He stood and walked to the rail, looking out over the water. He was a man just short of middle years and just above middle height, leaner than he once had been, with unruly brown hair, a wide, sweat-flecked forehead, and mild eyes of a shade not quite green and not quite blue. His lips were thin and tautly compressed, giving him a look of determination instantly belied by a less than affirmative chin.
Idly he flipped a stone into the water. “Get it!” he called, as two crocs glided noiselessly toward the disturbance in hopes of nabbing a fat gobbet of meat. But the stone sank, sending up black bubbles, and the crocs bumped their pointed noses lightly together and drifted apart. Quellen smiled.
It was a good life here at the heart of darkness, here in tropical Africa. Insects and all, black mud and all, humid solitude and all. Even the fear of discovery was supportable.
Quellen rehearsed the catalog of his blessings. Marok, he thought? No Marok here. No Koll, no Spanner, no Brogg, no Leeward. None of them. But especially no Marok. I miss him the least.
What a relief it was to be able to stay out here and not suffer their buzzing voices, not shudder when they burst into his office! Of course, it was wanton and immoral of him to set up shop as anü bermensch this way, a modern Raskolnikov transcending all laws. Quellen admitted that. Yet, he often told himself, life’s journey was a trip he’d take only once, and at the end what would matter but that he had traveled First Class part of the way?
This was the only freedom, out here.
And being far from Marok, the hated roommate, was best of all. No more to worry over his piles of undone dishes, his heaps of books scattered all over the tiny room they shared, his dry, deep voice endlessly talking on the visiphone when Quellen was trying to concentrate.
No. No Marok here.
But yet, Quellen thought sadly, yet, the peace he had anticipated when he built his new home had somehow not materialized. That was the way of the world: satisfaction draining off into nowhere at the moment of attainment. For years he had waited with remarkable patience for the day he reached Class Seven and was entitled to live alone. That day had come; but it had not been enough. So he had purloined Africa for himself. And now that he had encompassed even that, life was simply one uneasy fear after another.
Restlessly, he shied another stone into the water.
Pong.
As he watched the concentric circles of ripples fanning out on the dark surface of the stream, Quellen became conscious again of the warning bell ringing again at the other end of the house. Pong. Pong. Pong.The uneasiness within him turned to sullen foreboding. He eased himself out of his chair and headed hurriedly toward the phone. Pong.
Quellen switched it on, leaving the vision off. It hadn’t been easy to arrange things so that any calls coming to his home, back in Appalachia half a world away, were automatically relayed to him here.
“Quellen,” he said, eyeing the gray blank screen.
“Koll speaking,” came the crackling reply. “Couldn’t reach you before. Why don’t you turn on your visi, Quellen?”
“It’s not working,” Quellen said. He hoped sharp-nosed Koll, his immediate superior at the Secretariat of Crime, would not smell the lie in his voice.
“Get over here quickly, will you, Quellen? Spanner and I have something urgent to take up with you. Got it, Quellen? Urgent. It’s a High Government matter. They’re treading us hard.”
“Yes sir. Anything else, sir?”
“No. We’ll fill in the details for you when you get here. Which will be at once.” Koll decisively snapped the contact.
Quellen stared at the blank screen for a while, chewing at his lip. Terror clawed his soul. Was this it, the summons to headquarters to discuss his highly illegal, criminally selfish hideaway? Had the downfall come at last? No. No. They couldn’t have found out. It was impossible. He had everything squared.
But, came Quellen’s insistent thought, they must have discovered his secret. Why else would Koll send for him so urgently, with the whiplash tone in his voice? Quellen began to perspire despite the air conditioning, which kept away most of the fierce Congo heat.
They would put him back in Class Eight if they found out. Or, much more likely, they would bounce him all the way back to Twelve or Thirteen, and slap a perpetual hold on him. He would be doomed to spend the rest of his life in a tiny room inhabited by two or three other people, the biggest, smelliest, most unpleasant people the clicking computers could find for him.
Quellen calmed himself. Perhaps he was taking alarm for no reason. Koll had said it was High Government business, hadn’t he? A directive from above, not any private arrest. When they really found him out, Quellen knew, they wouldn’t simply summon him. They would come for him. So this was some affair of work. He had a momentary vision of the members of the High Government, shadowy demigods at least eleven feet high, pausing in their incomprehensible labors to drop a minislip memo down the chute to Koll.
Quellen took a long look at the green overhanging trees,bowed under the weight of their leaves and glistening with the beaded drops of the morning’s rain. He let his eyes rove regretfully over the two spacious rooms, his luxurious porch, the uncluttered view. Each time he left here, it was as though for the last time. For a moment, now that everything might well be just about lost, Quellen almost relished the buzzing of the flies. He gulped in a final sweeping look and stepped toward the stat. The purple field enveloped him. He was sucked into the machine.
Quellen was devoured. The hidden power generators of the stat were connected by direct link to the central generator that spun endlessly on its poles at the bottom of the Atlantic, condensing the theta force that made the stat travel possible. What was theta force? Quellen could not say. He could barely explain electricity, and that had been around for a longer time. He took it for granted and gave himself to the stat field. If someone had introduced a minor abscissa distortion, Quellen’s atoms would be broadcast to the universe and never reassembled, but one did not think about such things.
The effect was instantaneous. The lean, lanky form of Quellen was shattered, a stream of tagged wavicles was relayed halfway across the planet, and Quellen was reconstituted. It happened so fast—molecule ripped from molecule in a fragment of a nanosecond—that his neural system could not pick up the pain of total dissolution. The restoration of life came just as swiftly.
One did not think about the realities of stat travel. One simply traveled. To do otherwise was to ask for the miseries.
Quellen emerged in the tiny apartment for Class Seven citizens of Appalachia that everyone thought he inhabited. Some messages awaited him. He glanced at them: they were advertising blares mainly, although a note told him that his sister Helaine had come calling. Quellen felt a twitch of guilt. Helaine and her husband were prolets of the prole, ground under by the harsh realities. He had often wished he could do something for them, since their unhappiness added prongs to his own sense of conscience. Yet what could he do? He preferred not to get involved.
In a series of swift motions he slipped out of his lounging clothes and into his crisp business uniform, and removed the Privacy radion from the door. Thus he transformed himself from Joe Quellen, owner of an illegal privacy-nest in the heart of an unreported reservation in Africa, into Joseph Quellen, CrimeSec, staunch defender of law and order. He left the house. The elevator tumbled him endless stories to the tenth-floor quickboat landing. Stat transmission within a city was technically impossible; more’s the pity, Quellen felt.