Isserman Stevens stood behind the eucalyptus and trembled violently. He had slipped out of the dormitory ahead of a fat kid who fired and missed. He dodged into the pyrocanthus, foamy with blossom this spring, camouflaging his white school uniform. While other boys and the girls cleared the dorm for sanctuary in the brush and shrubbery, he had scuttled to the service area, his bright-orange tote bag masked by his body.
He stopped shaking and tugged the abstract sculpture from the bag. His sad-faced art professor had said, “Isserman, you’ve made a worm nest in eight rigid fins. The fifty-centimeter length, the overheft of the vertical members, the unbalance of the wedge crowning your spaghetti farm . . . well, as some have a tin ear for music, you have a glass eye for proportion.”
Isserman tried to snap the wedge from its slender base. It would not break. He smashed it onto the concrete platform of the disposal bin. There was a hairline crack, and he pounded until the wedge came free. He checked his gun. He checked his stolen clip. He checked his watch. Four minutes gone of the twenty allotted for the kilometer run to the classroom. A boy sobbed not far away.
He trembled again. He knelt and looked around the eucalyptus. The kid had given up for today. He was walking in the open, polka-dotted with shots. He was covered with twenty or thirty three-centimeter splats of all colors, pink on the back of one hand and an epic blue splash on his right temple. Isserman stopped shaking. The RAD was in sight, lumbering over the turf.
“Recycling Automatic Dispenser, Wayco Manufacturing, Model 22-K,” was the title of the operations manual he had studied. The compensators were not precisely in sync. That was why it undulated over the ground. Not enough to bother maintenance yet. It took a phase harmonizer to adjust. You could set it by trial and error with a dash-dot driver. As he watched, he thought he would remember this instant forever.
This was the moment of either-or. This was balancing on the antigravity stick with land instead of the lake below. This was do or flat-out die. He shuddered. The arms of the RAD reached out. The bin door slid down.
Isserman stepped smoothly to the arm. The disposal container was raised and tipped into the RAD. Old uniforms, paper, plastic bottles, shoes, the detritus of dormitory living tilted into the bin. The moment the container was emptied, Isserman rolled through the wide slot. He fumbled for the sculpture. Its edges caught on the bag. With committed calm, he worked it loose. He stood on the uncertain footing and set the base against the very center of the wall. With the other hand he held the wedge end-o against the closure of the door. The door slid up and locked onto it, leaving a twenty-centimeter gap. The RAD moved off.
The hydraulic-ram wall moved toward him. In vertical terms, he figured, an elephant stood on a card table, 1.75 tons per square meter. The ram engaged the sculpture. It held.
The RAD was double-ended for efficiency, so Isserman was looking out the back as it headed for the last school station at the rear of the classroom. He pulled his gun and began squeezing shots as targets offered. His yellow blotch with the personal isotope appeared twenty times on white uniforms. The gun was empty. He groped in the narrow space for the stolen clip in the tote bag.
He snapped eight shots when unsophisticated students tried to run with the RAD for shelter. He had to bend farther over as the trash rose under his feet. His elbow was forced to the line of his shoulders. He ignored the evidence. He made seven more scores before he looked down. The sculpture was failing, plastic turned plastic under the inexorable pressure. The spaghetti lines kept the thick fins in relationship, but he now had only thirty-to-thirty-five centimeters of space. He twisted and wrenched himself split-legged, straddling the sculpture, his narrowest dimension parallel to the ram face.
He held the gun in his teeth and pulled down with all his strength on the horizontal door. It was hard against the wedge and did not give a millimeter with his weight on it. He snorted between amusement and terror. Two hundred meters to the classroom. The RAD had been slowed by the students dodging around it. He looked at his watch. Three minutes to the bell. He squeezed off the last five shots with his hips pressed against the outer wall.
He was bitterly amused by his lack of information after all the research. Pragmatic Ethics said no one ever had enough overt data for a final decision—forget evaluation of the decision—but if he was going to be crushed like a dummy at fifteen and one-half years old, he should have thought to find out if his hips or chest would go first. The ram squeezed tighter. The empirical method! He bared his teeth. Never too late to learn. He would find out.
The RAD stopped, the arms went out, the door lowered, the ram retracted. He swarmed through the opening. He hit the ground between the arms at a dead run. His tote bag swung wide as he turned the corner of the building. The bell began to ring. He was through the door and stuffed his keycard into the counter before it stopped. He walked down the corridor and stepped into the classroom.
His name stood out from all the others in blue fire on the wall. His score 40-0. While his classmates stood and snarled, booed and hissed and cheered, he looked at the 293 names, a few in red; 20-5 was the best score. No one had scored over twenty in his three years of school. There had been only fifty-some graduates from a student body fluctuating at three hundred and under. This was achievement. He stood wire-taut. The names faded.
The wall printed, “Isserman Stevens report to Personnel.”
He waved an imperial farewell to his peers and grinned. They cheered him through the door. He staggered down the hall in a fit of reaction, almost losing control of his bladder, trembling, shaking, his mouth working . . . until a student appeared from a room. He walked with swaggering nonchalance.
He tapped his keycard into the slot of the Personnel door. It slid open, and he stepped into the closet. The door shut when he retrieved the keycard. The field built to congruency with the characteristic soft whine, up and beyond the audible range. Coinciding at all points when superimposition occurred, the click came like teeth snapping down a tunnel. The door opened.
“Isserman Stevens,” said a woman behind a desk. She nodded to a chair. “I’m Margaret Sandler.” The window behind her looked down on a night city—Los Angeles, Mexico City, Buenos Aires? What did it matter—Davenport, Rock Island, Moline—was she personnel chief for the stars or the secretarial pool? Her black hair was sleek, her intelligent brown eyes intimidating. “How did you get hold of that extra clip?”
“I assumed computer identification and called out Lock Theory and Practice, ma’am. The armory alarm is not very sophisticated.”
“Did you share access?”
“No, ma’am.”
“And how did you get to class all clear?”
His answer matched her brevity. When she asked why he had risked death by crushing, he said he had not figured to die any more than the girl who panicked on the aggie stick and drove into the side of the boat. She looked doubtful. “How did you get out, ma’am?”
“I suborned my peers. When did you realize what school was all about?”
“Weapons or Prag Logic or Exotic Anthro?” he hedged. “Who you shoot or who you don’t?” She waited patiently, her eyes probing. “I’m not sure I know now.” He said slowly, “The right to make mistakes, maybe, and graduation by ordeal. Oh, I figured this out, but I had a feeling I’d better learn something first. Maybe I was scared. I nearly scheduled Art last year. With no possessions allowed, it’s not easy—it’s hard to know the right time to go.” He stopped speaking.
“How many levels is school about?” she said softly, and answered herself: “Well, you can’t feed enough data to a computer, because relative values change. Because the human computer is associational on a value-shifting time-release program, the only meterstick is eating the model.” She ignored her confused metaphor. “Go to the next room. When Rawling is done with you, come back here.”
Rawling was impersonal, deft, and quick. “Strip down, sir. Step into the fitting booth. Let me snug the collar under your chin. Hold out your arms with the fingers separated. First the lubricant spray and then the moldform. Arms to the side, touch your hands to your shoulders. Squat down, sir, full knee bend. The quadriflex will accommodate with no discomfort. Stand still for the catalyst. Very well, sir. Step out. Slit here and here. Let me help you peel it off.”
Left alone at last in the programmed shower, Isserman shook and shook mindlessly while the scrubber and oil and water and foam worked on him.
Spidersilk-soft mesh underwear was waiting. The bronze-rust uniform fit like a second skin. It was engineered to support two guns at his thighs from his shoulders. The boots were red-bronze, and the fingertip-length coat was dull dazzle-striped. “Your complete outfit will be waiting for you, sir,” said Rawling. “Will you check your guns now, military jolt load.” He watched the holster release when the guns were drawn. He made and set a slight adjustment to the down-pull and said Margaret Sandler was waiting.
She looked him over. “Very nice. There’s a glass of berryea by your chair.” He sat and sipped it. “Do you have a clean handkerchief?” She smiled ruefully. “That’s my mother syndrome—it’s hard to let you children go. That’s why I must follow the book as well as you. My condolences. White uniform plus full score equals graduation. And my congratulations.”
“Th-thank you, ma’am.”
“You are the new Factor for Laramie.”
“F-factor?”
“An early-period planet—Timeless West—out in Boötes somewhere.” She watched a tremor shake him. “Muscles and windmills and water power working up to steam. No internal combustion. Despite all the ridiculous conditions, historical-fix planets flourish. You’ll go to Laramie because the last Factor was shot two weeks ago.”
He stopped trembling at this news, and she continued, “Not from your school. She carried a clean uniform in her tote bag to graduate. That was when we stopped putting out uniforms with the assistance of young men. She extrapolated her talent on Laramie. A wife used a period pistol on her. And before this, a woman filled the post for twenty-six years. She retired to spend more time with her grandchildren. So it always comes down to the individual. But it seemed more politic to send a man this time.”
She sat at her desk and punched coordinates at a terminal. She checked her work and tapped Execute and Hold. She stood and said, “Isserman, my only advice is the third law: The exercise of power has an opposite and equal action.”
“Somebody must be r-responsible, ma’am.”
“Yes. It’s a demanding and a weary burden.” She led the way to another room. “But it’s always been the only game in town. Now you get your choice, Isserman, graduate to your home town with no bias, or go factoring in the Timeless West.”
One door in the far wall read “Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts,” the other, “Laramie, Laramie.” A locker on wheels with his name on it, presumably full of clothing and personal gear, stood between the doors. Without hesitation, he pushed it to “Laramie.”
She made a gesture he had never seen before, thumb and forefinger together in a circle. It obviously meant good luck, God bless, goodbye. The door closed. Congruency elided the light-years, the eerie whine, the snap, and the door opened. He pulled out his locker and stood beside it.
The post was a horizontal cylinder, thirty meters interior diameter, corrugated outside, one hundred and twenty meters long. The bottom half contained the support systems. At ground level, Receiving and the Factor’s quarters were twenty meters deep, with enclosed passages on either side running the length of the post, giving interior access to the buildings under local control at either end. The rest of the space was open. The far half was elevated seats, with the staging area underneath, the arena, the eleven booths, the First Clerk’s desk and files to the left, the locked command console to the right, directly in front of Isserman Stevens.
It was familiar enough from the mock-up at school, but on Laramie it smelled of dust and summer in spite of the standard twenty-one-degree temperature. Fewer than a hundred men and women were in the stands, and a few clerks and handlers idled in the arena in front of the booths. They wore funny hats and peculiar clothing. Silence spread as Isserman Stevens walked to the console. He said he was the new Factor and would open transportation in one hour.
“Where you been, you little son-of-a-bitch?” shouted a virulent drunk on the steps to the arena. “You been dogging it while I dangled here at your pleasure!” He pulled his gun.
Stevens fired first. He aimed for the shoulder, and the man spun like a rag doll, arms flapping, and knocked over a boy carrying a wooden bucket of ice and beer bottles. The military load had a velocity of just under a kilometer per second, and the stun charge left a man numb to stimuli for ten hours. He would recover in two or three days. “Take him to local authority,” said Stevens.
He dropped the gun into the holster. The weight was familiar and comforting. He was almost grateful to the drunk, who had triggered this opportunity to establish his persona now.
“Post regulations prohibit firearms and booze,” he said firmly. “Either will interrupt orderly progression of our business. Keep in mind that this post exists at your option. Somebody has got to run interstellar transportation, and Earth alone has the radiation belts that make congruency possible. If you don’t like our established obligations, your recourse is to terminate the agreement, work for modification from your authority and my own, or develop another method of transport.” Three years of school with the quickest kind of pragmatic opportunists made him immune to sneers, smiles, frowns, or applause. “A Factor has discretionary powers, but I’ll operate by the book until discretion indicates otherwise.”
“Snot-nosed kid!” shouted a woman.
“One month disbarment,” said Stevens. He waited while handlers hustled her through the passage under the seats. “Other comment?” He waited. He walked backstage, put his keycard in the door to the Factor’s quarters, and shoved in his locker. He closed the door.
He sat in the middle of the floor and howled.
As Factor, he was at the focus of the love-hate that men felt for the Mother of the Stars, the Octopus of Space, cosmocentric Earth. Isserman mourned his own condition, alone, alone.
After the first dozen planets were settled, it became obvious that the paraphernalia of advanced society was too expensive to drop into the stellar void. The emphasis was drastically shifted to any group of a quarter-million people or more who wanted a world. Two hundred and fifty thousand made a reasonable minimum gene pool. The basic agricultural equipment was comparatively inexpensive. Each planet was decreed self-sufficient, to wither or flourish by its own efforts. The trickle of trade that could be handled by one Factor kept a commodity flow open and covered handling costs. Exchange of information by mail was unrestricted.
And he was the man responsible for a planet’s exterior communication. He was the link to Earth and some four thousand planets. He was the appointed arbiter, the bottleneck, the master of the post, the focus of resentment. He dumped this overwhelming burden on the carpet and howled.
“You got a problem, Buddy?”
A girl leaned against the doorjamb. She was dressed in the local costume, dark-blue tapered pants and a bandana-print shirt with pearl buttons, but she carried Earth pistols at her hips. Her shoes were pointed-toe boots with high heels. “Got a thorn in your paw? Let Mama—”
He jumped to his feet. “Who’re you?”
“Cathy Suddon. I’m the new housekeeper.”
“What’s ‘housekeeper’?”
“I been out shopping. My feet hurt.” She hopped on one foot and then the other, pulling off her boots. With the six-centimeter heels her eyes came to his chin. Now he could see that she was a small girl with long legs and a short, trim waist. Her mouth was wide and her lips smooth. She carried her head at a jaunty angle.
“Somebody has to buy food and fix it, Shorty, see the clothes are washed, and scrub bad ideas. Somebody has to keep the post and the planet going. Somebody’s got to be responsible for the whole thing, to check and balance and make it work. That’s me.” She walked to him on stockinged feet and infringed his personal space. “Who’s going to take care of you when you get sick of yourself? Who’s going to tinker inside your head when you’re out of sync and untrack your tangled feet? Me. I’m one of the one-to-one. I’m here to keep this operation in a condition of fine tune. What do you want to eat?”
“Th-thistles!”
“No local artichokes—I’ll fix a snack. Where you going?”
“I’m going to inspect Ruh-ruh-ruh . . .” He fled. He stumbled down the hall and out the back door as she called after him that lunch would be ready in ten minutes.
He stood on the loading dock at the far end of the post, with receiving stalls on either side. The native construction was built to join. It was hot and dusty in the pillared log warehouse. A team of horses stood half-asleep, harnessed to a wagon backed to the dock. Men’s voices came from one of the storage rooms lining the sides of the barn. Dust motes idled in thin shafts of sunlight through the shingled roof. He leaned against the wall. What color were her eyes? He had no idea. Responsibility and obligation. He groaned.
“Any problem has solutions,” he argued silently with the near horse. “Most are unacceptable. I could lock her outside. I could go native. I could always kill myself.” The horses sighed and shifted weight. “I could go along. And what’s so great about solutions?” he said wearily. “Add apples and oranges to make fruit salad . . .”
A door opened. A man with bowed legs and a leather face walked to the dock and introduced himself as Receiving Chief. He said things were slow, with no exports at the other end. The mail came in, and that was the most of it. He allowed that this was a helluva way to run a railroad. Stevens cheered up at his impersonal pique and said take all the considerations and figure a better way.
He returned to his quarters and picked at the lunch Cathy Suddon had prepared. She said, “You don’t like my cooking.” He said it was delicious. Her face was woebegone. He snatched his hand away from her shoulder before he patted it. He washed his face and went into the post. Her hair was thick and soft, brown and shining and short. Her eyes? Whatever color, and woebegone, forget it.
The seats were filled with people. The buzz diminished as the First Clerk greeted him. He was a scoop-nosed man with a broom moustache and drooping eyelids. “I’m Moberley Driggs. What happened was, the Mayor let anybody in promiscuous out of the heat. So me and the boys cleared the post and started over. Got numbers drawn, ready to go. Mail’s on the line. How long you figure to run?”
Stevens said, “Mail first, and then let’s see how it goes. I’m eight personal hours ahead of Laramie time. Tomorrow we’ll go on schedule.”
“Don’t you think maybe. . . ?” began Driggs. Stevens looked at him with level eyes. All interior personnel was appointed and paid by the Factor in local funds. “Um . . . yessir,” said Driggs.
Stevens keycarded the console and studied the board. A red eye showed in the BITE panel. “What’s with B dock?” Driggs said a new handler had run a skid out of the post, and a gang was carrying it back right now. Stevens looked at him thoughtfully. The Built-in-Testing Equipment panel went green. “I want an efficient, clean, no-foolishness operation,” he mused aloud. “I didn’t figure on any personnel changes for a week at least.” He did not wait for an answer. He turned to the board, checked the mail in the eleventh stall, and pushed the set key for Earth. The mail vanished. The booth gate unlocked.
“Lot one!” announced Driggs in loud relief. “Ten sacks of gold. Shipper, Bye Tompkins. Come on, Bye, let’s have the destination slip, just don’t stand there.”
Tompkins sidled up to the console. He had unblinking owl eyes. “Lookee, Factor,” he said, “it’s not fair. You people take your tenth off the top, and I got caught in the floods last spring in the Poconos, and it washed so bad that the gopher holes stood two meters in the air. . . .”
Stevens walked along the ten booths and said, “Number seven.” A clerk with pink armbands took the bag to the eleventh booth. Stevens sat at the console and turned to Bye Tompkins. The pickup carried his voice clearly to the spectators. “Ten percent for transportation is more than fair, and you know it, Mr. Tompkins. And you know the odds are in your favor—nine chances out of ten, if you want to gamble. The post bag might be full of rocks. Give me your consignee slip.” He set the coordinates for a planet he’d never heard of. He pushed the Execute button when the board went green. The sacks vanished when congruency occurred. The doors swung open.
Lot two was a shipment of wheat in the standard two-meter-cube containers. Stevens directed the ninth to the post booth. The antigrav skid handlers were clumsy, and one man barely escaped being smashed against the wall. Stevens told Driggs to run the bloody momentum training tape for all handlers, and since this would be a short day, get them some practice time later.
Lot three was bundles of furs, and he chose the ninth again.
Lot four was a mixed consignment of ornamental wrought iron. He chose the ninth for the third time.
Lot five was dried beef in containers, and he picked a random number from the console. Six was bulk corn. He took the opportunity to make the standard warning about concealed transmission of humans. No exceptions, the death rate was 100 percent.
Seven was hides, eight was high-grade chrome ore, and nine a single kunsite crystal sixty-eight centimeters long. Stevens took the speculator’s bids, but the shipper waited and paid the post 10 percent of the top figure. The man also had the tenth lot, a thirty-four-centimeter crystal, and let it go to the high bidder with a wolfish grin.
A man of rectitude objected to lot eleven, which he said was immoral: leather images for a degenerate religion. Stevens told him that redress lay with the government of Laramie, which controlled both exports and imports. The Factor’s business was not censorship. The man grew offensive and was banned for a month.
Lot twelve was leather; thirteen, bundles of herbs; lot fourteen, three boxes of beauty mud consigned by a woman who never should have sold it; lot fifteen, eight wheels of cheese that went to the high bidder.
Sixteen was a doctor of medicine who wanted drugs from Earth to halt an epidemic. He made a powerful plea. Little children were dying. Driggs watched the Factor with speculative eyes. Stevens quite properly offered his personal sympathy. He asked what the doctor or the government or the people involved proposed to trade. He would do everything he could do to expedite the matter. Next lot.
Seventeen was delicately braided stock whips with snappers to snatch a gout of flesh. Eighteen was announced as boxed silver ingots owned by a man with many friends who haw-hawed and hooted when Stevens picked the ninth for the post. The shipper tried to withdraw the remaining boxes, and the Factor cited transportation terms. The man left with his friends, who loudly demanded drinks and wondered what they were going to do on Aldie Eight with that bunch of drek.
Nineteen was another petitioner, who said his spiritual leader was dying on Themie. He wept, and Stevens said that personal transportation was impossible. The man said it wasn’t impossible and that all he had to do was step into the Factor’s booth. Stevens said that every man was planet-locked by necessity. There were no study commissions, no diplomatic VIP’s, no privileged visitors, no tourists. Each planet made its own destiny, as each planet made its own bureaucracy.
He was very tired, but he gave a short lecture on the history of Earth and the flight from reality by bureaucrats who wanted to do good to other people, and the near-disaster averted—as it turned out— by the discovery of congruity. Despotism, however benevolent, would destroy the development of any people. The uniculture of Earth would stay shattered. This petition was denied, and further petitions of this nature would not be considered.
He locked the console. He said it was one o’clock in the morning for him, and he’d been up since five.
There was no escape when the Mayor of Laramie invited him to the other planetary end of the building to present him with honorary citizenship. The Mayor also gave him a local-time watch with a tooled leather band and said they halfway figured on a banquet to meet prominent citizens. Stevens said he could not do justice to it, and how about tomorrow night? The Mayor agreed. Driggs had his entire crew cleaning and polishing. Isserman went to his quarters.
He sat on the floor.
Cathy Suddon sat cross-legged in front of him. She said she’d watched the monitor while she made a graduation cake. “Sonny, how come you were so mean to the petitioners? Why can’t Earth transport people and send drugs and help out?”
His head was on his wrists, hands locked around his knees. He looked at her, unseeing, fading in and out of his eyes.
She said, “I’ve been in the Jo’burg warehouse and seen those enormous rooms full of things. Thousands of people receiving and classifying and distributing. And Jo’burg is only one of a hundred and twenty-something, so why not give a little to Earth’s children, Buster?”
“Cathy. Knock it off.”
“‘Buster’? Well, ‘Issy’ sounds sissy-”
“I hope you’re trying to help,” he said with plodding exasperation, “because counterirritation is dumb. You’ve got more shells than a bag of pine nuts, but don’t pour ‘em on my head when it’s a meter off my shoulders. I feel thick as a shadow, scooped like a muskmelon, hollow as a bell. Don’t ring on me. When and how did you graduate?”
“Today. I made a plastic bag to cover me. But how can it be right to let children die-?”
“Shut up!” His wavering attention turned hard as fire in a diamond. “The toughest thing for men to learn is not to mess around with other people. That’s what school’s about, what all the planets are about, what the conscience of man’s about: leave other people alone. Inside society, give them the right to be wrong!”
“Oh, Duke.” She snuffled and said, “How come you’re not shaking anymore?”
He stretched full-length on the floor. “Who said it was easy?” He closed his eyes. “I think it’s inside now, not outside so much.” His voice turned dim. “We live between sun and sun. Between black and white on a wavery scale ... in magnificent gray . . .”
“Duke,” she said softly, “is it better or worse?”
“All the wise . . . men say this ... I dunno . . .”
She said, “We’ll have our graduation party when you wake up,” but he was asleep. She put a pillow under his head and covered him with a blanket and ran a hesitant finger down his cheek and went to frost the cake.
* * * *
W. Macfarlane writes:
What’s to tell about a story?
I’ll tell you. It’s got to stand on its own feet.
Rudyard Kipling wrote of a limboland where characters live after “The End,” and the damned writers forevermore are haunted by their own failures and misconceptions. Surely there’s a special level of limbo for people who write science fiction, where worlds bulge like eggs and imaginary societies hang their writers every day at noon, time without end.
Still and all, it’s worth the hazard. Even a gimpy world, imperfectly seen, may be as instructive as a funhouse mirror.
In what other kind of writing are we free to consider answers to all the once and future questions? The gimmickry of space elision is an old idea, and fun enough, but granted multitudinous planets, how do you avoid imperial Earth? How to finance colonies? How do you guard against the peril of self-righteousness? Granted the programming of human beings.
When you look around for exemplars of truth and justice, you find that youngsters know the most about these slippery things. Those of us grown older are less certain and more susceptible to bent principles. If you agree that men must have laws to live together, then maybe a smart fifteen-year-old is the only one strong enough to carry the burden. The able are always exploited, and that could be a good way to program a thinking animal, too.
I am a hot exponent of fiction, and look slaunchwise at people chained by current fact. How else in a lifetime can you meet so many people, and in science fiction so many speculations? In a very real way, we all make our own world, and if the central core of truth is unapproachable, we’ll know more about it the closer we can come to a spherical survey.
“Escape,” the mentally retarded sneer. “Impossibilities!”
What’s more unlikely than our meeting in the pages of a book, both of us in quest of the entertainment that is the first business of man: quasars and fiatworms and human beings are the entertainment of a cosmos programmed for no easy answers.
What a magnificent way to run things, and it’s the only game in town, the funhouse mirror, well worth the peril of Kipling’s limboland—and the story has got to stand on its own feet.