Tomorrow's Crimes Read online

  For Anarchaos is a rich world, a storehouse of valuable minerals and a significant exporter of furs. Trapping and mining are the two primary occupations, the former done by rugged individualists out in the wilds, the latter done by slaves captured by roaming press gangs and sold to the mining syndicates.

  Human occupancy of Anarchaos was in its eighty-seventh year when I arrived, making it the longest-running planet-wide madhouse in the history of the human race.

  V

  The sun inched minutely tuck wards across the sky as I drove eastward toward Ulik, so that I seemed gradually to be outdistancing it, until, when I first saw the city ahead of me, that red bail was in a position behind me that in my friendlier sun at home would indicate, in summer, approximately two o’clock in the afternoon. On Earth, of course, a distance of a thousand miles or more would separate sites two hours apart by the sun, but Anarchaos was in a much closer orbit to its Hell, so that Ni and Ulik were barely four hundred miles apart.

  The last fifty miles or so had been across a high barren plateau, rocky and uninviting. Two men mounted on hairhorses had tried to stop me at one point, blocking my path, but I accelerated toward them, and fired a shot from my new pistol, and they whirled away in front of me, cursing and shaking their fists. They were bearded, and dressed in furs, and had heavy-looking swords at their waists. They were the last humans I saw before coming to Ulik.

  Ulik was built in the center of a great flat brown valley, the dry bed of a onetime inland sea. The plateau ended here, the road sweeping down the bare eastern slope to the bottom, and then—a thin black line—arrowing straight across the dry sea-bed to the city.

  Ulik, first seen from far away and high atop the eastern edge of the plateau, had a kind of frail grandeur to it, the only sign of man in all this emptiness. The syndicate towers were fewer here than at Ni, but just as tall and just as graceful and just as slender, reflecting blood-red glints of sunlight. Because Hell lay off the zenith there were shadows of the tallest rock formations, long pointing black fingers stretching toward the city across the valley floor, I drove quickly down the long decline.

  It had been getting cold atop the plateau, but now as I moved down into the valley the air grew somewhat warmer again. I remembered that the UC man at the spaceport had said the temperature at Ulik was approximately sixty degrees.

  Ulik was a fur center, where the trappers brought their pelts for sale, where they were cured and treated and prepared for transport off-world. This paved Union Commission road ended at the city itself, but on the other side broad dirt tracks moved off toward the evening fine, showing the routes of the trappers and tradesmen, slavers and solitaries.

  The junkyard hovels were all on that side, too, so that the western approach to the city, where I was coming in, was all beauty and shine, as modem as any city anywhere, all towers and spires and graceful arches, sweeping high walkways and gossamer webs of communications lines.

  Now for the first rime I was seeing the syndicate towers up close. At ground level they were surprisingly heavy and thick in appearance, all steel and concrete, massive and windowless, darkened by their own shadows. Armed guards patrolled in groups at their iron doorways, glowering at me in suspicion as I drove by, and here and there down the side streets raggedly dressed men and women slithered along the concrete walls on minor, urgent, and incomprehensible missions.

  Although the off-world corporations owned these syndicates and their towers body and soul, nowhere did a corporate name or logo appear. Instead, above the heavy iron main doors of each structure was mounted the symbol of each syndicate: an inverted triangle containing the letter S, an X of crossed lightning bolts, a sledge hammer with a dog’s head, a raised black grill work on which was laid a silver stylization of a bird in flight.

  Finally I saw the one I wanted: a cornucopia dripping ice. Originally a syndicate of those who made or repaired refrigeration machines—freezers, air conditioners, home refrigerators—it had been taken over long ago by the Wolmak Corporation, a chemical company with some connections to the local mining industry. In the first decade or so of die colony’s existence, refrigeration units had actually been manufactured in this rower, and bartered with other syndicates, and later serviced and repaired by members of this syndicate, but all that was in the long dead past. The factory had long since been stripped bare, the original membership of the syndicate had died out, and the membership now was small, badly trained for repair work, and totally subservient to the Wolmak Corporation.

  Each syndicate, in the beginning, had given itself a one word—usually one syllable—name which implied the syndicate’s purpose, and this one had called itself la. The old syndicate names were still used, although today when anyone on Anarchaos spoke of Ice he actually meant Wolmak. The names of the owner corporations were never seen and rarely heard.

  I stopped my car in front of the Ice tower, saw to it that I had all my weapons on me, and stepped out onto the ground. The hunting knife was in its sheath against my back, the other knife in my left side pocket, the pistol in my right hip pocket, the gas spray can in my left hip pocket, and the piece of pipe tucked into my belt. I left my knapsack on the car seat.

  There were half a dozen guards in front of the Ice tower door, dressed in silver uniforms with pale blue edgings. (Although everything was tinged with red by the light of Hell, the color red was never used by humans here. Blues and greens and yellows were in use everywhere, all mottled by the red light, but the shades of red itself were completely avoided.) These guards had watched me with as much suspicion as anyone else while I was driving toward them, but now that I had stopped and gotten out of the car their suspicion was doubled, tripled. They held automatic rifles in clenched fists and glowered at me in furious silence.

  I didn’t move toward them, suspecting their great tension might lead them to kill me without finding out who or what I was. I merely stood beside the car, showed them my hands to demonstrate that they were empty, and called, “Tell Whistler that Rolf Malone is here.”

  They looked at one another, consulting together with glances and expressions. Finally, one backed to the building, opened a small plate beside the door, and spoke into a phone. The rest of us waited, in our respective places.

  Several minutes went by. The guard at the phone spoke and waited, and then spoke again, and waited again. Finally he called to me, “You related to Gar Malooe?”

  “His brother.”

  The guard relayed this information, and listened, and nodded, and put the phone away. “Colonel Whistler will see you,” he called. “Come forward.”

  I came forward. When I reached them I said, “You’ll watch my car for me.”

  “Yes, of course. Leave weapons out here.”

  I gave him everything but the sheath knife. However, I was then frisked and the knife found. “This, too,” said the guard, with neither humor nor indignation, and I took it off and gave it to him.

  When they were sure I was weaponless, one of them rapped on the iron door. As we stood there, he said, “Who is Gar Malone?”

  “My brother,” I said.

  He didn’t like that answer, but before he could decide what to do about it the door slid open and I stepped inside.

  VI

  When I was getting out of prison, in with the other paperwork I put a request for a stellar passport. My counselor mentioned it in our last session, saying, “You plan to start life again on a new world, Rolf, is that it?”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “Why is that, Rolf?” He used my name a lot, to establish a personal relationship between us. I never used his name at all.

  “My record here is pretty bad,” I said. “I know that’s not supposed to mean anything—an ex-convict is supposed to have the same rights as anybody else—but we both know it doesn’t work that way.’

  “It does for some men. Rolf. Men who are willing to wait it out.”

  “A record doesn’t travel with you to a new world,” I said. “That’
s one good rule the UCs got.”

  He snapped at everything, like a piranha fish, saying now, “You have a grievance against the Union Commission, Rolf?”

  “Not a bit,” I said. “I’ve never been off Earth, never had dealings with the Commission. But I know about that rule, and I think it’s a good one.”

  “Do you know anyone out there, Rolf? Any friends or relations?”

  “My brother’s got a job on a place called Anarchaos,”

  “I don’t believe I know the name.”

  “It’s small, and way out. New, too.”

  “Rolf, you could do better on Earth.”

  “I could do worse, too. Waiting it out isn’t a style that’s natural with me.”

  “You mean your temper, Rolf? There hasn’t been an outbreak from you in over three years. That’s cured, Rolf, I’m convinced of it.”

  “It’s not cured, it’s controlled. And it’s what got me in here, took seven years off my life. I don’t want to push that control too far.”

  “You may be right at that, Rolf,” he said. “I’ll recommend approval.”

  “Thank you,” I said. Because it was necessary.

  He was right about my temper, but on the other hand he was dead wrong. There had been no outward demonstration of it in over three years, as he’d said, but it had existed, inside me, compressed, chained, stifled, almost every waking minute of all that time. A prison is full of petty irritations, and it is my nature to irritate easily.

  But I had to learn to hold it in if I ever wanted to get out of that place, and what a man has to do he can do. And now, after seven years—I’d been given an indeterminate sentence for manslaughter, after I killed five people in an argument over a noisy parry—the temper was in tight iron shackles and I at last was free.

  I would never lose my temper again, this I knew. By now I was a little afraid of it myself; if once let out after being pent up so long, what would it be likely to do? No. It was the quiet way for me, from now on.

  With Gar. My brother Gar, three years my senior, as near enough like me to be my twin in all respects but one, and that one made all the difference. Gar had no temper at all. Nothing could enrage him, nothing aggravate him past endurance. Relatives—I’ve alienated myself from all of them by now, of course, parents included—used to say I had Gar’s temper as well is my own. That was when we were both children, and my destructive frenzies could do comparatively little damage. Later, as I grew older and stronger, such pleasantries were not among the things my relatives said of me. Gar was their darling, and I—to the extent that they dared ignore me—had ceased to exist.

  I suppose it would have been normal for me to grow up hating and envying Gar, but quite the reverse was true. He was the one person I never grew angry with, the only one in the world—in any world—whose opinion mattered to me. And he was fond of me, too, with a curious blend of normal brotherly affection combined with a goodhearted man’s indulgence of a rambunctious pet. He kept me out of trouble when he could, calmed me when he could, made things right after my flare-ups when he could.

  I finished my schooling at the minimum legal age, of course; school for me had been an endless succession of rows with teachers and fellow students. I had a number of jobs, none of them good, none of them for long. Then, at twenty-three, I went into prison, and stayed there till seven days past my thirtieth birthday.

  Gar went on with school, became a mining engineer with additional degrees in allied fields, and went to work for one of the great alloy firms. His even disposition and absorption in his work made him an ideal explorer in virgin territories, either alone or with small parties. He changed jobs infrequently, but each change was a step upward. When he went to work for Wolmak Corporation, my fourth year in prison, he was the highest paid field man they had, could have had an administrative job at executive level if he’d wanted it, and was only thirty years old.

  He wrote me from time to time, and less frequently I wrote back. In his next to last letter he told me of his transfer to Anarchaos, exciting prospects, brand new and unrealized potential, and said that if I were to be released as soon as I expected he was authorized to offer me a job as his field assistant. I accepted at once, and in his final letter he said the job was mine.

  After so many false starts, now at last I had found my place.

  I would be with Gar, the one man in all the world whose company I could tolerate, the two of us moving endlessly across empty landscapes where no human had ever been before, away J from society, away from humankind, out where only nature I could rasp my naked nerve-endings, and against nature in perfect safety I could howl my rage away.

  The day I got out of prison, the message came from the Union Commission. Gar had been killed. He was dead.

  Killed? By what? By whom?

  I went to the UC embassy, and there I first heard something of the unique nature of Anarchaos. “It was the colony that killed your brother,” a UC man told me; a statement I was to hear often.

  But I wanted more. I read tape after tape at the library, soon exhausting all that had been written about that filthy little planet, and then I read the sources of its social structure—Bakunin and the rest. And Rohstock, in his Voyages to Seven Planets:

  “Life on Anarchaos is itself sufficient punishment for any crimes its citizens may perform; there is, therefore, no other.”

  I was not satisfied. No one could tell me anything, no one could do anything. The identity of Gar’s killer, his motive, even his method; I couldn’t get a single fact. But I had my passport, and my traveling expenses had already been paid, and there w-as nothing to keep me on Earth, so I armed myself with an arsenal which was taken from me at Valhalla, and I went to Anarchaos.

  When they took my weapons away at Valhalla, I knew I would have to kill. I required weapons on Anarchaos for purposes both of protection and persuasion, and I knew from my reading that the only way to get weapons on Anarchaos was to take them from someone else. The realization that I would be forced to kill at least one Anarchaotian did not bother me in the slightest, possibly because of my previous experience at the task but more probably because of the oft-repeated theory that, “The colony killed your brother.”

  Not that I was prepared to admit the theory as fact. Whatever guilt others might share—the colony, the founders, the UC, the corporations—finally it must come down to the one, or two, or three, who had in fact committed the one specific murder of Gar Malone.

  Ultimately, I myself wasn’t sure what I planned to do. Learn, to begin with, and once I knew I could decide. Deep inside me the fury coiled like a snake, like a mainspring, but I kept it in control. Mindless rage would get me nothing. I had to be cold, mind rather than emotion; I had to be a machine gathering data.

  When the data was gathered, it itself would tell me what to do. What to do with the man who had killed Gar. Or, if it turned out that those were right who said the colony was his killer, I would again know what to do—then, not now. For now I knew only that I had questions to ask.

  And the first man of whom I would ask them was Colonel Holbed Whistler, the Wolmak Corporation’s manager at Anarchaos, the man who had been Gar’s final employer.

  VII

  “This way, Mr. Malone.”

  I had stepped from the elevator into a wide, shallow, featureless. low-ceilinged tan room in which blank dosed brown doors were spaced at regular intervals in every wall. The voice—feminine—had come from my right, where I saw a tall and slender blond woman holding a door open and smiling an invitation to me to enter.

  I had been frisked a second time by the inside guards before being put into the elevator, so I now spread my arms out and said. “Don’t you want to search me for weapons?”

  She laughed gently, a musical political sound, and said, “No, I don’t think so. They’re very thorough downstairs.”

  “So they arc.”

  I walked toward her, and she stepped aside to let me precede her through the doorway into a pale green corridor wh
ich curved away to the right. There were no windows here, nor in the tan room before it, so that nothing—the room, the corridor, the blond woman—was tinged with that unhealthy red light. The indirect lighting here was colorless; I could have been back home on Earth.

  The corridor was wide enough for us to walk abreast, so I waited for her to close the door and join me, noticing that she had a kind of beauty I hadn’t expected to find on Anarchaos, a smooth bland impersonal beauty that bespoke plastic surgery, social position or at least pretension, a background on Earth or on one of the oldest of civilized planets.

  Her clothing encouraged the impression. The saying is that even the most advanced worlds are a year to three behind Earth fashions, and the outer worlds and more recent colonies are as much as a generation behind Earth styles of apparel, but the dress this woman wore would have been perfectly in style on the Earth I’d left five days ago. It was tailored to her body, emphasizing, as it was meant to, her best features, blending with her face, her hair style, her jewelry in a way that could be achieved nowhere other than Earth.

  She turned, saw the attention I was giving her, and smiled companionably. “You like me?”

  “Very much. I hadn’t expected anyone as beautiful as you.”

  She was pleased, and honest enough to show it, saying, “Ah, you’re as gallant as your brother.”

  ‘You knew Gar?’

  “I thought of him as one of my dearest friends.” The plastic face expressed regret. “It was terrible, what happened.”

  “What did happen?”

  She became brisk. “Oh, the Colonel is the one to talk to. Come along, he’s waiting for you.”

  We started together along the corridor, which continued to curve to the right and which appeared to be spiraling upward. I wasn’t entirely sure whether we were going up a slight slope or that was merely the four per cent additional gravity I was feeling. I asked, and she said, “Oh, yes, we’re going up. The elevator can’t go any higher; the tower’s too narrow for the housing up here. It’s only a little distance.”