to one year’s pay. A total of $100,000. If, that was, the fellow would agree to one unusual condition: you go, you work, and you don’t come back until the four years are up or the work is done. You got two days off every week, just like in America, and you got a vacation every year, just like in America, but in the pampas. You couldn’t go back to North America (or even Rio) until your four-year hitch was over. If you died in South America, you got planted there-no one was going to pay to have your body shipped back to Wilkes-Barre. But you got fifty grand up front, and a sixty-day grace period during which you could spend it, save it, invest it, or ride it like a pony. If you chose investment, that fifty grand might be seventy-five when you came waltzing out of the jungle with a bone- deep tan, a whole new set of muscles, and a lifetime of stories to tell. And, of course, once you were out you had what the limeys liked to call “the other half to put on top of it.
This was like that, Armitage told Ted earnestly. Only the front half would be a cool quarter of a million and the back end half a million.
“Which sounded incredible,” Ted said from the Wollensak.
“Of course it did, byjiminy. I didn’t find ovit until later how incredibly cheap they were buying us, even at those prices.
Dinky is particularly eloquent on the subject of their stinginess… “they” in this case being all the King’s bureaucrats. He says the Crimson King is trying to bring about the end of all creation on the budget plan, and of course he’s right, but I think even Dinky realizes-although he won’t admit it, of course-that if you offer a man too much, he simply refuses to believe it.
Or, depending on his imagination (many telepaths and precogs have almost no imagination at all), be unable to believe it. In our case the period of indenture was to be six years, with an option to renew, and Armitage needed my decision immediately. Few techniques are so successful, lady and gentlemen, as the one where you boggle your target’s mind, freeze him with greed, then blitz him.
“I was duly blitzed, and agreed at once. Armitage told me that my quarter-mil would be in the Seaman’s San Francisco Bank as of that afternoon, and I could draw on it as soon as I got down there. I asked him if I had to sign a contract. He reached out one of his hands-big as a ham, it was-and told me that was our contract. I asked him where I’d be going and what I’d be doing-all questions I should have asked first, I’m sure you’d agree, but I was so stunned it never crossed my mind.
“Besides, I was pretty sure I knew. I thought I’d be working for the government. Some kind of Cold War deal. The telepathic branch of the CIA or FBI, set up on an island in the Pacific. I remember thinking it would make one hell of a radio play.
“Armitage told me, ’You’ll be traveling far, Ted, but it will also be right next door. And for the time being, that’s all I can say. Except to keep your mouth shut about our arrangement during the eight weeks before you actually… mmm… ship out. Remember that loose lips sink ships. At the risk of inculcating you with paranoia, assume that you are being watched.”
“And of course I was watched. Later-too later, in a manner of speaking-I was able to replay my last two months in Frisco and realize that the can-toi were watching me the whole time.
“The low men.”
EIGHT
“Armitage and two other humes met us outside the Mark Hopkins Hotel,” said the voice from the tape recorder. “I remember the date with perfect clarity; it was Halloween of 1955. Five o’clock in the afternoon. Me, Jace McGovern, Dave Ittaway,
Dick… I can’t remember his last name, he died about six months later, Humma said it was pneumonia and the rest of the ki’cans backed him up- ki’can sort of means shit-people or shitfolken, if you’re interested-but it was suicide and I knew it if no one else did. The rest… well, remember Doc Number Two?
The rest were and are like him. ’don’t tell me what I don’t want to know, sai, don’t mess up my worldview.’ Anyway, the last one was Tanya Leeds. Tough little thing…”
A pause and a click. Then Ted’s voice resumed, sounding temporarily refreshed. The third tape had almost finished. He must have really burned through the rest of the story, Eddie thought, and found that the idea disappointed him. Whatever else he was, Ted was a hell of a good tale-spinner.
“Armitage and his colleagues showed up in a Ford station wason, what we called a woody in those charming days. They drove us inland, to a town called Santa Mira. There was a paved main street. The rest of them were dirt. I remember there were a lot of oil-derricks, looking like praying mantises, sort of although it was dark by then and they were really just shapes against the sky.
“I was expecting a train depot, or maybe a bus with CHARTERED in the destination window. Instead we pulled up to this empty freight depot with a sign reading SANTA MIRA SHIPPING hanging askew on the front and I got a thought, clear as day, from Dick whatever-his-name was. They ’re going to kill us, he was thinking. They brought us out here to kill us and steal our stuff.
“If you’re not a telepath, you don’t know how scary something like that can be. How the surety of it kind of… invades your head. I saw Dave Ittaway go pale, and although Tanya didn’t make a sound-she was a tough litde thing, as I told you-it was bright enough in the car to see there were tears standing in the corners of her eyes.
“I leaned over her, took Dick’s hands in mine, and squeezed down on them when he tried to pull away. I thought at him, They didn’t give us a quarter of a mill each, most of it still stashed safe in the Seaman’s Bank, so they could bring us out to the ivilliwags and steal our watches. And Jace thought at me, / don’t even have a watch. I pawned my Gruen two years ago in Albuquerque, and by the time I thought about buying another one-around midnight last night, this was-all the stores were closed and I was too drunk to climb down off the barstool I was on, anyway.
“That relaxed us, and we all had a laugh. Armitage asked us what we were laughing about and that relaxed us even more, because we had something they didn’t, could communicate in a way they couldn’t. I told him it was nothing, then gave Dick’s hands another little squeeze. It did the job. I… facilitated him, I suppose. It was my first time doing that. The first of many. That’s part of the reason I’m so tired; all that facilitating wears a man out.
“Armitage and the others led us inside. The place was deserted, but at the far end there was a door with two words chalked on it, along with those moons and stars, THUNDERCLAP STATION, it said. Well, there was no station: no tracks, no buses, no road other than the one we’d used to get there. There were windows on either side of the door and nothing on the other side of the building but a couple of smaller buildings-deserted sheds, one of them just a burnt-out shell-and a lot of scrubland littered with trash.
“Dave Ittaway said, ’Why are we going out there?’ and one of the others said, ’You’ll see,’ and we certainly did.
“’Ladies first,’ Armitage said, and he opened the door.
“It was dark on the other side, but not the same kind of dark.
It was darker dark. If you’ve seen Thunderclap at night, you’ll know. And it sounded different. Old buddy Dick there had some second thoughts and turned around. One of the men pulled a gun. And I’ll never forget what Armitage said. Because he sounded… kindly. ’Too late to back out now,’ he said. ’Nowyou can only go forward.”
“And I think right then I knew that business about the sixyear plan, and re-upping if we wanted to, was what my friend Bobby Garfield and his friend Sullyjohn would have called just a shuck and jive. Not that we could read it in their thoughts.
They were all wearing hats, you see. You never see a low man-or a low lady, for that matter-without a hat on. The men’s looked like plain old fedoras, the sort most guys wore back then, but these were no ordinary lids. They were thinking-caps.
Although any-thinking-caps would be more accurate; they muffle the thoughts of the people wearing them. If you try to prog someone who’s wearing one-prog is Dinky’s word for thoughtreading-you just get a hum with a lot of whispering underneath.
Very unpleasant, like the todash chimes. If you’ve heard them, you know. Discourages too much effort, and effort’s the last thing most of the telepaths in the Algul are interested in.
What the Breakers are mostly interested in, lady and gentlemen, is going along to get along. Which only shows up for what it is-monstrous-if you pull back and take the long view. One more thing most Breakers are not into. Quite often you hear a saying-a little poem-around campus, or see it chalked on the walls: ’Enjoy the cruise, turn on the fan, there’s nothing to lose, so work on your tan.’ It means a lot more than’take it easy.”
The implications of that little piece of doggerel are extremely unpleasant. I wonder if you can see that.”
Eddie thought he could, at least, and it occurred to him that his brother Henry would have made an absolutely wonderful Breaker. Always assuming he’d been allowed to take along his heroin and his Creedence Clearwater Revival albums, that was.
A longer pause from Ted, then a rueful sort of laugh.
“I believe it’s time to make a long story a little shorter. We went through the door, leave it at that. If you’ve done it, you know it can be very unpleasant, if the door’s not in tip-top working order. And the door between Santa Mira, California, and Thunderclap was in better shape than some I’ve been through since.
“For a moment there was only darkness on the other side, and the howl of what the taheen call desert-dogs. Then a cluster of lights went on and we saw these… these things with the heads of birds and weasels and one with the head of a bull, horns and all. Jace screamed, and so did I. Dave Ittaway turned and tried to run, but Armitage grabbed him. Even if he hadn’t, where was there to go? Back through the door? It was closed, and for all I know, that’s a one-way. The only one of us who never made a sound was Tanya, and when she looked at me, what I saw in her eyes and read in her thoughts was relief. Because we knew, you see. Not all the questions were answered, but the two that mattered were. Where were we? In another world. When were we coming back? Never in life. Our money would sit in the Seaman’s of San Francisco until it turned into millions, and no one would ever spend it. We were in for the long haul.
“There was a bus there, with a robot driver named Phil. ’My name’s Phil, I’m over the hill, but the best news is that I never spill,’ he said. He smelled like lightning and there were all sorts of discordant clicking sounds coming from deep in his guts. Old Phil’s dead now, dumped in the train and robot graveyard with God alone knows how many others, but they’ve got enough mechanized help to finish what they’ve started, I’m sure.
“Dick fainted when we came out on Thunderclap-side, but by the time we could see the lights of the compound, he’d come around again. Tanya had his head in her lap, and I remember how gratefully he was looking up at her. It’s funny what you remember, isn’t it? They checked us in at the gate. Assigned us our dorms, assigned us our suites, saw that we were fed… and a damned fine meal it was. The first of many.
“The next day, we went to work. And, barring my little “vacation in Connecticut,’ we’ve been working ever since.”
Another pause. Then:
“God help us, we’ve been working ever since. And, God forgive us, most of us have been happy. Because the only thing talent wants is to be used.”
