If This Goes On

CHAPTER 7

“Lyle,” Master Peter van Eyck said to me, “reeves is due to catch the Comet for Cincinnati this afternoon. Are you ready?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Repeat your orders.”

“Sir, I am to carry out my—I mean his-selling schedule from here to the coast. I check in at the San Francisco office of United Textiles, then proceed on his vacation. In Phoenix, Arizona, I am to attend church services at the South Side Tabernacle. I am to hang around afterwards and thank the priest for the inspiration of his sermon; in the course of which I am to reveal myself to him by means of the accustomed usages of our order. He will enable me to reach General Headquarters.”

“All correct. In addition to transferring you for duty, I am going to make use of you as a messenger. Report to the psychodynamics laboratory at once. The chief technician will instruct you.”

“Very well, sir.”

The lodge Master got up and came around his desk to me. “Good-by, John. Watch yourself, and may the Great Architect help you.”

“Thank you, sir. Uh, is this message I am to carry important?”

“Quite important.”

He let it go at that and I was a bit irked; it seemed silly to be mysterious about it when I would find out just what it was in a few minutes. But I was mistaken. At the laboratory I was told to sit down, relax, and prepare myself for hypnosis.

I came out of it with the pleasant glow that usually follows hypnosis. “That’s all,” I was told. “Carry out your orders.”

“But how about the message I was to carry?”

“You have it.”

“Hypnotically? But if I’m arrested, I’ll be at the mercy of any psychoinvestigator who examines me!”

“No, you won’t. It’s keyed to a pair of signal words; you can’t possibly remember until they are spoken to you. The chance that an examiner would hit on both words and in the right order is negligible. You can’t give the message away, awake or asleep.”

I had rather expected to be “loaded” for suicide, if I was to carry an important message-though I hadn’t seen how they could do it at the last minute, other than supplying me with a pill, I mean, a method almost useless if the policeman knows his business. But if I couldn’t give away the message I carried, then I preferred to take my chances; I didn’t ask for poison. I’m not the suiciding type anyhow-when Satan comes for me, he’ll have to drag me . . .

The rocket port serving New Jerusalem is easier to get to than is the case at most of the older cities. There was a tube station right across from the department store that hid our headquarters. I simply walked out of the store, took the bridge across the street, found the tube stall marked “Rocket Port', waited for an empty cartridge, and strapped myself and my luggage in. The attendant sealed me and almost at once I was at the port.

I bought my ticket and took my place at the end of the queue outside the port police station. I’ll admit I was nervous; while I didn’t anticipate having any trouble getting my travel pass validated, the police officers who must handle it were no doubt on the lookout for John Lyle, renegade army officer. But they were always looking for someone and I hoped the list of wanted faces was too long to make the search for me anything other than routine.

The line moved slowly and that looked like a bad sign—especially so when I noticed that several people had been thumbed out of line and sent to wait behind the station railing. I got downright jittery. But the wait itself gave me time to get myself in hand. I shoved my papers at the sergeant, glanced at my chrono, up at the station clock, and back at my wrist.

The sergeant had been going through my papers in a leisurely, thorough manner. He looked up. “don’t worry about catching your ship,” he said not unkindly. “They can’t leave until we clear their passenger list.” He pushed a pad across the counter. “Your fingerprints, please.”

I gave them without comment. I’ve compared them with the prints on my travel pass and then with the prints Reeves had left there on his arrival a week earlier. “That’s all, Mr. Reeves. A pleasant trip.”

I thanked him and left.

The Comet was not too crowded. I picked a seat by a window, well forward, and had just settled down and was unfolding a late-afternoon copy of the Holy City, when I felt a touch on my arm.

It was a policeman.

“Will you step outside, please?”

I was herded outside with four other male passengers. The sergeant was quite decent about it. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you four to return to the station for further identification. I’ll order your baggage removed and have the passenger list changed. Your tickets will be honored on the next flight.”

I let out a yelp. “But I’ve got to be in Cincinnati tonight!”

“I’m sorry.” He turned to me. “You’re Reeves, aren’t you? Hmm . . . you are the right size and build. Still-let me see your pass again. Didn’t you arrive in town just last week?”

“That’s right.”

He went through my papers again. “Uh, yes, I remember now; you came in Tuesday morning on the Pilgrim. Well, you can’t be in two places at once, so I guess that clears you.” He handed my papers back to me. “Go aboard again. Sorry we bothered you. The rest of you come along.”

I returned to my seat and picked up my newspaper. A few minutes later the first heavy surge of the rockets threw us to the west. I continued reading the paper to cover up my agitation and relief, but soon got interested. I had been reading a Toronto paper only that morning, underground; the contrast was startling. I was back in a world for which the outside world hardly existed; the “foreign affairs” news, if you could call it that, consisted of glowing reports of our foreign missions and some accounts of atrocities among the infidels. I began to wonder where all that money went that was contributed each year for missionary work; the rest of the world, if you could believe their newspapers, didn’t seem much aware that our missions existed.

Then I began going through the paper, picking out items that I knew to be false. By the time I was through we were down out of the ionosphere and gliding into Cincy. We had overtaken the sun and had sunset all over again.

There must be a peddler’s pack in my family tree. I not only covered Reeves’s territory in Cincinnati, but bettered his quota. I found that I got as much pleasure out of persuading some hard-boiled retailer that he should increase his line of yard goods as I ever had from military work. I stopped worrying about my disguise and thought only about textiles. Selling isn’t just a way to eat; it’s a game, it’s fun.

I left for Kansas City on schedule and had no trouble with the police in getting a visa for my travel pass. I decided that New Jerusalem had been the only ticklish check point; from here west nobody would expect to pick up John Lyle, formerly officer and gentleman; he would be one of thousands of wanted men, lost in the files.

The rocket to K.C. was well filled; I had to sit beside another passenger, a well-built chap in his middle thirties. We looked each other over as I sat down, then each busied himself with his own affairs. I called for a lap table and started straightening out the order blanks and other papers I had accumulated during busy, useful days in Cincinnati. He lounged back and watched the news broadcast in the TV tank at the forward end of the car.

I felt a nudge about ten minutes later and looked around. My seatmate flicked a thumb toward the television tank; in it there was displayed a large public square filled with a mob. It was surging toward the steps of a massive temple, over which floated the Prophet’s gold-and-crimson banner and the pennant of a bishopric. As I watched, the first wave of the crowd broke against the temple steps.

A squad of temple guards trotted out a side door near the giant front doors and set up their tripods on the terrace at the head of the wide stairs. The scene cut to another viewpoint; we were looking down right into the faces of the mob hurrying toward us-apparently from a telephoto pick-up somewhere on the temple roof.

What followed made me ashamed of the uniform I had once worn. Instead of killing them quickly, the guards aimed low and burned off their legs. One instant the first wave was running towards me up the steps—then they fell, the cauterized stumps of their legs jerking convulsively. I had been watching a youngish couple right in the center of the pick-up; they had been running hand in hand. As the beam swept across them they went down together.

She stayed down. He managed to lift himself on what had been his knees, took two awkward dying steps toward her and fell across her. He pulled her head to his, then the scene cut away from them to the wide view of the square.

I snatched the earphones hanging on the back of the seat in front of me and listened: “—apolis, Minnesota. The situation is well in hand and no additional troops will be needed. Bishop Jennings has declared martial law while the agents of Satan are rounded up and order restored: A period of prayer and fasting will commence at once.

“The Minnesota ghettos have been closed and all local pariahs will be relocated in the reservations in Wyoming and Montana in order to prevent future outbreaks. Let this be a warning to the ungodly everywhere who might presume to dispute the divine rule of the Prophet Incarnate.

“This on-the-spot cast by the No-Sparrow-Shall-Fall News Service is coming to you under the sponsorship of the Associated Merchants of the Kingdom, dealers in the finest of household aids toward grace. Be the first in your parish to possess a statuette of the Prophet that miraculously glows in the dark! Send one dollar, care of this station—”

I switched off the phones and hung them up. Why blame the pariahs? That mob wasn’t made up of pariahs.

But I kept my lip zipped and let my companion speak first-which he did, with vehemence. “serves them right, the bloody fools! Imagine charging against a fortified position with your bare hands.” He kept his voice down and spoke almost in my ear.

“I wonder why they rioted?” was all that I answered.

“Eh? No accounting for the actions of an heretic. They aren’t sane.”

“You can sing that in church,” I agreed firmly. “Besides, even a sane heretic-if there could be such a thing, I mean—could see that the government is doing a good job of running the country. Business is good.” I patted my brief case happily. “For me, at least, praise the Lord.”

We talked business conditions and the like for some time. As we talked I looked him over. He seemed to be the usual leading-citizen type, conventional and conservative, yet something about him made me uneasy. Was it just my guilty nerves? Or some sixth sense of the hunted?

My eyes came back to his hands and I had a vague feeling that I should be noticing something. But there was nothing unusual about them. Then I finally noticed a very minor thing, a calloused ridge on the bottom joint of the third finger of his left hand, the sort of a mark left by wearing a heavy ring for years and just the sort I carried myself from wearing my West Point class ring. It meant nothing, of course, since lots of men wear heavy seal rings on that finger. I was wearing one myself—not my West Point ring naturally, but one belonging to Reeves.

But why would this conventional-minded oaf wear such a ring habitually, then stop? A trifling thing, but it worried me; a hunted animal lives by noticing trifles. At the Point I had never been considered bright in psychology; I had missed cadet chevrons on that issue alone. But now seemed a good time to use what little I had learned . . . so I ran over iii my mind all I had noticed about him.

The first thing he had noticed, the one thing he had commented on, was the foolhardiness of charging into a fortified position. That smacked of military orientation in his thinking. But that did not prove he was a Pointer. On the contrary, an Academy man wears his ring at all times, even into his grave, even on leave and wearing mufti . . . unless for some good reason he does not wish to be recognized.

We were still chatting sociably and I was worrying over how to evaluate insufficient data when the stewardess served tea. The ship was just beginning to bite air as we came down out of the fringes of space and entered the long glide into Kansas City; it was somewhat bumpy and she slopped a little hot tea on his thigh. He yelped and uttered an expletive under his breath. I doubt if she caught what he said.

But I did catch it—and I thought about it furiously while I dabbed at him with a handkerchief. “B. J. idiot!” was the term he used and it was strictly West Point slang.

Ergo, the ring callus was no coincidence; he was a West Pointer, an army officer, pretending to be a civilian. Corollary: he was almost certainly on a secret service assignment. Was I his assignment?

Oh, come now, John! His ring might be at a jeweler’s, being repaired; he might be going home on thirty days. But in the course of a long talk he had let me think that he was a business man. No, he was an undercover agent.

But even if he was not after me, he had made two bad breaks in my presence. But even the clumsiest tyro (like myself, say) does not make two such slips in maintaining an assumed identity—and the army secret service was not clumsy; it was run by some of the most subtle brains in the country. Very well, then—they were not accidental slips but calculated acts; I was intended to notice them and think that they were accidents. Why?

It could not be simply that he was not sure I was the man he wanted. In such case, under the old and tested principle that a man was sinful until proved innocent, he would simply have arrested me and I would have been put to the Question.

Then why?

It could only be that they wanted me to run free for a while yet-but to be scared out of my wits and run for cover . . . and thereby lead them to my fellow conspirators It was a far fetched hypothesis, but the only one that seemed to cover all the facts.

When I first concluded that my companion must be an agent on my trail I was filled with that cold, stomach-twisting fear that can be compared only with seasickness. But when I thought I had figured out their motives I calmed down. What would Zebadiah do? “The first principle of intrigue is not to be stampeded into any unusual act—“sit tight and play dumb. If this cop wanted to follow me, I’d lead him into every department store in K C—and let him watch while I peddled yard goods.

Nevertheless my stomach felt tight as we got off the ship in Kansas City. I expected that gentle touch on the shoulder which is more frightening than a fist in the face. But nothing happened. He tossed me a perfunctory God-keep-you, pushed ahead of me and headed for the lift to the taxicab platform while I was still getting my pass stamped. It did not reassure me as he could have pointed me out half a dozen ways to a relief. But I went on over to the New Muehlbach by tube as casually as I could manage.

I had a fair week in K.C . . . met my quota and picked up one new account of pretty good size. I tried to spot any shadow that might have been placed on me, but I don’t know to this day whether or not I was being trailed. If I was, somebody spent an awfully dull week. But, although I had about concluded that the incident had been nothing but imagination and my jumpy nerves, I was happy at last to be aboard the ship for Denver and to note that my companion of the week before was not a passenger.

We landed at the new field just east of Aurora, many miles from downtown Denver. The police checked my papers and fingerprinted me in the routine fashion and I was about to shove my wallet back into my pocket when the desk sergeant said, “Bare your left arm, please, Mr. Reeves.”

I rolled up my sleeve while trying to show the right amount of fretful annoyance. A white-coated orderly took a blood sample. “Just a normal precaution,” the sergeant explained. “The Department of Public Health is trying to stamp out spotted fever.”

It was a thin excuse, as I knew from my own training in PH.—but Reeves, textiles salesman, might not realize it. But the excuse got thinner yet when I was asked to wait in a side room of the station while my blood sample was run. I sat there fretting, trying to figure out what harm they could do me with ten c.c. of my blood—and what I could do about it even if I did know.

I had plenty of time to think. The situation looked anything but bright. My time was probably running out as I sat there—yet the excuse on which they were holding me was just plausible enough that I didn’t dare cut and run; that might be what they wanted. So I sat tight and sweated.

The building was a temporary structure and the wall between me and the sergeant’s office was a thin laminate; I could hear voices through it without being able to make out the words. I did not dare press my ear to it for fear of being caught doing so. On the other hand I felt that I just had to do it. So I moved my chair over to the wall, sat down again, leaned back on two legs of the chair so that my shoulders and the back of my neck were against the wall. Then I held a newspaper I had found there up in front of my face and pressed my ear against the wall.

I could hear every word then. The sergeant told a story to his clerk which would have fetched him a month’s penance if a morals proctor had been listening-still, I had heard the same story, only slightly cleaned up, right in the Palace, so I wasn’t really shocked, nor was I in any mood to worry about other people’s morals. I listened to several routine reports and an inquiry from some semi-moron who couldn’t find the men’s washroom, but not a word about myself. I got a crick in my neck from the position.

Just opposite me was an open window looking out over the rocket field. A small ship appeared in the sky, braked with nose units, and came in to a beautiful landing about a quarter of a mile away. The pilot taxied toward the administration building and parked outside the window, not twenty-five yards away.

It was the courier version of the Sparrow Hawk, ram jet with rocket take-off and booster, as sweet a little ship as was ever built. I knew her well; I had pushed one just like her, playing number-two position for Army in sky polo-that was the year we had licked both Navy and Princeton.

The pilot got out and walked away. I eyed the distance to the ship. If the ignition were not locked-Sheol! What if it was? Maybe I could short around it, I looked at the open window. It might be equipped with vibrobolts; if so, I would never know what hit me. But I could not spot any power leads or trigger connections and the flimsy construction of the building would make it hard to hide them. Probably there was nothing but contact alarms; there might not be so much as a selenium circuit.

While I was thinking about it I again heard voices next door; I flattened my ear and strained to listen.

“What’s the blood type?”

“Type one, sergeant.”

“Does it check?”

“No, Reeves is type three.”

“Oho! Phone the main lab. We’ll take him into town for a retinal.”

I was caught cold and knew it. They knew positively that I wasn’t Reeves. Once they photographed the pattern of blood vessels in the retina of either eye they would know just as certainly who I really was, in no longer time than it took to radio the picture to the Bureau of Morals Investigation—less, if copies had been sent out to Denver and elsewhere with the tab on me.

I dove out the window.

I lit on my hands, rolled over in a ball, was flung to my feet as I unwound. If I set off an alarm I was too busy to hear it. The ship’s door was open and the ignition was not locked—there was help indeed for the Son of a Widow! I didn’t bother to taxi clear, but blasted at once, not caring if my rocket flame scorched my pursuers. We bounced along—the ground, the little darling and I, then I lifted her nose by gyro and scooted away to the west.