“If you see this man, you are to follow him, dictograph him completely—completely, do you understand?—and not lose sight of him unless you are relieved by at least ten other Watchers. Is that clear?”
Again he did not wait for an answer, but snapped his fingers casually, indicating the daily briefing was over.
Themus rose with the other thirty-eight Watchers and began to leave the room. There was a uniform look on all their faces; they all had the picture of Elix behind their eyes. Themus began to edge out of his row. He started when Furth called to him.
“Oh, Watcher Themus, I’d like a word with you.”
Furth was a strange man, in many ways. He did not fit Themus’s picture of a Superior, from previous experience with them, and, still bewildered by the abrupt fate assigned Elix, he found himself looking on his Superior with a mixture of awe, incredulity, hatred and fear.
“I hope the—uh—little lesson you saw today will not upset you. It was a harsh measure, to be sure, but it was the only way to get the point across.”
Themus knew precisely what the Superior Watcher meant, for he had been taught from youth that this was the way matters should be handled. He also knew what he felt, but he was Kyben, and Kyben know their place.
Furth looked at him for a long moment, then pulled the black sheen that was his cloak closer about him. “I have you slated for big things here, Themus. We will have a post open for a new Junior Watcher in another six to eight months, and your record indicates you’re a strong possibility.”
Themus was shocked at the familiarity in both conversation protocol and exposition of Corps business, but he kept the astonishment from showing on his face.
“So I want you to keep an eye open here in Valasah,” continued Furth. “There are a number of—well—irregularities we want to put a stop to.”
“What sort of irregularities, Superior?” The Superior’s familiarities had caused a corresponding ease to settle over the Underclassman.
“For one, this fraternization—oh, strictly on an ‘occupying troops’ level, to be sure, but still a deviation from the norm—and another is that we’ve had a number of men leave the Corps.”
“You mean sent home or—like Watcher Elix?”
The Superior squirmed visibly. “Well, no, not exactly. What I mean is, they’ve—you might say disappeared.”
Themus’s eyes opened wider in surprise. “Disappeared? That indicates free choice.”
The roles of Superior and Underclassman seemed for the moment to have been transposed, as Furth tried to explain to the new Watcher. “They’ve just gone. That’s all. We can’t find any trace of them. We suspect the Crackpots have been up to tricks more annoying than usual.”
He suddenly stopped, realizing he had lowered himself by explaining to a lesser, and drew himself erect.
“But then, there’s always been a certain percentage of loss here. Unusual, but not too unusual. This is a mad world, don’t forget.”
Themus nodded.
“But then, to compensate, there are a certain number of Crackpots who want to leave their insane people, also. We take off a good three hundred every year; people with the proper Kyben mind, the kind who can snap into a problem and solve it in no time. Good, logical thinkers. The administrative type. You know.”
“I see, sir,” said Themus, not at all understanding.
He was becoming more and more lost in trying to fathom his Superior.
The elder Watcher seemed to sense a change in the Underclassman’s attitude, for once again he became brusque, realizing he had overstepped himself.
“Well, accurate snooping, to you. Good rounds!”
Themus snapped a brisk salute at the Superior and left quickly.
His beat that day was the Seventh Sector, a twelve-block coverage with five fellow Watchers, their rounds overlapping. It was a route from the docks to the minaret-village. From the stock-pens near the Golwal Institute to the pueblo-city.
Valasah, like all cities on Kyba, was a wild mélange of disorder. Airy, fragile towers of transparent plastic rose spiraling next to squat quonsetbuildings. Teepees hunkered down next to buildings, of multi-dimensional eccentricity, whose arms twisted in on themselves till the eye lost the track of their form.
Streets twisted and suddenly opened onto others. Many stopped dead as though their builders had tired of the effort of continuing. Large empty lots stood next to stores in which customers fought to get at the merchandise.
The people strutted, capered, hobbled, marched and walked backward on both hands and feet through the streets, in the stores, across the tops of a hundred different styles of transportation.
Themus snapped his dictobox on and spoke, “Record,” into it. Then he walked slowly down one street, up the next, into an office building, through doors, past knots of people, dictating anything and everything. Occasionally he would see a fellow Watcher and they would exchange salutes, eyes never leaving their wards.
The Crackpots seemed oblivious to his presence. No conversation would slow or halt at his approach, no one would move from his path, all seemed to accept him somehow.
This bothered Themus.
Why aren’t they angry at our eavesdropping? he wondered. Why do they tolerate us so? Is it fear of the Kyben might? But they are Kyben, too. They call us Stuffed-Shirts, but they are still Kyben. Or were once. What happened to the Kyben might that was born into each of them?
His thoughts were cut off by the sight of an old woman, skin almost yellow-white from age, rapidly wielding a three-pronged pickaxe at the cement of a gutter. He stopped, began dictating, and watched as she broke through the street, pulling out huge gouts of cement-work and dirt from underneath. In a moment she was down on hands and knees, feverishly digging with her gnarled old hands at the dirt.
After thirty-nine minutes, her hands were raw and bleeding, the hole was quite four feet deep, and she kneeled in it, dirt arcing away into the air.
The fifty-minute mark brought her to a halt. She climbed laboriously out of the six-foot hole, grabbed the pickaxe and leaped back in. Themus moved nearer the edge. She was hacking away madly at a sewer pipe some three feet thick.
In a few moments she had driven a gaping hole in the side of the pipe. She reached into her bodice and brought out a piece of what looked like dirty oilcloth, strung with wires.
Themus was astounded to see both clear water and garbage running out of the pipe. Both were running together. No, they looked as though they were running together, but the flow of clean water came spurting out in one direction, while the muck and garbage sprayed forth from the opposite direction. They were running in opposite directions in the same pipe!
She clamped the oilcloth onto the pipe, immediately stopping the escape of the water and refuse, and began filling the hole in. Themus watched her till the hole was neatly packed in, only slightly lower than the street level. She had thrown dirt haphazardly in all directions, and some of it was still evident on car tops and in doorways.
His curiosity could be contained no longer.
He walked over to the old woman, who was slapping dirt off her polka-dotted dress. Blood from her raw hands spotted the garment. “Excuse me—” he began.
The old woman’s face suddenly assumed “Oh no, here they are again!” as its message in life.
“Garbage runs with the drinking water?” He asked the question tremulously, thinking of all the water he had drunk since his arrival, of the number of deaths from botulism and ptomaine poisoning, of the madness of these people.