Planet in Peril
Authors: John Christopher
WAS SHE REAL?
Charles looked down at the unconscious girl. The girl who’d worked with him, loved him. He turned to the other man.
“What have you done to Sara, Hiram? What’s this all about?”
From his pocket, Hiram
Dinkuhl
took a small knife; he flipped the catch and the sapphire blade leaped out. Charles watched in fascination as the other man bent down toward the unconscious face. Charles heard himself saying: “Stop. . . !”
With a deft motion,
Dinkuhl
sliced into the flesh at the base of the girl’s forehead. He held up the strip he had cut away. There was no bleeding from the incision. The cut laid bare not flesh but plastic.
Now, beyond any doubt, Charles knew he had been loving a mask…
JOHN CHRISTOPHER
PLANET IN PERIL
Copyright © 195
9
by
John Christopher
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author
’s
imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Planet in Peril
I
After he had put
the remains of the meal down the chute and snapped the table back into the wall, Charles
Grayner
slumped automatically in his fireside chair and his eyes, as automatically, went to the flickering
telescreen
. He cut the whole thing off when he left the house in the morning, but the daily help put it on again. He knew her viewing habits by now; she alternated between three channels—Red League, Honey, and
Cosy
Bright. The singer,
Loulou
del Keith, was a
Cosy
Bright exclusive. His hand dropped to the control panel. He checked himself for a moment and then pressed the ninth button decisively.
Sight and sound went, and were replaced by a Mozart string quartet. On the screen was the El Greco “Cleansing of the Temple.”
Dinkuhl
had used that juxtaposition before—twice at least. Charles felt a mild irritation; he had been one of those who had protested against this business of deliberately associating musical works and paintings.
The quartet ended, on a flat note.
Dinkuhl’s
face came through, characteristically smiling, half mocking, half enraged.
“This,”
Dinkuhl
said, “is Channel KF.” His voice was soft but flexible; it could resonate into anger. “I propose to save a lot of people a lot of money. Well, when I say a
lot
of people—” He shrugged. “I've hired a boy to go through my
stenoflips
for me. He has instructions to destroy any one that tells me I have to stop linking Mozart and El Greco, or Haydn and Rubens, or Beethoven and Rembrandt So save yourself a couple of quarters.”
He paused. “Do you object that you would prefer to see the musicians, in all their ugliness, in all their squalor? In that case I recommend that you go right out and see them—in the flesh, my friends, in the disillusioning flesh. Few of you will have to travel more than five hundred miles to find a concert hall. But this is TV, and there is only one Channel KF, and I shall continue to kill two birds with one stone. Some of you, at least, must be tone deaf.”
Dinkuhl
backed away from the camera, turned his back on it, and rooted around in a corner of the studio. Then he came back to face the camera. “Now I remember,” he said. “I fixed it all up before. Ladies and gentlemen, the KF newsreel!”
The music was a neat parody of the signature tune for the Red League newsreel, in a minor key, mocking. The screen showed the night sky, caught the Moon, and dissolved into a familiar moonscape—the view from the
Tycho
observatory.
“Out there,”
Dinkuhl
said, “along with mystery, there is beauty. Let us look not at a new planet but at the
—the
—new comet.”
The screen was patterned with brilliant stars; the bright smudge of the comet was central, beneath Jupiter.
“More than two thousand years ago this great comet last swept in its parabola round the sun. While eighty generations of men have come and gone, while the human race has climbed so painfully to its
present eminence, that majestic luminary has been plodding round a course trillions of miles away in the outer dark.”
The camera came back to
Dinkuhl’s
own face. He lowered his head so that light gleamed from the bald patch at the crown, and smiled up from under bushy eyebrows.
“I suggest you get up out of that goddam chair, and go outside and have a look for yourself. Channel KF proposes to help you on your way by closing down for half an hour. We are going out on the roof to have a look at the comet
ourselves
. Good-bye.”
The screen went blank. Charles got up, found his field-glasses and went out into the night air, damp and a little frosty.
He made his way down the path to the point, beyond the arbor, where his view of the sky would be uninterrupted. He raised his glasses and found the comet. He looked at it until his arm began to ache and his hand shook the glasses. Nothing much—a smear of whiteness, with one of the planet's moons set in it like a pearl.
He was preparing to go back to the house when he heard the loud ring of the call amplifier; automatically he quickened his step and then, deliberately, slowed again. He pressed the door open, and cut the amplifier out. The din dropped to the usual persistent buzz.
In the lounge, he pressed the button for the information panel on the
callscreen
. The letters sprang into being at the left-hand side, ran across, and jerked back again, in a never-ending series:
GRAYNER FROM LEDBETTER—UC DIV HQ DETROIT—URGENT URGENT—PERSONAL—GRAYNER FROM LEDBETTER—
Ledbetter. He wasted no time in putting the
callscreen
on reply circuit. While his Accept call was going out he pulled a chair over and sat down. He tried to be at ease, reminding himself that at thirty-eight he was past the stage of being upset by unexpected calls from HQ. At least, he should be.
It was not Ledbetter, of course, who took the call. A young man, with a sleek look and the little
rubylite
badges on his lapels, spelling out United Chemicals, smiled.
“
Grayner
?” he said. "We haven't met, have we? I'm Official
Paulton
.”
“Glad to know you,” Charles said evenly.
“Manager Ledbetter wants to see you; he asked me to fix an appointment. Can you get here in the morning?”
“All right.”
“Ten hundred. Look me up first. My room is F 73. You know your way around the place, I take it?”
“I’ve been there before.”
“See you then.”
Paulton
let his smile fade into a look of sober concentration, and then switched off. The
callscreen
blanked. Charles sat where he was for several minutes. The first thing he told himself was that there was no point at all in trying to work out possible reasons for the call to see Ledbetter. From that stage, nevertheless, he went on to do precisely that.
His niche in the Saginaw laboratories was a small but apparently secure one. If this were a demotion—a removal back, perhaps, to the general lab—it was difficult to see why he should be called
urgently in to Detroit to be informed of it. That was a routine matter and would be dealt with through routine channels. It would not need an interview with Ledbetter to confirm it.
The same argument applied to the suggestion that there might be a promotion for him. There could be no justification. Sixteen years’ research in the radioactive properties of diamonds had not, he knew, fitted him for the control of any larger project. One assistant and two lab boys. After sixteen years you could do that, and that was all you could do.
That left him up in the air. No demotion, no promotion-then why the call to Detroit?
At precisely ten hundred the following morning
Paulton
looked puzzled when he saw Charles’ face. Charles was standing in the corridor outside room 73 on F floor and the small inset
callscreen
transmitted his features to the panel on the wall facing
Paulton’s
desk. Then
Paulton’s
face cleared.
“
Grayner
, of course! Come on in.”
The door beside him slid open, and closed after him as he went through.
Paulton
had genuine interest and recollection on his face when they met in the flesh. His control, Charles reflected, was admirable; many would have overdone the forgetfulness. He shook hands with a warm grip. Ledbetter’s rooms, of course, were on B.
Paulton
led him through to the room marked
Manager
G. D.
Ledbetter
, and whistled at the door. It opened, and they went in. Ledbetter was talking into a
dictaphone
. He looked up grimly as they entered, but went on to finish the
stenoflip
he was engaged on. Then he said to
Paulton
:
“I propose to have the sound-key changed on that door. When I do I shall make a point of not letting you in on the new one. Who’s this?”
“
Grayner
,”
Paulton
said. “It won’t make a lot of difference—about the door.
Grayner
. You told me to get him here to see you.”
Ledbetter said: “Yes, of course. All right, you can go, Harry. Next time you come in, use the
callscreen
.”
Paulton
, retreating, said: “
I’ll
try to remember.” Charles had been studying Ledbetter. He had seen him on newsreels and in the UC
telezine
, but those had been formal occasions. Now he was entirely friendly and relaxed. He had got his
managership
young and his present seniority had been reached in a vault over several more likely shoulders. He said to Charles: “You’ll be wondering why I’ve got you to come along here.”
Charles said: “Well, naturally. And the notice was rather short.”
Ledbetter nodded. “The reason I wanted to see you is that I am in the middle of the usual thing that new Area Managers go in for. I’m having a reorganization.” He looked directly at Charles. “You will have noticed some of the earlier changes in your own plant?”
Charles nodded. “I’d hoped maybe I was in too small a niche to be noticed.”
From one of the drawers in his desk Ledbetter produced a microfilm capsule and clipped it into the projector. The
telescreen
on the wall lit up and displayed what was immediately recognizable as one of Charles’ own recent reports—
The effect of zeta irradiation on the photoelectric properties of a type II diamond (Cape white).
“You write a very fair report
.
But you’re not ambitious?”
“You have my
psychoplan
.”
Ledbetter smiled. “Frankly, an error was made in your case. You aren’t really the dead-end type.”
“You didn’t call me in simply to offer condolences— official or otherwise?”
Ledbetter said: “Now, let’s get it straight and lay it on the table. Alpha—I’m in a mood for change. Beta—you should never have been tossed into that lab in the first place. Gamma’s the rub. Gamma—you’ve spent sixteen years messing around with radio-active diamonds. That restricts the possibilities of what we can do with you to a somewhat startling extent.”
Charles said: “Very interesting. Delta?”
“Coincidence,” said Ledbetter, “rears its ungainly but attractive head. There’s a little place going at a spot called San Miguel. South of San Diego. Area HQ is at Los Angeles—a guy called
Mettrill
. You’ll like him. And you will be picking up some interesting threads. This for
instance
.”