Robert Silverberg - The Alien Years

After the fourth pardon came a surprise, though. Someone from Mary Canary’s staff dropped around and said to him, “You like to do things a little too well, don’t you, kid?”

“What?”

“Didn’t anybody tell you? You can’t make every fucking pardon you write a perfect one. You do that all the time, you’re bound to attract the attention of the Entities, and that’s not something you really want to do, is it? Or anything that we would want you to do.”

Andy didn’t get it. “I’m supposed to write bad pardons some of the time, is that what you’re saying? Pardons that don’t go through?”

“Right. Some of them, anyway. I know, I know, it’s a professional thing with you. You have a rep to maintain and you want to look good. But don’t look too good, you know what I mean? For your own sake. And also it makes everybody else look bad, because nobody else does perfect work. Once word gets around town about you, customers will start coming in here from other districts, and you can see the problem with that. So flub a few, Mickey. Stiff a client, now and then, okay? For your own sake. Okay? Okay?”

That was hard, being expected to do less than perfect work. It went against his nature to do an incompetent hack. But he’d have to write a couple of stiffs before long, he supposed, just to keep the guild guys happy.

At the beginning of the second week a woman came to him who wanted a transfer to San Diego. Nice-looking woman, twenty-eight, maybe thirty years old, job in the LACON judiciary wing, had some reason for wanting to change towns but couldn’t swing the transfer arrangements. Tessa, her name was. Fluffy red hair, full red lips, pleasant smile, good figure. Nice. He had always had a thing for older women.

Andy was uneasy about having so many LACON people coming to him for pardons. But this one had the right letter of recommendation too.

He started setting up the hack for her.

Then he said, thinking about the fluffy red hair, the good figure, the week and a half he had just spent sleeping alone in this strange new town, “You know, Tessa, I’ve got an idea. Suppose I write a transfer for both of us, for Florida, or maybe Mexico. Mexico would be nice, wouldn’t it? Cuernavaca, Acapulco, somewhere down there in the sun.” A sudden wild impulse. But what the hell: nothing ventured, nothing gained. “We could have a nice little holiday together, okay? And when we came back you’d go to San Diego, or wherever you wanted, and—”

Andy could see her reaction right away, and it wasn’t a good one.

“Please,” she said, very cool and crisp, no pleasant smile at all, now. Glowering at him, in fact. “They told me you were a professional. Making passes at the customers isn’t very professional.”

“Sorry,” Andy said. “Maybe I got a little carried away.”

“San Diego is what I want, yes? And solo, if you don’t mind.”

“Right, Tessa. Right.”

She was still giving him that scowling look, as though he had unzipped himself in front of her, or worse. Suddenly he was angry. Perhaps he had let himself get carried away, yes. A little out of line, yes. But she didn’t have to look at him that way, did she? Did she? It was offensive, being scowled at like that, just because he had stepped a little out of line.

He was supposed to write a few pardons that didn’t work out, Mary Canary’s guy had told him. Screw up his code a little, once in a while, get things just a tiny bit wrong.

All right, he thought. Let this one be the first. What the hell. What the hell. He wrote her an exit permit for San Diego. And put just the littlest little bug in it, down near the end, that invalidated the whole thing top to bottom. It was a very little bug, not even an entire line of code. It would do the trick, though. Teach her a lesson, too. He didn’t like it when people glowered at him like that.

Mark, Paul Carmichael’s oldest son, drove Tony down to Los Angeles from the ranch, taking the back road eastward through Fillmore and Castaic to the place where it met the remnants of Interstate 5, and heading south from there. Steve Gannett had determined that the most likely location of Prime’s sanctuary was in the northeastern sector of the city, bounded by the Hollywood Freeway on the north, the Harbor Freeway on the west, the city wall on the east, and Vernon Boulevard on the south.

Within that zone, Steve said, the highest-probability location for the site itself was right in the heart of the old downtown business district. He had all sorts of figures, based on Entity transit vector observations, that proved to his own satisfaction, at least, that a certain building two blocks south of the old Civic Center was the place. Mark delivered him, therefore, to the East Valley gate of the wall, where Burbank met Glendale, which was as close as he could get to downtown. There Mark would wait, for days, if necessary, while Tony entered the city on foot and made his steady way toward the designated target area.

“Give me a ping,” Mark said, as Tony got out of the car.

Tony grinned and held up his arm. “Ping,” he said. “Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping.”

“There you are,” Mark said. “Right on the screen where you belong.”

They had put an implant in Tony’s forearm, one that had a directional locator built into it. One of the best implant men in San Francisco had designed it and come down to the ranch to install it, and Lisa Gannett had programmed it to broadcast its signal right into the city telephone lines. Wherever Tony went, they would be able to follow him. Mark could trace him from the car; Steve or Lisa could track him from the ranch’s communications center.

“Well, now,” Mark said. “All set to get going, are you, then?”

“Ping,” said Tony again, and moved off in the direction of the wall.

Mark watched him go. Tony didn’t look back. He walked quickly and steadily toward the gate. When he reached it, he put his implant over the gatekeeper node and let it read the access code that Lisa had written for him.

The gate opened. Tony entered Los Angeles. It was a few minutes past midnight. His big moment was unfolding at last.

He was ready for it. More than ready: Tony was ripe.

He was carrying, in his backpack, a small explosive device powerful enough to take out half a dozen square blocks of the city. All he had to do now was find the building where Steve thought Prime might be hidden, affix the bomb to its side, walk quickly away, and send the signal to the ranch, the single blurt of apparently meaningless digital information that would tell them they could detonate at will.

Khalid had spent close to seven years training him for this, emptying out whatever had been inside Tony’s soul before and replacing it with a sense of serene dedication to unthinking action. And, so they all hoped, Tony was completely and properly programmed now. He would go about his tasks in Los Angeles the way a broom goes about sweeping away fallen leaves scattered along a walk, giving no more thought to what he had come here to do, or what the consequences of a successful mission might be, than the broom gives to the leaves or the walk.

“He’s inside the wall,” Mark said, over the car phone. “On his way.”

“He’s inside the wall,” Steve said at the ranch, pointing to the yellow dot of light on the screen, and to the red one. “That’s Mark, sitting in the car just outside the wall,” he said. “And that one’s Tony.”

“And now we wait, I guess,” said Anson. “But is his mind blank enough, I wonder? Can you just trot right in there and stick a bomb on a building without thinking at all about what you’re doing?”

Steve looked up from the screen. “I know what Khalid would say to that. Everything is in the hands of Allah, Khalid would say.”