The sack dangling from his fingers, he locked up and headed for the rapitrans.
* * *
Having eaten a leisurely meal watching his new but not ostentatiously expensive holographic TV, he left home again at eleven-ten poppa-momma, carrying the sack in a small black satchel. He took the rapitrans to a station where very few people stopped after sunset, a beach stop favoured by sunners and surfers, isolated between the sprawling tentacles of the city because here the ground was too weak to bear the weight of buildings of economic height. He had established the habit of a nightly constitutional along the beach over several years. It was one of the things that kept his sleeping-time down.
He wandered at a leisurely pace until he was out of sight of the rapitrans. Then, with sudden swift purpose, he dodged into the total shadow of some ornamental bushes and opened the satchel. From it he withdrew a mesh mask and put it on. Then he sprayed the plastic sack with an aerosol which would destroy both the greasy trace of fingerprints and the giveaway epidermal cells which might have rubbed off on it.
Finally he took out a bolt-gun—legitimately owned, licensed by the fuzzy-wuzzies as suitable for a man owning a valuable machine-shop—and moved on along the beach.
He came to the prearranged rendezvous and stopped, checking his watch. He was two minutes early. Shrugging, he stood in silence, and waited.
Shortly a voice addressed him out of the darkness. It said, “Over here—this way.”
He turned towards the sound. The voice had been male, but beyond that he could tell nothing about the owner. Dealing with partisans, that was the way he preferred things to be. Almost certainly he was in the field of a black-light projector, so he acted as though the invisible speaker could watch every movement he made.
With his gun he indicated a point on the sand near his feet. A small package arced through the air and landed with a thud. Dropping on one knee, putting down the satchel but not the gun, he felt its contents and gave a nod. He exchanged the package for the plastic sack, rose, and took a couple of paces backward. By now his vision had adjusted fully to the dimness, and he could see that the person who emerged from shadow to collect the sack was not the one who had spoken, but a shiggy, probably young, certainly with a good figure.
Bending—slowly, so as not to alarm the man waiting in the background—he selected a stick and with it wrote upside-down words on the sand.
WHAT FOR?
A muted chuckle. The man said, “It’ll be in the news tomorrow.”
THINK I’D SELL YOU OUT?
“I’ve stayed free for eighteen months,” the man said. “It wasn’t by advertising my movements.”
ME—8 YEARS.
By now the shiggy had withdrawn to the company of her man. He scuffed over what he had written with his bad foot, and substituted GT ALUMINOPHAGE.
“You’ve got that?” the partisan said, startled.
BREEDING NOW.
“How much?”
CHEAP. TELL ME WHAT THERMITE FOR.
Then he crossed that through, and wrote EXPENSIVE.
“I catch. Name some figures.”
Once more he scuffed over the letters.
$150 PER 1000. BREED 1,000,000—6 DAYS.
“Are they as good as GT claims?”
12 HR BROKE INCH MONOFILAMENT ROPE.
“Christ! That’s the stuff they hang suspension bridges on!”
RIGHT.
Scuffed over again. Expectant waiting.
“We could use that,” the man said finally. “Okay, I’ll gamble. We’re going to put out the Bay Bridge rapitrans.”
TRACK WELL GUARDED.
“We’re not going to put it on the track. There’s a stretch where the vacuum parcels tube parallels the monorail. If we time it right it should melt through and short the power cables.”
PHOS-ACID IGNITER?
“No, we have a timer with an HT arc.”
NOT MINE.
Another chuckle, this one with a wry inflection. “Thanks, when I can afford your standards I’ll send to Switzerland. Okay, I’ll let you know when we need the aluminophage.”
NIGHT.
“Good night.”
From the direction of the voice there came soft scuffling sounds. He waited till they were over, then found a bit of flotsam and stirred up the sand where he had written his part of the conversation.
He turned for home with as brisk a step as his short leg allowed, leaving the last of his footprints to be wiped out by the night’s tide.
* * *
Instead of going to bed in his apt, he did as he often did on fine nights and carried an inflatable mattress up to the roof of the block. He also took a pair of binocs, but these were well concealed inside the mattress-roll.
A boy and a shiggy were enjoying themselves up there when he arrived, but that was a customary hazard. He would have plenty of privacy where he wanted to be, on the far side of the ventilator stacks. Contentedly he spread the mattress, calculating in his head how long to wait before beginning his watch. He estimated an hour, and that was close. It was sixty-six minutes before a brilliant glow bulged and dripped through the Bay Bridge parcels tube and sagged sections of it into contact with the monorail power leads.
He gave a nod of professional approval. That little lot would take all night to sort out. Not bad for amateurs, not bad at all. Though when he expanded his services to handle the requirements of partisans as well as ordinary hobby-type saboteurs, he had hoped they’d target on something more ambitious. Nuisance-value was all right in its place, but …
It wasn’t that he shared the partisans’ political convictions. He was neither a nihilist nor a little red brother, which were the two polar-opposed factions that kept them as busy quarrelling among themselves as attacking the established society around them. There was simply no other outlet for his greatest talent. The army had eptified him as a saboteur, and after the incident which bequeathed him his bad leg they had refused to re-enlist him.
What else can a hungry man do but eat the food he finds in front of him?
They hadn’t yet had the presence of mind to cut the power feeding the shorted cables on the bridge, and the display of sparks was making the struts and girders glow like the pillars of hell. Jeff Young felt the heat of the thermite bomb seem to penetrate his belly and move downwards, and with the hand not holding his binocs he began rhythmically to afford himself relief from it.
continuity (15)
DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT
Some corporations still maintained the traditional table for meetings of the board. Not GT, a modern product. The boardroom on the presidential floor of the tower was a place of soft pearly lights under an arched ceiling, punctuated by thrones consisting in a comfortable padded seat surrounded with electronic equipment. Every place had a holographic projection screen, a sound-recorder, a computer readout, and phones giving direct access to any of GT’s forty-eight subsidiary plants and better than nine hundred local offices in fifteen countries, some of them by satellite relay.
The thrones for the officers were upholstered in genuine leather, those for senior VP’s in woven fabric, and those for junior VP’s and specialist staffers called in to give advice in resilient plastic. Two extra thrones in leather had been installed today, one for Elihu Masters—one could hardly accord less to an ambassador—the other for the scarecrow-gaunt synthesist from State whom Norman had met during their preliminary discussions, Dr. Raphael Corning. It was the first time Norman had had to work in direct co-operation with a synthesist, and the man’s range of immediately available knowledge had depressed him, making him feel he had wasted the whole of his earlier life.
But that was not the only thing which was bringing him down. He felt hollow, as though he was about to crumple under intolerable strain. On all previous occasions since he was promoted to board status he had relished the fact that he was the only Afram who attended these meetings and looked forward to the day when he would inherit first a fabric-, then a leather-covered throne. Accident had kicked him ahead of his plans. The whole Beninian venture would turn on him as a pivot, regardless of what rank they officially allotted him.