The Man Who Staked the Stars Part 11

By the time they had finished eating, their isolation was complete.

The office was a command post now, with only the slender, unattended telephone wires connecting them with the outside worlds.

Bryce moved over behind his desk. He drew the telephone toward him and dialed a number. Somewhere, in the locked safe, the phone rang.

From the case he took a toy dial phone. Pierce's eyes were on it, his eyebrows lifted quizzically, but Bryce offered no explanation. The boy was due for a series of surprises. And when it was over, he would know everything without any explanations, and too late to interfere.

"Hi Al," Bryce said to the recorded "Yeah?" at the other end. He dialed a number on the toy dial, the one receiver against the other's back. After the usual ritual, Bryce said, "h.e.l.lo George, how's everything going?"

This is it, Bryce thought. This was the first part of the final blow to UT. And the only instrument he needed in his delightfully simple method was a telephone. Originally he had planned six brief warning calls to the six key numbers of the ground organization. He would tell them to refuse to take anything from the hands of the UT branch, and break contact with them immediately after accepting cash for miscellaneous items. That would set the stage.

The police trap would close on all members of the UT branch of the organization while they were enc.u.mbered with a maximum of incriminating objects to dispose of in too little time. Then would come his anonymous tip to the police. He'd inform them that certain employees of UT in a few listed cities would be found to be smuggling in large quant.i.ties of drugs. The thing would be so simple. And the whole works would blow up with the efficiency of the calculated explosion of nuclear reaction.

That had been his original plan.

But things would be different now. The morning in the easy chair had changed his approach. The newer, more elaborate program, still remarkably simple, would bring down the whole structure within UT without the help of the police, but by himself alone, planning it, initiating it, executing it with no one's help. Not even Pierce's.

He heard himself saying:

"This is 'h.e.l.lo George.' Listen to me and don't interrupt.

"Somebody has talked. I've been betrayed myself. Get that? h.e.l.lo George is washed up. Right now the cops are tapping this line. It doesn't make any difference to me, now. But it does to you. This is an open warning from h.e.l.lo George to you. Spread the word. I'll keep making calls until they break in on me and cut this line.

"Meanwhile, spread the word. Break connections with me and the whole organization. Get out of range before the trap closes. But pa.s.s on this warning first.

"I'll hold out against questioning a short time. The police will get me eventually, of course. And when they do they'll pump me dry.

They'll get names and addresses. The whole works will get grabbed, unless you move fast. Spread the word."

Bryce paused and winked at Pierce who was standing at his elbow, "Any questions? Yes, I'm sure. Of course I'm sure. Any other questions?

Good luck, Okay."

He hung up.

As Caesar once said, the dice were rolling.

Pierce, beside him through it all, simply stood there, his eyes wide and his face sharp with curiosity and incredulity, his body twitching now and then from the infection of the excitement which rippled over the room. That excitement had been there, though Bryce had not permitted himself to indulge in it in any visible way. He had showed Pierce a new facet to his operations, one which Pierce could not antic.i.p.ate immediately, one in which only he, Bryce, could make the snap decisions and evaluate the immediate responses demanded of him.

That was with the first call.

With the second one Pierce began to contribute, rising to the occasion as he had so often and quickly done in the past. He began pacing up and down between calls, smoking furiously and laughing under his breath.

"Tell 'em the police are breaking down the door," he suggested during the third call. "Say you're hypnoed to hold out against questioning five days at the most, two hours more likely."

His suggestions were a howl. Bryce repeated them into the phone with counterfeit desperation and was rewarded by the sounds of panic at the other end. He and Pierce chortled over the frantic queries and exclamations from the victim. The whole thing, succinct and pointed and with the dramatic power of simplicity, was one super practical joke which would set the entire solar system scurrying around for the next few weeks.

The ramifications would be endless. Persons would vanish abruptly and take up new names and ident.i.ties in the obscure countries, others would draw out their heavy savings and take the first rocket out from Earth. There would be a new influx of refugees to the Belt, new settlers to be honest farmers and factory workers and repair men.

Yes, the situation was dramatic.

The day was a good day.

But as Bryce hung up on the last call, a depressing sense of calamity, unsettlingly anti-climatic, began to press down on him. Pierce was talking about plans for the next week with an enthusiasm which should have been completely contagious.

But there was something wrong. There was something wrong.

What was it?

Bryce felt Pierce's enthusiasm catch at him and start to sweep him away. He savored the pleased glow produced by the shattering changes he had managed to cram into one day. With six telephone calls he had broken the drug ring completely and forever, broken it so completely that no member of it would ever have dealings with any member of it again. All of them were out of business, fleeing with the imaginary hounds of the law baying at their heels.

He smiled at the thought.

And then his smile faded for some strange reason and he ceased listening to Pierce for a moment, looked away and ceased listening, for hearing Pierce just then distracted oddly from the clarity of his thinking. He wanted to review what he had just done.

What was wrong?

What?

He struggled with a mounting confusion, the desk top and telephones blurring as he tried to concentrate with desperate effort.

Unexpectedly the question sprang into focus. It was as if the room turned inside out, the day turned upside down.

He had smashed himself--not UT!

Why?

Why had he made those calls--changed his plans--and made those calls?

With the most perfect and terrible clarity he saw the results of what he had done. The organization destroyed. The contacts he had made fifteen years ago as an anonymous young dock hand, contacts that as Bryce Carter he could never make again--vanishing--merging with the great ma.s.s of the public--becoming gray unknown figures. The building of years melting like a sugar castle melts into the tide--the invisible army that had obeyed his sourceless voice without being able to blackmail or rebel, the perfectly balanced tool in his hands that could be used for the bribing of venal politicians, with a limitless fund for the bribery, the growing secret control of the most venal of the political machines of Earth, that by the time he needed it it would have been an irresistible weapon in his hand for the single swift political blow that would rip the Belt from Earth control, and give it a seat on the a.s.sembly of the Federated Nations, and mastery of the solar system--

But as he sat there the organization dissolved.

He grasped the phone, but there was n.o.body to call now, no one would answer. He could never reach them again.

This was sanity now, but what had it been before when he was cheerfully destroying his future? It seemed to him that there were two halves to his brain, each wanting different things. For a moment the one that had controlled the day was gone, and he was sane again, but how long would that moment last? What sign had there been when it took control? Would he know it when it came again?

He remembered that in the tube train that morning he and Pierce had had a half joking argument about the best short-and-merry life. One of the happy ones on the list had been the INC agent, because they spent so much of their lives working into smuggling gangs that they had all the pleasures and profits of being a crook and an honest man too. Was that where he had slipped his cog?

Looking back on the things he had done that day he saw that much of it had fitted an abstract pattern of justice, as if he had been thinking of himself as an INC man. Or as if--

He thought of the things he had seen in his childhood that they had called zombies, and jeered at and tormented without fear of any retaliation or vengeance from their gray-faced victims. Imprisoned men--they looked normal--but they had been mentally imprisoned.

Law-zombies, memorizing and following laws and being honest with a simple and terrifying literalness.

He had not known that he had any capacity for terror.

Bryce Carter. He had his name, his ident.i.ty and his memory, and they were his own. Sometimes he had had nothing else, only the pride and strength of knowing his ident.i.ty, that it was his and stronger than others, just as his hands were stronger, a thing they couldn't take from him.

_Could they?_ There was a nightmare he had had more than once, that he remembered suddenly for the first time, with all its atmosphere of childish strangeness. The cop psychos were after him. He was trapped in a big room with lights and they had his head open and were chasing him around inside his head somehow, trying to catch him, and kill him, the him that lived in his mind.