John Brunner Read online

  She nodded very slowly. This was a comforting conclusion to have reached, and it would be best to cling to it as long as she could. Kynance Foy, with Earthside college degrees in qua-space physics and interstellar commerce, not to mention her earlier study of business law and practical engineering, was a very different proposition from some neurotic Neferti-tian precariously poised between nonconformity and psychotherapy.

  Just as she had brought a load of trammeling mental baggage with her from Earth, in the shape of her preconceptions about the force of law and the way society ought to operate, so too the Zygra Company—including the computers which made the ultimate decisions—would predicate its future plans on a set of vulnerable axioms.

  Hadn't Shuster blanched when he'd learned that she had studied law? Why, if not because the company he worked for were flying a perilously tight orbit?

  "Studholme and Zacharias versus the Perseus Asteroid Mining Company, 2011," she murmured aloud. "A contract entered into by one of the parties with intent to deceive or defraud is not a valid contract."

  How far did the term "intent to deceive or defraud" extend? Did it include the setting of traps to make the victim break the conditions of employment, or was that covered by the "caveat signator" ruling in Biicher versus the Ngat Yu Rare Earths Combine, 2066? Not likely; the latter case concerned the supply of goods, not payment of salary or exercise of an employee's contractual benefits.

  Chin in hand, staring at nothing, she concentrated on what she remembered of the great trail-blazing precedents with a ferocity her college instructors would have applauded— though they might have been astonished. Gubbins and Kino-shita versus the Loki Rhodium Monopoly, 2012: "A company in law is a corporate counterpart of the individual; hence an individual and a company enter into a contract with equal standing before the law"—not very helpful, since most subsequent judges had tended to be influenced by the fact that Judge Petropavlov had been institutionalized three weeks later for senile dementia ....

  What a flimsy house-of-cards-like structure the law was, when you examined it in this state of mind! How many people's lives—and deaths, she reminded herself with a shudder-had been affected by what a judge had had for breakfast!

  She rose determinedly to her feet. She knew, or at any rate she could reasonably believe, that from now until the harvesting ship returned to Zygra every moment of the day and night she would be watched by recorders in some form or another, so that government computers on Nefertiti could be assured of the legality of this operation. What could she say or do to make certain the computers cited this moment, now, to bring to the attention of the government's human officials?

  She took a deep breath and addressed the air.

  "My name is Kynance Foy." She added the date and time. "I have been engaged in the capacity of supervisor here by the Zygra Company. As a result of certain remarks made to me by Executive Shuster of that company, I believe that an attempt will be made to infringe the spirit of the contract of employment I have entered into. I adduce as circumstantial evidence the admitted fact that none of my nine immediate predecessors has managed to complete his year of duty and collect his salary. Compare Studholme and Zacharias versus the Perseus Asteroid Mining Company, 2011—1 think," she concluded on a more doubtful note.

  Merely saying it made her feel immensely better at once. Let the Zygra Company beware—Kynance Foy, armed with her Earthside non-specialist education, was a different proposition from some neurotic Nefertitian! (But better not say that aloud, for fear it might offend officials of that planet's government.)

  If she could leave nothing else behind her—if they did in fact murder her—at least she might be remembered as a legal precedent. Humming, sustained by that vicarious form of immortality, she began to survey the surroundings in which she found herself.

  IX

  LOGICALLY, the first thing to do was to count the jaws of the trap. She already had her mental list of obvious pitfalls; now she turned it into a written catalogue, which grew with dismaying speed as she surveyed her surroundings.

  They were taking no chances, for instance, with injury or sickness. She had never seen the threshold of an automatic medicare cabinet set so low. If she so much as slept the clock around, she would waken to find a snuffling servo making metabolic checks beside the bed, and behind it, alert for the trigger-signal, the prosthetics responsible for the fiction of "live human occupancy" and hence continued ownership of the planet.

  Just a second, though. She narrowed her eyes as something half-shadowed at the base of the medicare master unit caught her attention. Even someone seriously enough injured to require hundred percent life-support of the quality available here was entitled to compulsory repatriation—Abdul Gamaliel Higgins versus the Systemwide Communications Company, 2018: "An individual legally alive in respect of the Celestial Bodies Occupancy Act is legally alive in respect of any other contract or obligation whatsover." That had been an interesting case—the only one on the galactic statute book where the proxies who had fought the case had been held unable to benefit from the success of it.

  In short: you cant have it both ways.

  But the Zygra Company seemed determined to do so. There was something at the very back of this medicare unit which she didn't think belonged. Cautiously she fetched a circuit-tracer and began to work out what it was. Before touching anything, of course, she spoke to the impersonal recorders monitoring her every movement.

  "I suspect a malfunction in part of the automatic equipment and propose to verify the suspicion. 'Inspection for the purpose of verification or repair of non-manually operated equipment does not constitute sabotage'—the Lyon et Marseilles Freight Company versus Adolphe ben Hossein, 1992!"

  When she finally did discover the purpose of the mysterious addition to the cabinet, she was shaking with fury. It was nothing more than a self-fatiguing resonator plate, attached as one of the seals on the piping from the plasma store, far below in the station's bowels, to the life-supporting prosthetics here. To what signal it was sensitive she couldn't be sure, but she suspected it would resonate to the frequencies generated as Zygra One boomed down to land on the station's steel deck. Broken, it would admit air to the pipe, and—that would be the end of the supervisor, and of the company's worry about the cost of repatriation. "In the event of an employee's decease, funerary arrangements shall be undertaken in accordance with custom at his place of origin; next of kin may exercise right of repatriation but the company shall be at liberty to stow the remains in an unpressurized hold." That was a very recent decision: Relict of Arthur Wong versus Universal Exploitation, 2176.

  Of course, the fractured plate would have been replaced with a sound one automatically before the starship's crew emerged to find the body ....

  For a little while after that she was cast into despair again. There was something fiendishly subtle about a trap so simple yet so nearly infallible—how could she ever hope to match the deviousness of the minds who had conceived it?

  Yet as she proceeded with her survey her spirits lightened anew. The Zygra Company's planners had themselves been victims of circumstance. Developing new planets at high pressure—in her earlier image, homesteading half a continent with scrap equipment—led to a particular attitude of mind. The ideal aimed at was "turn her on and let her run," and the more successful the outworlders had grown at achieving high reliability, the less they had worried about modifications and improvements.

  They had started, right back in the early days of colonization, from a given basis of technical knowledge. They had been too busy applying what they'd already known to undertake much original research; their genius-level breakthroughs had been on the practical, not the theoretical, level. Inspired corner-cutting was no substitute for Earthside-style exhaustive testing. Earth had the manpower to waste on minor changes for the sake of closer tolerances, a one percent improvement in energy consumption, or even for change's own sake. Fashion was a powerful force at home, but its return was still a novelty amo
ng the outworlders.

  Consequently, when Kynance came to look over the machinery running Zygra, she was struck by an aura of obsolescence. It was by far the largest integrated automatic system in the known galaxy, but for precisely that reason the Zygra Company had chosen to incorporate in it tried and true devices, not ones which lacked adequate field-tests.

  The impact was so unexpected she had difficulty fixing it in her mind as real, rather than wishful thinking. She made what comparisons she could in an attempt to convince herself. Suppose, for instance, two centuries previous, it had been necessary to build a transport system across hostile territory-say an African desert. By then, there were hovercraft, monorails, flying mules and so forth to choose from; nuclear power reactors, linear induction motors, fuel-cells, and a number of other possible power sources had been known.

  But the decision would almost certainly have been for conventional diesel locomotives hauling conventional trains on steel rails of a type already familiar for a hundred and fifty years or more. In other words, the automatics controlling Zygra were to faster-than-light starships as a railroad to a nuclear power-station.

  Which left her in approximately the position of someone trying to stop a diesel locomotive with sheer ingenuity: a tough problem, but not beyond a solution.

  Self-preservation came first, though. Actual interference would have to wait.

  Even the simplest of her necessary tasks—rigging remote extensions for the central alarm—was tricky, not because she couldn't take precautions against infringing the contract, but because so many things that sprang to mind for the purpose, simply weren't available.

  She could say to the recording machines, "In my opinion j the alarms are inadequate to comply with the conditions of my employment—von Hagen and Machetti versus Ice V Con- | struction Company of Titan, 2119: 'Ceteris paribus the ex- 1 perience of employees in the field carries more weight than ] predictions by even the most up-to-date computers not at the ] site of operations.' "

  But she couldn't make a qua-space signal relay out of Zy-gran wood and old plastic food-boxes.

  Somehow she managed to jury-rig her alarm switches. Heartened, she tackled the self-fatiguing plate on the medicare cabinet, exchanging it for a proper seal impervious to anything but a carbide-tooth saw. During that job, she established that the station's central computers were indeed well primed with legal information. The moment she touched the plasma pipe, a warning about her contract dinned into her ears. She waited till it was over, then quoted Lyon et Marseilles versus Hossein again, and tried a second approach. This time the computer didn't raise any objections.

  Wonderful! How about a less directly applicable precedent? She thought hard for ten minutes and settled on Yukinawa, dos Passos and Szerelmy versus Ge Nuclear Fusion Monopoly, 2087: "Modifications to automatic machinery which improve its function without detriment to the purposes of the proprietor do not constitute grounds for voiding a contract of employment."

  At this point she had a feeling she detected a somewhat unhappy grinding sound in the machinery below the deck on which she stood. A grim smile flitted over her face. The computer's experience obviously didn't include supervisors of her stamp.

  Later, for the sake of company, it might be fun to rig some vocal-communication circuits with the central computer—no substitute for another human being, but better than nothing.

  Although the harvest was over, the area surrounding the main station was still swarming with undersized pelts. It was also, and not by coincidence, at present the largest area of open water on the planet. The solar tide which had drawn the pelts to their rendezvous with the starship had submerged several hundred square miles which ordinarily counted as land by Zygran standards: slimy mudflats and patches of silt temporarily anchored by unconsumed bondroots.

  But as the waterlevel subsided, so the pelts, and their herding monitors, and the coating-station and all the rest of the automatically-controlled substations, would disperse over half the planet's surface.

  If she wanted to get acquainted at first hand with the whole of her responsibility, now was the time to do so. She could investigate the unexplored portions of the main station at leisure, but everything else would shortly be hull-down over the horizon.

  She checked out one of the reserve monitors. It wasn't intended for transporting passengers, and her weight put the deck half an inch below water, but it wouldn't sink, and if she fell off she could always swim back to the main station. Clinging with fingers and toes to the slippery plastic casing of the handling units, she steered it awkwardly to the coating-station.

  The place stank like a glue factory. That was a factor she hadn't reckoned with, though it was only to be expected considering that the whole business of this vessel nearly as big as the main station was to concentrate, distill and apply a sort of gummy organic jelly to full-grown pelts. There was probably no time to go back and get a respirator; underfoot she could sense the vibrations of the drive warming, and very soon now the vessel would take off in search of specially rich clumps of the weed with which it started its annual cycle of processing.

  Breathing as shallowly as possibly, she toured the whole of it, and everywhere found evidence for her conclusion about the technical status of the devices here. She had never studied organic chemistry properly, but before the boy who had mocked her for not being able to fix her skycar there had been another who had been insufferably proud of his ability in the garden, and she had crammed enough horticulture into her head to wipe the grin off his face. This enabled her to say without fear of argument (Argument with whom? muttered an annoying small voice at the back of her mind) that any competent Earthside organochemist could have increased the efficiency of the coating-station by fifty percent inside of a week.

  She crossed next to one of the substations which rode herd on the monitors in the same way that the latter did on the pelts: tracking them, reporting to the main station their location and the environment they encountered and performing routine repairs and maintenance. She was barely in time; some instinct was exciting the pelts, and a gorgeous polychrome stream of them was heading westwards, compelling the automatics to start scattering. But she was aboard it long enough to make doubly sure of her conclusions.

  "That cuts the company down to size!" she told the air as she swam back to the main station—her monitor had answered a call from its parent and was well out of reach, but she didn't mind the short swim because it gave her the chance to speak aloud without being recorded. "I must stop thinking of it as a bunch of infinitely clever villains, and regard it as a belligerent dinosaur: big, but stupid!"

  She clambered up the side of the main station and stood looking out over the steel deck with pools of water dripping from her clothes. Now at least she knew what she had to do. All it would take to save her from infringing her contract was a mixture of caution and dirty-minded suspiciousness. And once that was settled, she could let herself relax occasionally. The climate was damp, but at least it was warm-when the sun broke through, it would be quite pleasant to he out here on the deck and acquire an all-over tan ....

  She turned slowly through a complete circle, a hint of awe coloring her thoughts as she at last took in what it meant to be in charge of a whole planet almost the size of Earth.

  —And froze, staring at something impossible, incredible, intolerable. In letters of fire a clause from her contract blazed across her field of vision: a clause she had thought there was no risk of breaking, but which in this instant she realized was the one she could not force herself, here, now, to comply with.

  Not if she wanted to keep company with herself for the rest of her life.

  Even a wave is a signal, she realized bitterly. At least she could keep her hands by her sides. But all that could do was postpone the reckoning. She was already doomed.

  X

  "Too LATE!" Victor moaned. "The bastard's made us too late!"

  By "bastard" he meant the miserable Dickery Evan, whose weight slumped across the ster
n of their clumsy "boat" made it even more difficult than usual to force through the water. They had been able to do nothing for him except feed him and re-tie the displaced splint on his broken forearm—and at that, Horst suspected, they hadn't helped noticeably. Unless he got back to civilization he would have a deformed arm until he died.

  Coberley rounded on Victor. "Be quiet!" he thundered. "Maybe you could have left the character to die out there, but I couldn't have. And what do you mean, anyway—he made us too late? Who was supposed to be navigating us? Who sent us straight into a mudbank, hey?"

  Horst winced, remembering the loathsome sucking sensation of that mud around his legs up to the knee as he and Coberley had struggled to get their craft afloat again. They had still been trying to find a line of clear water more than a few inches deep and pointing in the direction they wanted to go, when they'd heard the knelling sound of the starship taking off again.

  "It wasn't my fault we ran aground!" Victor screamed. "I wasn't in the bow looking out for shoals, was I?"

  Horst caught Coberley's eye and scowled at him. "There's no point in arguing with him," he muttered. "He's in one of his down-phases again. We're lucky he's stayed on the upswing this long—at least if he goes completely crazy now we know we're close to where we want to get."

  It was pretty slim comfort. Victor's cycles of clear thinking alternated with periods of moody noncommunication, sometimes lasting for days on end, out of which he would only emerge to voice complaints or angry insults. He should never have come to Zygra. The isolation had broken him completely.