A Man of Double Deed Page 8

  Coman reached across and stoked her cheek. ‘Never before so serious or so beautiful.’

  ‘Ah, you don’t think anything of my opinion!’

  Both Coman and Jonl stared at her thoughtfully, for her agitation was by no means simulated. She had never before shown such interest or conviction regarding matters related to world affairs – indeed had never bothered with anything outside the relationship they had forged and the various domestic arrangements which she looked after. Only once before had she been moved by a premonition of real danger to Coman – a premonition which had proved true enough, for shortly afterwards he had barely escaped with is life from a predicament, the memory of which even now he kept sealed and protected by as many bars as there were trip-fused to its operation. He said now: ‘I assure you that I respect your opinion when it is born of your intuition. But your fears for my safety are unnecessary, for now I have been doubly warned.’

  Her large eyes regarded him gravely. They sat silent for a moment or two, then at last Coman rose. ‘Come. We’ll have a look round the City, and then find a pleasant place to lunch.’

  The Fifteenth City, although remarkable and even beautiful from a distance, presented a somewhat ungainly appearance at close quarters. Owing to its pier-like construction it was built on a perfectly flat surface about three miles wide, winding sometimes backward upon itself for nearly a hundred miles, high above the Canton and Enderbury Island. For the whole of its length along the west side ran its one main thoroughfare, a hundred yards wide, containing six main belts moving at varying speeds, fed by countless subsidiaries from inside the City. On the outside of the belt one large foot-promenade covered the same distance and overlooked the expanse of Pacific ocean stretching to the horizon. A small rail was provided for strollers to lean upon, while outside this hung an invisible wall, the usual protection afforded against drops of any size.

  The middle and east side of the City was a vast conglomeration of shops, buildings of all kinds and entertainment palaces, jostling and struggling for life and recognition. The last twenty miles to the south, however, were taken up with Government buildings, constructed in the shape of a fan and surrounded on all sides by a natural parkland – one of the only three left on Earth. There were two scanning platforms, one at each end of the City, and upon these all the radio and telecommunication service had their headquarters, together with those of the police and the machinery for the many automatic control systems.

  Roughly in the centre of the ‘pier’ a vast rectangle had been built with seating accommodation for 100,000 spectators, and it was here that the majority of sensation-seekers, tourists – and indeed most classes of the City’s society – gathered to watch, and sometimes to take part in, the most popular entertainment of the age. ‘The Games’, a replica of the ancient Roman form of spectacle, had been revived soon after the great era of rebuilding which had followed the Atomic Disaster. At first fairly innocuous, it had with increasing speed become a venue for blood-letting so inordinate, so intricate and so many-sided as to leave the imagination intoxicated and confused. Many and varied were the arguments raised both for its continuation, and for its abolition. Yet it had not only survived but flourished, and by the end of the twenty-first century had gained such a hold upon the minds of men, human and alien, in high as well as in low places, and had become such a source of revenue to local and World government, as to be part and parcel of that civilisation. No one man or group of men and women could at that time avail against its hold upon the masses.

  Here it seemed, was the perfect outlet for a race encompassed by machines, marshalled and controlled by ingenious instruments that thought for them, coddled and suffocated by marvellous electronic devices that garnished and suckled them – a race no longer troubled and alerted by the threat of imminent war but smothered by the luxuries of peace, the terrible apathies and ennuis engendered by too little work, and too much time. Here were amphitheatres where men could see themselves as men, with swords and rapiers; pistols which fired bullets and pellets, not invisible rays and shocks; the romance of mailed fists and long lances; splinter bombs and arrows; a place where, if he wished, any man might actually throw aside the stifling cloak of modern comfort – even the shield of medicine which could now prolong human life to a hundred years or more – and become a real man, a hero for the millions to revere.

  Many were the challenges offered and accepted, mostly by young men and sometimes by women. Many were the rivers of blood which stained the sand. But of course the vast majority of combats and spectacles were waged by professionals – gladiators from the families of gladiators. These were recruited from every country on Earth and beyond: the men from Venus and Mars, the Sefen from the tiny world in Canis Major and, more recently, the tall creatures from Macre, in the Formalhaut System.

  Most of all, perhaps, the Games offered a refuge from the guilt and despair that hung around men’s heels in that age: the despair of the ordinary man and woman of ever assimilating one fraction of the continual avalanche of new knowledge and data which with the conquest of outer Space and the finding of new life-forms, sociologies, beliefs and cultures, were thrust upon their consciousnesses. For more than a hundred years, millions of young people had been trained to think for the most part in terms of technology; but the fresh horizons of life and thought opened up by scientific progress were beyond the comprehension of all but a few. Most people lived and died pursued by a bedlam of new sounds, colours and shapes, definitions and meanings, the majority of which they could not, or dared not, try to understand. As for the guilt, all men had the worm of it in them from the beginning. With each age it grew fatter, and the quest for both its origin and its cure was to continue.

  After a walk along the promenade they took a chair-belt to that part of the City where the Raylonds lived, and gazed down upon the area from a bridge constructed of wire strands, unbelievably strong but of such gossamer slenderness that from only a short distance it seemed like a glistening spider’s web.

  ‘My word, our new fiend certainly lives in style,’ Said Sein.

  The whole district contained houses of the best sort, in most cases with gardens showing a profusion of exotic blooms, lawns, and here and there even a small swimming pool, luxuries made possible by the generous rain supply allowed in this Section. Signs of expensive burglar alarm systems, in the shape of pencil-like antennae, were to be seen dotted around buildings and belt-ways, and nearly every estate had its robot guard at or near the entrance to its grounds.

  ‘You should be quite comfortable in whichever little prison you’re to spend the next few days,’ said Coman.

  ‘Always supposing that we do talk our way into it,’ said Jonl.

  ‘Oh – hell!’ Sein exclaimed suddenly. She took Coman’s arm, and, despite the amused glances of passers-by, buried her face against his shoulder.

  ‘Why did I have to throw in my lot with you two?’ she asked. ‘How long will it last? How long will you last Claus?’

  ‘You tell me – with your intuition,’ he replied touching her hair.

  ‘I only know that life wouldn’t be worth living if anything – bad happened to us.’ She shivered involuntarily. ‘Sometimes I feel that this existence is some kind of dream, or rather – that I’ve been born out of my time. Why couldn’t we have lived, say, two hundred years ago, when the world was younger and full of natural beauty? When there were sprawling cities, and fields, forests, and villages and people rode horses and bicycles, and women had husbands and babies, and lived just for those they loved, and when the sky was just a black dome twinkling with unknown stars?’

  Coman glanced over her head at Jonl. ‘All through time people have been wishing they lived in other ages,’ he said. ‘It’s no use, Sein. We have to make our own time, good or bad.’

  ‘Yes, I’m a fool,’ she said, fumbled for a handkerchief. ‘Come on, I could do with another drink – a strong one. I want to be quite dizzy by the time you have to leave.’

  They found a
restaurant overlooking the blue sea. During the meal Sein regained her composure, but sat quiet and subdued, although she drank a good deal of shinel – a mild-tasting but potent drink imported from Venus.

  It was six thirty when they eventually left the restaurant, to spend their remaining time listening to a concert given by on of the world’s top orchestras, in a glass dome situated on a great column of plastic which rose, complete with audience and musicians, slowly into the evening sky, to a height of four hundred feet, and remained there until the end of the performance, at eight thirty.

  The Fifteenth City was full of startling works of this nature, sometimes awe-inspiring, sometimes ridiculous – feats so splendid that men could forget, momentarily at least, their inner uncertainty and instability in the contemplation of such marvels, wrought and fashioned by human ingenuity and skill.

  When the time came to part, Coman touched their faces in torn and Jonl said: ‘Look after yourself, and don’t get too involved with that woman, whoever she might be.’

  He smiled, his mind already elsewhere. Until now the feeling of purpose had not really caught hold, and he had been nothing, merely the image in the dream which belonged to both of them. But now he had already withdrawn from them and all the things they stood for – the warmth of love and companionship, the heat of lust, the laughter and the pain – and was become a keyman, pure and simple.

  He said: ‘Don’t be foolish about the woman or my safety. Nothing bad will happen and we shall be together in two days.’

  Sein seemed about to speak, then turned her face away. Jonl took her arm, and, with one last look at Coman stepped with her on to the belt that would take them to the barrier surrounding the Raylond estate.

  He stared after them, a part of his mind imprinting indelibly the image of their retreating figures on that most poignant memory bank interconnected with the heart. This parting might be the last – who could tell? He did not care for intuitions, especially Sein’s, for they had an extrasensory importance of their own. Yet if he were killed it would be of no real concern to anyone except the two women. And the sadness of the two women meant nothing, except to Claus Coman. And Claus Coman would be dead.

  There were no safety locks, no recognition signals, or anything of the sort here. Why should there be? Who would burgle or attack a man who had nothing? Who even wanted to approach and look at a man who was only half a man, a semi-robot, with addled brains, wired for strange sounds and even stranger thoughts, who laughed at the wrong times and talked to ghosts in his grotesquely musical voice, who would dislocate his arm, and put it back all in the same instant while he was speaking to you, and who suddenly stamped his feet on imaginary bugs long crushed?

  ‘Greetings Deenan,’ said Coman.

  The figure in the chair on the porch stared past him into the darkness and said not a word. Near by, the waters of the Pacific lapped against one of the giant pylons supporting the City and a soft breeze caressed the sparse feather-weed that grew amid the sand dunes. Coman walked up the steps of the porch and stood for a moment, listening into the strange, half-human, half-metal brain, following the whisperings along the maze of corridors, and found the I sleeping. With a shrug he passed by into the building.

  It was long and low, the living room functional in design, scrupulously clean and comfortable, but without personality. The government-supplied robot, a spindly-legged creature of the old type, with a humanoid face, rose from a chair in one corner and glided forward as Coman crossed the threshold.

  Its brain recognised the fact that he was a newcomer, and its voice asked: ‘Who you? What you want? Answer now please, or I send alarm signal.’

  ‘A friend of Deenan,’ Coman replied, and gave his personal identity number.

  So now Deenan had some protection of a flimsy sort, for this new gadget had been built in since Coman had last called on his friend. Its clumsy brain processes searched through necessarily limited memory banks, found his name and photographic likeness, and the robot stood to attention.

  ‘Fetch me a spirit drink,’ Coman instructed, and as the robot obeyed his order and brought a tray with glasses and decanter the man on the porch stirred, then rose and came into the room.

  He sat down in one of three chairs grouped round a table in the centre of the room and began to laugh. It was a strange eerie noise, and Coman was suddenly glad that he had not brought the two young women here. Sein would have overcome the fear but she would have found the sadness unbearable.

  Yet in some way he sensed that Deenan had changed, or had been changed. At first sight he seemed more dreadful, and it was easy to assume that the hold on sanity, always precarious, together with the will to continue the farce of life, had suffered grievously during the previous months since they had met. But then Coman was not so sure.

  ‘No, the works are not running down – they’ve been renovated!’ cried the caricature of a man, and stamped his feet on the floor, laughing. It was as if he had read his friend’s mind, and yet Coman had felt nothing.

  ‘I thought you were asleep,’ he said.

  ‘And I thought you were dead – you were always looking for it,’ replied Deenan. He went on inconsequentially: ‘Have you seen my pictures? Things are going tolerably well with me and I’ve had a new head put in.’

  He stopped grimacing with his metal jaws and his borrowed eyes looked softly on Coman’s face. ‘I can’t say the right words, Coman.’

  ‘Don’t trouble to try, old fellow.’

  ‘I can’t say the – I can’t – where’s the beautiful dark female creature you brought – was it yesterday?’

  ‘I’m alone,’

  ‘What a pity. Once I felt jealous even of you, but at last it got through to me —’ The ex-spaceman tapped his body, deep in the groin, and the dull reply of metal came through his clothes.

  ‘Robots don’t – can’t get jealous about women – so why bother?’

  ‘Why indeed?’

  They had both been mad for women in the old days, and women had been mad for them, for spacemen had been persona grata with the fair sex.

  ‘Now I feel nothing. Want nothing – only the sea. I want to walk straight down the beach and in; but they built in a suicide prevention clause.’

  Coman nodded, only half listening, looking into Deenan’s mind. Something troubled the sensitive web of his own perception. there was a difference – something had happened to the other’s mental processes since last time, but he couldn’t quite pin it down.

  What had Deenan meant by ‘a new head’ and his ‘pictures’? The head seemed physically unaltered. Rebuilt in the first place by one of the ships surgeons, hastily and in a somewhat haphazard fashion, owing to a variety of reasons – principally the necessity of using rather primitive tools and equipment – the job had been pronounced adequate on return to base and it had not been thought worth while to alter its basic construction. Yet, whereas Coman had once been able to probe easily, he now found evidence of closed areas he had not sensed or noticed before, and it was almost as if a series of ‘blocks’ had been raised by the owner to prevent him from examining what was going on within those areas.

  He was mystified. His telepathic powers had not manifested themselves until some time after that voyage and Deenan had not known of them, did not know now – Coman was sure of that. On the other hand, how could a mind two-thirds mechanical, and conditioned, have secrets so important that it enclosed them behind locks?

  ‘There’s something I have to say to you but I can’t remember – does that sound stupid, Coman?’ asked Deenan, his eyes in their deep sockets as troubled and puzzled as those of Coman. He began to thump his arms against the metal side of his seat and Coman winced instinctively.

  ‘Those pictures you mentioned —?’

  ‘Ah yes, take another drink.’ He turned to the robot, motionless in its corner. ‘Get the paintings, ugly one.’

  When the robot had disappeared he began to giggle. ‘You must realise that I’m better off than some pe
ople,’ he said between cackles, ‘I’m half human and half one of them, so I see things from both sides.’

  He was silent for a moment and then went on: ‘You remember we used to laugh at the idea of robots eventually beginning to think for themselves?’ Coman nodded. The other wagged a finger. ‘Don’t ever laugh again, old friend.’

  Coman was still more puzzled. He could read something of what was going on in the other’s mind and it just did not make sense. Deenan was trying to tell him something, but it wasn’t that robots could think. And yet it was. When he tried to go deeper and find the true answer he came up against – not barriers, but just – nothing.

  The pictures were, at first sight anyway, grotesque daubs of shrieking colour, the kind of thing one might expect a half-crazed person to produce, given the materials and the opportunity. Coman endeavoured to look interested, but it would not have mattered if he had spat in obvious disgust.

  Deenan insisted on having them lined up against the wall, and then gave a running commentary on each, interspersed with varying instructions to the robot: ‘That’s an interior scene in a house situated at an entirely new angle in space and time. Move it to the left, Cort, it clashes with the headless nude. A bit more – that’s better. Now that is my idea of a politician cut to pieces in the Arena at Starm – no, you’ve got it upside down, you tinfaced fool! That’s better. Observe the torrent of yellow blood, and a knife and fork for the winner. That is a portrait of you, and the piece of dark fascination you brought here last time, Claus. What d’you think of it?’

  Coman gazed at this intently, trying to find the subconscious pattern that must have inspired it. Inside a rough square of mixed blues was implanted a mass of red and green streaks, and right in the centre of these was a perfect circle of delicate, predominantly warm grey.