Turncoat

V

THREE men climbed into the front seat; two of them immediately turned to face the rear. Each of these rested the slim blue-steel barrel of a weapon on the top of the seat, aiming squarely at Bass.

A fourth man got into the rear compartment on the right side and settled himself carefully with his back against the side-cushions. His weapon, unlike the others, was a familiar one—a gas-pellet pistol, with its short barrel sprouting from a fat ovoid casing.

All four had clipped tiny respirator cartridges into their nostrils.

They were taking no chances what ever, Bass realized vaguely. The two in front beside the driver had something more deadly than gas-pistols, probably solid-projectile guns, perhaps; he had heard that the Glenbrook Guard had such things, though he had never seen one.

Even if he should somehow be able to overpower the man in the back—the only one within reach—and take his gun away, it would do him no good. If he made any hostile move toward the driver, or the other two in front, the man in back would gas him.

A Guardsman outside took a key from the driver and stepped back to lock the door through which Bass had entered. Bass turned his head to watch.

“Eyes front!” snapped the man with the gas-pistol. “Hands in your lap, and don’t move!”

Bass obeyed. No chances at all, he thought. Three men with guns … door locked on my side … they daren’t even let me turn my head, or move my hands.

They’re afraid.

The thought was oddly exhilarating. The fear and respect of the three men with guns, surrounding him as he sat unarmed and defenseless, was an almost palpable flow. Half-consciously at first, then with deliberate purpose, Bass reacted to it: he sat up straighter, feeling his muscles loose and ready from calf to shoulder; he stared back at the fixed, stony glitter of their eyes behind the masks. His own eyes narrowed slightly and he let his lip curl slightly, as if in malicious amusement.

They reacted as if they had been struck, flinching perceptibly, fingers tensing on triggers—and at that realization, despair washed over Bass again. It didn’t matter what they thought: the actuality was that he was hopelessly trapped, alone, unarmed, friendless—and he was on his way to be killed.

The car began to move. To his right, out of the corner of his eye, Bass could see another keeping pace with it; in front was still another. That made three. The fourth, presumably, was bringing up the rear. Again: no chances.

They turned south, then east again at the next corner. The land rose imperceptibly as they went, until they were climbing a steep hill, the Guardsmen front looking down on Bass as if they were on stepladders. Five blocks; ten; fifteen.

The noises Bass had heard before were nearer now: shouts, screams, tatters of music, all blended into a single cacophonous roar. One of the men in the front seat made a sound of annoyance. “Go up DuPont to Hoyle,” he said to the driver. “See can you get around it.”

The driver punched a series of studs on the control board and repeated the instructions. Obediently, the lead car swung right around the next corner.

WITH an effort that shook him with its intensity, Bass forced his mind free of its numb paralysis. There had to be something he could do—now, while he still had some freedom to act. There had to be … if only because these men thought there was.

He had two facts to work with. One: incredibly, this world and the one he knew were like mirror twins. The people who had fled in terror at sight of him had acted just as he would have done himself, if he had seen them in Glenbrook. The common people of each world believed the other to be inhabited by monsters; and each side was horribly, tragically wrong.

The common people—not the Executives or Stockholders. It could not conceivably be coincidence that Laudermilk, in Glenbrook, had showed him the same trademark that he saw in use here on the other side. The double deception had been deliberately established, was being deliberately maintained with all the elaborate mechanism of store and state, for some purpose Bass could not imagine.

Two: The Guardsmen, despite their immense power, were as ignorant as the Consumers. That was logical, even if it made the Guard less efficient in dealing with people like Bass—and such cases must be rare; no “demon” had crossed the wall into Glenbrook in the memory of any man living. A secret like this one must be well kept, or it could never have been kept at all.

Less efficient… .

That was the clue, Bass realized, with sudden, mounting excitement. Less efficient how—and why?

The obvious answer was: because they were afraid of him. But a moment’s thought was enough to show him that it was no answer at all. Certainly they were afraid … just as a lion-hunter might be afraid of a lion. They were courageous, trained men, proud of their hereditary calling, hardened to violence. If he attacked them, if he made a single threatening gesture, they might be terrified, but they would shoot him just the same.

What else?

Abruptly Bass found himself remembering the way they had acted after his capture—not one of them had approached him nearer than two yards until he was in the car; and after that, the one Guardsman who shared the rear seat with him had kept as far away as he could get. Caution, or—necessary inefficiency?

Not caution.

They could have manacled his hands behind his back. They could have knocked him unconscious, tied his arms and legs with enough wire to hold an elephant. They could have searched him for weapons and evidence.

Ail of these would have been reasonable and proper things to do; they had not done one ; and why? Because every act involved touching him or his clothing—his Glenbrook clothing; his hat for instance, with its label, “GP,” woven into the fabric.

And that, Bass realized, remembering a certain red-plastic bag, would have been impossible.

His heart was beating painfully fast. If he could somehow manage to touch all three of them with some article of his clothing—swiftly, and simultaneously—then shock might delay their reaction for the second he would need to leap past the man with the gas-gun, reach the unlocked right-hand door and get away.

They turned another corner, heading eastward again, up another hill. The crowd-noises grew louder.

There were two things wrong with that program, Bass thought frenziedly. One: Was the right-hand door really unlocked ? He thought so—he couldn’t believe he had failed to notice anything so important, and it made a distorted kind of sense: one rear door had to be left unlocked so that the men in the other car could get at him if he overpowered the four in this one. But if he was wrong—

Two: The three Guardsmen would have to be immobilized at the same instant—an obvious impossibility. Even they would allow him time to disrobe at leisure and select his weapons, he didn’t have three arms… .

The thought ended as they topped the rise and headed into a blast of sound. At the end of the next block a kaleidoscope mass of singing, shouting, screaming humanity filled the street solidly.

Bass swallowed hard. The cars would have to slow down to get through the crowd, he told himself numbly, and the Guardsmen’s attention would be divided. It wasn’t much help, but it was all he was likely to get.

There was no more time for deliberation. Within seconds, he would have to act.

THE lead car’s siren groaned tentatively, then burst into a full-throated scream; after a moment the other three joined it. As the lead car nosed into the crowd, Bass saw that the one to his right was falling back.

Then they were in the crowd, that had parted sluggishly to let the first car through, then flowed together again, and now, with equal slowness, was opening the lane once more. Flushed, staring faces bobbed past the windows; raised arms flourished a forest of crazily tilted banners; mouths gaped wetly. The din was no longer even perceptible as sound. Bass felt it as a heavy, maddening vibration submerged by the sirens’ howling.

Tension plucked fiendishly at his nerves. It was the same with the Guardsmen; their bodies were unnaturally rigid, eyes glittering fixedly through their masks, lips taut and bloodless. An intolerable pressure was building, building… .

Bass moved. His body was already tilting forward and to the right, his thigh-muscles bunching to take his weight, as his right hand darted up to his cap, seized it and swept it in the same motion at the full length of his arm straight across the faces of the two gunmen in the front seat.

Time froze. Bass saw the two gun-muzzles belch flame, and felt a clublike blow in his right side that spun him around, half-erect, facing the third man. A sudden expanding haze of grayness blurred his vision for an instant, but he saw the third man’s face, teeth gleaming in the startled mouth, before the flung cap eclipsed it. Then he was hurling himself at the door, his fist slamming the catch. The door melted away in front of him and he tumbled out onto the street.

A blast of sound struck him; and a blur of color; and a dizzying wave of pain. Coughing and retching, vainly trying to keep his balance, he lurched forward into the crowd. He caromed off one dimly-seen body and into another; his fingers caught a handful of fabric and clutched it desperately for an instant until momentum sent him staggering in a new direction.

Behind him a flat, echoing roar cut across the bedlam. A chorus of screams rocketed up: screams of genuine fear and agony, not hysteria.

Bass kept going blindly, clutching at .the packed bodies that impeded him, forcing them apart, swinging himself around them. The pain in his side was no more than a dull, distant ache, but his eyes were swimming with tears, and his coughing choked him so that he could hardly breathe.

Something struck him a stunning blow on the forehead and he fell, scraping his fingernails down a fiat, rough surface that could only be a brick wall. He lay there, head ringing, his mind stupidly fumbling the tiny circle of his weariness and his pain, until some remembered urgency drove him to his feet again. He leaned against the wall, straining for breath, until nausea bent him double and he vomited.

When he straightened, wiping the tears out of his eyes, his head was clearer and he could see again. He had been hit twice, he realized; once with a gas pellet, once with a solid projectile. But he had been moving too fast to get more than a whiff of the gas, and the wound in his side must be a slight one; he had barely felt it. He had been lucky….

But he had to keep moving, or his luck would run out.

The crowd swirled around him: men in peaked hats and women in square ones ; fringed and beaded capes, green, rose, orange, lavender … flushed shiny faces and blind eyes … a banner swayed past, and he caught the letters “VE NOT, WANT” ; his mind supplied the rest of the familiar motto: “Save not, want not.”

NOW suddenly he knew what his crowd was. It hadn’t occurred to him before, although he should have known from the sound alone—he’d had enough else to think about, Infinite knew, and besides that, there was no Founder’s Day this month. But this could be nothing else than the procession that climaxed a Founder’s Day celebration—the disorganized, miles-long rout that followed the procession, rather. Every able-bodied man and woman in the district would be here, shouting drunk on sacramental wines, sermons, singing, dancing, mock-fights and exhortation—the only release they had, the only time they could let themselves go, year after year, as long as they lived.

He moved up the street away from the intersection, keeping as close to the wall as he could. So long as he stayed well buried in the crowd, he thought, he was reasonably safe. If he staggered, so did the celebrants: if he stared wildly, so did they; if his clothing was stained and disordered, so was theirs. But his hatlessness could betray him….

He remedied that by plucking a hat from the nearest male head. Before the man had time to turn, Bass was out of sight in the crowd. He thought he heard a dismayed shout rise up behind him, but in the clamor he couldn’t be sure.

He couldn’t, of course, stay in the crowd forever; he had to get out before the Guard set up a cordon around the whole area and trapped him. Neither could he afford to risk leaving the crowd at either of the nearest intersections. Almost certainly the Guard had had time to post men there. But there was another way.

This was a business district. Some of the ground-floor shops might still be staffed—dispensing sacramental wine and liquor, trademark-pendants and other holy articles—but the majority would be deserted, and, of course, unlocked. Only the Guard needed locks in a world where angels enforced the law.

There was a metal signboard, fastened just above the bobbing heads of the crowd; steeply angled from his viewpoint, but almost legible. S, T, A— He circled toward it, and in another moment was able to make out the rest.

STAMFORD BOOK OUTLET. Underneath, in smaller lettering, U/M LICENSE NO. 8402331.

A book shop—perfect. Who would buy a book on a Founder’s Day? Bass edged around a wild-haired woman who stood swaying and singing to herself in the doorway, turned the knob and slipped into the shadowed interior.

Light from the street penetrated only as far as the first row of tables. Bass paused a moment beyond that point, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. Beside him, gold-lettered titles gleamed up at him from a table-load of stacked, identical books. The many-times-repeated phrase caught his attention as he was about to move on:

“… With Security and Abundance For All …”

He stared at it incredulously. An identically-titled book was on sale in Glenbrook, had been for years ; it was required reading in the schools. The binding was different, of course, and—he bent closer—the authors’ names. That settled it: a coincidence. But—

He wavered and gave in. Common sense told him that every second of unnecessary delay was dangerous; but he couldn’t leave that question unanswered behind him. He snatched up one of the volumes and shoved it, with some difficulty, into the wide pocket on the inside of his stolen cape.

Near the low doorway at the rear o the shop, another title gleamed at him from a shelf: POCKET ATLAS OF THE WORLD. His fingers twitched for it, but he shook his head and plunged on. through the curtain, into an unlighted back room.

The simplest decisions, he thought dizzily, as he groped his way between a table and a mass of piled books, seemed to have become unaccountably difficult. He had a curious disembodied feeling, and his mind kept drifting stubbornly off into fantasy: a swift glimpse of Gloria, flushed and beautiful ; Dean Horrock’s blunt, palsied fingers, tamping tobacco into his pipe; his father’s heavy, black-browed face, seen more distinctly than he had remembered it for years.

He realized that his wound must be more serious than he had thought; and that, if this went on, his recapture was certain. But it didn’t seem to matter.

HE WAS in a hallway, clearly enough—he had been following a wall in the same direction interminably — but he had no idea how he had got there or which way he ought to go next. His mind was lucid but still very detached; a cool, tenuous cloud of intelligence withdrawn into a corner of his skull; if it hadn’t been for the knot of pain in his side, he would have been able to ignore his bodily sensations altogether.

He stopped in the darkness and tried to orient himself. Which way had he turned when he’d first got into the hallway? The knowledge simply wasn’t there. Blankness, from the time he was halfway across the room behind the bookshop until a few moments ago.

A new, fiercer spasm of pain …

When he could think again, he pushed himself away from the wall and moved forward cautiously, hands outstretched. The first thing to do was to make sure he was in a corridor. He might have been walking around and around a room, endlessly following four walls that he couldn’t distinguish from one.

Four steps, and his fingers touched smother wall. He moved to the right, feeling his way. Three steps, and a moulding slid under his fingers. Beyond it was a narrow vertical opening, with a faint current of air breathing through it. He groped for the doorknob, found it.

Dim gray light from two windows struck his eyes when he opened the door. There were three small desks, their varnish glinting faintly; filing cabinets, swivel chairs, a curling glossy-paper calendar on the wall. There didn’t seem to be any exit. Puzzled, he moved forward.

The gray light tuned yellowish as he advanced until, a few paces from the windows, two incandescent globes rose into view. Streetlights. He was on the second floor; sometime during that blank period he must have stumbled onto a stairway and, senselessly, climbed it.

At any rate, he was on the right side of the building. Peering down warily from the side of a window, he could see that the street beneath was utterly deserted. A sheet of newspaper, turning and twisting like a live thing, swam halfway up across the face of the building opposite, then dived abruptly out of sight.

… Something was wrong. There was elusive, indefinable menace in what he saw in the deserted street, or the vacant windows of the building across the way, or in the brooding, angular shapes of chimney-pots and wind-vanes dimly outlined against the sky.

Was that it, the sky? How long had he been unconscious?

He stared at it. No; it hadn’t darkened perceptibly since he’d last seen it. His blackout, probably, had lasted only a few minutes—just long enough to reach the stairway, climb it, and wander a few yards down the second-floor corridor.

But his heart was thudding painfully against his ribs, moments later, as he descended the ink-black staircase toward the street.

He groped his way along the hall, through a cluttered back room, into a larger chamber and a glare of light from the street-lamps outside., Along two walls of the room stood rows of belt-driven machinery; in the center was a long, low table that bore rows and heaps and windrows of shoes.

Bass hesitated a moment, thinking, I could easily find a pair to fit me, and it would be worth the delay, because— But it wouldn’t, he knew. If his face, or his gait or his physique didn’t betray him, his shoes wouldn’t. He was stalling deliberately, afraid to go out into that lighted, empty street.

Keeping in shadow as much as he could, he edged forward to the doorway. He stared through the grimy pane: Nothing. No one on the street in either direction, as far as he could see; no movement but the tumbling dance of paper scraps along the gutter. No one in the shadowed doorways across the street.

The brass doorknob was slick against his sweaty palm. He eased it around, opened the door inchmeal. Wind fluttered through the opening, bringing a muted echo of the noise from the next street. Grinding his teeth, Bass stepped out onto the sidewalk.

Nothing.

Nothing but fear, so thick he could almost taste it.

He was wounded, he told himself; wounded and tired and sick. That was the reason he felt like this, it had to be. And in any case, nothing could be more dangerous than going back, unless it was standing here like a fool, waiting for the Guard to come and find him.

He moved forward, one step, two, three. With each step the sense of danger grew stronger. In spite of himself he came to a halt, staring around him. The vacant, windy street—the darkened windows—above him, the broken silhouette of wind-vanes and chimney-pots….

REALIZATION came, explosively. He saw those enigmatic shapes, not as they appeared now, half blotted out by the street lamps’ glare, but as he had seen them from the window above. Cylinders, T-shapes, cubes—and a wide-angled, tapering V.

The blades of a copter!

In Glenbrook, no one was allowed to land a copter on a rooftop—no one except the Guard.

And if the Guard had had time to put a copter there, then there would be Guardsmen concealed on the street as well… .

The whole chain of reasoning occupied a fraction of a second; to Bass, there was no interval between the first step and the last. He whirled and leaped back toward the shelter of the doorway.

In the middle of that leap, Bass heard a shout: “Get it!”

As his foot struck the pavement, bedlam fountained behind him. The sharp, slapping echoes blended one explosion into the next to make one single marrow-shaking roar. Something slapped the pavement viciously to Bass’s left; something else chewed a fan-shaped wad of splinters from the frame of the entranceway ahead. A round tiny hole, radiating hairline cracks, appeared low in the display window to the right.

Bass did not strictly speaking leap again; his momentum carried him forward over his leg’s leverage. When he came down the second time, he was eight feet away from the recessed door.

And the door vanished behind a roiling cloud of gray-white gas that filled the entranceway brim-full. Tendrils of it curled off around the frame-edge, whipped by the wind—too slowly.

Bass rocked violently to a stop … stood hesitating for a moment during which something struck his right shoe a wrenching blow … and dived head-first through the cracked glass of the display window.

Footsteps echoed behind him down the lightless corridor.

Winded, staggering, the pain in his side stabbing him fiercely at every movement, Bass emerged from the bookshop doorway and hurled himself into the crowd again. Twice, in the first ten yards, he caught a glimpse of a scarlet uniform and. had to angle off in a new direction. When he slowed down and let himself be carried along by the crowd’s eddying movement, it was only because his overtaxed muscles refused to carry him any farther at a faster pace.

The character of the crowd had changed somehow, he realized vaguely; its blended shriek and roar were as raucous as ever, but under them was a muted, persistent humming. And here and there, isolated in the restless flow, were motionless clots of people with their heads bent together. He passed close to several of these groupings, and caught meaningless scraps of conversation that penetrated the uproar: “… pushed ‘em with ‘is …” “Told ‘em I got to find my daughter…”’ “…call to be feared unless …”

The clots broke up and reformed, but always, it seemed to Bass, they grew larger and more frequent. He edged his way into one as it grew into being around a large, self-important-looking man in a sky-blue cape. He heard:

“‘S matter up there, man? What’s happenin’?”

“Don’t know n’more than you, friends. They’re stoppin’ ever’body at the corner —won’t let nobody through.”

“Other corner, too!”. cried a gnomelike little man. “Told ‘em I had to find my daughter, but they wouldn’ …”

Bass turned back into the current, shaken. Either the Guard had acted more swiftly and efficiently after his escape than he would have believed possible, or his period of blankness had lasted just long enough to give them the time they needed. At any rate they had effectively trapped him, with a cordon at each end of the block, and—undoubtedly—men posted on each of the adjoining streets.

He saw another red uniform, and dodged deeper into the crowd. Their only problem now, he thought feverishly, was to dip the one fish they wanted out of the pool. They might bring up a hundred men, or two hundred, but only—how many? Four cars, with perhaps as many as six men in each. Only twenty-four Guardsmen, at most, had actually seen him, not counting the ones who had fired at him, a few minutes ago, across the full width of the street ….

He stumbled, and, looking downward, saw that a long, curling strip of plastic had been ploughed up from the sole of his right shoe. He stooped painfully and tore it loose, knowing at the same instant that the action was futile. He could steal a complete set of new clothing, put on spectacles, somehow contrive a false mustache, alter his appearance completely … and still they would only have to look for a man with a gunshot wound.

Bass put his fingers tentatively to the warm stickiness at his side. Incredible that he had been shot … most of the red stain wiped off against his overshirt, but a little remained, buried in the grooves between the tiny ridges of his fingertips… .

They still wanted him alive. That must be the reason they had done nothing until he had turned to run back into the building: they had wanted him to get far enough out into the street so that they could cut him off and capture him. And then, when they had fired, they had aimed low, at his legs. Another paradox: believing him to be a fiendishly powerful monster, the Guard treated him as if he were made of ordinary mortal flesh.

That, he thought dizzily, could be resolved by thinking of the Guard in two parts—the lower ranks, who were bound by superstition, and the high officials, who weren’t—but it led immediately to still another: His knowledge made him dangerous, clearly, but it couldn’t be of any interest in itself to the Guard or any other organ of the state. Unless—

Unless the two co-existing mercantile states were in competition, as one licensed craftsman might compete with another, and sometimes sent spies or troublemakers into each other’s territory?

The notion of the Glenbrook Store competing with anyone made Bass’s head swim, and yet he sensed dimly that it might explain a great many things—things that he had never before thought needed any explanation. The insistence on a high birth-rate, and the consequent overcrowding. The very structure of society itself, the Wall, the false stories of iron-fleshed demons… .

NOW he had to get out, he thought, with sudden, desperate clarity. If they recaptured him and took him to Guard headquarters, there would be no question of simply interrogating him and then killing him. They would want information about Glenbrook’s espionage system, and they could not afford to believe that he didn’t have it. They would keep him alive, and in pain, as long as they could.

“Commoners of Stamford, attention!” an enormous voice blared suddenly. Bass stopped, quivering. Around him he saw heads turn toward the invisible loudspeaker; the roar of the crowd began to diminish. “Among you is a man who by accident has exceeded his capacity for alcohol. This man is temporarily beyond the control of his angel and is not responsible for his actions. I repeat, his condition is temporary. This man is not possessed, but he is dangerous to himself and others.”

A hum of interested, curious or dismayed voices arose, to subside as the loudspeaker bellowed: “All persons in this block, between Dine and Kusko Streets, will move in an orderly manner toward the sound of my voice. You will each be examined individually by the Guard, after which you will be free to continue the celebration.”

The clamor of the mob burst forth again, more deafening than before; but the huge, packed mass slowly began to move down the street. Bass hung back until wide patches of confetti-strewn pavement began to appear behind him; then the crowd forced him to move.

His mind was spinning frantically, finding a grip nowhere. The fishermen were emptying their net; it would be a slow process, but infallible. There was no way he could escape it. In a few minutes, half an hour at most—

But why had the Guard told that clumsy lie? The question and the answer came almost simultaneously. Remembering the fat man in the Glenbrook Store, Bass thought: They don’t want to start a panic.

There was no time to reason out his chances. Bass turned to the nearest citizen—a dropsical dull-eyed man with pendulous nose and lips—and blurted : “They’re not telling the truth—they don’t want to alarm us. There’s a demon loose in the crowd!”

The man stared at him for a moment and said, “You’re drunk, man. Forget it.”

Bass said desperately, “Look!” Seizing the man’s cape in one hand, with the other he flung his own cape open to show the blood-stained overshirt with its damning, plainly visible “GP.”

The man pulled away calmly. His eyes, Bass saw now, barely focused: it was unlikely that he could see the overshirt, let alone the trademark on it.

He tried a woman, and then an acne-scarred boy, with the same result. The crowd moved on. Bass found himself near the loose-lipped man again. Suddenly inspired, he grasped the fellow’s cape in both hands and swung him around to face him. “Y’ drunk,” said the man, and gurgled a parody of laughter.

“Listen,” said Bass. “U/M products are no good. The Stockholders all have bad breath. The Executives eat dirt. The Salesmen—”

The man had staggered back, his eyes goggling in sudden sobriety. Halfway through Bass’s third sentence, he violently wrenched himself free and darted with loud bellowings into the crowd.

Bass pushed his way a dozen steps to the right, seized a nervous-looking woman and repeated his blasphemy. Her shrieks were gratifyingly audible as she ran. By the time Bass found his fourth customer, the word had spread; he could hear it echoing shrilly from every side: “A demon!” The crowd was beginning to move faster.

Despairing of making himself heard any longer, Bass resorted to pinching everyone within reach. The crowd’s forward motion accelerated to a fast walk, to a run, to a stampede.

He saw the wreckage of a wooden barricade, flanked by shouting, impotent Guardsmen, as the flood swept past the intersection.

In spite of the pulsing pain in his side, Bass kept up with a segment of the crowd that fled eastward, straight up the hill. Sirens were howling again, from every direction—the most beautiful sound he had ever heard, because it meant that his enemies no longer knew where to look for him.

But half a mile further on, the first dozen or so of the scattered crowd began to stream past him, running in the other direction as if salvation depended on it. Dropping out, Bass saw why.

At the crest of the hill was a barricade—a real one, this time, with swinging searchlights, massed cars and copters, and an army of men with bulky weapons.