Philip Dick - The Science Fiction Anthology

At the moment they are milling belligerently outside my force-field screen. As I look into their stupid, imaginationless faces I can only think that somewhere in the past they were invented by some unorthodox Terran scientist, probably of English descent. They—

Wait.

The force field. It’s wavering. It must have been damaged when it got tramped underfoot. They are going to get in to me. It—

Barnhart watched them prepare the rocket that would blast him into an orbit circling the planet. He could see and even hear the sound that vibrated through the thin membrane in which he was encased, but he could not move a nerve-end. Fortunately his eyes were focused on infinity, so he could see everything at least blurrily.

The Leader, who seemed to have grown a few inches, wasted no time. He gave the orders and the quronos lifted him into the rocket. The hatch closed down on the indigo day and he was alone.

The blast of takeoff almost deafened him but he didn’t feel the jar—only because, he realized, he could feel nothing.

A few weeks later the centrifugal force of the spinning rocket finally nudged the latch and the hatch swung open. Barnhart was exposed to naked fire-bright blackness itself.

After a day or two he stopped worrying about that, as he had stopped fretting about breathing.

He grew accustomed to the regular turn around the planet every fourteen hours. For two out of every three seconds he faced out into space and that was always changing. Yet, all poetry aside, the change was always the same.

He didn’t have to worry about keeping on a schedule. He kept on one automatically.

And he didn’t like it.

So he kept retreating further and further from it....

“We couldn’t leave him there!”

What? Who? Barnhart thought along with at least seven other double-yous. He returned to himself and found that he was standing in the airlock of a spaceship, faced by his first mate Simmons and his stooge York.

“We couldn’t leave him there,” Simmons repeated with feeling. “That would be the nastiest kind of murder. We might maroon him. But none of us are killers.”

“It’s not the punishment we will get for the mutiny,” York complained. “It’s having to go back to his old routine. That time-schedule mind of his was derailing mine. He was driving the whole crew cockeyed. Even if he wasn’t going to kill us all by the rule book, I think we would have had to maroon him just to get rid of him.”

Simmons fingered a thin-bladed tool knife. “I wonder how he got up there in that rocket and in this transparent shroud? I’m sure he’s alive, but this is the most unorthodox Susp-An I’ve ever seen. Almost makes you believe in destiny, the way we lost our coordinate settings and had to back-track—and then found him out there. (“I’ll bet he jimmied the calculator,” York grouched.) You know, York, it’s almost as if the world down there marooned him right back at us.”

The first mate inserted the knife blade. The membrane withered and Barnhart lived.

“Now the arrest,” York murmured.

“What are you muttering about, York?” Captain Barnhart demanded. “What are we standing around here for? You can’t expect me to waste a whole afternoon on inspection. We have to get back on schedule.” He looked to his wrist. “Fifteen hundred hours.”

“He doesn’t remember ,” York said behind him.

“He remembers the same old routine,” Simmons said. “Here we go again.”

Barnhart didn’t say anything. In the close confines of a spaceship there was bound to be a certain degree of informality.

He stepped inside his cabin at the end of the corridor and did what he always did at fifteen hundred hours.

York and the first mate were deeply disturbed.

Barnhart looked out at them sharply. “Well, spacemen, I run a taut ship here. I expect everyone to hit the mark. Adhere to the line. Follow my example. Snap to it!”

Simmons looked at York and his shoulders sagged. They couldn’t go through the whole thing again, the marooning, the rescue, then this. That routine would drive them crazy.

Even this was preferable.

They joined Barnhart in geoplancting.

They lived in a small house beside the little Wolf river in Wisconsin. Once it had been a summer cottage owned by a rich man from Chicago. The rich man died. His heirs sold it. Now it was well insulated and Mrs. Jamieson and her son were very comfortable, even in the coldest winter. During the summer they rented a few row boats to vacationing fishermen, and she had built a few overnight cabins beside the road. They were able to make ends meet.

Her neighbors knew nothing of the money she had brought with her to Wisconsin. They didn’t even know that she was not a native. She never spoke of it, except at first, when Earl was a boy of seven and they had just come there to live. Then she only said that she came from the East. She knew the names of eastern Wisconsin towns, and small facts about them; it lent an air of authenticity to her claim of being a native. Actually her previous residence was Bangkok, Siam, where the Agents had killed her husband.

That was back in ‘07, on the eve of his departure for Alpha Centaurus; but she never spoke of this; and she was very careful not to move from place to place except by the conventional methods of travel.

Also, she wore her hair long, almost to the shoulders. People said, “There goes one of the old-fashioned ones. That hair-do was popular back in the sixties.” They did not suspect that she did this only to cover the thin, pencil-line scar, evidence that a small cylinder lay under her skin behind the ear.

For Mrs. Jamieson was one of the Konvs.

Her husband had been one of the small group who developed this tiny instrument. Not the inventor— his name was Stinson, and the effects produced by it were known as the Stinson Effect. In appearance it resembled a small semi-conductor device. Analysis by the best scientific minds proved it to be a semi-conductor.

Yet it held the power to move a body instantly from one point in space to any other point. Each unit was custom built, keyed to operate only by the thought pattern of the particular individual.

Several times in the past seven years Mrs. Jamieson had seen other Konvs, and had been tempted to identify herself and say, “Here I am. You are one of them; so am I. Come, and we’ll talk. We’ll talk about Stinson and Benjamin, who helped them all get away. And Doctor Straus. And my husband, E. Mason Jamieson, who never got away because those filthy, unspeakable Agents shot him in the back, there in that coffee shop in Bangkok, Siam.”

Once, in the second year after her husband’s death, an Agent came and stayed in one of her cabins.

She learned that he was an Agent completely by accident. While cleaning the cabin one morning his badge fell out of a shirt pocket. She stood still, staring at the horror of it there on the floor, the shirt in her hands, all the loneliness returning in a black wave of hate and frustration.

That night she soundlessly lifted the screen from the window over his bed and shot him with a .22 rifle.

She threw the weapon into the river. It helped very little. He was one Agent, only one out of all the thousands of Agents all over Earth; while her husband had been one of twenty-eight persons. She decided then that her efforts would be too ineffective. The odds were wrong. She would wait until her son, Earl, was grown.

Together they would seek revenge. He did not have the cylinder—not yet. But he would. The Konvs took care of their own.

Her husband had been one of the first, and they would not forget. One day the boy would disappear for a few hours. When he returned the small patch of gauze would be behind his ear. She would shield him until the opening healed. Then no one would ever know, because now they could do it without leaving the tell-tale scar. Then they would seek revenge.