I Speak for Earth Page 6

  Schneider glanced back over his shoulder, waiting for the other personnel on board to clear the doorway. He said, “Joe, even if we succeed in convincing the Federationers we’re good enough to join them, let’s not forget that we’re blind if we try and convince ourselves as well.”

  He walked beside Schneider and another man—a tall man in sweat shirt and shorts, whose knees were incredibly knobby—thinking hard about what Schneider had just said. It made sense. There could all too easily be people in the world who thought of the notoriety and glory which could come to them if they were selected, whether or not they got through. They would be insane, of course. But some of them might be at large and capable of doing damage.

  Schneider was talking technicalities—something about the measurement of minuscule electric currents—with his companion. Joe thought he remembered the companion from the project building in New York, but he couldn’t be certain. When Joe burst out with his next remark, it was a few seconds before Schneider managed to haul himself back to the previous subject.

  Joe said, “But isn’t the location of this place secret?”

  Schneider broke off, blinked, hesitated, and remembered that he had failed to introduce the knobby-kneed man to Joe. Belatedly he said, “Joe, this is Dr. Lagenfeld of the Cybernetics Institute in Sydney—Joe Morea, Sam.”

  If Joe had met Langenfeld in New York, he hadn’t been told his name; he would certainly have remembered it, because it was famous. There was warmth in his voice as he said, taking Lagenfeld’s hand, “Glad to meet you, doctor. Another candidate?”

  Langenfeld answered, “Not a chance,” he said lightly, failing completely to hide a hint of regret. “Too easily irritated, they told me. No, you’ll meet your fellow candidates down the other end of the island. I ordered a car to meet us—there it is now.”

  He pointed; a UN-yellow car was waiting alongside the airfield office, its driver leaning boredly on the hood. A small detachment of African troops headed by a white officer in UN uniform, passed in front of it. The sight reminded Joe of his question.

  “Doc, I was asking—isn’t this place secret?”

  “Nowhere on Earth is secret any more,” said Schneider sententiously. Lagenfeld looked puzzled, and Schneider told him what they had been talking about in the plane before landing.

  At once the Australian’s face was grave. He said, “Yes—that’s a new development. I don’t know much about it yet. It was a snap decision based on some intelligence report. Seems there are now more would-be candidates than the intelligence boys need, and some of them are of the sour-grapes type. One-Worlders, you know?”

  He shot an inquiring glance at Joe, who nodded. “I’ve heard one of them spouting at a street-corner meeting,” he said.

  “Ah-huh. Well …”

  He got no further. A shrill wild clangor filled the air from a huge alarm bell mounted on the roof of the airport office—they spun round to face the plane again. Men were hastily gathering up their equipment and running for dear life, making for the edge of the field, all except for the crew of a bright red car which had suddenly emerged from one of the prefabricated sheds near the office. In the car were men in snouted masks and thick protective clothing.

  “Another one!” exclaimed Lagenfeld obscurely, and seized Schneider’s arm. “Get under cover—fast!”

  Not stopping to ask questions, Joe obeyed. In front of the airport office was a man-high wall of sand and concrete blocks; Lagenfeld indicated that they should dodge behind it. Already there they found a UN officer with the sallow skin of an Indian, his small black moustache beaded with sweat. He was peering over the top of the wall with a periscope; slung over one shoulder was a portable video-audio recorder, and over the other a black box with a row of white push buttons on the top.

  “Another one, Major Gupta?” demanded Lagenfeld, panting after the sudden violent run.

  The Indian turned away from his periscope and passed a hand over his face to wipe away perspiration. He nodded. “Looks like it,” he said curtly. “Very well shielded, too. Could easily have slipped past the inspection at New York. But the activity’s gone up during the flight. They say it may hit guncrit in the next ten minutes, depending on how big a blast the saboteur wants.”

  Joe found himself almost stuttering with amazement as he spoke. He said, “You mean—there’s a bomb on board our plane?”

  The Indian glanced at him and nodded. “A pony atomic,” he said. “About a quarter-kiloton yield, I imagine. Want to take a look?” He gestured at the periscope.

  A fractional hesitation; then: “By God, yes!” Joe snapped, and bent to stare into the eyepiece.

  The red car had halted alongside the plane. Now the only visible movement in the entire field of the periscope’s view was the snake-like waggling of a power line that had been hauled through the door of the aircraft and was still being carried forward. One man had remained with the car, but he was absolutely immobile; he might have been a statue. On the ground between his feet was what Joe recognized as a portable antigrav projector, of the kind that had originally been developed as a line-of-sight artillery piece. There was an adjustment on the ’scope for magnification; Joe brought the car and man into sharp close-up and saw the power needles on the projector glowing very faintly in the bright sunlight.

  Suddenly there was a commotion. A man, snout-masked, came to the door of the plane carrying a flat box—quite small, small enough to lie flat in a corner of the plane’s hull, but obviously extremely heavy for its size.

  The alarm bell rang out a second time, more wildly yet. The man in the plane flexed his knees tremendously, straightened, and heaved his ponderous burden down towards the antigrav projector five feet away. While it was still in mid-air, the man controlling the projector leaned with all his weight on the power control. The beam snatched at the bomb in its short flight, and snapped it out of sight faster than the eye could follow.

  “Hide your eyes!” rasped Major Gupta. “Hide your eyes!”

  Automatically Joe’s eyelids blinked down, but even so he was too slow. Five miles away over the empty ocean a small new sun was born, doubling the glare from the ground about them and leaving painful bluish afterimages.

  Later, the sound came to them like a clap of thunder.

  Without realizing it, they had all remained frozen to wait for the explosion. When it had come and gone, they began painfully to relax and moved cramped muscles.

  Wiping sweat from his face, Lagenfeld was the first to speak. He said in a voice that still shook noticeably, “I have to hand it to your boys, Major Gupta. They’ve certainly got bomb disposal down to a fine art.”

  The major attempted nonchalance, but it was plain that he too had been on edge. He said offhandedly, “This kind of thing is nothing, Dr. Lagenfeld. It’s the big ones that are the trouble—the megatonners. Remind me some time to tell you about the Polaris warhead we found in Baffin Bay when I was a cadet. You couldn’t just move that one over the horizon with antigrav. It hadn’t been serviced for four years, but its yield would still have been around three or four megatons.”

  “Were you with the UN inspection teams?” Joe suggested.

  “That’s right.” The major unclamped his periscope from the blast wall and started to fold it up. “Believe me, that was a comfortable kind of job compared with this, though. Well, excuse me—I must get my technicians’ report.”

  He vanished at a run in the direction of the red car, and the others emerged into the open again. Soberly, Joe spoke to Lagenfeld. “You said—another one?” he repeated.

  Lagenfeld nodded. “We had the first one three days ago, on the plane that brought the candidate from Lagos. But that one was only a conventional explosive, and there was so much of it you could hardly overlook it. They’d turned out the contents of one of our own crates and filled it up to here with dynamite.” Lagenfeld tapped his forehead. “They found that one when they were circling to come in, and they managed to jettison it in the sea.”

  Sch
neider managed a sort of grin. “So now you see, Joe, you are not just here for what we told you. I am sorry.”

  He paused, while Joe shrugged and shook his head, and then reached forward unexpectedly and caught up Joe’s wrist. He felt the pulse with professional accuracy, counting a dozen beats and letting the wrist fall again.

  “You were not frightened?”

  “Is this just another of your tests?” Joe demanded suspiciously.

  “Unfortunately, no,” said Schneider, and his voice trembled on the last word. “I wish it might have been! But I was taking my opportunity while it came—again, you were not frightened?”

  Joe listened to his own heartbeat for a moment, and gave a thoughtful nod. “You know,” he said, “I was thinking that up at Old Stormalong you can get out of the habit of being frightened, because up there everything happens because it’s intended to. Short of meteorites, of course. You think ten times before you do anything; you sort of get to recognize competence and ability to cope with a situation when you meet it.”

  Schneider said gently, “But you were just saying you were once knocked out by the inertia of a strut?”

  “I was a new recruit then. It takes a while to learn.”

  “I see.”

  They had reached the waiting car, and Lagenfeld was holding the door for them to get in. Schneider became brisk and changed the subject as he settled back in his seat.

  “We are to go now to our quarters, as I was instructed. And then you are to have the opportunity to meet your other colleagues.”

  The car whisked them up the mile of road from the field to the village. It proved larger than Joe had estimated from the air; part of it was living quarters, part barracks for the detachments of UN troops who had moved in some time ago and part was technical offices. Langenfeld pointed out individual buildings: psychology block, electronics block, records office, administrative office, field hospital, and others.

  At length the car halted before a block that had a more permanent air than the others; it looked like an ordinary pleasant modern house, lifted out of an expensive, planned suburb and deposited here so that one automatically looked round for others, each with a tidy garden. There were no others.

  “Your quarters,” said Lagenfeld with a wave of his hand. “You’ll probably be wanting breakfast when you’ve had a chance to clean up and change clothes—over there is the main canteen. I’ll go over and tell them you’re coming.”

  Schneider nodded, getting out of the car. As Joe followed him, he turned back and addressed Lagenfeld again.

  “Joe will want to meet the other candidates as soon as possible. Do you think you could have them all there by—say in one hour’s time?”

  “Will do.” said Lagenfeld.

  “All are now here. Today then we can already get down to the real work.”

  Lagenfeld parodied a look of dismay, waved, and told the driver of the car to take him on down the road. Together, Joe and Schneider went into the house.

  The quarters were palatial. Joe found himself shaping a silent whistle as he looked around the room allotted to him. Everything was perfect. Everything. Even the books on the shelves of the bookcase were ones he loved. The furniture was cleanly designed in a practical style that he as an engineer appreciated at first glance. The layout of the room and the adjacent shower room were obviously the result of patient time-and motion analysis. On one wall was a photograph of Earth from somewhere in the region of Old Stormalong’s orbit. On another was a Dali—Premonition of Civil War. Joe shook his head wonderingly. He recalled that one of the psychologists at the project had spent an hour with him going over his likes and dislikes in literature, art and music. Obviously, the purpose hadn’t simply been to furnish an apartment for him—but they had made good use of what they had been told.

  A photograph cube lying on its side on the shelf at the head of the divan-bed caught his attention. Automatically he went across to pick it up and straighten it. When he did, he caught his breath and held it.

  It was a head and shoulders color portrait of Maggie. Etched in the substance of the cube, and forming a sort of halo around her hair, was a message in her handwriting:

  I wish I could be with you, too.

  The letters had obviously been triggered by setting the cube right side up; after half a minute they faded, and there was only the portrait.

  Joe shook his head again and put the cube down. A warm feeling flooded his mind. Suddenly he realized that in spite of everything Schneider had said about him not being frightened, deep down he had been scared stiff. The fear was going, diminishing like ebbing tide. In its place there came a sort of cautious confidence.

  Whistling, glancing every now and again at the portrait in the cube and remembering the feel of Maggie’s hair on his cheek, remembering the sound of her voice until it almost seemed that the message in the cube had been spoken, Joe attended to what was necessary: a quick shower, a change into fresh clothes from the baggage that had been delivered before he arrived. He was brushing his hair when a knock came at the door and Schneider entered after his reply.

  “I think we might go for breakfast, yes?” Schneider proposed. Joe nodded and set down his brushes.

  “Doc, this is a fabulous setup they’ve given us! I was expecting a sort of emergency barrack! Is it a kind of hearty breakfast for the condemned man?”

  His voice was light, and when he turned to face the other he was smiling. But there was no answering smile on Schneider’s face. Preferring to take the remark literally, he answered, “It is simply for us to be comfortable.”

  “I like.” Joe gave another appreciative glance around the room. “Good functional. No waste. No fuss. By the way—was that picture your idea, doc?”

  Schneider would have appeared to be preening himself if he hadn’t been such an essentially dignified person. He said, “I hoped you might like to be welcomed in such a way.”

  “Thanks. It was a wonderful idea.”

  “You sound suddenly almost excited, Joe. Can I take it that you are no longer disturbed by the possibilities that are ahead for you—for us all?”

  Joe laughed, and held the door for Schneider to go out. “You can just say I feel pretty good,” he said.

  “I am glad. Doubtless, condemned or not, your appetite is also a healthy one.”

  A sort of shadow passed across his face as he spoke. Joe barely caught sight of it, but he could not mistake it. He frowned.

  “Doc, you’re worried, aren’t you?”

  Falling into step beside him as they left the house and headed towards the building which Lagenfeld had pointed out as the main canteen, Schneider shrugged. “I am a little,” he admitted.

  “Is it just the same thing that’s worrying everyone else? The consequences of failure?”

  “Not altogether.” Schneider stared ahead, unseeing. “I carry—you must understand—most of the responsibility. On me everything turns for I was in charge and still am of the selection project. It is an equivocal position in which I find myself. We act by logic, as I remember saying to you already. But we cannot make our subconscious subject to logic, can we?”

  Joe shook his head, saying nothing.

  “I must thank you for this, however, Joe,” Schneider went on after a pause. “Everything you do or say makes me feel more than right in suggesting you as the—a candidate.”

  “I’m the one who’s supposed to be having confidence in you,” said Joe; staring at him.

  “Then it is good that we each create confidence in the other. Come, let us test the edge of that appetite in here, and talk of other things while we eat.”

  There were four people in the recreation room. His colleagues. His rivals. But he didn’t go on with that idea. Later, he had the impression that any risk of his regarding the others as competition had been prevented by the casual, careful way in which Schneider had always spoken of the “other candidates” as colleagues. He had conveyed by manner and tone a subtle assumption that each of them wanted to
secure the best possible choice for the vital test looming ahead.

  The room itself was not large—about the size of the one that had been allotted as his own quarters. It was warm in color with a comfortable array of furniture. At a table, leaning forward on their elbows and concentrating on a game of chess, were two of the candidates—a slender woman in a sari, whose long sleek black hair was twisted up over her head and held in place with an ivory clasp exquisitely carved, and a stolid-looking man with a square face, determined chin, very powerful legs revealed by his short pants.

  In two of the easy chairs, reading, were the others. On the left, near the phono-tape cabinet, a round-faced woman with eyes like sloes, wearing glasses and a rather drab but wellcut tunic shirt which somehow conveyed the air of being a uniform. She was reading a thick gaudy-covered novel. On the right, a dark brown man—also wearing glasses—reading a set of proofs and pausing to mark a printing error with a fountain pen. He was slim, nervous-looking, and had a face which was almost positively ugly. But he was the first to glance up to see who had entered, and when he did, his face was transformed by a white-toothed smile.

  “Good morning,” said Schneider, walking forward. There was a chorus of replies which sounded to Joe oddly like the chorused greeting of school children when the teacher entered for the first lesson of the day. He repressed a desire to smile and followed Schneider forward.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt your game,” he said to the chess-players, and the stolid man sat back, spreading his hands.

  “It matters not at all,” he said, in good but poorly inflected English. “I believe I must resign—it is shakhmat in five moves”

  He glanced at the Indian woman, who nodded and smiled, and dropped the pieces back in their box before setting the board aside.

  Schneider tugged one of the vacant easy chairs around with his foot until it faced the rest of the room, and then dropped into it. He rested his elbows on its arms, clasped his hands, and smiled.

  “Well, we are now all here,” he said. “Shall we make a last concession to superstition and say we hope for good luck? From now on, it is logic that we must obey, without risking reliance on instinctive feelings. We must get to know one another first, of course—Joe, please sit!—and therefore I would like to propose that we make ourselves acquainted. I would like you to describe yourselves without modesty please, as fully and completely as you possibly can. I will if you like begin by presenting myself. My name is Fridrich Schneider, and all my friends call me Fritz. I am fifty-three years old. The reason I do not sometimes speak perfect English is that I was born in Salzburg, in Austria, and I did not learn English until I studied psychology in England when I was twenty-one. I am a psychologist, not a psychiatrist; I have only for a short time been in curative work, many years ago. Aside from that, I have been studying always the physical aspect of the process of thought. I have a degree in cybernetics as well as in psychology. I am well known in my field. I have done work on the electrical implantation of nervous impulses, on human adaptation, on the early diagnosis of nervous disease and on other subjects.