Walt & Leigh Richmond Read online

  "Am I allowed to know," the boy before him was choosing his words carefully, "just what this molecular training is— of what it has consisted?"

  "You will be questioned on the subject, and you must know enough to answer those questions intelligently. Yes." Mallard leaned back in his chair and his voice took on a lecture-platform quality.

  "You have been trained by molecular memory transplantation. The inoculations you were given were of memory molecules, produced originally by minds thoroughly schooled in each of the disciplines to which you have been subjected." He leaned forward again, and again tented his hands on the desk before him. This explanation was a familiar one. He had used it effectively on the military, on prospective donors. It came easily to his tongue.

  "These memory molecules are extracted from trained and dedicated persons in each discipline. They are then duplicated in the laboratory and returned to the original donor; any of the duplicates may be substituted with equal success. The donor loses nothing but a few blank days during which a majority of his memory molecules are sorted and duplicated and then reinstalled. And even should the reinstalling, by some misfortune, not be complete, the infinite filing system of the body's biochemical processes can reduplicate and replace throughout the donor's system from the molecules that have not been extracted in only a matter of weeks."

  Stan listened in growing amazement to the statements, recalling the memories of the tests, the search for answers that seemed to be right there but not quite within reach, and their sudden appearance. He thought he was drawing facts and abilities from his "subconscious," but...

  "But, sir. I understood that memory was an electronic, not a molecular function. That it was a function of the brain itself .. . ?"

  "Ah, yes. The electronic brain function as against the biochemical body function of memory storage." The professor was pleased with himself now. Stan might not be the student he would have most wished to see succeed, but the work of the years would be demonstrated, and his efforts CTilminate in the recognition that he—yes, he deserved. There was pleasure in his voice as he went on:

  "The research is new. As far as we can tell, the old educational system of study, which required information to be filtered through the five senses into the electronic brain system, gave the student conscious control of the knowledge and abilities he acquired. Whereas our molecular training implants, introduced directly into the biochemical information-filing system of the body, produce a stimulus-response basis on which the knowledge is available. And," he added, the pleasure in his voice becoming more pronounced, "it is the stimulus-response reaction to information-need for which we are training."

  The professor paused, nodding his head slowly. "You can see that the normal response of an older person to any situation calling for his knowledge and abilities would be quite different from that of a young man. What we need is youngsters, primed with knowledge and trained abilities, who will use those knowledges and abilities the way an old man would use them: with caution, with due regard for accepted methods of operation, with due respect for his superiors.

  "With this molecular training system, we will be able to fill the action posts of government and the military with young men who will dependably react to almost any situation not only with the most extensive knowledge and abilities that experts have achieved, but in the manner that would be dictated by those same elderly, disciplined minds!"

  "In other words," Stan said slowly, "what you are doing here is creating educated robots?"

  Mallard found himself jerked back to the realities of the moment, and he stared at the boy. "That's a harsh term," he said finally. "But, yes, in its way. What we are doing is putting the education and discipline of mature minds into young bodies. You may find this emotionally upsetting at first thought," he added kindly, "but consider. You have an education and abilities that could have been given you in no other way. You have a spread of knowledge that no one person could have attained in one lifetime; and you have acquired this while you are still young. If the knowledge and abilities are not exactly under your control, why—in the military no one is under his own control anyway, so what loss?"

  Stan found his emotions chaotic, fear predominant; but was not convinced. If he was, in fact, a robot, why must it be for the military?

  Then anger surged. Their puppet, was he? But he'd studied—for himself and by himself—and that was not puppetry. There had to be a way to find out whether, essentially, he was indeed what they supposed him to be. But it would take time.

  "I . . . I'll need some time to think this whole thing over," he said weakly.

  "Of course you will, my boy." The professor nodded to himself. "You have had a strenuous course, and will need a bit of relaxation. So you are being given a two weeks' leave to return home and enjoy yourself. Then you will report back here for a short pre-induction training, and will be taken to Greateryork for your first assignment. You've not been drawing against your student's credit balance, so you have in excess of two thousand credits to spend any way you wish before you report to your new post. Enjoy yourself. You will be quite busy for a while after you return, so enjoy your leave."

  Accepting the professor's smile and nod as a dismissal, Stan left the room. Pep talk's over and I'm to swallow the fact that Authority has made me a guinea pig without my knowledge, he thought, and I imagine without my father's knowledge either. I'm supposed to swallow it with pleasure and feel obligated to go right on being a demonstration guinea pig for the rest of my life.

  The bitterness of the thought surged through him. But, he asked himself honestly, would I change the situation if I could? Would I forfeit having had the course? And he knew he wouldn't.

  The resentment was there; but the knowledge was there too; knowledge in fields that had each taken a man his entire lifetime to acquire. The knowledge is there, he told himself, and I got most of it from Professorburgers. But he found himself fiercely glad that he'd studied as hard as possible; that there was knowledge there, too, which he had gotten by himself, for himself.

  His thinking was still caught between resentment and pride by the time he was aboard the tubecar that would whisk him through the vacuum tunnel system. Having inserted his credit card and dialed his destination, Stan would be delivered direct, in this same tubecar, to the tubeport beneath the sky-rise that was his home in Elko, Nevada, more than two thousand miles away, in under two hours.

  Home. He'd thought of it through his childhood as open and free, with its sky-rise buildings separated by several acres of trees and playgrounds and fresh air; with the vistas of distant mountains giving the feeling that there was some real space in the world, even when you knew the mountains themselves were thoroughly inhabited.

  A nostalgia for the open wastes of snow and ice topsides at the school shook him, and he drew his cloak of privacy more tightly around him, though he was alone in a two-seater. He'd always had privacy. It was the factor given top priority in a crowded civilization. But space—that was another factor, and a different thing entirely; and he'd found himself drinking it in in his daily trips up and out into the intense cold and intense aloneness topsides at the school.

  Suddenly he knew he was not going home; not just yet Five percent of the credits given him as student aid were spent; but the other credits were untouched yet, and they'd take him where he wanted to go, keep him for at least a few days—a few days in which he could watch the tugs that took off for space.

  He looked at the map of the tube-network on the screen of the car before him, saw by the tiny light that marked his position that he was already in the main Alcan-Europe Tubeway that carried most of the traffic across the Pole; and nearing Anchorage.

  He leaned toward the small keyboard beneath the map and pushed the button marked CHANGE OF DESTINATION. Then he inserted his credit card into the slot beside the keyboard.

  With a click the keys of the board loosened so that they could be used, and he punched out carefully: White Sands. Then, glancing at the map, he adde
d the coordinates given there.

  The action put the invariable record into the computer for anyone who cared to ask through Information Retrieval.

  But who would care to ask? He was a student, with two weeks and a fist full of credits to spend as he pleased.

  Ill

  STAN AHHIVED at Termdock, White Sands, and made his way to a visitor's gallery from which he could watch the vast tarmac on which the space tugs landed and took off.

  For an hour he watched in fascination as the stubby-winged aerodynamic needles, skirted like old women for their ground-effect takeoff, ran through their twenty-five mile ground run. The real activity of the port was invisible to him here, restricted to the mile after mile of underground warren that subsurfaced the field itself. There would be mountains of freight being fed up to the waiting tugs through moving belt loaders. There would be the few passengers and the many workers. There would be rebuilding and repair, bargaining and sweating: the varieties of activity that backgrounded trade between Earth and the system.

  Above, Stan had seen two takeoffs and three landings while he watched; and it had left him unsatisfied.

  Why had he come here, anyhow? he asked himself. To think. To think—and to be near the ships that were reaching out; to be near the fact of space.

  But he felt shuttered from it; felt as barriered as ... as a robot, he told himself.

  Abruptly he straightened away from the rail. He had plenty of credits to his card, didn't he? And seven hundred of those credits would get him freighter-tug passage, round-trip, to Orbdock. At least there he'd be in space itself, or nearly. At least there he'd see the real freighters, the ships that went into the system, not just their servicing tugs.

  Stan entered the freight tug with his hood up so that the excitement boiled in him would be disguised, but all the pilot saw was another privacy-mad stupe of a suburban Earthie. He gestured to the acceleration couch beside his own.

  "And keep that damned cloak out of my way," he said, not bothering to hide his casual contempt.

  The boy's flush was not completely hidden by the hood that shrouded his head, but he only asked timidly, "Don't planeteers wear cloaks?"

  The question didn't merit an answer, the pilot decided, and only replied, "Hmmmph," then busied himself over the controls.

  Stan restrained an impulse to throw back his hood, contenting himself instead with studying the pilot.

  He was perhaps thirty-five, with a mobile face over a wrinkled uniform; his every gesture was alert and intent on what he was doing. The gestures were quick and sure; the hands . . .

  Stan's eyes followed the hands to the controls they were manipulating, and a feeling of familiarity tugged at his senses. Alert now himself, he leaned forward. That would be the skirt control; there the dials indicating atmospheric density; that the rate-of-approach indicator; there . . . His hood fell back and his cloak loosened without his noticing the fact.

  "Belt in. We're taking off." The pilot didn't even look at his passenger as he strapped himself into the padded chair.

  The surge of acceleration was less than that of a tube-car, but it thrilled along Stan's every nerve, and he watched the great tarmac move past, then fly past, and finally flash past as the tug reached mach speeds; felt the surge as the needle-ship went through the sonic barrier as though bursting a brick wall with a karate blow, and flew beyond it, free. He saw the pilot's sure hands flash first to the vanes which angled them suddenly upward, and then to the skirt controls which withdrew those ground-effect wrappings into the belly of the craft.

  Earth fell away, and Stan, who had seen it fall away in this manner a hundred times in 3-D dramas, exulted in the difference of the fact from the fantasy; saw, eventually, Earth like a ball to his vision and himself the still center of the blackness of space. They were an ecstasy of factors, those differences. A robot, am 1? he thought. TU get my own experiences! But it was a small thought, far at the back of his mind as his senses drank in the facts of flight.

  Orbdock is mile after mile of interlocked gridwork of air-stiffened tubing, floating in space. The zero-G plastiplex is centered by a two-thousand-foot plastic doughnut that spins slowly to give gravity to the offices and restaurants and trading halls, the repair shops and maintenance and living facilities that are the nucleus of the dock.

  Freight and passengers arrive here from Earth via space tugs which dock at one side of the complex. They tether there to the longest tubes of the grid, tubes which string out from the grid itself like loose spaghetti.

  The freight is transferred through the tubes by fan-powered pneumocars directly to the interplanetary ships that berth on the far side of the complex. Spherical, with ion-drive tubes through their centers, the ships look like huge balloons with sticks through them; or like some form of alien insect which hangs, as though disdaining the complex itself, at the very tips of the tubes through which it is fed its tonnage of food, air, water, freight and people.

  The passengers are transshipped through the tubes by pneumocar, too, but usually go first to the spincenter doughnut.

  Stan stepped out of the pneumocar into a shrub- and flower-bordered area that held a restaurant on one side, an information booth on the other. He made his way into the restaurant and chose a small table near the wall, his eye caught by its clear plastic and the aquarium beyond. He knew the water was for shielding from the strong radiation of the sun out here beyond the atmosphere; that it also served as a major part of the air and waste recycling system, and that the fish were part of that system too. He knew that the water was flowing past in six-foot-deep rivers, its motion creating the spin of the doughnut he was in, that gave him gravity. But the serenity of the fish, of the plants stirring in the river's morion, belied the fact.

  There could be no viewports as such within this shielding, but huge screens showing the complex beyond gave the illusion of windows; though the scenes were all still, the arrival and departure of tugs or ships was almost the only visible activity, and those might or might not occur while he watched.

  He turned his attention to the people around him. They seemed to be mostly ships* personnel or dock workers, in uniforms of various styles and kinds—some neat, others looking used and rumpled. He felt conspicuous. There were cloaks to be seen, but very few, and those obviously tourists. Earth tourists, Stan thought, surprised at the distaste that went with the thought; and realizing with revulsion that the category included himself and that his cloak was the mark that categorized him.

  He sat for hour after hour and let his senses simply absorb the scene: the light gravity, the complex, the space beyond and between its network; the smell of recycled air, the movement, the talk around him, the soft music—the feel of an orbital station. He felt drugged with the new sensations, drugged and content to sit, unthinking.

  And then, as though a switch had closed, his mind turned on; his emotions, held in leash since he had left the school, would no longer be denied.

  Over a megacredit the school has spent on me, and I am obligated for that, he found himself telling himself. Or am I? I didn't bargain for the investment, though Vm glad Tve got it—extra knowledge, be it robot or my own.

  But shall 1 be a guinea pig for the rest of my life? Let them manufacture me into a complete robot? A megacredit. Is that what a lifetime is worth?

  And while he talked to himself, he felt the tug of the ships he had watched all afternoon. Man will never reach the stars, he thought. That's been shown by the equations. But...

  But oh, the free, untrammeled spaces between the planets! Yet, was the Belt a free man's area? He didn't know; he had no way of knowing. The Belt had won its independence in a daring and individualized fight; his uncle had fought to win that independence and died for it. Yet had the freedom he had won survived the hazards of necessity the Belt itself imposed? Survived the fact that to stay alive a man must be enclosed in atmospheres built and designed for man? And was that so very different from being enclosed in a privacy cloak, the only protection against
an environment too crowded to be meant for man?

  The 3-D told of slaves in the Belt, working and sweating because there was no "outside," no "topsides," to which they could escape. The 3-D told of hardship and privation. But Uncle Trevor—Trail Duster Trevor—he'd been a proud man and a strong one, with a strong laugh. . ..

  Stan remembered the only time he'd seen his uncle after he was old enough to remember the details. He'd been tall and strong, swinging the youngster into the air and then onto his shoulders, as though physical contact were not something to be avoided. Stan had been scared at the time, but he'd responded after a minute to the hard hands that lifted him; to the feel of flying through the air; to the height of his uncle's shoulders; to the exhilaration of roughness and . . . yes, to the physical contact itself.

  You don't make slaves of that sort, he told himself now.

  He remembered the taste of fear as his uncle bent down, and the rough hands took him up in the delicious freedom of flying. Freedom and fear, he thought now; would freedom always carry the connotations of fear? He supposed it would, for freedom was bought by a man at a price, and only a stupid man refused to recognize the price as he demanded the commodity.

  "Get yourself an education, boy," the big man had told him, roughing the red hair so like his own. "But don't let 'em make you a sissy while they're giving you an education. Do your own thinking while you get the information you need, boy. Then come on out to the Belt I'll have a berth for you; but you're going to have to get yourself there, you know." Then he'd added, half under his breath, "And you not even old enough yet to properly remember."

  The small boy had remembered; and the twenty-four-year-old remembered now with a nostalgia that was overwhelming.

  Guinea piggery; and for the military at that. . . .

  With a rejection that was almost bigger than he could contain, Stan flung himself to his feet.