The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge Read online

  Traly opened his door and stepped down, dragging Norman behind him. With difficulty the chimpanzee kept his balance and did not land on his head. The drunk driver was muttering to himself, “Las’ time I drive this trash. They can pick up the inventories themselves. Good riddance.” He kicked a rollagon. “Just wait till I get some Bender fusion packs. I’ll show ’em. C’mon, you.” He gave Norman a jerk, and began walking across the street.

  The waterfront was almost deserted. Traly was heading for what appeared to be the only operating establishment in the area: a tavern. The bar had a rundown appearance. The “aluminum” trim around the door had long since begun to rust, and the memory cell for the bar’s sky sign suffered from amnesia, so that it now projected into the air:

  The D-unk PuT pavern

  Traly entered the bar, pulling Norman in close behind. Once the fluorescents had probably lighted the place well, but now only two or three in a far corner were operating.

  He pulled Norman around in front of him and seemed eager to announce his discovery of the “talkin’ monkey.” Then he noticed that the bar was almost empty. No one was sitting at any of the tables, although there were half empty glasses of beer left on a few of them. Four or five men and the barkeeper were engaged in an intense discussion at the far end of the room. “Where is everybody?” Traly was astonished.

  The barkeeper looked up. “Jimmy! Right at lunch President Langley came on TV an’ said that the government was going to let us buy as many Bender fusion boxes as we want. You could go out an’ buy one right now for twenty-five bucks. When everybody heard that, why they just asked themselves what they were doin’ sittin’ around in a bar when they could have a job an’ even be in business for themselves. Not much profit for me this afternoon, but I don’t care. I know where I can get some junk copters. Fit ’em out with Bender packs and start a tourist service. You know: See the U.P. with Don Zalevsky.” The bartender winked.

  Traly’s jaw dropped. He forgot Norman. “You really mean that there’s no more black market where we can get fusion boxes?”

  One of the customers, a short man with a protuberant beak and a bald pate, turned to Traly. “What do you need a black market for when you can go out an’ buy a Pack for twenty-five dollars? Well, will you look at that: Traly’s disappointed. Now you can do whatcher always bragging about, go out and dig up some fusion boxes and go into business.” He turned back to the others.

  “And we owe it all to President Langley’s fizical and economic policies. Bender’s Pack coulda destroyed our nation. Instead we only had a little depression, an’ look at us now. Three years after the invention, the economy’s on an even keel enough to let us buy as many power packs as we want.”

  Someone interrupted. “You got rocks in your head, buddy. The government closed down most of the mines so the oil corporations would have a market to make plastics for; we get to produce just enough ore up here so no one starves. Those ‘economic measures’ have kept us all hungry. If the government had only let us buy as many Packs as we wanted and not interfered with free competition, there wouldna been no depression or nothing.”

  From the derisive remarks of the other customers, this appeared to be a minority opinion. The Beak slammed his glass of beer down and turned to his opponent. “You know what woulda happened if there wasn’t no ‘interference’?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Everybody woulda gone out an bought Packs. All the businesses in the U.S. woulda gone bankrupt, ’cause anyone with a Bender and some electric motors would hardly need to buy any regular goods, except food. It wouldn’t have been a depression, it woulda been just like a jungle. As it is, we only had a short period of adjustment,” he almost seemed to be quoting, “an’ now we’re back on our feet. We got power to burn; those ore buckets out in the bay can fly through the air and space, and we can take the salt out of the water and—”

  “Aw, you’re jus’ repeating what Langley said in his speech.”

  “Sure I am, but it’s true.” Another thought occurred to him. “And now we don’t even need Public Works Projects.”

  “Yeah, no more Public Works Projects,” Traly put in, disappointed.

  “There wouldn’t have been no need for PWP if it wasn’t for Langley and his loony ideas. My old man said the same thing about Roosevelt.” The dissenter was outnumbered but voluble.

  NORMAN HAD BECOME engrossed in the argument. In fact he was so interested that he had forgotten his danger. Back in the District he had been made to learn some economics as part of his regular course of study—and, of course, he could remember considerably more about the subject. Now he decided to make his contribution. Traly had loosened his grip; the chimpanzee easily broke the hold and jumped to the top of the counter. “This man,” he pointed to the Beak, “is right, you know. The Administration’s automatic stabilizers and discretionary measures prevented total catastro—”

  “What is this, Jimmy?” The bartender broke the amazed silence that greeted Norman’s sudden action.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you guys. I picked up this monkey back in Ishpeming. He’s like a parrot, only better. Jus’ listen to him. I figure he could be worth a lot of money.”

  “Thought you were going into the trucking business, Jimmy.”

  Traly shrugged. “This could be a lot greener.”

  “That’s no parrot-talk,” the Beak opined. “The monkey’s really talking. He’s smart like you and me.”

  Norman decided that he had to trust someone. “Yes I am, yes I am! And I need to get into Canada. Otherwise—”

  The door to the Drunk Pup Tavern squeaked as a young man in brown working clothes pushed it halfway open. “Hey, Ed, all of you guys. There’s a bunch of big Army copters circling the bay, and GI’s all over. It doesn’t look like any practice maneuver.” The man was panting as if he had run several blocks.

  “Say, let’s see that,” moved the Beak. He was informally seconded. Even the bartender seemed ready to leave. Norman started. They were still after him, and they were close. He leaped off the counter and ran through the half-open door, right by the knees of the young man who had made the announcement. The man stared at the chimpanzee and made a reflex grab for him. Norman evaded the snatch and scuttled down the street. Behind him, he heard Traly arguing with the man about, “Letting my talking monkey escape.”

  He had dropped his blanket when he jumped onto the counter. Now the chill drizzle made him regret the loss. Soon he was damp to the skin again, and the water splashed his forearms and legs as he ran through spots where water had collected in the tilted and cracked sections of sidewalk. All the shops and dives along the street were closed and boarded up. Some owners had left in such disgust and discouragement that they had not bothered even to pull in their awnings. He stopped under one such to catch his breath and get out of the rain.

  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 c
onstruction 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 naïve 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.