Max Wyman shoved his way through such a roar of voices and such a crush of bodies as he had never known before. Scratch Sheet Square was bright as day—brighter. Atomic lamps, mounted on hundred-story buildings hosed and squirted the happy mob with blue-white glare. The Scratch Sheet's moving sign was saying in fiery letters seventy-five feet tall: "11:58 PM EST ... December 31st ... Cops say two million jam NYC streets to greet New Year ... 11:59 PM EST ... December 31st ... Falcaro jokes on TV 'Never thought we'd make it' ... 12:00 midnight January 1st ... Happy New Year ..."
The roar of voices had become insane. Max Wyman held his head, hating it, hating them all, trying to shut them out. Half a dozen young men against whom he was jammed were tearing the clothes off a girl. They were laughing and she was too, making only a pretense of defending herself. It was one of New York's mild winter nights. Wyman looked at the white skin not knowing that his eyes gloated. He yelled curses at her, and the young men. But nobody heard his whiskey-hoarsened young voice.
Somebody thrust a bottle at him and made mouths, trying to yell: "Happy New Year!" He grabbed feverishly at the bottle and held it to his mouth, letting the liquor gurgle once, twice, three times. Then the bottle was snatched away, not by the man who had passed it to him. A hilarious fat woman plastered herself against Wyman and kissed him clingingly on the mouth, to his horror and disgust. She was torn away from him by a laughing, white-haired man and turned willingly to kissing him instead.
Two strapping girls jockeyed Wyman between them and began to tearhisclothes off, laughing at their switcheroo on the year's big gag. He clawed out at them hysterically and they stopped, the laughter dying on their lips as they saw his look of terrified rage. A sudden current in the crowd parted Wyman from them; another bottle bobbed on the sea of humanity. He clutched at it and this time did not drink. He stuffed it hurriedly under the waistband of his shorts and kept a hand on it as the eddy of humanity bore him on to the fringes of the roaring mob.
"Syndic leaders hail New Year ... Taylor praises Century of Freedom ... 12:05 AM EST January 1st ..."
Wyman was mashed up against a girl who first smiled at his young face invitingly ... and then looked again. "Get away from me!" she shrieked, pounding on his chest with her small fists. You could hear individual voices now, but the crowd was still dense. She kept screaming at him and hitting him until suddenly Scratch Sheet Square Upramp loomed and the crowd fizzed onto it like uncorked champagne, Wyman and the screaming girl carried along the moving plates underfoot. The crowd boiled onto the northbound strip, relieving the crush; the girl vanished, whimpering, into the mob.
Wyman, rubbing his ear mechanically, shuffled with downcast eyes to the Eastbound ramp and collapsed onto a bench gliding by at five miles per hour. He looked stupidly at the ten-mile and fifteen-mile strips, but did not dare step onto them. He had been drinking steadily for a month. He would fall and the bottle would break.
He lurched off the five-mile strip at Riverside Downramp. Nobody got off with him. Riverside was a tangle of freightways over, under and on the surface. He worked there.
Wyman picked his way past throbbing conveyors roofed against pilferage, under gurgling fuel and water and waste pipes, around vast metal warehouses and storage tanks. It was not dark or idle in Riverside. Twenty-four hours was little enough time to bring Manhattan its daily needs and carry off its daily waste and manufactures. Under daylight atomics the transport engineers in their glass perches read the dials and turned the switches. Breakdown crews scurried out from emergency stations as bells clanged to replace a sagging plate, remag a failing ehrenhafter, unplug a jam of nylon bales at a too-sharp corner.
He found Breakdown Station 26, hitched his jacket over the bottle and swayed in, drunk enough to think he could pretend he was sober. "Hi," he said hoarsely to the shift foreman. "Got jammed up in the celebration."
"We heard it clear over here," the foreman said, looking at him closely. "Are you all right, Max?"
The question enraged him. "'Smatter?" he yelled. "Had a couple, sure. Think 'm drunk? Tha' wha' ya think?"
"Gee," the foreman said wearily. "Look, Max, I can't send you out tonight. You might get killed. I'm trying to be reasonable and I wish you'd do as much for me. What's biting you, boy? Nobody has anything against a few drinks and a few laughs. I went on a bender last month myself. But you get so GoddammedmeanI can't stand you and neither can anybody else."
Wyman spewed obscenity at him and tried to swing on him. He was surprised and filled with self-pity when somebody caught his arm and somebody else caught his other arm. It was Dooley and Weintraub, his shift-mates, looking unhappy and concerned.
"Lousy rats!" Wyman choked out. "Leas' a man's buddies c'd do is back'm up...." He began to cry, hating them, and then fell asleep on his feet. Dooley and Weintraub eased him down onto the floor.
The foreman mopped his head and appealed to Dooley: "He always like this?" He had been transferred to Station 26 only two weeks before.
Dooley shrugged. "You might say so. He showed up about three months ago. Said he used to be a breakdown man in Buffalo, on the yards. He knew the work all right. But I never saw such a mean kid. Never a good word for anybody. Never any fun. Booze, booze, booze. This time he really let go."
Weintraub said unexpectedly: "I think he's what they used to call an alcoholic."
"What the hell's that?" the foreman demanded.
"I read about it. It's something they used to have before the Syndic. I read about it. Things were a lot different then. People picking on you all the time, everybody mad all the time. The girls were scared to give it away and the boys were scared to take it—but they did anyway and it was kind of like fighting with yourselfinsideyourself. The fighting wore some people out so much they just couldn't take it any more. Instead of going on benders for a change of pace like sensible people, they boozedallthe time—and they had a fight inside themselves aboutthatso they boozed harder." He looked defensive at their skeptical faces. "Ireadit," he insisted.
"Well," the foreman said inconclusively, "I heard things used to be pretty bad. Did these alcoholers get over it?"
"I don't know," Weintraub admitted. "I didn't read that far."
"Hm. I think I'd better can him." The foreman was studying their faces covertly, hoping to read a reaction. He did. Both the men looked relieved. "Yeh. I think I'd better can him. He can go to the Syndic for relief if he has to. He doesn't do us much good here. Put some soup on and get it down him when he wakes up." The foreman, an average kindly man, hoped the soup would help.
But at about three-thirty, after two trouble calls in succession, they noticed that Wyman had left leaving no word.
The fat little man struggled out of the New Year's eve throng; he had been caught by accident. Commander Grinnel did not go in for celebrations. When he realized that January fifteenth was now fifteen days away, he doubted that he would ever celebrate again. It was a two-man job he had to do on the fifteenth, and so far he had not found the other man.
He rode the slidewalk to Columbus Square. He had been supplied with a minimum list of contacts. One had moved, and in the crazily undisciplined Syndic Territory it was impossible to trace anybody. Another had died—of too much morphine. Another had beaten her husband almost to death with a chair leg and was in custody awaiting trial. The Commander wondered briefly and querulously: why do we always have such unstable people here? Or does that louse Emory deliberately saddle me with them when I'm on a mission? Wouldn't put it past him.
The final contact on the list was a woman. She'd be worthless for the business of January fifteenth; that called for some physical strength, some technical knowledge, and a residual usefulness to the Government. Professor Speiser had done some good work here on industrial sabotage, but taken away from the scene of possible operations, she'd just be a millstone. He had his record to think of.
Sabotage—
If a giggling threesome hadn't been looking his way from a bench across the slidewalk, he would have ground his teeth. In recent weeks, he had done what he estimated as an easy three million dollars worth of damage to Mob Territory industry. And the stupid fools hadn'tnoticedit! Repair crews had rebuilt the fallen walls, mechanics had tut-tutted over the wrecked engines and replaced them, troubleshooters had troubleshot the scores of severed communications lines and fuel mains.
He had hung around.
"Sam, you see this? Melted through, like with a little thermite bomb. How in the hell did a thing like that happen?"
"I don't know. I wasn't here. Let's get it fixed kid."
"Okay ... you think we ought to report this to somebody?"
"If you want to. I'll mention it to Larry. But I don't see what he can do about it. Must've been some kids. You gotta put it down as fair wear and tear. But boys will be boys."
Remembering, he did grind his teeth. But they were at Columbus Square.
Professor Speiser lived in one of the old plastic brick faculty houses. Her horsy face, under a curling net, looked out of the annunciator plate. "Yes? What is it?"
"Professor Speiser, I believe you know my daughter, MissFreeman. She asked me to look you up while I was in New York. Have I come much too late?"
"Oh, dear. Why, no. I suppose not. Come in, Mr.—Mr. Freeman."
In her parlor, she faced him apprehensively. When she spoke she rolled out her sentences like the lecturer she was. "Mr. Freeman—as I suppose you'd prefer me to call you—you asked a moment ago whether you'd come too late. I realize that the question was window-dressing, but my answer is quite serious. You have come too late. I have decided to dissociate myself from—let us say, from your daughter, Miss Freeman."
The Commander asked only: "Is that irrevocable?"
"Quite. It wouldn't be fair of me to ask you to leave without an explanation. I am perfectly willing to give one. I realize now that my friendship with Miss Freeman and the work I did for her stemmed from, let us say a certain vacancy in my life."
He looked at a picture on her desk of a bald, pleasant-faced fellow with a pipe.
She followed his eyes and said with a sort of shy pride: "That is Dr. Mordecai, of the University's Faculty of Dentistry. Like myself, a long-time celibate. We plan to marry."
The Commander said: "Do you feel that Dr. Mordecai might like to meet my daughter?"
"No. I do not. We expect to have very little time for outside activities, between our professional careers and our personal lives. Please don't misunderstand, Mr. Freeman. I am still your daughter's friend. I always shall be. But somehow I no longer find in myself an urgency to express the friendship. It seems like a beautiful dream—and a quite futile one. I have come to realize that one can live a full life without Miss Freeman. Now, it's getting quite late—"
He smiled ruefully and rose. "May I wish you every happiness, Professor Speiser?" he said, extending his hand.
She beamed with relief. "I was so afraid you'd—"
Her face went limp and she stood swaying drunkenly as the needle in the ring popped her skin.
The Commander, his face as dead as hers, disconnected his hand and sheathed the needle carefully again. He drew one of his guns, shot her through the heart and walked out of the apartment.
Old fool! She should have known better.
Max Wyman stumbled through the tangle of Riveredge, his head a pot of molten lead and his legs twitching under him as he fled from his shame.
Dimly, as if with new eyes, he saw that he was not alone. Riveredge was technically uninhabited. Then what voices called guardedly to him from the shadows: "Buddy—buddy—wait up a minute, buddy—did you score? Did you score?"
He lurched on and the voices became bolder. The snaking conveyors and ramps sliced out sectors of space. Storage tanks merged with inflow mains to form sheltered spots where they met. No spot was without its whining, appealing voice. He stood at last, quivering, leaning against a gigantic I-beam that supported a heavy-casting freightway. A scrap sheet of corrugated iron rested against the bay of the I-beam, and the sheet quivered and fell outward. An old man's voice said: "You're beat, son. Come on in."
He staggered a step forward and collapsed on a pallet of rags as somebody carefully leaned the sheet back into place again.
Max Wyman woke raving with the chuck horrors. There was somebody there to hand him candy bars, sweet lemonade, lump sugar. There was somebody to shove him easily back into the pallet of rags when he tried to stumble forth in a hunt for booze. On the second day he realized that it was an old man whose face looked gray and paralyzed. His name was T. G. Pendelton, he said.
After a week, he let Max Wyman take little walks about their part of Riverside—but not by night. "We've got some savage people here," he said. "They'd murder you for a pint. The women are worse. If one calls to you, don't go. You'll wind up dumped through a manhole into the Hudson. Poor folk."
"You'resorryfor them?" Wyman asked, startled. It was a new idea to him. Since Buffalo, he had never been sorry for anybody. Something awful had happened there, some terrible betrayal ... he passed his bony hand across his forehead. He didn't want to think about it.
"Would I live here if I weren't?" T. G. asked him. "Sometimes I can help them. There's nobody else to help them. They're old and sick and they don't fit anywhere. That's why they're savage. You're young—the only young man I've ever seen in Riveredge. There's so much outside for the young. But when you get old it sometimes throws you."
"The Goddammed Syndic," Wyman snarled, full of hate.
T. G. shrugged. "Maybe it's too easy for sick old people to get booze. They lose somebody they spent a life with and it throws them. People harden into a pattern. They always had fun, they think they always will. Then half of the pattern's gone and they can't stand it, some of them. You got it early. What was the ringing bell?"
Wyman collapsed into the bay of the I-beam as if he'd been kicked in the stomach. A wave of intolerable memory swept over him. A ringing bell, a wobbling pendulum, a flashing light, the fair face of his betrayer, the hateful one of Hogan, stirred together in a hell brew. "Nothing," he said hoarsely, thinking that he'd give his life for enough booze to black him out. "Nothing."
"You kept talking about it," T. G. said. "Was it real?"
"It couldn't have been," Wyman muttered. "There aren't such things. No. There was her and that Syndic and that louse Hogan. I don't want to talk about it."
"Suit yourself."
He did talk about it later, curiously clouded though it was. The years in Buffalo. The violent love affair with Inge. The catastrophic scene when he found her with Regan, king-pin mobster. The way he felt turned inside-out, the lifetime of faith in the Syndic behind him and the lifetime of a faith in Inge ahead of him, both wrecked, the booze, the flight from Buffalo to Erie, to Pittsburgh, to Tampa, to New York. And somehow, insistently, the ringing bell, the wobbling pendulum and the flashing light that kept intruding between episodes of reality.
T. G. listened patiently, fed him, hid him when infrequent patrols went by. T. G. never told him his own story, but a bloated woman who lived with a yellow-toothed man in an abandoned storage tank did one day, her voice echoing from the curving, windowless walls of corrugated plastic. She said T. G. had been an alky chemist, reasonably prosperous, reasonably happy, reasonably married. His wife was the faithful kind and he was not. With unbelievable slyness she had dulled the pain for years with booze and he had never suspected. They say she had killed herself after one frightful week-long debauche in Riveredge. T. G. came down to Riveredge for the body and returned after giving it burial and drawing his savings from the bank. He had never left Riveredge since.
"Worsh'p the grun' that man walks on," the bloated woman mumbled. "Nev' gets mad, nev' calls you hard names. Give y'a bottle if y' need it. Talk to y' if y' blue. Worsh'p that man."
Max Wyman walked from the storage tank, sickened. T. G.'s charity covered that creature and him.
It was the day he told T. G.: "I'm getting out of here."
The gray, paralyzed-looking face almost smiled. "See a man first?"
"Friend of yours?"
"Somebody who heard about you. Maybe he can do something for you. He feels the way you do about the Syndic."
Wyman clenched his teeth. The pain still came at the thought. Syndic, Hogan, Inge and betrayal. God, to be able to hit back at them!
The red ride ebbed. Suddenly he stared at T. G. and demanded: "Why? Why should you put me in touch? What is this?"
T. G. shrugged. "I don't worry about the Syndic. I worry about people. I've been worrying about you. You're a little insane, Max, like all of us here."
"God damn you!"
"He has...."
Max Wyman paused a long time and said: "Go on, will you?" He realized that anybody else would have apologized. But he couldn't and he knew that T. G. knew he couldn't.
The old man said: "A little insane. Bottled-up hatred. It's better out of you than in. It's better to sock the man you hate and stand a chance of having him sock you back than it is just to hate him and let the hate gnaw you like a grave-worm."
"What've you got against the Syndic?"
"Nothing, Max. Nothing against it and nothing for it. What I'm for is people. The Syndic is people. You're people. Slug 'em if you want and they'll have a chance to slug you back. Maybe you'll pull down the Syndic like Samson in the temple; more likely it'll crush you. But you'll bedoingsomething about it. That's the great thing. That's the thing people have to learn—or they wind up in Riveredge."
"You're crazy."
"I told you I was, or I wouldn't be here."
The man came at sunset. He was short and pudgy, with a halo of wispy hair and the coldest, grimmest eyes that Wyman had ever seen. He shook hands with Wyman, and the young man noted simultaneously a sharp pain in his finger and that the stranger wore an elaborate gold ring. Then the world got hazy and confused. He had a sense that he was being asked questions, that he was answering them, that it went on for hours and hours.
When things quite suddenly came into focus again, the pudgy man was saying: "I can introduce myself now. Commander Grinnel, of the North American Navy. My assignment is recruiting. The preliminary examination has satisfied me that you are no plant and would be a desirable citizen of the N. A. Government. I invite you to join us."
"What would I do?" Wyman asked steadily.
"That depends on your aptitudes. What do you think you would like to do?"
Wyman said: "Kill me some Syndics."
The commander stared at him with those cold eyes. He said at last: "It can probably be arranged. Come with me."
They went by train to Cape Cod. At midnight on January 15th, the commander and Wyman left their hotel room and strolled about the streets. The commander taped small packets to the four legs of the microwave relay tower that connected Cape Cod with the Continental Press common carrier circuits and taped other packets to the police station's motor pool gate.
At 1:00 A.M., the tower exploded and the motor pool gate fused into an impassible puddle of blue-hot molten metal. Simultaneously, fifty men in turtle-neck sweaters and caps appeared from nowhere on Center Street. Half of them barricaded the street, firing on citizens and cops who came too close. The others systematically looted every store between the barricade and the beach.
Blinking a flashlight in code, the commander approached the deadline unmolested and was let through with Wyman at his heels. The goods, the raiders, the commander and Wyman were aboard a submarine by 2:35 and under way ten minutes later.
After Commander Grinnel had exchanged congratulations with the sub commander, he presented Wyman.
"A recruit. Normally I wouldn't have bothered, but he had a rather special motivation. He could be very useful."
The sub commander studied Wyman impersonally. "If he's not a plant."
"I've used my ring. If you want to get it over with, we can test him and swear him in now."
They strapped him into a device that recorded pulse, perspiration, respiration, muscle-tension and brainwaves. A sweatered specialist came and mildly asked Wyman matter-of-fact questions about his surroundings while he calibrated the polygraph.
Then came the pay-off. Wyman did not fail to note that the sub commander loosened his gun in his holster when the questioning began.
"Name, age and origin?"
"Max Wyman. Twenty-two. Buffalo Syndic Territory."
"Do you like the Syndic?"
"I hate them."
"What are your feelings toward the North American Government?"
"If it's against the Syndic, I'm for it."
"Would you rob for the North American Government?"
"I would."
"Would you kill for it?"
"I would."
"Have you any reservations yet unstated in your answers?"
"No."
It went on for an hour. The questions were re-phrased continuously; after each of Wyman's firm answers, the sweatered technician gave a satisfied little nod. At last it ended and he was unstrapped from the device.
Max was tired.
The sub commander seemed a little awed as he got a small book and read from it: "Do you, Max Wyman, solemnly renounce all allegiances previously held by you and pledge your allegiance to the North American Government?"
"I do," the young man said fiercely.
In a remote corner of his mind, for the first time in months, the bell ceased to ring, the pendulum to beat and the light to flash.
Charles Orsino knew again who he was and what was his mission.
It had begun when the girl led him through the conference room door. Naturally one had misgivings; naturally one didn't speak up. But the vault-like door far downstairs was terrifying when it yawned before you and even more so when it closed behind you.
"What is this place?" he demanded at last. "Who are you?"
She said: "Psychology lab."
It produced on him the same effect that "alchemy section" or "Division of astrology" would have on a well-informed young man in 1950. He repeated flatly: "Psychology lab. If you don't want to tell me, very well. I volunteered without strings." Which should remind her that he was a sort of hero and should be treated with a certain amount of dignity and that she could save her corny jokes.
"I meant it," she said, fiddling busily with the locks of yet another vault-like door. "I'm a psychologist. I'm also by the way, Lee Falcaro—since you asked."
"The old man—Edward Falcaro's line?" he asked.
"Simon pure. He's my father's brother. Father's down in Miami, handling the tracks and gaming in general."
The second big door opened on a brain-gray room whose air had a curiously dead feel to it. "Sit down," she said, indicating a very unorthodox chair. He did, and found that the chair was the most comfortable piece of furniture he had ever known. Its contact with his body was so complete that it pressed nowhere, it poked nowhere. The girl studied dials in its back nevertheless and muttered something about adjusting it. He protested.
"Nonsense," she said decisively. She sat down herself in an ordinary seat. Charles shifted uneasily in his chair to find that it moved with him. Still no pressure, still no poking.
"You're wondering," she began, "about the word 'psychology'. It has a bad history and people have given it up as a bad job. It's true that there isn't pressure nowadays to study the human mind. People get along. In general what they want they get, without crippling effort. In your uncle Frank Taylor's language, the Syndic is an appropriately-structured organization of high morale and wide public acceptance. In my language the Syndic is a father-image which does a good job of fathering. In good times, people aren't introspective.
"There is, literally, no reason why my line of the family should have kept up a tradition of experimental psychology. Way, way back, old Amadeo Falcaro often consulted Professor Oscar Sternweiss of the Columbia University psychology faculty—he wasn't as much of a dashing improvisor as the history books make him out to be. Eventually one of his daughters married one of Sternweiss' sons and inherited the Sternweiss notebooks and library and apparatus. It became an irrational custom to keep it alive. When each academic school of psychology managed to prove that every other school of psychology was dead wrong and psychology collapsed as a science, the family tradition was unaffected; it stood outside the wrangling.
"Now, you're wondering what this has to do with trying to slip you into the Government."
"I am," Charles said fervently. If she'd been a doll outside the Syndic, he would minutes ago have protested that all this was foolish and walked out. Since she was not only in the Syndic, but in the Falcaro line, he had no choice except to hear her babble andthenwalk out. It was all rot, psychology. Id, oversoul, mind-vectors, counseling, psychosomatics—rot from sick-minded old men. Everybody knew—
"The Government, we know, uses deinhibiting drugs as a first screening of its recruits. As an infallible second screening, they use a physiological lie-detector based on the fact that telling a lie causes tensions in the liar's body. We shall get around this by slipping you in as a young man who hates the Syndic for some valid reason—"
"Confound it, you were just telling me that they can't be fooled!"
"We won't fool them. You'llbea young man who hates the Syndic. We'll tear down your present personality a gray cell at a time. We'll pump you full of Seconal every day for a quarter of a year.... We'll obliterate your personality under a new one. We'll bury Charles Orsino under a mountain of suggestions, compulsions and obsessions shoveled at you sixteen hours a day while you're too groggy to resist. Naturally the supplanting personality will be neurotic, but that works in with the mission."
He struggled with a metaphysical concept, for the first time in his life. "But—but—how will I know I'mme?"
"We think we can put a trigger on it. When you take the Government oath of allegiance, you should bounce back."
He did not fail to note a little twin groove between her brows that appeared when she saidthinkandshould. He knew that in a sense he was nearer death now than when Halloran's bullet had been intercepted.
"Are you staying with it?" she asked simply.
Various factors entered into it.A life for the Syndic, as in the children's history books. That one didn't loom very large. But multiply it byit sounds like more fun than hot-rod polo, and that bythis is going to raise my stock sky-high with the familyand you had something. Somehow, under Lee Falcaro's interested gaze, he neglected to divide it byif it works.
"I'm staying with it," he said.
She grinned. "It won't be too hard," she said. "In the old days there would have been voting record, social security numbers, military service, addresses they could check on—hundreds of things. Now about all we have to fit you with is a name and a subjective life."
It began that spring day and went on into late fall.
The ringing bell.
The flashing light.
The wobbling pendulum.
You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic Territory. You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic Territory. You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic....
Mom fried pork sausages in the morning, you loved the smell of pumpernickel from the bakery in Vesey Street.
Mr. Watsisname the English teacher with the mustache wanted you to go to college—
Nay, ye can not, though ye had Argus eyes,In abbeyes they haue so many suttyll spyes;For ones in the yere they have secret vvsytacyons,And yf ony prynce reforme....
Nay, ye can not, though ye had Argus eyes,In abbeyes they haue so many suttyll spyes;For ones in the yere they have secret vvsytacyons,And yf ony prynce reforme....
—but the stockyard job was closer, they needed breakdown men—
You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic Territory. You are—
The ringing bell.
The flashing light.
The wobbling pendulum.
And the pork sausages and the teacher with the mustache and poems you loved and
page 24, paragraph 3, maximum speed on a live-cattle walkway is three miles per hour: older walkways hold this speed with reduction gears coupled to a standard 18-inch ehrenhafter unit. Standard practice in new construction calls for holding speed by direct drive from a specially-wound ehrenhafter. This places a special obligation in breakdown maintenance men, who must distinguish between the two types, carry two sets of wiring diagrams and a certain number of mutually-uninterchangeable parts, though good design principles hold these to a minimum. The main difference in the winding of a standard 18-incher and a lowspeed ehrenhafter rotor—
Of course things are better now, Max Wyman, you owe a great debt to Jim Hogan, Father of the Buffalo Syndic, who fought for your freedom in the great old days, and to his descendants who are tirelessly working for your freedom and happiness.
And bow-happiness is a girl named Inge Klohbel now that you're almost a man.
You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic Territory. You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic Territory.
And Inge Klohbel is why you put away the crazy dream of scholarship, for her lips and hair and eyes and legs mean more to you than anything, more than
Later phonologic changes include palatal mutation; i.e., beforechtandhsthe diphthongseo, io,which resulted from breaking, becameie (i, y)as incneoht, chieht,andseox (x equallinghs), siex, six, syx....
the crazy dream of scholarship, what kind of a way is that to repay the Mob and
The ringing bell.
The flashing light.
The wobbling pendulum.
repay the Syndic and young Mike Hogan all over the neighborhood suddenly and Inge says he did stop and say hello but of course he was just being polite.
so you hit the manuals hard and one day you go out on a breakdown call and none of the older men could figure out why the pump was on the blink; a roaring, chewing monster of a pump it was, sitting there like a dead husk and the cattlefeed backed up four miles to a storage tank in the suburbs and the steers in the yards bawling with hunger, and you traced the dead wire, you out with the spot-welder, a zip of blue flame and the pump began to chew again and you got the afternoon off.
And there they were.
Lee Falcaro: (Bending over the 'muttering, twitching carcass) Adrenalin. Brighter picture and louder sound.
Assistant: (Opening a pinch cock in the tube that enters the arm, increasing video contrast, increasing audio): He's weakening.
Lee Falcaro: (In a whisper) I know. I know. But this is IT.
Assistant: (Inaudibly) You cold-blooded bitch.
You are Max Wyman, you are Max Wyman,
and you don't know what to do about the Syndic that betrayed you, about the girl who betrayed you with the living representative of the Syndic, about the dream of scholarship that lies in ruins, the love that lies in ruins after how many promises and vows, the faith of twenty years that lies in ruins after how many declarations.
The ringing bell.
The flashing light.
The wobbling pendulum.
And a double whiskey with a beer chaser.
Lee Falcaro: The alcohol. (It drips from a sterile graduate, trickles through the rubber tubing and into the arm of the mumbling, sweating carcass. The molecules mingle with the molecules of serum: In seconds they are washed against the cell-walls of the forebrain. The cell-walls their structure as the alcohol molecules bumble against them; the lattices of jelly that wall in the cytoplasm and nuclear jelly become thinner than they were. Streams of electrons that had coursed in familiar paths through chains of neurones find easier paths through the poison-thinned cell-walls. A "Memory" or an "Idea" or a "Hope" or a "Value" that was a configuration of neurones linked by electron streams vanishes when the electron streams find an easier way to flow a New "Memories," "Ideas," "Hopes" and "Values" that are configurations of neurones linked by electron streams are born.)
Love and loyalty die, but not as if they had never been. Their ghosts remain, Max Wyman and you are haunted by them. They hound you from Buffalo to Erie, but there is no oblivion deep enough in the Mex joints, or in Tampa tequila or Pittsburgh zubrovka or New York gin.
You tell incurious people who came to the place on the corner for a shot and some talk that you're the best breakdown man that ever came out of Erie; you tell them women are no God-damn good, you tell them the Syndic—here you get sly and look around with drunken caution, lowering your voice—you tell them the Syndic's no God-damned good, and you drunkenly recite poetry until they move away, puzzled and annoyed.
Lee Falcaro: (Passing a weary hand across her forehead) well, he's had it. Disconnect the tubes, give him a 48-hour stretch in bed and then get him on the street pointed towards Riveredge.
Assistant: Does the apparatus go into dead storage?
Lee Falcaro: (Grimacing uncontrollably) No. Unfortunately, no.
Assistant: (Inaudibly, as she plucks needle-tipped tubes from the carcass' elbows) who's the next sucker?
The submarine surfaced at dawn. Orsino had been assigned a bunk and, to his surprise, had fallen asleep almost at once. At eight in the morning, he was shaken awake by one of the men in caps.
"Shift change," the man explained laconically.
Orsino started to say something polite and sleepy. The man grabbed his shoulder and rolled him onto the deck, snarling: "You going toargue?"
Orsino's reactions were geared to hot-rod polo—doing the split-second right thing after instinctively evaluating the roll of the ball, the ricochet of bullets, the probable tactics and strategy of the opposing four. They were not geared to a human being who behaved with the blind ferocity of an inanimate object. He just gawked at him from the deck, noting that the man had one hand on a sheath knife.
"All right, buster," the man said contemptuously, apparently deciding that Orsino would stay put. "Just don't mess with the Guard." He rolled into the bunk and gave a good imitation of a man asleep until Orsino worked his way through the crowded compartment and up a ladder to the deck.
There was a heavy, gray over-cast. The submarine seemed to be planing the water; salt spray washed the shining deck. A gun crew was forward, drilling with a five-incher. The rasp of a petty-officer singing out the numbers mingled with the hiss and gurgle of the spray. Orsino leaned against the conning tower and tried to comb his thoughts out clean and straight.
It wasn't easy.
He was Charles Orsino, very junior Syndic member, with all memories pertaining thereto.
He was also, more dimly, Max Wyman withhismemories. Now, able to stand outside of Wyman, he could recall how those memories had been implanted—down to the last stab of the last needle. He thought some very bitter thoughts about Lee Falcaro—and dropped them, snapping to attention as Commander Grinnel pulled himself through the hatch. "Good morning, sir," he said.
The cold eyes drilled him. "Rest," the commander said. "We don't play it that way on a pigboat. I hear you had some trouble about your bunk."
Orsino shrugged uncomfortably.
"Somebody should have told you," the commander said. "The boat's full of Guardsmen. They have a very high opinion of themselves—which is correct. They carried off the raid in good style. You don't mess with Guards."
"What are they?" Orsino asked.
Grinnel shrugged. "The usual elite," he said. "Loman's gang." He noted Orsino's blank look and smiled coldly. "Loman's President of North America," he said.
"On shore," Orsino hazarded, "we used to hear about somebody named Ben Miller."
"Obsolete information. Miller had the Marines behind him. Loman was Secretary of Defense. He beached the Marines and broke them up into guard detachments. Took away their heavy weapons. Meanwhile, he built up the Guard, very quietly—which, with the Secretary of Information behind him, he could do. About two years ago, he struck. The Marines who didn't join the Guard were massacred. Miller had the sense to kill himself. The Veep and the Secretary of State resigned, but it didn't save their necks. Loman assumed the Presidency automatically, of course, and had them shot. They were corrupt as hell anyway. They were owned body and soul by the southern bloc."
Two seamen appeared with a folding cot, followed by the sub commander. He was red-eyed with lack of sleep. "Set it there," he told them, and sat heavily on the sagging canvas. "Morning, Grinnel," he said with an effort. "Believe I'm getting too old for the pigboats. I want sun and air. Think you can use your influence at court to get me a corvette?" He bared his teeth to show it was a joke.
Grinnel said, with a minimum smile: "If I had any influence, would I catch the cloak-and-dagger crap they sling at me?"
The sub commander rolled back onto the cot and was instantly asleep, a muscle twitching the left side of his face every few seconds.
Grinnel drew Orsino to the lee of the conning tower. "We'll let him sleep," he said. "Go tell that gun crew Commander Grinnel says they should lay below."
Orsino did. The petty officer said something exasperated about the gunnery training bill and Orsino repeated his piece. They secured the gun and went below.
Grinnel said, with apparent irrelevance: "You're a rare bird, Wyman. You're capable—and you're uncommitted. Let's go below. Stick with me."
He followed the fat little commander into the conning tower. Grinnel told an officer of some sort: "I'll take the con, mister. Wyman here will take the radar watch." He gave Orsino a look that choked off his protests. Presumably, Grinnel knew that he was ignorant of radar.
The officer, looking baffled, said: "Yes, Commander." A seaman pulled his head out of a face-fitting box and told Wyman: "It's all yours, stranger." Wyman cautiously put his face into the box and was confronted by meaningless blobs of green, numerals in the dark, and a couple of arrows to make confusion complete.
He heard Grinnel say to the helmsman: "Get me a mug of joe, sailor. I'll take the wheel."
"I'll pass the word, sir."
"Nuts you'll pass the word, sailor. Go get the coffee—and I want it now and not when some steward's mate decides he's ready to bring it."
"Aye, aye, sir." Orsino heard him clatter down the ladder. Then his arm was gripped and Grinnel's voice muttered in his ear: "When you hear me bitch about the coffee, sing out: 'Aircraft 265, DX 3,000'. Good and loud. No, don't stop looking. Repeat it."
Orsino said, his eyes crossing on double images of the meaningless, luminous blobs: "Aircraft 265, DX 3,000. Good and loud. When you bitch about the coffee."
"Right. Don't forget it."
He heard the feet on the ladder again. "Coffee, sir."
"Thanks, sailor." A long sip and then another. "I always said the pigboats drink the lousiest joe in the Navy."
"Aircraft 265, DX 3,000!" Orsino yelled.
A thunderous alarm began to sound. "Take her down!" yelled Commander Grinnel.
"Take her down, sir!" the helmsman echoed. "But sir, the skipper—"
Orsino remembered him too then, dead asleep in his cot on the deck, the muscle twitching the left side of his face every few seconds.
"God-damn it, those were aircraft!Take her down!"
The luminous blobs and numbers and arrows swirled before Orsino's eyes as the trim of the ship changed, hatches clanged to and water thundered into the ballast tanks. He staggered and caught himself as the deck angled sharply underfoot.
He knew what Grinnel had meant by saying he was uncommitted, and he knew now that it was no longer true.
He thought for a moment that he might be sick into the face-fitting box, but it passed.
Minutes later, Grinnel was on the mike, his voice sounding metallically through the ship: "To all hands. To all hands. This is Commander Grinnel. We lost the skipper in that emergency dive—but you and I know that that's the way he would have wanted it. As senior line officer aboard, I'm assuming command for the rest of the voyage. We will remain submerged until dark. Division officers report to the wardroom. That's all."
He tapped Orsino on the shoulder. "Take off," he said. Orsino realized that the green blobs—clouds, were they?—no longer showed, and recalled that radar didn't work through water.
He wasn't in on the wardroom meeting, and wandered rather forlornly through the ship, incredibly jammed as it was with sleeping men, coffee-drinking men and booty. Half a dozen times he had to turn away close questioning about his radar experience and the appearance of the aircraft on the radar scope. Each time he managed it, with the feeling that one more question would have cooked his goose.
The men weren't sentimental about the skipper they had lost. Mostly they wondered how much of a cut Grinnel would allot them from the booty of Cape Cod.
At last the word passed for "Wyman" to report to the captain's cabin. He did, sweating after a fifteen-minute chat with a radar technician.
Grinnel closed the door of the minute cabin and smirked at him. "You have trouble, Wyman?" he asked.
"Yes."
"You'd have worse trouble if they found out for sure that you don't know radar. I'd be in the clear. I could tell them you claimed to be a qualified radar man. That would make me out to be pretty gullible, but it would make you out to be a murderer. Who's backing you, Wyman? Who told you to get rid of the skipper?"
"Quite right, sir," Orsino said. "You've really got me there."
"Glad you realize it, Wyman. I've got you and I can use you. It was a great bit of luck, the skipper corking off on deck. But I've always had a talent for improvisation. If you're determined to be a leader, Wyman, nothing is more valuable. Do you know, I can relax with you? It's a rare feeling. For once I can be certain that the man I'm talking to isn't one of Loman's stooges, or one of Clinch's N.A.B.I. ferrets or anything else but what he says he is—
"But that's beside the point. I have something else to tell you. There are two sides to working for me, Wyman. One of them's punishment if you get off the track. That's been made clear to you. The other is reward if you stay on. I have plans, Wyman, that are large-scale. They simply eclipse the wildest hopes of Loman, Clinch, Baggot and the rest. And yet, they're not wild. How'd you like to be on the inside when the North American Government returns to the mainland?"
Orsino uttered an authentic gasp and Commander Grinnel looked satisfied.
The submarine docked at an indescribably lovely bay in the south of Ireland. Orsino asked Grinnel whether the Irish didn't object to this, and was met with a blank stare. It developed that the Irish consisted of a few hundred wild men in the woods—maybe a few thousand. The stupid shore-bound personnel couldn't seem to clean them out. Grinnel didn't know anything about them, and he cared less.
Ireland appeared to be the naval base. The government proper was located on Iceland, vernal again after a long, climatic swing. The Canaries and Ascencion were outposts.
Orsino had learned enough on the voyage to recognize the Government for what it was. It had happened before in history; Uncle Frank had pointed it out. Big-time Caribbean piracy had grown from very respectable origins. Gentlemen-skippers had been granted letters of marque and reprisal by warring governments, which made them a sort of contract navy. Periods of peace had found these privateers unwilling to give up their hard earned complicated profession and their investments in it. When they could no longer hoist the flag of England or France or Spain, they simply hoisted the Jolly Roger and went it alone.
Confusing? Hell, yes! The famous Captain Kidd thought he was a gallant privateer and sailed trustingly into New York. Somewhere he had failed to touch third base; they shipped him to London for trial and hanged him as a pirate. The famous Henry Morgan had never been anything but a pirate and a super-pirate; as admiral of a private fleet he executed a brilliant amphibious operation and sacked the city of Panama. He was knighted, made governor of a fair-sized English island in the West Indies and died loved and respected by all.
Charles Orsino found himself a member of a pirate band that called itself the North American Government.
More difficult to learn were the ins and outs of pirate politics, which were hampered with an archaic, structurally-inappropriate nomenclature and body of tradition. Commander Grinnel was a Sociocrat, which meant that he was in the same gang as President Loman. The late sub commander had been a Constitutionist, which meant that he was allied with the currently-out "southern bloc." The southern bloc did not consist of southerners at this stage of the North American Government's history but of a clique that tended to include the engineers and maintenance men of the Government. That had been the reason for the sub commander's erasure.
The Constitutionists traditionally commanded pigboats and aircraft while surface vessels and the shore establishments were in the hands of the Sociocrats—the fruit of some long-forgotten compromise.
Commander Grinnel cheerfully explained to Charles that there was a crypto-Sociocrat naval officer primed and waiting to be appointed to the command of the sub. The Constitutionist gang would back him to the hilt and the Sociocrats would growl and finally assent. If, thereafter, the Constitutionists ever counted on the sub in a coup, they would be quickly disillusioned.
There wasn't much voting. Forty years before there had been a bad deadlock following the death by natural causes of President Powell after seventeen years in office. An ad hoc bipartisan conference called a session of the Senate and the Senate elected a new president.
It was little information to be equipped with when you walked out into the brawling streets of New Portsmouth on shore leave.
The town had an improvised look which was strange to Orsino. There was a sanitation reactor every hundred yards or so, but he mistrusted the look of the ground-level mains that led to it from, the houses. There were house flies from which he shied violently. Every other shack on the waterfront was a bar or a notch joint. He sampled the goods at one of the former and was shocked by the quality and price. He rolled out, his ears still ringing from the belt of raw booze; as half a dozen sweatered Guards rolled in, singing some esoteric song about their high morale and even higher venereal rate. A couple of them looked at him appraisingly, as though they wondered what kind of a noise he'd make if they jumped on his stomach real hard, and he hurried away from them.
The other entertainment facilities of the waterfront were flatly ruled out by a quick inspection of the wares. He didn't know what to make of them. Joints back in Syndic Territory if you were a man, made sense. You went to learn the ropes, or because you were afraid of getting mixed up in something intense when you didn't want to, or because you wanted a change, or because you were too busy, lazy or shy to chase skirts on your own. If you were a woman and not too particular, a couple of years in a joint left you with a considerable amount of money and some interesting memories which you were under no obligation to discuss with your husbands or husband.
But the sloppy beasts who called to him from the windows of the joints here on the waterfront, left him puzzled and disgusted. He reflected, strolling up Washington Street with eyes straight ahead, that women must be in short supply if they could make a living—or that the male citizens of the Government had no taste.
A whiff from one of those questionable sewer mains sent him reeling. He ducked into another saloon in self-defense and leaned groggily against the bar. A pretty brunette demanded: "What'll you have?"
"Gin, please." He peeled a ten off the roll Grinnel had given him. When the girl poured his gin he looked at her and found her fair. In all innocence, he asked her a question, as he might have asked a barmaid back home. She could have answered, "Yes," "No," "Maybe," or "What's in it for me?"
Instead she called him a lousy bastard, picked up a beer mug and was about to shatter it on his head when a hand caught her and a voice warned: "Hold it, Mabel! This guy's off my ship.
"He's just out of the States; he doesn't know any better. You know what it's like over there."
Mabel snarled: "You better wise him up, then, friend. He can't go around talking like that to decent women." She slapped down another glass, poured gin and flounced down the bar.
Charles gulped his gin and turned shakily to his deliverer, a little reactor specialist he had seen on the sub once or twice. "Thanks," he said feeling inadequate. "Maybe you better wise me up. All I said was, 'Darling, do you—'"
The reactor man held up his hand. "That's enough," he said. "You don't talk that way over here unless you want your scalp parted."
Charles, buzzing a little with the gin, protested hotly: "But what's the harm? All she had to say was no; I wasn't going to throw her down on the floor!"
It was all very confusing.
A shrug. "I heard about things in the States—Wyman, isn't it? I guess I didn't really believe it. You mean I could go up to any woman and just ask her how's about it?"
"Within reason, yes."
"Anddothey?"
"Some do, some don't—like here."
"Like hell, like here! Last liberty—" and the reactor man told him a long, confusing story about how he had picked up this pig, how she had dangled it in front of him for one solid week while he managed to spend three hundred and eighty-six dollars on her, and how finally she had bawled that she couldn't, she just hated herself but she couldn't do anything likethatand bang went the door in his face, leaving him to finish out the evening in a notch joint.
"Good God!" Charles said, appalled. "Was she out of her mind?"
"No," the reactor man said glumly, "but I must have been. I should of got her drunk and raped her the first night."
Charles was fully conscious that values were different here. Choking down something like nausea, he asked carefully: "Is there much rape?"
The little man signalled for another gin and downed it. "I guess so. Once when I was a kid a dame gave me this line about her cousin raped her when she was little so she was frigid. I had more ambition then, so I said: 'Then this won't be anything new to you, baby,' I popped her on the button—"
"I've got to go now," Charles said, walking straight out of the saloon. He was beginning to understand the sloppy beasts in the windows of the notch joint and why men could bring themselves to settle for nothing better. He was also overwhelmed by a great wave of home sickness.
The ugly pattern was beginning to emerge. Prudery, rape, frigidity, intrigue for power—and assassination? Beyond the one hint, Grinnel had said nothing that affected Syndic Territory.
But nothing would be more logical than for this band of brigands to lust after the riches of the continent.
Back of the waterfront were shipfitting shops and living quarters. Work was being done by a puzzling combination of mechanization and musclepower. In one open shed he saw a lathe-hand turning a gunbarrel out of a forging; the lathe was driven by one of those standard 18-inch ehrenhaft rotors Max Wyman knew so well. But a vertical drillpress next to it—Orsino blinked. Two men, sweating and panting, were turning a stubborn vertical drum as tall as they were, and a belt drive from the drum whirled the drill bit as it sank into a hunk of bronze. The men were in rags, dirty rags. And it came to Orsino with a stunning shock when he realized what the dull, clanking things were that swung from their wrists. They were chained to the handles of the wheel.
He walked on, almost dazed, comprehending now some cryptic remarks that had been passed aboard the sub.
"No Frog has staying power. Give a Limey his beef once a day and he'll outsweat a Frog."
"Yeah, but you can't whip a Limey. They just go bad when you whip a Limey."
"They just get sullen for awhile. But let me tell you, friend, don't ever whip a Spig. You whip a Spig, he'll wait twenty years if he has to but he'llgetyou, right between the ribs."
"If a Spig wants to be boiled, I should worry."
It had been broken up in laughter.
Boiled!Could such things be?
Sixteen ragged, filth-crusted sub-humans were creeping down the road, each straining at a rope. An inch at a time, they were dragging a skid loaded with one huge turbine gear whose tiny herringbone teeth caught the afternoon sun.
The Government had reactors, the Government had vehicles—why this? He slowly realized that the Government's metal and machinery and atomic power went into its warships; that there was none left over for consumers, and the uses of peace. The Government had degenerated into a dawn-age monster, specialized all to teeth and claws and muscles to drive them with. The Government was now, whatever it had been, a graceless, humorless incarnate ferocity. Whatever lightness or joy survived was the meaningless vestigial twitching of an obsolete organ.
Somewhere a child began to bawl and Charles was surprised to feel a profound pity welling up in him. Like a sedentary man who after a workout aches in muscles he never knew he owned, Charles was discovering that he had emotions which had never been poignantly evoked by the bland passage of the hours in Syndic Territory.
Poor little bastard, he thought, growing up in this hellhole. I don't know what having slaves to kick around will do to you, but I don't see how you can grow up a human being. I don't know what fear of love will do to you—make you a cheat? Or a graceful rutting animal with a choice only between graceless rutting violence and a stinking scuffle with a flabby and abstracted stranger in a strange unloved room? We have our guns to play with and they're good toys, but I don't know what kind of monster you'll become when they give you a gun to live with and violence for a god.
Reiner was right, he thought unhappily.We've got to do something about this mess.
A man and a woman were struggling in an alley as he passed. Old habit almost made him walk on, but this wasn't the playful business of ripping clothes as practiced during hilarious moments in Mob Territory. It was a grim and silent struggle—
The man wore the sweater of the Guards. Nevertheless, Charles walked into the alley and tore him away from the woman; or rather, he yanked at the man's rock-like arm and the man, in surprise, let go of the woman and spun to face him.
"Beat it," Charles said to the woman, not looking around. He saw from the corner of his eye that she was staying right there.
The man's hand was on his sheath knife. He told Charles: "Get lost. Now. You don't mess with the Guards."
Charles felt his knees quivering, which was good. He knew from many a chukker of polo that it meant that he was strung to the breaking point, ready to explode into action. "Pull that knife," he said, "and the next thing you know you'll be eating it."
The man's face went dead calm and he pulled the knife and came in low, very fast. The knife was supposed to catch Charles in the middle. If Charles stepped inside it, the man would grab him in a bear hug and knife him in the back.
There was only one answer.
He caught the thick wrist from above with his left hand as the knife flashed toward his middle and shoved out. He felt the point catch and slice his cuff. The Guardsman tried a furious and ill-advised kick at his crotch; with his grip on the knife-hand, Charles toppled him into the filthy alley as he stood one-legged and off balance. He fell on his back, floundering, and for a black moment, Charles thought his weight was about to tear the wrist loose from his grip. The moment passed, and Charles put his right foot in the socket of the Guardsman's elbow, reinforced his tiring left hand with his right and leaned, doubling the man's forearm over the fulcrum of his boot. The man roared and dropped the knife. It had taken perhaps five seconds.
Charles said, panting: "I don't want to break your arm or kick your head in or anything like that. I just want you to go away and leave the woman alone." He was conscious of her, vaguely hovering in the background. He thought angrily:She might at least get his knife.
The Guardsman said thickly: "You give me the boot and I swear to God I'll find you and cut you to ribbons if it takes me the rest of my life."
Good, Charles thought.Now he can tell himself he scared me. Good.He let go of the forearm, straightened and took his foot from the man's elbow, stepping back. The Guardsman got up stiffly, flexing his arm, and stooped to pick up and sheath his knife without taking his eyes off Charles. Then he spat in the dust at Charles' feet. "Yellow crud," he said. "If the goddam crow was worth it, I'd cut your heart out." He walked off down the alley and Charles followed him with his eyes until he turned the corner into the street.
Then he turned, irritated that the woman had not spoken.
She was Lee Falcaro.
"Lee!" he said, thunderstruck. "What are you doing here?" It was the same face, feature for feature, and between her brows appeared the same double groove he had seen before. But she didn't know him.
"You know me?" she asked blankly. "Is that why you pulled that ape off me? I ought to thank you. But I can't place you at all. I don't know many people here. I've been ill, you know."
There was a difference apparent now. The voice was a little querulous. And Charles would have staked his life that never could Lee Falcaro have said in that slightly smug, slightly proprietary, slightly aren't-I-interesting tone: "I've been ill, you know."
"But what are youdoinghere? Damn it, don't you know me? I'm Charles Orsino!"
He realized then that he had made a horrible mistake.
"Orsino," she said. And then she spat: "Orsino!Of theSyndic!" There was black hatred in her eyes.
She turned and raced down the alley. He stood there stupidly, for almost a minute, and then ran after her, as far as the alley's mouth. She was gone. You could run almost anywhere in New Portsmouth in almost a minute.
A weedy little seaman wearing crossed quills on his cap was lounging against a building. He snickered at Charles. "Don't chase that one, sailor," he said. "She is the property of O.N.I."
"You know who she is?"
The yeoman happily spilled his inside dope to the fleet gob: "Lee Bennet. Smuggled over here couple months ago by D.A.R. The hottest thing that ever hit Naval Intelligence. Very small potato in the Syndic—knows all the families, who does what, who's a figurehead and who's a worker. Terrific! Inside stuff! Hates the Syndic. A gang of big-timers did her dirt."
"Thanks," Charles said, and wandered off down the street.
It wasn't surprising. He should haveexpectedit.
Noblesse oblige.
Pride of the Falcaro line. She wouldn't send anybody into deadly peril unless she were ready to go herself.
Only somehow the trigger that would have snapped neurotic, synthetic Lee Bennet into Lee Falcaro hadn't worked.
He wandered on aimlessly, wondering whether it would be minutes or hours before he'd be picked up and executed as a spy.