The Unteleported Man Read online

  "Unnoticed by any tracking station? Out of over six thousand separate monitoring devices in orbit in the Sol system none detected the time capsule when it arrived?"

  Frowning, Freya said, "What do you mean to imply, Rachmael?"

  "The time capsule," Rachmael said, "from Whale's Mouth, the launching of which we watched years ago on TV — it wasn't detected by our tracking stations because it never arrived. And it never arrived, Miss Holm, because despite those crowd scenes it was never sent."

  "You mean what we saw on TV — "

  "The vid signal, via Telpor," Rachmael said, "which showed the happy masses at Whale's Mouth cheering at the vast public launching ceremony of the time cap­sule — were fakes. I've run and rerun recordings of them; the crowd noise is spurious." Reaching into his cloak he brought out a seven-inch reel of iron oxide Am­pex and tape; he tossed it onto her desk. "Play it back. Carefully. There were no people cheering. And for a good reason. Because no time capsule, containing quaint artifacts from the Fomalhaut ancient civiliza­tions, was launched from Whale's Mouth."

  "But — " She stared at him in disbelief, then picked up the aud tape, held the reel uncertainly. "Why?"

  "I don't know," Rachmael said. "But when the Om­phalos reaches the Fomalhaut system and Whale's Mouth and I see Newcolonizedland, I'll know." And, he thought, I don't think I'll find ten or sixty malcon­tents out of forty million... by that time, of course, it'll be something like a billion colonists. I'll find —

  He ended the thought abruptly. He did not know.

  But eventually he would know. In the little matter of eighteen years.

  2

  In the sybaritic living room of his villa, on his satellite as it orbited Terra, the owner of Lies In­corporated, Matson Glazer-Holliday, sat in his human-made dressing gown smoking a prize, rare Antonio y Cleopatra cigar and listening to the aud tape of the crowd noises.

  And, directly before him he watched the oscilloscope as it transformed the audio signal into a visual one.

  To Freya Holm he said, "Yes, there is a cycle. You can see it, even though you can't hear it. This aud track is continuous, running over and over again. Hence the man's right; it's a fake."

  "Could Rachmael ben Applebaum have — "

  "No," Matson said. "I've sequestered an aud copy from the UN info archives; it agrees. Rachmael didn't tamper with the tape; it's exactly what he claims it to be." He sat back, pondering.

  Strange, he thought, that von Einem's Telpor gadget works only one way, radiating matter out... with no return of that matter, at least by teleportation, possible. So, rather conveniently for Trails of Hoffman, all we get via Telpor as a feedback from Whale's Mouth is an electronic signal, energy alone... and this one now ex­posed as a fake; as a research agency I should have dis­covered this long ago — Rachmael, with all his creditors hounding him jet-balloonwise, keeping him awake night and day, hammering at him with countless technological assists, impeding him in the normal course of con­ducting routine business, has detected this spuriousness, and I — damn it. Matson thought, I missed, here. He felt gloomy.

  "Cutty Sark Scotch and water?" Freya asked.

  He nodded absently as Freya, who was his mistress, disappeared into the liquor antechamber of the villa to see if the 1985 bottle — worth a fortune — were empty yet.

  But, on the credit side, he had been suspicious.

  From the start he had doubted the so-called "Theorem One" of Dr. von Einem; it sounded too much like a cover, this one-way transmission by the technicians of THL's multitude of retail outlets. Write home from Whale's Mouth, son, when you get there, he thought acidly; tell your old mom how it is on the colony world with its fresh air, sunshine, all those cute little animals, those wondrous buildings THL robots are constructing... and the report-back, the letter, as elec­tronic signal, had duly arrived. But the beloved son; he could not personally, directly report. Could not return to tell his story, and, as in the ancient story of the lion's den, all the footprints of guileless creatures led in to the den, yet none led out. It was the fable all over again — with something even more sinister added. That of what appeared more and more to be a thoroughly phony trail of outgoing tracks: the electronic message-units. By someone who is versed in sophisticated hard­ware, Matson thought; someone is tinkering around, and is there any reason to look beyond the figure of Dr. Sepp von Einem himself, the inventor of the Telpor, plus Neues Einige Deutschland's very efficient techni­cians who ran Ferry's retail machinery?

  There was something he did not like about those Ger­man technicians who manned the Telpors. So businesslike. As their ancestors must have been, Matson mused. Back in the twentieth century when those ancestors, with the same affectless calm, fed bodies into ovens or living humans into ersatz shower baths which turned out to be Zyklon B hydrogen cyanide gas chambers. And financed by reputable big Third Reich business, by Herr Krupp u. Sohnen. Just as von Einem is financed by Trails of Hoffman, with its vast central offices in Grosser Berlinstadt — the new capital of New Whole Germany, the city in fact from which our distinguished UN Secretary General emanates.

  "Get me," Matson said to Freya, "instead of Scotch and water, the file on Horst Bertold."

  In the other room Freya rang up the autonomic research equipment wired into the walls of the villa... electronic hardware, minned — miniaturized — for the most part, of a data-sorting and receiving nature, plus the file-banks, and —

  Certain useful artifacts which did not involve data but which involved high-velocity A-warhead darts that, were the satellite to be attacked by any of the UN's repertory of offensive weapons, would take up the fight and abolish the missiles before they reached their target.

  At his villa on his Brocard ellipse satellite Matson was safe. And, as a precaution, he conducted as much business as possible from this spot; below, in New York City, at Lies Incorporated's offices, he always felt naked. Felt, in fact, the nearby presence of the UN and Horst Bertold's legions of "Peace Workers," those armed, gray-faced men and women who, in the name of Pax Terrae, roamed the world, even into the pathetic moonies, the sad, failure-but-still-extant early "colony" satellites which had come before von Einem's break­through and the discovery by George Hoffman of Fomalhaut IX, now called Whale's Mouth and now the colony.

  Too bad, Matson thought archly, that George Hoff­man didn't discover more planets in more star systems habitable by us, the frail needs of living, sentient, men­tating biochemical upright bipeds which we humans are.

  Hundreds and hundreds of planets, but —

  Instead, temperature which melted thermo-fuses. No air. No soil. No water.

  One could hardly say of such worlds — Venus had proved a typical example — that the "living was easy." The living, in fact, on such worlds was confined to homeostatic domes with their own at, wa, and self-regu temp.

  Housing, per dome, perhaps three hundred somatic souls. Rather a small number, considering that as of this year Terra's population stood at seven billion.

  "Here," Freya said, sliding down to seat herself, legs tucked under her, on the deep-pile wool carpet near Matson. "The file on H.B." She opened it at random; Lies Incorporated field reps had done a thorough job: many data existed here that, via the UN's carefully watchdogged info media, never had reached the public, even the so-called "critical" analysts and columnists. They could, by law, criticize to their hearts' content, the character, habits, abilities and shaving customs of Herr Bertold... except, however, the basic facts were denied them.

  Not so, however, to Lies Incorporated — an ironic sobriquet, in view of the absolutely verified nature of the data now before its owner.

  It was harsh reading. Even for him.

  The year of Horst Bertold's birth: 1964. Slightly before the Space Age had begun; like Matson Glazer-Holliday, Horst was a remnant of the old world when all that had been glimpsed in the sky were "flying saucers," a misnomer for a U.S. Air Force antimissile weapon which had, in the brief confrontation of 1992, proved ineffectu
al. Horst had been born to middle-class Berlin — West Berlin, it had then been called, because, and this was difficult to remember, Germany had in those days been divided — parents: his father had owned a meat market... rather fitting, Matson reflected, in that Horst's father had been an S.S. officer and former member of an Einsatzgruppe which had murdered thousands of innocent persons of Slavic and Jewish ancestry... although this had not interfered with Johann Bertold's meat market business in the 1960s and '70s. And then, in 1982, at the age of eighteen, young Horst himself had entered the spotlight (needless to say, the statute of limitations had run out on his father, who had never been prosecuted by the West German legal ap­paratus for his crimes of the '40s, and had, in addition, evaded the commando squads from Israel who, by 1980, had closed up shop, given up the task of tracking down the former mass murderers). Horst, in 1982, had been a leader in the Reinholt Jugend.

  Ernst Reinholt, from Hamburg, had headed a party which had striven to unify Germany once more; the deal would be that as a military and economic power she would be neutral between East and West. It had taken ten more years, but in the fracas of 1992 he had ob­tained from the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. what he wanted: a united, free Germany, called by its present name, and just chuck full of vim and Macht.

  And, under Reinholt, Neues Einige Deutschland had played dirty pool from the start. But no one was really surprised; East and West were busy erecting tents where major popcens — population centers such as Chicago and Moscow — had existed, and hoping to god that the Sino-Cuban wing of the C.P. did not, taking advantage of the situation, move in and entrench... .

  It had been the secret protocol of Reinholt and his N.W.G. that it would not be neutral after all. On the contrary.

  New Whole Germany would take out China.

  So this was the unsavory basis on which the Reich had re-obtained unity. Its Waffen technicians had devised, as instructed, weapons which had, in 1997, dealt a ter­minal punch to People's China. Matson, examining the folio, very rapidly scanned this part, because the Reich had come up with some show-stoppers, and even the abominable U.S. nerve gas had seemed like a field of daisies in comparison — he did not wish to see any men­tion of what Krupp u. Sohnen had devised as an answer to China's thousands of millions who were spilling as far west as the Volga, and toward the U.S., were cross­ing from Siberia — taken in 1993 — into Alaska. In any case the compact had been agreed on, and even Faust would have blanched at it; now the world had no People's China but a New Whole Germany to contend with.

  And what a quid pro quo that had proved to be. Because, correctly and legally, Neues Einige Deutsch­land had obtained control of the sole planet-wide and hence Sol system-wide governing structure, the UN. They held it now. And the former member of the Reinholt Jugend, Horst Bertold, was its Secretary General. And had faced squarely, as he had promised when cam­paigning for election — it had become, by 1995, an elec­tive office — that he would deal with the colonization problem; he would find a Final Solution to the tor­mented condition that (one) Terra was as overpopulated throughout as Japan had been in 1970 and (two) both the alternate planets of the Sol system and the moonies and the domes et al. had failed wretchedly.

  Horst had found, via Dr. von Einem's Telpor telepor­tation construct, a habitable planet in a star system too far from Sol to be reached by the quondam drayage en­terprise of Maury Applebaum. Whale's Mouth, and the Telpor mechanisms at Trails of Hoffman's retail out­lets, were the answer.

  To all appearances it was duck soup, feathers, scut included. But —

  "See?" Matson said to Freya. "Here's the written transcript of Horst Bertold's speech before he was elected and before von Einem showed up with the Telpor gadget. The promise was made before teleporta­tion to the Fomalhaut system was technologically possi­ble — in fact, before the existence of Fomalhaut was even known to unmanned elderly relay-monitors."

  "So?"

  Matson said grimly, "So our UN Secretary General had a mandate before he had a solution. And to the German mind that means one thing and one thing only. The cat and rat farm solution." Or, as he now suspected, the dog-food factory solution.

  It had been suggested, ironically, in imitation of Swift, by a fiction writer of the 1950s, that the "Negro Question" in the U.S. be solved by the building of giant factories which made Negroes into canned dog food. Satire, of course, like Swift's A Modest Proposal, that the problem of starvation among the Irish be solved by the eating of the children... Swift himself lamenting, as a final irony, that he had no children of his own to of­fer to the market for consumption. Grisly. But —

  This all pointed to the seriousness — not merely of the problem of overpopulation and insufficient food pro­duction — but to the insane, schizoid solutions seriously being considered. The brief World War Three — never officially called that; called instead, a Pacifying Action, just as the Korean War had been a "Police Action" — had taken care of a few millions of people, but — not quite enough. As a solution it had worked to a partial extent; and was, in many influential quarters, viewed exactly as that: as a partial solution. Not as a catas­trophe but as a half-answer.

  And Horst Bertold had promised the balance of the answer.

  Whale's Mouth was it.

  "So in my opinion," Matson murmured, to himself mostly, "I've always been suspicious of Whale's Mouth. If I hadn't read Swift and C. Wright Mills and the Herman Kahn Report for Rand Corporation..." He glanced at Freya. "There have," he said, "always been people who would solve the problem that way." And I think, he thought, as he listened to the aud tape of the crowd noises, a tape which pretended to consist of a transcript from the launching, at Whale's Mouth, of the ritualistic, celebration-inspired time capsule back through hyper-space — or in some such ultra high velocity fashion — to Terra, that we have those people and that solution with us again.

  We have, in other words, UN Secretary General Horst Bertold and Trails of Hoffman Limited and its economic multi-pseudopodia empire. And dear Dr. Sepp von Einem and his many Telpor outlets, his curiously one-way teleporting machine.

  "That land," Matson murmured, vaguely quoting, lord knew who, what sage of the past, "which all of us must visit one day... that land beyond the grave. But no one had returned to report on't. And until they do — "

  Freya said perceptively, "Until they do, you're going to stay suspicious. Of the whole Newcolonizedland set­tlement. Aud and vid signals are not good enough to convince you — because you know how easily they can be faked." She gestured at the deck running the tape at this very moment.

  "A client," Matson corrected her. "Who on a non­verbal level, what our Reich friends call thinking with the blood, suspects that if he takes his one remaining inter-stellar worthy flagship, the — " What was it called? "The Navel," he said. "The Omphalos; that's what that lofty Greek word means, by the way. Takes the Navel direct to Fomalhaut, that after eighteen years of weary deep-sleep which is not quite sleep, more a hypo­nagogic, restless tossing and turning at low temp, slowed-down metabolism, he will arrive at Whale's Mouth, and oddly it will not be beer and skittles. It will not be happy conapt dwellers, smiling children in auto­nomic schools, tame, exotic, native life forms. But — "

  But just what would he find?

  If, as he suspected, the aud and vid tracks passing from Whale's Mouth to Terra via von Einem's Telpor mechanisms were covers — what really lay beneath?

  He simply could not guess, not when forty million people were involved. The dog-food factory? Are, god forbid, those forty million men, women and children dead? Is it a boneyard, with no one there, no one even to extract the gold from their teeth — because now we use stainless steel?

  He did not know, but — someone knew. Perhaps en­tire New Whole Germany, which, having cornered the lion's share of power in the UN, hence ruled throughout the nine planets of the Sol system; perhaps as a totality it, on a subrational, instinctive level, knew. As, in the 1940s, it had intuited the existence of the gas chambers beyond the cages
of twittering birds and those high walls that kept out all sight and sound... and except for that oddly acrid smoke from chimneys all day long —

  "They know," Matson said aloud. Horst Bertold knew, and so did Theodoric Ferry, the owner of THL, and so did doddering but still crafty old Dr. von Einem. And the one hundred and thirty-five million inhabitants of Neues Einige Deutschland, to some degree; not ver­bally — you couldn't put an expert psych rep of Lies In­corporated in a small room with a Munich cobbler, run a few routine drug-injections, make the standard quasi-Psionic transcripts, EEGs of his para-psychological reactions, and learn, know, the literal, exact truth.

  The whole matter was, damn it, still obscured. And this time it was not cages of twittering birds or shower baths but something else — something, however, equally effective. Trails of Hoffman published 3-D, multi­color, brilliantly artistic, exciting brochures displaying the ecstatic life beyond the Telpor nexus; the TV ran ceaseless, drive-you-mad ads all day and night, of the underpopulated veldt landscape of Whale's Mouth, the balmy climate (via olfactory track), the warm the-answer-is-yes two-moon-filled nights... it was a land of romance, freedom, experimentation, kibbutzim with­out the desert: cooperative living where oranges grew naturally, and as large as grapefruits, which themselves resembled melons or the breasts of the women there. But.

  Matson decided carefully, "I am sending a veteran field rep across, via normal Telpor, posing as an un­married businessman who hopes to open a watch repair retail shop at Whale's Mouth. He will have grafted sub-derm a high-gain transmitter; it will — "

  "I know," Freya said patiently; this was evening and she obviously wished for a relaxation of the grim reality of their mutual business. "It will regularly release a signal at ultra-high frequency on a none-used band, which will ultimately be picked up here. But that'll take weeks."

  "Okay." He had it now. The Lies Incorporated field rep would send back a letter, via Telpor, in the cus­tomary manner encoded. It was that simple. If the letter arrived: fine. If not —