CHAPTER VIII
Dot's face was tense as she watched him. Doug held the delicate phone device to his ear with pressure that made his flesh white around it. He was oblivious to the wonder-like comforts of the beautiful home now, cursing it subconsciously as though it had been built for the sole purpose of trapping him, imprisoning him here.
The high-pitched signal in the receiver repeated evenly and he forced himself to wait. His fingers drummed an uneven tattoo on the low table, vibrated the dismantled parts of the tele-radio set that he'd examined earlier. The open pages of the catalogue from the Science Council library trembled in his left hand.
"Electrosupply, Federal Service Division," the voice said suddenly.
"Hail, this is Senior Quadrate Blair again."
"Hail, sir. Is there something unsatisfactory? The equipment you ordered should have arrived at your home—"
"It has, it is satisfactory. However I find that I neglected to request a high-speed bl—correction, high-kempage power-pack." He tried to steady the pages. The closely printed alphabetized lines kept running together.
"High-kempage power-pack? Your reference, sir?"
"Reference?" The veins on his throat stood out, but his voice was not a sudden bellow from indignation. "You forget my position! How soon may I expect the unit?"
"As soon as possible, sir."
He hung up. "Damn," he said. "Damn it to hell anyway!"
"Doug, can I do anything?"
"No, honey, no. We've just got to sweat it out until that pack gets here. It'll be all right." He forced a smile, sank to a chair, put his head in his hands. She knelt beside him. "The film-strips, that you saw—they must have been—horrible."
He looked up. "Horrible isn't the word. God, what people. And at first they seemed so—What a cold-blooded, ruthless—"
"Easy, mister." She came closer to him and he felt himself relax slowly at the warmth of her touch.
"What a system.... I guess I read over those reports a dozen times. They know there is no possible way to tell how long such an awful mental shock will stay—even in the impressionable mind of a half-grown child. Yet they accept it as full-blown conditioning process—they believe in it! They believe in everything around here—they worship the government, the Prelate General, the Director—even me! And because there's no war and hasn't been since the first Prelatinate, they keep right on believing that from the day you fight in the games—if you survive—till the day you die, you're thoroughly conditioned against physical violence—" He let the sentence taper off into silence.
"Just rest awhile, darling," she murmured.
He smiled. "Thanks, Dot. But I've got to get that mess downstairs cleaned up. I'll be all right."
The equipment—the neat sorted rows of resistors, condensers, vacuum tubes and the rest of it glittered on the long, wide expanse of the workbench he'd installed. At one end was a half-completed framework, and at the other—was the blackened ruin of what had been a transformer.
The burnt-out unit had cooled, but the stench of overheated oil and melted insulation still hung in the air trapped in the blue haze of smoke.
"Can any of the rest be assembled in the meantime, Doug? I'll help...."
He busied himself with the blackened junk. "It could, but it's not worth the chance. It's got to be so damn perfect. I've got to know exactly what I'm going to be able to get out of the pack. Got to have at least 1,000 Volts—or should I say Kemps—anyway. Damn the DC...."
He hadn't found out about the utility power in the house until he'd blown up the transformer. It was a little thing, direct current rather than alternating current, but it meant time, and there wasn't much time. He knew there'd be no chance of his getting through the games undetected, even if he found a way somehow to stomach such a horror.
There was a gentle chiming sound.
"The front door, Doug!"
"Guess I really threw a scare into 'em! You go up first, I'll douse the lights."
There were two of them, and their uniforms were white. Their helicopter idled on the front lawn. They saluted.
"Quadrate Blair, if you'll accompany us please."
They stood there, their faces impassive, their tones matter-of-fact as though they had asked him to pass the salt.
"Accompany you? I understood that you were going to deliver—"
"S-Council, Department of Security, sir. You appreciate our position. We have our orders. The Prelatinate-Attorney suggests an interview immediately, sir. If you will accompany us, please."
"You may tell the—the Prelatinate-Attorney that I'm quite busy, but that I shall be glad to make an appointment for him later tomorrow."
They stood there. There was a questioning look on Dot's face, and he had no answer for it. Somehow, they'd gotten onto something. Jane. No. Tayne again—
"We are sorry, sir."
"I'm afraid I fail to understand. You make it sound actually as though I'm to have no choice in the matter. Who issued your orders?"
"Office of the Director, sir. And actually, sir, you have no choice. If you will please accompany us."
They stood, immobile, waiting. There were only two of them. But he knew that in minutes there could be two hundred.
He went with them.
He judged the pneumatic elevator tube had descended at least 20 levels below the surface before it came to a softly-whispering halt on a resilient cushion of compressed air. They left the tube, and the same miracle of lighting that kept the city in eternal daylight was gently suffused through the entire length of the wide, silent corridors.
They did not walk far. Doug forced his mind into what order he could. If this were some adventure fantasy from the pages of fiction there would somehow be an escape, some thing he could suddenly do and the tables would be turned. But it was not. It was fantastic, but it was as real as the day the first atomic bomb was dropped.
The sliding panel admitted them to a round, low-ceilinged room similar in most respects to his own office, even to the intertelecon screen inset in the curving wall to the left of the large metal desk. The man behind the desk was thin-faced and slight, but there was an intelligence behind the high forehead that seemed to put a snap in his wide-spaced eyes as well as in his voice. But it was the eyes that made Doug's nerves feel that they must break like an overdrawn violin string at any moment; the voice was smooth, controlled.
The orderlies saluted and were dismissed. The panel slid closed.
"Sorry to have to call you down here like this, Doug. But damn it, it's my job, and besides that you've done something this time for which there'd be hell to pay if the PG ever found out and you know it as well as I do."
He gestured Doug to a chair. The Prelatinate-Attorney's tone was relaxed, but Doug wondered how it might have sounded to a man of lesser rank than himself.
One thing was certain; it was time to go back into the act. "I suppose this all is leading up to threats of the S-Council—"
"Doug, when the DO buzzed me and said they'd been notified by Electrosupply that you'd refused to give a reference for a piece of equipment you ordered, there was nothing else for me to do but to get you down here on the spot. You can imagine where I'd be if I didn't."
"It was Tayne I suppose."
There was a quick flick of the attorney's eyes, but his face didn't change. "Personalities don't matter, Doug."
Doug waited for it. Behind the nonchalance, the employer-to-faithful-but-errant-employee tone, there was something of hard spring steel, coiled, waiting to be sprung.
"I'm not sure I like your tone," Doug bluffed. "I have some degree of position you know—"
"Yes, I know—you seldom let anybody forget it. I understand you've even reminded the Director on occasion...."
Doug shrugged. "Suppose we get down to it. Just what is there this time that has the DO so upset?"
The Attorney stiffened visibly. "What is there? You mean you don't realize that you've come about as close as anyone can come to committing a capital heresy? Did you actually suppose you could order a thing like that without a triple-endorsed Science Council reference? You know as well as I do how strict the law is about possession of restricted equipment of any kind by anyone except members of the Science Council itself. Even the Director has to go through channels! Where d'you think we'd be, anyway, if just anybody and everybody could read any books, tinker with any kind of paraphernalia they wanted to? Damn it, man, if every Tom, Dick and Harry went fooling around with the knowledge that wasn't food for them the whole damn planet would be in the S-chambers!"
"What do you mean, restricted—?"
"And we can't have any exceptions! Except, that is, for the special training such as picked men as yourself received at the Quadrature Academy. But when it comes to personal possession of restricted stuff, without the required reference, you might just as well be caught with a copy of Freud in your library!"
The pack. That had to be what he meant—he'd been phoning for the pack, and they'd asked for a reference.... Somehow, he had to—the catalogue! The closely printed lines that got tangled up because he couldn't hold it steady!
"You're accusing me of ordering restricted—"
"Now look, Doug. You'd better tell me—I don't want it on the record that I had to use Right of Office to get an answer. You ordered a high-kempage power-pack. Now what for?"
"High-kempage power-pack? You can't be serious!"
"I've warned you, Doug."
"Warn and be damned! You sit there and repeatedly accuse me of ordering restricted equipment—without reference, and you haven't even got your facts straight! Did Electrosupply tell you that?"
A peculiar look was on the Attorney's face.
"DO said so."
"Well you could've saved us a good hour's time if you'd have called me to see what I had to say first before dragging me over here as if I were a common criminal! I think an apology will be in order!" If only Barnum had been right! "What I ordered, just in the event you're as interested as you say you are, was a high-speed blower-rack!"
"A—what?"
Reel him in!
"A high-speed blower-rack. So happens I'm having trouble with the electronic units of my vento-conditioner at home, and I'm doing the work myself more or less as a project in avocational therapy—"
"Now it is you who can't be serious. How great a fool do you think—"
"Damn it, whose word are you going to take in this?" Doug stood up. "Some Electrosupply technician's, who can't hear any better than you can reason, or mine?"
There was a second's silence.
"All right, Doug. You're a fool, you know. You are, and so am I.... It was a high-speed blower-rack. I'll make sure it's set straight."
"Well, thank you."
"Just be careful, Doug."
"That's good advice—don't wear it out!"
He turned quickly, made his exit before the panel had widened half-way.