Manalone (4 page)

‘And that’s why you get on so much better with machines, Manalone. They don’t confuse belief with knowledge. Let’s face it, you can’t bear unsupported viewpoints. They rob you of all the best lines in an argument. Only in this case… San claims to have seen the figures … and you haven’t. So who’s become unsupported now?’

Thinking about it, Manalone realized that he never had seen any figures for mortality in pregnancy. He had merely presumed a parallel from what he knew of the achievements in other fields of medical science. A fiftieth of one percent he would have believed; half of one percent would have been difficult to swallow – but five percent would be an impossibility.

‘It is an impossibility, isn’t it, Manalone? You’re having quite a night for impossibilities. First a film that couldn’t be made, and now a statistic that’s two orders of magnitude too high. One impossibility means you don’t have sufficient data … two impossibilities usually means that somebody doesn’t want you to have sufficient data. Now I wonder who that somebody could be… and whether he has some agents… who follow you around in the dark? And exactly what it could be he’s so anxious you shouldn’t have data about?’

Re-examined in
the light of morning, his suppositions of the previous night seemed slightly absurd. No matter how carefully he looked, there was no trace of an agent watching the house, nor did he expect to find any. Equally, the problems the night had raised no longer seemed insurmountable. By the time the contract autram arrived to take him to work, Manalone felt reasonably confident that he had found nothing which would not yield to a little patient probing.

Automated Mills Consolidated formed a major part of the giant Bersted industrial complex, and was certainly a major financial supporter of an area otherwise classified as distressed. In Automated Mills, Manalone held a key position. As Senior Technologist he had personally designed and been responsible for most of the installation, and his philosophy of painstaking attention to detail was reflected in every facet of the Company’s operations. Had he been ambitious, Manalone could probably have gained managerial control of the plant. However, his horror of being overwhelmed by what he regarded as administrative trivia led him to concentrate his talents on the purely technical aspects of the venture, whilst Adam Vickers had gained overall control as Comptroller. This was a situation which Manalone accepted quite happily, even if Sandra did not.

As he entered the computer block, Manalone could hear the autophone shrilling in his office, but so many people appeared with minor queries for him to answer as he traversed the polished corridor that by the time he had reached the autophone the caller had rescinded. All that remained was the instrument’s log which displayed the caller’s code. Manalone regarded the instrument with disfavour, and keyed it to remember the number for later use. He had enough trouble establishing contact with people directly, without the hindrance of the faceless, pulse-code-modulated and usually distorted autophone.

His first
and most immediate job of the day was to check the on-line processing computer’s returns for evidence of long-term drift of critical parameters. This was something which Manalone was uniquely qualified to do, since he had an implicit understanding of both the computer’s blind logic and the complex processes being controlled. There was an inevitable gap between the logical control function and faultless machine performance, and this gap he filled competently from the wide range of his knowledge and experience.

He was barely halfway through dictating his notes on the range of minor adjustments to be made, when Vickers’ secretary came into the office. Maurine van Holt and Manalone had maintained a fragile and slightly antagonistic relationship for several guarded years. Her twisted, almost sardonic grin, and her discomforting comprehension of the private workings of his mind, were two of the very few aspects of personal relationships which ever got very far through Manalone’s defences. To Manalone, she was a character very much larger than life, and he was usually both annoyed and slightly flattered by her determined ability to get through to the person underneath his skin.

‘And what’s our tame genius found to worry about this morning?’ Her voice was richer and had a greater range of nuance and inflection than any other voice Manalone had ever heard. Her words and the range of meanings behind them were hardly ever in complete coincidence.

‘Leave me alone, will you, Mau. I’ve a pile of work to get through.’

‘Uh! So it’s going to be another of those mornings, is it?’ She dropped into the chair near his desk and fixed him with her peculiarly penetrating gaze which she knew he found impossible to ignore.

‘I’ll have to see Vickers later, Mau – about Mrs Hiller. Five times I’ve asked her to re-programme the iso-potentials on the pH monitoring loop, and she still isn’t allowing for electrode drift. Either we get ourselves a new programmer or we get a new set of instruments.’

‘What’s worrying you, Manalone?’

‘I just told you. Now if you’d…’

‘You haven’t told me a damn thing. I mean, what’s
really
worrying you? You’re up against something big.’

‘Just another
brush with San, I guess.’

‘I said big, Manalone. The way Sandra affects you, you wouldn’t even notice if she got up and quit. But sure as hell something’s got into you this morning.’

‘Nothing that need concern you, Mau.’

‘Isn’t it? If something eats you, then Adam Vickers is likely to fall, because he hasn’t a ghost of a chance of holding the Mills together by himself. And if he falls, then I’m out of a job. With the national unemployment figure topping fifty-three percent, that’s not a prospect I welcome very much. You might say I’ve a vested interest in your welfare.’

‘Leave it alone, Mau. It’s not the sort of problem that bites.’

‘Well, it’s not another woman, that’s for sure!’

An unexplored item on one of the returns caught Manalone’s eye and he pulled it towards him, the better to examine the detail. Maurine van Holt continued to watch him as he immediately became absorbed by the new problem. Her wry, twisted grin spoke volumes, every page culled from a separate level of her complex personality.

‘I had the feeling this was going to be another of those mornings,’ she said, as she quietly left him to his work.

Manalone, however, was more aware of her leaving than she would have believed. He had become conscious this time, as never before, that she was deliberately trying to draw information out of him. Usually he felt flattered by her interest, and opened up about his worries. Had it not been for the incident of the police agent, he would probably have told her about the unreal photo-play. She, more than anyone else he knew, would have appreciated his interest in it, even if she could not comprehend the magnitude of the problem. Now, with the memory of the police tail still fresh in his mind, her probing seemed to him to be suddenly attached to his collection of impossibilities, though he could find no logic to justify the adhesion.

As soon as work permitted, he went into the computer laboratory, and there began to set up a programme which included the time and distance sequences he had culled from the film. As he already knew, the answers made no sense. With trained intuition, he inverted the problem, and made the computer derive a set of physical constants for a theoretical reality which would be consistent with the effects as observed. When the answers came he sat and stared at the tabulated sheets for a long time before he noticed that his hands were shaking.

‘Steady,
Manalone! It doesn’t really mean what it seems to say. It’s just that you didn’t have sufficient data to work from.’

The reference to data took him back to his thoughts during the night, and he reached for the access code-list of the statistics and critical tables which were held for interrogation in the National Archive Computer. The Automated Mills computing complex had on-line access to the National Archive, and Manalone frequently used computer interrogation when verifying critical parameters.

As he began to set up the access code, a sudden caution stayed his hand. After a moment’s thought he brought in the fast camera he used for recording transient phenomena. He coded the health statistic he wished to receive, started the interrogation, then immediately ran in a second code which differed from the first only by one figure in the sequence. The screen lit for a mere fraction of a second before the correction was established, and then steadied on the second code which gave him the detailed structure and properties of isophorone diamine. The event would be read by the archive computer as a normal miscode, and only the second charge would be registered. Nevertheless, his camera now carried a record of the fleeting image of the few frames which had been replaced.

He set the camera on auto-develop, recovered the processed film, and ran it straight into the reader. The first six hundred frames were blank, and then a single frame displayed the current statistics for mortality during childbearing. Manalone froze as he read the impossible figure of five hundred and seven deaths per ten thousand cases sampled.

‘Five percent plus! Two orders of magnitude too high – and you owe Sandra an apology. But it’s still an impossibility. No society would tolerate that loss of life.’

The next frame completed the shock. It stated flatly:

RESTRICTED INFORMATION
NOT AVAILABLE TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC

Manalone guessed
what had happened. The archive computer carried the full report, but its interrogation was programmed to activate a censor circuit. Only by using a fast camera had he accidentally picked up the information before the censor could trigger. The censor, of course, was designed to release the information to selected interrogators.

‘Which is very odd, Manalone. Because what could be so damaging about a generalized health statistic … that the government need to invoke a legal Act of Censorship? One impossibility means you don’t have sufficient data… two impossibilities usually means that somebody doesn’t want you to have sufficient data. And when that somebody has the power to invoke an Act of Censorship it raises a unique question … just what have you got yourself into, Manalone?’

Fully alert now, Manalone cleared the memory from all the computer circuits he had been using, and dropped the camera film into the destructor. Then he went back to his office, lost in thought. A single point of light on the autophone store reminded him that he still had not responded to a call. He keyed the instrument to contact the caller, and picked up the hand set. A recorded voice informed him that Paul Raper was already on his way.

Until supper
was finished, Paul Raper had concentrated his attention on maintaining a guarded truce with Sandra, whose dislike of the reporter was patently obvious. The feeling was mutual. Raper was a product of his time, a creature of the assertive buoyancy which the more mature tended to inherit from the Breve. He was not normally given to modulating his character to accommodate a woman he openly disliked. He had kept the peace purely out of consideration for Manalone. Even without Sandra’s presence, though, it was easy to see that something was worrying him.

‘What’s on your mind, Paul?’ asked Manalone at last.

‘I wish to hell I knew what to call it. In fact I’m hoping you’re going to be able to name it for me. You saw the film?’

‘Last night.’

‘I tried to warn you not to go, but unfortunately you’d already left. I had the word that the police were watching the place.’

Manalone nodded and recounted the details of the previous evening, including the interlude with the Breve and the police agent who had followed him.

‘I was afraid of that,’ said Raper. ‘I had a similar experience myself. At first I thought it was imagination – but it isn’t. Any ideas yet as to what was wrong with that film?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Manalone. ‘It was simply a badly made film which apparently used a set of physical postulates which were almost, but not quite, real. I don’t suppose ninety-nine percent of the audience even noticed anything wrong. But it’s an interesting speculation as to how or where that film was made.’

Sandra wandered close, and Raper held his tongue until she was again out of earshot. When he did continue, his voice was hushed and taut.

‘I haven’t told you this before, Manalone, because I didn’t want you to get involved – but that film was only one item out of an increasing collection of things which don’t make sense these day.’

‘Like a
five percent mortality of mothers in pregnancy?’ asked Manalone quietly.

Raper was visibly surprised. ‘I don’t know where the hell you got that piece of information, but you’re perfectly right. And I could cite you half a hundred similar items. What we’re accustomed to accept as reality breaks down as soon as you scratch too deeply beneath the surface.’

Manalone sat silently for a while, trying to wrestle with the implications of what Raper had said. ‘If you think that,’ he said finally, ‘why haven’t you mentioned it to me before?’

‘Firstly, you wouldn’t have believed me without first-hand experience. Secondly, as I said just now, I tried to avoid you getting involved. I thought the film was safe, but I was wrong.’

‘Involved with whom?’

‘With the police.’

‘But why the hell …?’

‘Manalone, I don’t know why the police are interested. I only know they are.’

‘Let’s get back to square one,’ said Manalone decisively. ‘This isn’t making much sense to me so far. Are you trying to tell me that you’ve unearthed a range of subjects which raise similar problems to the ones we’ve mentioned?’

‘More than that. I’m also trying to put it to you that every time I’ve tried to investigate any of these particular subjects I’ve always run up against the MIPS.’

‘The MIPS? Who are they?’

‘You aren’t going to like this, Manalone. They’re special operatives of the Ministry of Information and Public Security. In short – political secret police.’