—was deposited on the hardwood floor by the lamp. Not far from the piano, two dried grains of tobacco were ceremoniously laid out. The machine waited an interval of ten seconds and then, as an internal section of magnetic tape clicked into place, it suddenly said, “Ugh! Damn it…”

Curiously, its voice was husky and masculine.

The machine made its way to the closet door, which was locked. Climbing the wood surface, the machine reached the lock mechanism, and, inserting a thin section of itself, caressed the tumblers back. Behind the row of coats was a small mound of batteries and wires: a self-powered video recorder. The machine destroyed the reservoir of film—which was vital—and then, as it left the closet, expelled a drop of blood on the jagged tangle that had been the lens-scanner. The drop of blood was even more vital.

While the machine was pressing the artificial outline of a heel mark into the greasy film that covered the flooring of the closet, a sharp sound came from the hallway. The machine ceased its work and became rigid. A moment later a small, middle-aged man entered the apartment, coat over one arm, briefcase in the other.

“Good God,” he said, stopping instantly as he saw the machine. “What are you?”

The machine lifted the nozzle of its front section and shot an explosive pellet at the man’s half-bald head. The pellet traveled into the skull and detonated. Still clutching his coat and briefcase, bewildered expression on his face, the man collapsed to the rug. His glasses, broken, lay twisted beside his ear. His body stirred a little, twitched, and then was satisfactorily quiet.

Only two steps remained to the job, now that the main part was done. The machine deposited a bit of burnt match in one of the spotless ashtrays resting on the mantel, and entered the kitchen to search for a water glass. It was starting up the side of the sink when the noise of human voices startled it.

“This is the apartment,” a voice said, clear and close.

“Get ready—he ought to still be here.” Another voice, a man’s voice, like the first. The hall door was pushed open and two individuals in heavy overcoats sprinted purposefully into the apartment. At their approach, the machine dropped to the kitchen floor, the water glass forgotten. Something had gone wrong. Its rectangular outline flowed and wavered; pulling itself into an upright package it fused its shape into that of a conventional TV unit.

It was holding that emergency form when one of the men—tall, red-haired—peered briefly into the kitchen.

“Nobody in here,” the man declared, and hurried on.

“The window,” his companion said, panting. Two more figures entered the apartment, an entire crew. “The glass is gone—missing. He got in that way.”

“But he’s gone.” The red-haired man reappeared at the kitchen door; he snapped on the light and entered, a gun visible in his hand. “Strange ... we got here right away, as soon as we picked up the rattle.” Suspiciously, he examined his wristwatch. “Rosenburg’s been dead only a few seconds … how could he have got out again so fast?”

Standing in the street entrance, Edward Ackers listened to the voice. During the last half hour the voice had taken on a carping, nagging whine; sinking almost to inaudibility, it plodded along, mechanically turning out its message of complaint.

“You’re tired,” Ackers said. “Go home. Take a hot bath.”

“No,” the voice said, interrupting its tirade. The locus of the voice was a large illuminated blob on the dark sidewalk, a few yards to Acker’s right. The revolving neon sign read:

Thirty times—he had counted—within the last few minutes the sign had captured a passerby and the man in the booth had begun his harangue. Beyond the booth were several theaters and restaurants: the booth was well-situated.

But it wasn’t for the crowd that the booth had been erected. It was for Ackers and the offices behind him; the tirade was aimed directly at the Interior Department. The nagging racket had gone on so many months that Ackers was scarcely aware of it. Rain on the roof. Traffic noises. He yawned, folded his arms, and waited.

“Banish it,” the voice complained peevishly. “Come on, Ackers. Say something; do something.”

“I’m waiting,” Ackers said complacently.

A group of middle-class citizens passed the booth and were handed leaflets. The citizens scattered the leaflets after them, and Ackers laughed.

“Don’t laugh,” the voice muttered. “It’s not funny; it costs us money to print those.”

“Your personal money?” Ackers inquired.

“Partly.” Garth was lonely, tonight. “What are you waiting for? What’s happened? I saw a police team leave your roof a few minutes ago … ?

“We may take in somebody,” Ackers said, “there’s been a killing.”

Down the dark sidewalk the man stirred in his dreary propaganda booth. “Oh?” Harvey Garth’s voice came. He leaned forward and the two looked directly at each other: Ackers, carefully-groomed, well-fed, wearing a respectable overcoat… Garth, a thin man, much younger, with a lean, hungry face composed mostly of nose and forehead.

“So you see,” Ackers told him, “we do need the system. Don’t be Utopian.”

“A man is murdered; and you rectify the moral imbalance by killing the killer.” Garth’s protesting voice rose in a bleak spasm. “Banish it! Banish the system that condemns men to certain extinction!”

“Get your leaflets here,” Ackers parodied dryly. “And your slogans. Either or both. What would you suggest in place of the system?”

Garth’s voice was proud with conviction. “Education.”

Amused, Ackers asked: “Is that all? You think that would stop anti-social activity? Criminals just don’t—
know
better?”

“And psychotherapy, of course.” His projected face bony and intense, Garth peered out of his booth like an aroused turtle. “They’re sick … that’s why they commit crimes, healthy men don’t commit crimes. And you compound it; you create a sick society of punitive cruelty.” He waggled an accusing finger. “You’re the real culprit, you and the whole Interior Department. You and the whole Banishment System.”

Again and again the neon sign blinked BANISH it! Meaning, of course, the system of compulsory ostracism for felons, the machinery that projected a condemned human being into some random backwater region of the sidereal universe, into some remote and out-of-the-way corner where he would be of no harm.

“No harm to us, anyhow,” Ackers mused aloud.

Garth spoke the familiar argument. “Yes, but what about the local inhabitants?”

Too bad about the local inhabitants. Anyhow, the banished victim spent his energy and time trying to find a way back to the Sol System. If he got back before old age caught up with him he was readmitted by society. Quite a challenge … especially to some cosmopolite who had never set foot outside Greater New York. There were—probably—many involuntary expatriates cutting grain in odd fields with primitive sickles. The remote sections of the universe seemed composed mostly of dank rural cultures, isolated agrarian enclaves typified by small-time bartering of fruit and vegetables and handmade artifacts.

“Did you know,” Ackers said, “that in the Age of Monarchs, a pickpocket was usually hanged?”

“Banish it,” Garth continued monotonously, sinking back into his booth. The sign revolved; leaflets were passed out. And Ackers impatiently watched the late-evening street for sign of the hospital truck.

He knew Heimie Rosenburg. A sweeter little guy there never was… although Heimie had been mixed up in one of the sprawling slave combines that illegally transported settlers to outsystem fertile planets. Between them, the two largest slavers had settled virtually the entire Sirius System. Four out of six emigrants were hustled out in carriers registered as “freighters.” It was hard to picture gentle little Heimie Rosenburg as a business agent for Tirol Enterprises, but there it was.