‘Delvaney,’ said the voice from the walls, ‘Emergency in Time Level Six-Fourteen. You’re wanted on the Third Frame.’ And in the large, quiet, sun-blossoming office, Delvaney slept whilst again and again the voice, with pitch and tempo altering through a dozen inflections, called sombrely and unanxiously to him. Disturbed by the involuntary motion of a thin angular arm, an empty glass began to roll across the desk. Delvaney was dreaming.
It was a recurrent dream, familiar as whisky, piquant as a spring morning. The girl in it was tall, slim, bright brown, extraordinarily pliant and faceless. In the dream, he was able to investigate this problem of her facelessness. She had a problem, this beautiful girl, one of communication which was complicated by her own lack of identity. ‘Time,’ she had said, ‘if time could have a stop.’ Delvaney found himself out of sympathy with her philosophizing. She was the focus of his every erotic fancy at one time, and at another she would be a creature of mist and light, segmenting into a dozen reflections of herself and weaving them into a pattern. It was the patterns that disturbed him, that and the noise. ‘Quiet,’ he said, and he woke to find he was talking to the voice from the walls.
He reached the door as three youngish women burst through it. His secretary and her assistants.
‘The Plot Director says you’re to get over right away, Del,’ said the efficient assistant, the one who didn’t trouble to hide her awareness of his dishevelled state.
‘Come on, Del,’ said his secretary. ‘Try this.’ She mixed a drink. ‘It’s quick and it lasts for a few hours. That’s all you’ll need for this one.’
Del muttered several obscenities at the Plot Director. The second assistant said, ‘Delightful,’ and Del felt a stab of self-pity. They all needed him, but they knew he was on the way down. Even his secretary occasionally looked at him with distaste, whereas at one time she had worshipped him. He patted her on the backside and she answered, ‘I’ll wait for you tonight,’ as she always did, but he could see that the old eagerness was gone.
‘What is it?’ he said.
‘Six short-term trippers stuck in Third Six-Fourteen.’ He frowned. ‘Mid-Byzantine,’ she added. ‘There’s an Executive’s daughter mixed up in it.’
‘Damn all lousy short-stay trippers!’ Del shouted. He reached for the glass on the desk, but already the women were beginning the Emergency routine. They clipped the helmet-like Plot Informant on his head and punched buttons on the control panel that covered the wall behind his desk. He had a momentary glimpse of the woman of the dream as the drug began to take effect, but then it was gone.
‘It was the girl,’ explained his secretary, pushing him through the blue door marked ‘Emergency’. ‘All hell let loose. The Chief Programmer says there’ll have to be a complete rewrite for a couple of decades before the Plot gets back to normal.’
‘What girl?’
‘You’ll find out,’ said the second assistant. ‘Come back in one psychotic piece, dear,’ she said and, as the door slid into its place behind him, she added, ‘we need you.’
‘I hope he can still do it,’ said the assistant who worried. ‘It is a bit nasty this time. Have you two ever been to Third Six-Fourteen?’
‘No,’ said the secretary. ‘I’m a romantic girl really. Nineteenth-century England for me every time. All cousins and discreet incest and galloping consumption. I’m going to the new one this year—the one Alex wrote up during his second sabbatical year. Why don’t you try them?’
‘Not realistic enough for me,’ said the efficient assistant. ‘Too much Charlotte and Emily and Jane and litcrit. I suppose it’s all right for a week or so but it seems all so wordy. Alex can’t get the feel of real life. He’s fine with novels and letters and diaries, and I know he does a nice job of conflation, but what I like is something fairly modern and hectic.’
The secretary eyed her with dislike. ‘I was forgetting, dear,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t really see you fluttering a fan.’
‘But what about Del?’ said the worried assistant.
The second assistant shrugged. ‘If he doesn’t make it, we’ll still have a job for years. Think of all the reports we can make out. Histories of his cases. Cross-reference work.’ She smiled. ‘It might be better with him out of the way.’
‘Bitch,’ said the secretary. ‘He’ll be all right. He can still do it.’
‘He has gone down in the grades,’ pointed out the second assistant, quite unabashed. ‘You can’t really call this a big job.’
‘It was just bad luck on the Seventh Frame!’ said the worried assistant.
‘And the Sirian job?’ said the other assistant. ‘And two years ago when the Primitives got out of hand on the First Frame?’
‘That was bad luck,’ said the secretary firmly. ‘He was damned good, and he’s had a bad patch lately; but he can still cope.’
‘You’re still in love with him,’ said the worried assistant. ‘That’s wonderful!’
‘There’s the statistics too, if he doesn’t make it,’ said the efficient assistant gaily. ‘Years of work!’
‘And is it a bad one? Really bad?’ said the other assistant.
‘A Disaster.’
Even the efficient assistant looked back in awe.
‘You don’t lose the touch because of a run of bad luck,’ said the secretary. ‘Del can still find the answer.’
‘Any dead?’ said Del. The familiar excitement of impending action was there, but there was the doubt too. He looked at the Plot behind the Chief Programmer. It was bad.
‘One so far,’ said the Plot Director. ‘But don’t worry about that.’ He turned to the Chief Programmer. ‘Del worries.’
‘You’re not to worry about casualties,’ said the Chief. ‘There’s another four men you might not be able to get out. I’ll have to write them off if you can’t work something into the Plot for them. Your job is to make sure of one thing, and one thing only.’ He stopped because Del was reaching for the bottle the Plot Director kept in a drawer. He frowned now, but Del took no notice.
‘It’s very important,’ said the Plot Director worriedly. In his anxiety, he reached out a hand to detain Del’s arm. Immediately Del chopped out and the Plot Director looked at his own numb shoulder. ‘These men of action,’ he said, with a pained smile. After that, Del knew that he had been called in only as a last resort. All the other members of the Disaster team must either be out working or recovering from injuries.
‘Please, Del,’ said the Plot Director, and Del felt sorry for him. Here was another person who simply wanted to hold on to his job, another like his bitchy office help.
Del drank slowly. ‘Make sure of what?’ he asked.
‘The girl—bring her out alive. No conditions. No restrictions.’
‘This the Executive’s daughter?’
‘Hector Rosetti’s only child.’
The intent desperate faces opposite him were explained. Del knew that the whole framework of this sector of Programming would be thrown out of work if the girl wasn’t brought out.
‘There was a slip-up—not ours,’ hastily added the Plot Director. ‘You got the details on the way over?’
Del touched the Informant that still slipped information into his mind. ‘A little set-piece, bit of subversive work for half-a-dozen conspirators. I’ve got that.’
‘She fouled it up!’ snarled the Chief Programmer. ‘What did we do to get a girl like that! Bookings didn’t check her stability ratings, and anyway they didn’t get a valid disclaimer!’
‘I don’t want to go back to being part of the audience,’ said the Plot Director. ‘Just get this one right, Del. We’re all relying on you.’
In a stagey voice, the Chief Programmer appealed to Del in his turn: ‘When I was a kid, I used to think the Frames were real. I got a job fixing some of the small plots when I graduated, but the romance of the Frames was still real to me. All those little people wanting to experience for themselves the thoughts and emotions of peoples who lived in happier days! Think of all those wonderful tensions and neuroses they’re going through right now! And you’re the man who’s going to make sure they go right on enjoying themselves!’
‘She sounds an interesting girl,’ offered Del.
‘She’s under-age, she’s Executive Rosetti’s daughter, and she’s due for execution in a couple of hours! Now, get in there, Delvaney, and bring her out!’
‘Can he do it?’ Del heard the Chief saying anxiously as he entered the long, coffin-like conveyor. The faint swish of the tube hid the answer. All other thoughts were hidden too as Del felt his own world slipping away. Now the helmet began to acclimatize him to the world of Byzantium.
‘Hadrian Antonius,’ the ten thousand voices murmured. Information flowed into Del’s brain. ‘Freeman and soldier, former ballistae expert, now entrepreneur and tax-farmer in Thrace; inharmoniously married with two children alive, a girl of fifteen soon to be the wife of a guardsman, and a boy attending the local military academy.’ His friends were Artemius, a wine-importer, and Eudoxus, a sub-governor. ‘Friends too,’ muttered Del.
It was to be dry and hot in Constantinople, with riots and beatings, processions, parades and circuses. The tyrant Basil had been overthrown, chiefly because he had been too honest. The ministers Nicephorus the Eunuch and Photius the Treasurer had decided on their own candidate for the vacant throne, and they had sufficient money to bribe the Praetorian Guard into acquiescing. Basil was locked in a cave filled with bats, scorpions and vipers; so far he had evaded the reptiles by a combination of luck and agility. Del found himself interested in spite of the prosaic nature of the Plot. The Programmer had stuck to historical fact. He had sufficient intelligence to know that the details of palace politics were themselves of great interest. Action, sudden and violent action, was a part of tenth-century Byzantine life.
Basil, of course, had been unaware of the true state of affairs. A gallant general, he had become Emperor by accident. He had not known how to ensure that Photius paid the fleet and the armies, nor had he the wit to realize how Nicephorus had alienated the populace by issuing Imperial decrees that curtailed the holidays, lowered the free ration of bread, and ensured deliberately poor shows at the circus. And now a thousand trumpets would sound when he hung between a gold statue of a pig and a silver statue of a wolf; at his first howl of terror, a thousand banners would wave, and then the best-known buffoons would be invited to hack at the unfortunate Basil till he died.
Pictures of the political scene flashed across Del’s conscious mind as facts were hammered subliminally into his unconscious. Then word-patterns followed, voice rhythms, habit recognition signals, and endless personality data. Few men could stand the impact of the mass of knowledge specialists in Plot Disaster Control had to absorb. In an hour, Del learned all that there was to know about the six trippers who had contrived to get into difficulties in the re-created world of Byzantium. Like a latter-day Faust, Del was ejected through a trapdoor onto the floor of a cellar in a wineshop.
The first thing he saw was a dead man. He was recognizable by his deep sunburn and the criss-cross of old machete scars from a previous vacation. Blood seeped from sword wounds in his chest. There was nothing to be done for him and nothing to be learned from him. Del crossed quickly to the rough stone steps and up to the crowded tavern above. The woman saw him.
‘The dead arise!’ she called. Half-a-dozen men looked round. Outside the roar of the huge crowd swelled and boomed.
‘Julia, my heart, my queen, my empress!’ shouted Del to her. Immediately he had recognized her as the loud-mouthed bitch who informed on her customers to one of Nicephorus’ agents.
‘But you came from the cellar where the de. . .
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