periods.
He sat before a huge console, surveying scores of dials, at the end of a machine that was over five hundred yards long. Today it was turning out glass paper the color of watered blood, made only for Ritual publications, packing it in sheets and dispatching them in automatic trucks; but the machine could be adjusted to everything from metal sheeting to plastic felts. At the far end sat another man, diminished by distance, busily tending more dials that could really take care of themselves.
After a while the man went out for a break. Hart ran a hundred yards to a section that was not working. He snapped it into the alloy supply and fed in the tape. In a minute, several dozen tiny contacts came down a chute. He pocketed them and disconnected the section just before his fellow worker reappeared.
The man walked down the floor to him, looking curious.
“Anything the matter?” he asked, hopeful for some break in routine.
“No, just felt like a walk.”
“Know what you mean—I feel restless too. Too bad this plant’s only two years old. Boy, wouldn’t she make a great disintegration!” He grinned, slapping a fender affectionately.
Hart joined in the joke. “Gives us something to look forward to in ten years.”
“A good way to look at things,” said the other man.
At home he locked the contacts in a desk drawer. Tomorrow he would deliver most of them to Burnett’s apartment.
But the next morning an emergency letter came from his group leader, warning him not to appear there. I am going completely underground. I think they may suspect my activities. The dispersion plan must go into effect. You know how to reach Johnson and Wright and they each in turn can get to two others. Good luck!
He had just put the letter in his pocket when Eric announced the arrival of a Rituals Inspector.
The man had nervous close-set eyes and seemed embarrassed by his need to make such a visit. Hart took the offensive as his best defense. “I don’t understand this, Inspector,” he protested. “You people should be busy with High Holy preparations. Are you losing your taste for work?”
“Now, now, Mr. Hart, that’s a very unkind remark. I dislike this nonsense as much as anyone.” His square jaw chewed into each word as he opened his scanning box. “It’s the anti-social sabotage.”
“Do you mean to say I am under suspicion?” Marie was now loitering in the doorway, worse luck.
“Oh, no. Nothing so insulting. This is strictly impersonal. The Scanning Center has picked apartments at complete random and we’re to make spot checks.”
The eye at one end of the box blinked wickedly, waiting for an information feed. “Now, sir, if you’ll pardon me, I’ll just take the records from one of those desk drawers—any drawer—and put them in the box.” Hart slid open a drawer. “No, sir, I think I’ll try the next one. It’s regulation not to accept suggestions.”
With a hand made deft by practise he scooped out all the sheets and tapes and put them in the box. The scanner’s fingers rapidly sorted them past the eye. Hart exhaled, relieved that an innocuous drawer had been selected, and the inspector handed back the material to him. “Well, Inspector, that’s that.”
“Not quite.” The Inspector selected another drawer at the other end of the desk and dumped everything before the scanner. His examination was speeding up and that was not good; he would have time to take more sample readings.
“Now if you’ll empty your left pocket—”
“Oh, this is too much!” Marie exploded. “My husband struggles all night on secret work, studying to find ways to stop the anti-socials, and you treat him like one of them!”
“You’re working on the problem?” the Inspector said respectfully. “What are you doing?”
Frying pan to fire. Hart preferred the pan and pulled open a drawer. “It’s too complicated, too much time needed to explain!”
The Inspector glanced at his watch. “I’m falling behind schedule.” He closed up his box. “Sorry, but I have to leave. Heavy time sheet today.”
As soon as he was gone, Hart breathed easier. Nothing incriminating would be fed into the Central Scanner.
Marie became apologetic. “I’m sorry I said it, Wendell, but I couldn’t keep quiet. All I did last night was peek in once or twice.”
He shrugged. “I’m just on a minor project.”
“Every bit counts.” She shook her head. “Only you have to wonder—I mean, don’t think I’m treasoning, but while I was shopping an hour ago a lot of women said you have to think—how come all that obsolescent junk could work so well, after being thoroughly wrecked, too? You almost wonder whether some of it was too good for disintegration.”
Wendell pretended to be shocked. “Just a fluke of circumstance. If something like that happened again you’d be right to wonder. But it could not ever happen again.”
“Don’t get me wrong, Wendell. None of the women attacked anything. It was more like what you just said. They said if it happened again, then you’d have to wonder. But of course it couldn’t happen again.”
How well the tables had turned! Not only had Marie’s ignorant knowledge proven helpful but she had now given him a positive idea also.
When he met Wright and Johnson at the latter’s apartment that evening he explained it to them. “We can propagate ‘dangerous’ thoughts and yet appear completely loyal. We can set up the reaction to next High Holy Day.”
“How?” demanded Johnson. “That’s having your cake and eating it.”
“Nothing’s impossible in the human mind,” Wright said. “Let’s listen.”
“Here’s the point. Wherever you go there will be people tsk-tsking about the Preliminary fiasco. Just reassure them, say it meant nothing at all by itself. If it ever happened again, then there would be room for doubt but, of course, it could not happen again!”
Wright smiled. “That’s almost feminine in its subtlety.”
He smiled back. “My wife inspired it. Don’t get nervous—it was unconscious, sheerly by accident.”
“Whatever the cause, it’s the perfect result,” Johnson conceded. “We’ll spread it through the net.”
“Along with this, I hope.” Wendell dumped the contacts on a table top. “It’s the smallest size possible. A lot should get by unnoticed. Find cell members who can set up cryotrons with a wide range of instructions to cope with anything in the piles. Some weirdly alive concoctions of ‘obsolescent’ parts ought to result.”
“Some day the world’s going to know what you’ve done for it,” said Johnson solemnly.
“That could happen too soon!” Miss Wright’s face, honest and open in its horse-like length, broke into a wide grin.
“Amen,” said Hart, adding the private hope that Marie, blessed with superior looks, might be able to show as much superior wisdom some day.
The hope was not immediately fulfilled. When he reached home Marie was in a tizzy of excitement. “You’re just in time, darling. They just caught three subversives. One of them was a woman,” she added as this were compounding an improbability with an impossibility. “They’re going to show them.”
He gripped his belt tightly. “A woman?”
“That’s right. There she is now.”
A uniformed officer was gently helping a pale little old woman sit down before the camera, as if she were more an object of pity than of fear. Hart relaxed.
“—caught red-handed with the incriminating papers,” shouted an offstage announcer. “Handbills asserting objects declared obsolescent could actually last indefinitely!”
“What do you have to say for yourself?” the officer asked gently. “You must realize, of course, that such irreligious behavior precludes your moving in general society for a long time to come.”
“I don’t know what came over me,” she sobbed in a tired voice. “Curiosity. Yes, curiosity, that’s what it was. I saw these sheets of paper in the street and they said we should stop working so hard at compulsory tasks and start working to expand our own interests and personalities.”
“Self-contradictory nonsense!” said the voice.
“Yes, I know that. But it made me curious and I took it home to read, and it said our compulsory tasks were
