Null-A Continuum (34 page)

They walked until they came to an on-ramp. Here the immense high-speed trucks had to slow nearly to a crawl before turning and accelerating to a merge, but the first three trucks trundling by would not pick up hitchhikers.

Anslark forced the next truck to stop by interfering with its electrical system. The huge dray lumbered to a stop along the road, but the driver did not get out to open his hood or inspect the engine. He merely sat behind the wheel, a look of sullen fear on his sallow features.

When the two men approached, the driver cracked the
window of his cab and asked for their identification badges and internal passports. “You need papers to go from district to district!” he shouted down to them. “Give me your operating numbers—I'll radio it in to the police computer.”

Gosseyn sent the man to a memorized position many miles away, a spot up a tree.

It was Anslark who, after less than a minute of driving, found the monitoring devices wired under the dashboard. He said he could prevent the circuits from reporting their location to ground traffic control, but Gosseyn was uneasy.

The countryside seemed to have once been farmland: Under the double-crescent moons of Petrino, dusty and weed-overgrown acres lay fallow. Here and there were empty, burnt-out shells of farmhouses, and abandoned tractors and harvester-robots lay rusting in the moonlight, one every few miles along the way. The corpses of some local animals, Petrine horses and cattle, lay rotting along the roadsides by the score.

The only feature along the road that was not in disrepair was a series of enormous billboards, some of them hundreds of feet high, which lit up with music and blaring announcements as the truck drove past, vast televised images of actors and actresses bawling out slogans and boasts lauding the victories of something called the Northeastern District Three-Year Economic Efficiency Plan.

Gosseyn felt the pressure of the thought-inspection machines examining his nervous system for loyalty-implant paths. These detectors were hidden in the electronic circuits of every blaring billboard. Anslark turned the invisible force-patterns aside, and no alarm was given.

AN hour later, the primary rose, dull and red, in the East, no brighter than the moon seen from Earth, and cast a deceptive shadowy, ruddy light across the dark landscape.
But this time, they had traveled four hundred miles or so, and there was a service station built like a metal wall across the several lanes of the highway, pierced by drive-through bays where trucks could be weighed and refueled.

There seemed to be only one attendant, and so the line of trucks waiting for fuel was a long one. Most of the drivers sat or stood near a campfire made in the brush by the roadside culvert, sipping coffee from a tin pot held over the fire on a stick.

Anslark approached the group, saying, “I've never come this route before. What's the procedure?”

The several men eyed him warily. Gosseyn, watching from the shadows nearby, saw the same look in each man: unshaven, unkempt, their uniforms dirty, patched, and ill fitting. But their faces told the real story: These men lived in terror of arbitrary arrest or death. They looked at each other with stubborn wariness, as if trying to decide if Anslark were a police informer. One of them spat on the ground and said, “New rules this week. Show the man your passport, bill of lading, tonnage report, fuel consumption record, and the log from your onboard, as well as your loyalty card and mission tags. He gives you the chit for the mileage and you mark it in the log, and he stamps it.”

Another man spoke up: “And you gotta sign for your fuel cells.”

The first man nodded, still eying Anslark warily. “Yeah. Like he said. And you gotta turn in your empties, get the numbers in the book, all that.”

A younger man, who was lying near the fire half-asleep, tilted back his hat and gave Anslark an unfriendly look. “And you better have a carton of cigarettes or something to give the man; otherwise he puts your empty cells back in and you get about twenty miles before you go dry. And then it's a call in to the ground transport, Faithful Citizen, and we all know what that means.”

All the men around the fire stiffened, their eyes now white-rimmed with alarm, but no one made any quick moves. Two or three of the men there slowly put their hands to their belts, where they carried homemade knives, or put a hand into a coat pocket, where Gosseyn could sense the metallic signature of pistols.

Anslark held his hands in plain view and backed away from the group, smiling. Gosseyn saw Anslark walking back among the trucks. He passed a spot where, in the darkness, a man was hiding between two trucks. The man was not visible, but Gosseyn could detect his nerveactions, and he was sure Anslark was also aware of him.

Anslark was a skilled actor. His reaction was one of convincing surprise when a thin figure stepped out from between two trucks. “Halt there, Faithful Citizen!”

In the weak red light from the starry sky, his features shadowed by his hat brim, it was impossible to tell how old he was—but the voice was husky with age. In one hand he held a crowbar. “You heard any disloyal talk, eh? You have anything to report? Anyone to turn in?”

Anslark said in a voice of lilting mockery, “You're working in pairs, aren't you? The man up by the fire said something disloyal, and you come here to shake a bribe out of anyone who overhears. Is that the racket? You turn me in to the secret police for not reporting the comment. The question is, what stops me from turning you and him in to the soldiers over there?”

On the far side of the service station, two young men, maybe fifteen years old, wearing dark uniforms and carrying heavy power rifles, were playing in an abandoned truck, slashing holes in the skirt of the ground-effect platform with their bayonets and taking swigs from a bottle they passed between them.

The old man's chuckle echoed strangely in the gloom. He hefted the crowbar. “Go ahead, Faithful Citizen. Everything I'm doing is for the good of the Authority. Just flushing out the malcontents is all. What've you got on your truck? Liquor? Cigarettes? Chocolate?”

Two other men came out of the underbrush behind Anslark quite suddenly, grabbing him by the arms, pinning him between them.

The old man said, “Now, Faithful Citizen, your codes? We need your robot-loader to move the containers from your rig to ours, so we need the codes, and numbers from your logbook.”

One of the men holding Anslark said in a slow, thick voice, “Eh, Dreel, lookit this feller! He don't have this month's Loyalty tab on his shoulder or nuttin'. These ain't normal duds. He ain't even from Petrino at all, I'm thinking. An off-worlder. Filthy offler!”

“Shaddap,” snarled the old man, Dreel. “Why would an offler be driving a rig, eh? He prob'ly just stole those clothes.”

The other man said nervously, “This ain't right, Dreel. Let's turn him in and just collect the bounty for wreckers. If we're found meddling with an off-worlder …”

Anslark, despite that he was half bent over from the pain of his arms being twisted, spoke in a clear and thoughtful voice. “I have visited your lovely world many times, and been feted by your heads of state. Why, suddenly, am I unwelcome?”

Dreel said harshly, “Off-worlders ain't loyal to Petrino. So they're out to get us. So we gotta get them first. Stands to reason.”

The man on Anslark's left, who was twisting his arm up behind his back, chuckled a muddy chuckle. “I heard the Psych Bosses are gunna vote next month and put all them immigrants and job-stealers in jail, kick ‘em back to their own planets, offler scum.”

Anslark said softly, “You still have elections?”

Dreel said, “ ‘F course! We're a free people!” He shrugged. “But only if you pass your psych test. Gotta loyalty detector in every ballot booth.”

Anslark twisted his head, speaking back over the shoulders of the thugs behind him: “Have you heard enough?”

Gosseyn, in his shadow-form, was blended with the darkness beneath the extinguished and broken street lamps lining the road, and so no one noticed his silhouette until he spoke: “I've heard enough.”

“Good,” said Anslark. “I was getting tired of this.” As he straightened up, there was a snap of electricity. The men holding him were thrown from their feet. Bluish sparks tripped across the length of the crowbar in Dreel's hand, and Dreel dropped it with a cry.

The two men were crouching, recovering their balance. Dreel was on his knees and had his scalded hands tucked into his armpits. All three glared, not at Anslark but at Gosseyn, whose shadow-body was partly visible now that he stood near the trucks and the splashed light of their headlights could pick the misty black silhouette out from the night.

Dreel's lips drew back in a snarl of hate. “The Follower!”

The two men fell back away from Gosseyn. “Enro's creature!” said one. The other said, “The Loyalty Machine was right!”

Gosseyn solidified.

Dreel said in a voice of hoarse terror, “It's Gosseyn! The Follower is Gilbert Gosseyn!”

The two young soldiers in the distance noticed the disturbance. One of them raised his rifle to his shoulder, putting his eye to his rifle's photo-multiplying nightscope. He must have seen Gosseyn's face clearly in his scope, for he gave a low cry of terror and pulled the trigger, but the beam emerging from the barrel was diffracted where it passed near Anslark. The bent beam missed Gosseyn and ignited a tree. Prince Anslark turned slowly and raised his hand, and both weapons lit up with sparks. The soldiers threw down their burning rifles and drew long knives from their belts.

The other truck-drivers were stirred from their apathy by the cries. They brought out their pistols and knives, and those that had neither picked up stout sticks from the
roadside, or rocks. The mob rushed toward Gosseyn and Anslark, shouting as they came.

In his solid form, Gosseyn transported himself and Anslark back into their truck, which was, by this time, forty miles past the service station barrier. The automatic driving mechanism had been guiding the truck down the road for some minutes, for Gosseyn had similarized the truck onto the stretch of highway he had glimpsed beyond the barrier. The fuel cells that had been loaded from the service station onto the lead truck he now similarized in the cargo bed of this truck: In a moment or so, they could pull over and load the fuel units into the engine.

Within the cabin were uniforms and badges, the paperwork and other materials Gosseyn had memorized from in and around the service station while Anslark had been getting the drivers to tell him what he needed. It was easy enough for Gosseyn to memorize the uniforms worn by two men of his and Anslark's build without memorizing the men wearing them. Gosseyn had brought everything into the cab with him when he brought Anslark. The naked men were somewhere left behind at the station.

Anslark opened his kit and started molding faces to match those showing on their badges. As he worked, Anslark said, “Well, what did you make of all that?”

Gosseyn said in a grim voice, “I had been wondering how Petrino, one of the most cosmopolitan centers of the galaxy, the capital planet of the largest member of the Interstellar League, could have citizens programmed to suffer from xenophobic paranoia. It is far outside the range of normal psychological-social development. But note the psychiatrically sophisticated method of convincing people they still live in a democracy—they still have votes, and perhaps even count the results—while they toil under a totalitarian control-scheme that is destroying their economy, and has already destroyed their moral fiber. Criminals who have convinced themselves that the crime is for the general good of Petrino can
escape detection, and the authority is not concerned with maintaining law and order. In fact, law and order is being deliberately broken down.” A note of bitterness crept into his voice. “Did you see their farms? Good soil, rich and black, growing nothing but weeds, or left to wash away downstream.”

Anslark was staring at him in disbelieving astonishment: an expression he could only be wearing if he put it on his mask deliberately. “Strange what you find worthy of comment, Mr. Gosseyn! I note that they recognized your face! At a glance! They knew your name!”

“The fight-or-flight instinct is an early-evolved structure of the base layer of the nervous system. It is not normal for half-armed or unarmed men to rush a superbeing like the Follower, not without steeling themselves. Subliminal conditioning has linked recognition of me with an instant terror-aggression reflex…. It shows the depth of the psychological skills X possesses, perhaps even more than he passed on to Lavoisseur. I also am shocked at the degree of penetration the warped form of Null-A has so rapidly accomplished.”

“But how did they know who you were? Three men taken at random, on a random stretch of road … the soldier opened fire the moment he saw your face … does everyone on this planet know you?”

Gosseyn, instead of answering, turned on the radio and said, “Radio, find me a station that is broadcasting news or comment concerning Gilbert Gosseyn.”

There was a short pause while the radio searched. Then, with a click: “Faithful Citizens! The Loyalty Machine of Munremar broadcast this warning as of 21:30 hours Zone Ten time! The next voice you will hear will be that of the Loyalty Machine!”

A cool, unhurried voice came from the radio speaker: “The Predictors of Yalerta, led by the Predictor Yanar, have been cooperating with the Interstellar League against the menace of renewed military threat from the
Greatest Empire. Their local representative reports that several blurs or ‘dark areas' their prediction powers cannot penetrate have appeared on the temporal horizon. This indicates the presence of the immortal man, Gilbert Gosseyn of Venus, the notorious murderer of the leading members of the League Security Council, is or soon will be active in the Central District of the Intercontinental Land Bridge, near the Predictors' local headquarters in Munremar.”