The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (5 page)

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Authors: Vernor Vinge

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Norman glanced about for some sign of airborne infantrymen, but as far as he could see, the sky was empty of men and aircraft. He examined the awning above him. For several years the once green plastic fabric had been subjected alternately to baking sun and rotting rain. It was cheap plastic and now it hung limp, the gray sky visible through the large holes in the material. Norman looked up, got an idea. He backed away from the awning and then ran toward it. He leaped and caught
its rusting metal frame. The shade sagged even more, but held. He eased himself over the frame and rested for an instant on the top; then pulled himself onto the windowsill of a second-story apartment.
Norman looked in, saw nothing but an old bed and a closet with one lonely hanger. He caught the casing above the window and swung up. It was almost like being Tarzan. (Usually, Norman tended to identify himself with Tarzan rather than with the Lord-of-the-Jungle’s chimpanzee flunkies.) He caught the casing with his toes, pushed himself upwards until he could grasp the edge of the flat roof. One last heave and he was lying on that tar-and-gravel roofing material. In places where the tar had been worn away, someone had sprayed plastite, but more time had passed and that “miracle construction material” had deteriorated, too.
The roofs provided scant cover from observation. Fifty feet away; Norman saw the spidery black framework of a radio tower mounted on the roof of another building. It was in good repair; probably it was a government navigation beacon. Norman sneezed several times, violently. He crawled warily across the roof toward the tower. The buildings were separated by a two-foot alley which Norman easily swung across.
He arrived at the base of the tower. Its black plastic members gleamed waxily in the dull light. As with many structures built after 1980, Hydrocarbon Products Administration regulations dictated that it be constructed with materials deriving from the crippled petroleum and coal industries, Norman remembered. In any case, the intricate framework provided good camouflage. Norman settled himself among the girders and peered out across Marquette.
THERE WERE HUNDREDS OF THEM! IN THE DISTANCE, TINY FIGURES IN Allservice green were walking through the streets, inspecting each building. Troop carriers and airtanks hung above them. Other airtanks patrolled some arbitrary perimeter about the city and bay. Norman recognized the setup as one of the standard formations for encirclement and detection of hostile forces. With confident foreknowledge he looked up and examined the sky above him. Every few seconds a buckrogers fell out of the apparently empty grayness. After a free fall of five thousand feet, the airborne infantrymen hit their jets just two or three hundred feet above the city. Already, more than twenty of them were posted over the various intersections.
The chimpanzee squinted, trying to get a clearer view of the nearest buckrogers. Images seen through the air behind and below the soldier seemed to waver. This and a faint screaming sound was the only indication of the superheated air shot from the Bender powered thermal element in the soldier’s backpack. The infantryman’s shoulders seemed
lopsided. On more careful inspection Norman recognized that this was due to a GE fifty-thousand line reconnaissance camera strapped to the soldier’s upper arm and shoulder. The camera’s eight-inch lens gaped blackly as the soldier turned (rotated?) in the chimp’s direction.
Norman froze. He knew that every hyper-resolution picture was being transmitted back to Sawyer AFB where computers and photo-interp teams analyzed them. Under certain conditions just a clear footprint or the beady glint of Norman’s eyes within the maze of girders would be enough to bring a most decisive—though somewhat delayed—reaction.
As the buckrogers turned away, Norman sighed with relief. But he knew that he wouldn’t remain safe for long. Sooner or later—most likely sooner—they would be able to trace him. And then … With horror he remembered once again some of the terrible bits of information that hid in the vast pile he knew, remembered the punishments for unauthorized knowledge.
He had to escape them!
Norman considered the means, both fictional and otherwise, that had been used in the past to elude pursuers. In the first place, he recognized that some outside help was needed, or he could never escape from the country. Erik Satanssen, he remembered, always played the double agent, gaining advantages from both sides right up to the denouement. Or take Slippery Jim DiGriz … the point was there are always some loopholes even in the most mechanized of traps. What organization would have a secret means of getting across Lake Superior into Canada? The Reds, of course!
Norman stopped fiddling with his soaked suspenders, and looked up. That was the pat answer, in some stories: Pretend to side up with the baddies just long enough to get out of danger and expose them at the same time. Turning around, he gazed at the massive automated pier jutting out into the bay. At its root were several fourth-class apartments—and in one of them was the only Soviet agent in the Upper Peninsula! Norman remembered more about Boris Kuchenko. What sort of government would employ a slob like that as a spy? He racked his memory but could find no other evidence of espionage in the U.P. area.
Many tiny details seemed to crystallize into an idea. It was just like in some stories where the hero appears to pull his hunches out of the thin air. Norman
knew
without any specific reason, that the Soviets were not as incapacitated as they seemed. Stark, Borovsky, Ivanov were smart boys, much smarter than the so-called Bumpkinov incompetents they had replaced. If Stark had been in power in the first place, the Soviet Union might have survived Bender’s invention without losing more than a few outlying SSR’s. As it was the Party bosses controlled only the area immediately around Moscow and some “hardened” bases in the Urals. Somehow Norman felt that, if all the mental and physical resources of the rulers had been used against the counterrevolutionaries,
the Reds’ position would have to be better. Borovsky and Ivanov especially, were noted for devious, backdoor victories. Something smelled about this spy business.
If Kuchenko was more than he seemed, there might be a way out even yet. If he could trick the Reds into thinking he was a stupe or a traitor, they might take him to some hideout in Canada. He knew they would be interested in him and his knowledge; that was his passport and his peril. They must never know the things
he
knew. And then later, in Canada, maybe he could expose the Russian spies and gain forgiveness.
THE NEAREST BUCKROGERS WAS NOW FACING DIRECTLY AWAY FROM NORMAN’S tower. The chimpanzee moved away from the tower, hurried to the edge of the roof, and swung himself over. Now he was out of the line of sight of the infantryman. He reached the ground and scampered across the empty street. Soon he was padding along the base of the huge auto pier. Finally he reached the point where the street was swallowed by the enclosed portion of the pier. Norman ran into the dimness, at least he was out of the rain now. Along the side of the inner wall was a metal grid stairway. The chimp clambered up the stairs, found himself in the narrow corridor serving the cheap apartments which occupied what otherwise would have been dead space in the warehouse pier. He paused before turning the doorknob.
“ … . Move fast!” The knob was snatched from his fingers, as someone on the other side pulled the door open. Norman all but fell into the room. “What the hell!” The speaker slammed the door shut behind the chimpanzee. Norman glanced about the room, saw Boris Kuchenko frozen in the act of wringing his hands. The other man spun Norman around, and the chimpanzee recognized him as one Ian Sloane, civilian employee No. 36902u at Sawyer AFB; so the hunch had been right! The Reds were operating on a larger scale than the government suspected.
Norman assumed his best conspiratorial air. “Good morning, gentlemen … or should I say Comrades?”
The older man, Sloane, kept a tight grip on his arm. A look of surprise and triumph and oddly—fear, was on his face. Norman decided to go all the way with the double-agent line. “I’m here to offer my services, uh, Comrades. Perhaps you don’t know quite what and who I am …” He looked around expectantly for some sign of curiosity. Sloane—that was the only name Norman could remember, but it couldn’t be his real one—gazed at him attentively, but kept a tight grip on his arm. Seeing that he was going to get no response, Norman continued less confidently. “I … I know who you are. Get me out of the country and you’ll
never regret it. You must have some way of escaping—at the very least some hiding place.” He noticed Boris Kuchenko glance involuntarily at a spot in the ceiling near one of the walls. There was an ill-concealed trap hacked raggedly out of the ceiling. It hardly seemed the work of a master spy.
At last Sloane spoke. “I think we can arrange your escape. And I am sure that we will not regret it.”
His tone made Norman realize how naive his plan had been. These agents would get the information and secrets from him or they would destroy him, and there was no real possibility that he would have any opportunity to create a third, more acceptable alternative. The fire was much hotter than the frying pan, and fiction was vaporized by reality. He was in trouble.
Pfft.
The tiny sound came simultaneously with a pinprick in his leg. The curtains drawn before the window jerked slightly. A faint greenish haze seemed to hang in the air for an instant, then disappeared. He scratched his leg with his free hand and dislodged a black pellet. Then he knew that the photo-interpretation group at Sawyer had finally found his trail. They knew exactly where he was, and now they were acting. They had just fired at least two PAX cartridges into the room, one of which had failed to go off. The little black object was a cartridge of that famous nerve gas.
During the Pittsburgh Bread Riots back in ‘81, screaming mobs, the type that dismember riot police, had been transformed into the most docile groups by a few spoken commands and a couple of grams of PAX diffused over the riot area. The stuff wasn’t perfect, of course; in about half a percent of the population there were undesirable side effects such as pseudo-epilepsy and permanent nerve damage; another half percent weren’t affected by normal dosages at all. But the great majority of people immediately lost all power to resist outside suggestion. He felt Sloane’s grip loosening.
Norman pulled away and spoke to both men. “Give me a boost through that trapdoor.”
“Yes, sir.” The two men agreeably formed a stirrup and raised the chimpanzee toward the ceiling. As they did, Norman suddenly wondered why the gas had not affected him.
Because I’m not all here!
He answered himself with an almost hysterical chuckle. The gas could only affect the part of him that was physically present. And, though that was a very important part, he still retained some of his own initiative.
As Norman pushed open the trap, there was a splintering crash from the window as a buckrogers in full battle gear came hurtling feet first
into the room. With a spastic heave, the chimp drew himself into the darkness above. From below he heard an almost plaintive, “Halt!” then Sloane’s formerly menacing voice; “We’ll go quietly, Officer.”
NORMAN PICKED HIMSELF UP AND BEGAN RUNNING. THE WAY WAS DIMLY LIT from windows mounted far above. Now that his eyes were adjusted, he could see bulky crates around him and above him. He looked down, and gasped, for he could see crates below him, too. He seemed suspended. Then Norman remembered. In the dim light it wasn’t too evident, but the floor and ceiling of this level were composed of heavy wire mesh. From a control board somewhere in the depths of the building, roller segments in the mesh could be turned on, and the bulkiest crates could be shuttled about the auto pier like toys. When in operation the pier could handle one million tons of merchandise a day; receiving products from trucks, storing them for a short time, and then sliding them into the holds of superfreighters. This single pier had been expected to bring the steel industry to Marquette, thus telescoping the mining and manufacturing complexes into one. Perhaps after the Recovery it would fulfill its promise, but at the moment it was dead and dark.
Norman zigzagged around several crates, scampered up an incline. Behind him he could hear the infantrymen, shed of their flying gear, scrambling through the trap door.
They
would never believe his honesty now that he had been seen consorting with the communists. Things did indeed look dark—he complimented himself on this pun delivered in the midst of danger—but he still had some slim chance of escaping capture and the terrible punishment that would be sure to follow. He had one undetonated PAX cartridge. Apparently its relatively gentle impact with his flesh had kept it from popping. Perhaps not all the soldiers were wearing the antiPAX nose filters—in which case he might be able to commandeer a helicopter. It was a wild idea, but the time for cautious plans was past.
The pier seemed to extend forever. Norman kept moving. He had to get away; and he was beginning to feel very sick. Maybe it was some effect of the gas. He ran faster, but even so he felt a growing terror. His mind seemed to be dissolving, disintegrating. Could
this
be the effect of PAX? He groped mentally for some explanation, but somehow he was having trouble remembering the most obvious things, while at the same time extraneous memories were swamping him more completely than they had for weeks. He should know what the source of the danger was, but somehow …
I’m not all here!
That was the answer! But he couldn’t understand what its significance was anymore. He no longer could form rational plans. Only one goal remained—to get away from
the things that were stalking him. The dim gray glow far ahead now seemed to offer some kind of safety. If he could only reach it. Intelligence was deserting him, and chaos was creeping in.

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