“I see him, Mr Mintoff,” he said. “Right beside Frame Thirty-two. Okay, you contact his mother. And thanks for calling – we’ll get the little beggar in from there in a hurry.”
Jerome replaced the telephone and depressed the intercom toggle which would let him speak to the chief of his maintenance force. “Frank, there’s a kid stuck out on the glass. Yeah, on Transparency One just beyond Frame Thirty-two. Send somebody out to get him, and make sure a medic goes as well – the brat’s going to need a shot of something to calm him down.”
Returning to the window, Jerome leaned on the ledge and stared at the strange, confined world he had grown to love in spite of all its faults and peculiarities. He had a decision to make, and it had to be done quickly. Strictly speaking, the plight of the boy out there on the glass did not constitute an emergency situation, and therefore he would not be officially justified in closing up the mirrors before the scheduled hour. All three mirrors had to be retracted at the same time, to preserve the Island’s symmetrical dynamics, which meant enforcing a universal black-out – and there were many colonists who objected strenuously to that sort of thing. There would be a barrage of complaints, some of them from influential people, but Jerome was a kindly man with two children of his own, and it troubled him to think of a small boy trapped on the glass, suspended in space.
The sooner he could put a semblance of solidity beneath the boy’s feet and screen him off from infinity, the better chance the young adventurer would have of emerging from his ordeal without personality scars. He picked up the rarely-used red telephone which would transmit his voice to every home, office and workshop on Island One.
“This is Community Director Jerome speaking,” he said. “There is no cause for alarm, but we are going to close up the mirrors for a short period. The black-out will be as brief as we can possibly make it, and I repeat there is no cause for alarm. I apologize for any inconvenience that may be caused. Thank you.”
Jerome then contacted his Engineering Executive and gave the order which would bring a premature sunset to his domain.
In the darkened front room of her house, midway along the Blue Valley, Alice Ledane awoke with a start.
She had been skimming on the wavetops of consciousness for hours, sometimes dipping into restless sleep as her private struggle drained her of nervous energy, then surfacing again to feel more exhausted than ever. As was usual on a day like this, she had no idea of the time. She got to her feet, parted the drapes slightly and made the discovery that it was night outside.
Incredulously, she put her hand in the pocket of her dressing gown and found the day’s first capsule still there. It was sticky to the touch. She held the tiny ovoid in the palm of her hand for a few seconds, then let it fall to the floor.
Alice went back to the divan and lay down. It was much too soon, she knew, to start congratulating herself on a victory – but if she had managed to get through one day with no outside help there was nothing to prevent her getting through the others which were to follows.
THE KINGDOM OF O’RYAN
The well-dressed stranger sat down, put his attaché case on the floor, crossed his legs and said, “Is there any insanity in your family?”
I thought immediately of my cousin Trev, who at that very moment was in the next office, squatting inside a packing case lined with aluminium foil and projecting reverent thoughts in the general direction of the star Betelgeuse. Had he finally stepped over the borderline between tolerable nuttiness and criminal lunacy? Was somebody coming to take him away?
“Insanity?” I gave the stranger an indignant stare. “What a ridiculous question! Has anybody filed a complaint?”
“Don’t get me wrong, Mr Cluny.” He smiled and took a business card from his waistcoat pocket. “I was merely trying to find out if your views on insanity coincide with mine. You see, I divide the insane into only two categories – the unpredictable and the predictable.”
“Do you?”
“Or, to put it another way – the unprofitable and the potentially profitable.”
“Really?” I glanced at the card he had handed me. It read: Ralph D. Wynter, Computer Systems Consultant. The after-effects of the previous night’s binge were impairing my ability to think, but I was practically certain that Wynter wasn’t making any kind of sense. “I’m afraid I don’t quite see …”
“In here,” Wynter said impressively, patting his attaché case, “I have a list of the names and addresses of 400,000 crazy people, and it’s worth a lot of money to you and me.”
“That’s good to know.” I tried to sound mildly interested and cheerful as I withdrew my legs from the kneehole of my desk just in case it became necessary to flee. Wynter was about forty, with steel-rimmed glasses and a look of square-jawed integrity which would have made him a champion used car salesman, but it was becoming obvious that he had a screw loose. What a way to start the day! I was closeted in my office with a genuine noodle, and the only person I could have called upon for help was my cousin Trev, selfstyled apostle of the Supreme Nizam of Betelgeuse.
Wynter’s eyes twinkled behind curved flakes of glass. “You must be wondering what this is all about. Let me make it clear to you by asking one question – do you ever bet on the horses?”
“What?” I gazed at Wynter with increased perplexity. This was what he called making it clear?
“Do you ever gamble on horse-racing?”
“Never.”
“Why not?”
“Ah …” I strove for a succinct way to express my feelings about the evils of gambling. “I might lose my money.”
“Good man!” Wynter gave me a delighted grin. “I thought you would have the right attitude, but I wanted to be sure. You see, the crazy people on my list all suffer from the same delusion – they’re convinced it is possible to predict the outcome of a horse race.”
“That is crazy,” I replied, beginning to relax a little as I sensed that Wynter was not completely adrift from reality and that he was in fact working round, albeit in a peculiar manner, to making some kind of a proposition. “If there was any way of knowing the winners in advance the profession of bookmaker would never have arisen.”
“Precisely! I can see we’re going to hit it off just fine.”
“I don’t think so, Mr Wynter,” I said, flipping his business card back across my desk. “I don’t know what all this has to do with computer systems, but I’m a very busy man and I haven’t got time to …”
To make yourself a third of a million dollars in less than a month? Tax free?”
My heart wobbled a couple of times like a machine with a defective mounting, and to gain a bit of leeway I said, “I always pay my taxes.”
That was a lie, of course. The main reason I allowed cousin Trev to stay on in the business was that he was down in the books as receiving a vice-presidential salary of 25,000 dollars a year, whereas he was able to get by quite comfortably on the sixty a week I actually doled out to him. It was tricks like that which enabled me to keep the place on its feet, but even so things were beginning to look pretty bleak and the notion of making a quick killing had a powerful appeal.
Wynter gave me a knowing glance. “What I mean is that the money will be untraceable, and it will be up to you whether you declare it or not.”