Alexander Blish was the security chief at Tomloy's, the new nuclear physics research centre. They were doing things in the plant that had never been done before. They were tapping power sources so terrible that their ultimate conclusions could be heaven on earth or a hell of destruction. Armageddon might be just around the dangerous corner which humanity called tomorrow. Blish had problems. There were alien forces to consider. There were human traitors who were prepared to sell out the Empire if the price was right. The price could be as high as planetary control. Wilkie Gordon was Alexander's second problem. Wilkie was an outworlder with strange wild talents. He could be an invaluable ally or a deadly enemy. Blish had to decide and decide at once. If he made the wrong choice there was just a chance that Gordon could detect the aliens and renegades before they reached the J-Pile...
Release date:
September 30, 2014
Publisher:
Gateway
Print pages:
320
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THE big man behind the desk was known as ‘Alex’ to his friends. He didn’t have a great many who came in that category, and right here in the centre of Tomloy he didn’t apparently have any. Alex thumbed through a stack of microfilm report indexes, sighed resignedly and began feeding the appropriate tapes into the reader. It was very much the same old stuff that he had been dealing with since he arrived. Personal dossiers on the thousands of employees at Tomloy. Blish found his mind wandering just a trifle. How the devil had he got involved with the security work in the first place, he asked himself. There must be easier ways of earning a living; there must be more popular ways of earning a living! And yet, some kind of voice deep down within him—perhaps the voice of duty—the voice of conscience, was saying, ‘You know dam’ well why you took it on, Alex! You knew that somebody had to do it, and you knew that nobody wanted to do it, and you knew that you were capable.’
‘Perhaps I’m a big head,’ he thought. ‘No you’re not,’ said the voice of duty, the voice of conscience, deep down within him; ‘humility does not consist of able men thinking themselves inadequate. Nor does it consist of strong men thinking themselves weak.’
Alex sighed again, and turned his eyes back to the micro-reader. On and on and on went the dossiers; names, photographs, fingerprints, electronic sound images of voice modulations as depicted on an oscillograph; recordings of brain waves from an electro-encephalogram … all that it was possible to know about a human being, all that it was possible to record. Everything that was distinctive, everything that was specific, everything that was individual in the fullest sense of the word, was all recorded here.
Alex looked up at the big wall-chron; its sleek hands seemed to be mowing away the blades of grass of which the grassy plain of his life was composed.
There were an awful lot of stems and leaves across that plain, an awful lot of blades; nevertheless the wallchron’s sweep hand scythed on relentlessly.
Alex began dreaming of retirement. One of those beautiful, soft, relaxing dreams that come to men who are desperately overworked, that bring the sound of bitter-sweet pleasure with them. There was something tantalising about the dream of retirement. He imagined what it would be like to have a one-hundred, or perhaps two-hundred storey level penthouse on one of the old solar system planets, maybe as near Earth as Mars or Venus. Maybe if he saved carefully he might even be able to afford a place on Earth itself! But that was normally the dream of the man who could reckon his cash in billions of inter-stellar credits, and Blish, being an honest security officer didn’t reckon that he was ever going to get into that category … No, it would have to be Mars or Venus at best for his penthouse. A garden? A garden?, A GARDEN? On his money! Of course, he could have afforded land out here on one of the mid-worlds for prices here were realistic. But who wanted to retire on one of the mid-worlds? The in-worlds were the places for retirement.
The in-worlds, or the very core of the in-worlds, the home-worlds. Nobody could afford land there. Even the syndicates only bought it in feet! But building techniques pushed up and up, pushed up so high that it was a wonder the land on which so much had been spent was able to support the weight of the great edifices that rose from it.
Earth in particular bristled like a great porcupine in space! Even land on the old ocean floors went at fabulous prices. Of course, that kind of land was cheap, thought Blish, compared to dry prices, but by the time you had paid the contractor to sink the necessary submarine piles on which to build, it worked out just about as expensive.
The word ‘garden’ went whispering round his mind again—like everybody else, he would have to be content with a hydroponics room. Wonderful things could be done with a good hydroponics room. Syntho-soil and the new nuclear-physics processes, together with the latest chemical genetic techniques could produce almost any kind of plant, and many a weary administrator—or security chief—who had retired to an upper-deck penthouse with a hydroponics tank had found that some of his discoveries had been a very useful augmentation to his pension, and his savings. Blish suddenly realised that he had been day dreaming to such an extent that he had missed the relevant details of the last micro-film dossier. He clicked the reader into reverse and waited for the micro-film to line itself up again. The repeater light flashed above his head. He re-engaged the feed control; the dossier that he had missed flashed up clear, stark, bright and vivid on the screen. There were three cross references in the corner, and Blish snapped out of his reverie. Three cross references on a dossier meant that the bearer of that dossier was somebody different, somebody very different! Three cross references were very unusual. Even two were a little bit out of the ordinary; one alone stood a man out from his immediate contemporaries.
‘So you’re a three cross-reference man, are you?’ said Alex, half to the micro-film screen and half to himself. He pressed a button and stopped the reader in mid-stride. He looked at the name again ‘Wilkie Gordon.’ He touched the other button, his secretary appeared.
Lorraine was tall and willowy, graceful, too in a mid-worlder sort of way, but there was something about mid-world and out-world women that didn’t completely appeal to Alex.
He thought of himself as a bit of a throw-back sometimes, but his taste ran entirely to in-worlders and home-worlders. He never could get used to the dark blue and green hair that most of the mid-worlders favoured, and there was something about their cast of feature, although it had exciting effects on the blood pressures and biological urges of the majority of men, that left Alex strangely unmoved. Lorraine’s jet black eyes rested on him momentarily.
‘Yes, sir?’ Her voice had a strange timbre, an unusual quality—unusual that was, thought Alex, by in-world standards. She was a good assistant and thoroughly, trustworthy. He sometimes felt guilty about not being able to work up more enthusiasm for the local talent, but he supposed there must be deep psychological reasons why it took an in-world girl to set his pulses racing … best of all, a home-worlder. Alex went delirious over pure bred Earth girls. But they were so few and far between out there in the mid-worlds that you had to be at least a planetary administrator to hope to get one on your staff. He suddenly realised that he was staring rather blankly.
‘Sorry, Lorraine,’ he apologised. ‘I want the file of these cross references.’ He indicated the micro-film.
‘At once, sir.’ She moved smoothly out again. Alex turned his attention to the dossier ahead of him once more.
ALEX had been reading the dossiers which Lorraine had brought in, and he had to admit that this was one of the few occasions in his life when he was in an absolute quandary. If these dossiers, with their careful cross-references, had been accurately compiled—and it was the pride of Alexander Blish’s department that everything under his control was accurate if nothing else—then he was faced with one of the toughest problems that had yet come his way as security chief. He wished he hadn’t been quite so far behind on his checking, and routine work. He knew that good police work and good security work were routine, efficient routine; if you sieve often enough and carefully enough, you will turn out the pebbles, you will separate the wheat from the chaff. The sheep will stand out from the goats, the bad fish can be thrown back into the water, while the good fish can be safely barrelled and salted.
Alex wondered whether he was mixing metaphors too much! He mixed metaphors much in the way that a connoisseur of wines and spirits would mix cocktails—it was one of his hobbies.
Alex liked playing with words, they fascinated him and amused him. Words and hydroponics-tank-gardening were his relaxations, . . .
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