Chapter III

Driving down to Nork the next morning, I dropped off the feeder tramway onto the fast belt south. Hanging from the feeder hook, waiting for an open space in the line of cars, it occurred to me a lot of people were on the road, both Nork-bound and northbound to Montral.

"Crimmus shopping," I said aloud, remembering, and swore mildly at the slip. While the day--tomorrow, it was--still meant something to some, it's not the kind of rational deformity you generally talk about.

Sara would, of course.

But I long ago faced the fact that Sara's a romantic. As neuroses go, that's a mild one, and didn't even call automatically for correction. All that it meant was that she was restricted to the C Population Zones that she wouldn't leave anyway, and a little outside special tutoring in the Realities for our children.

It wouldn't even affect my job or Civil Service rating. Still, if Vermont were ever zoned Population B, there might be trouble. She wouldn't leave Milbry.

Oho, I thought to myself, locking onto the Nork belt and double-checking the destination coordinates, I am lapsing into speculation--risky ground, for a Reporter. The code expressly forbids speculation, and with reason.

Speculation uses an inadequate number of arbitrarily chosen half-truths to shape conflicting possibilities, all but one of which time must prove to be false. Truth is only what has already happened. Conjecture is a laboratory matter for trained scientists to dabble in, under laboratory controls. Judging from the scarcity of scientific news these days, conjecture wasn't working there either.

Having neatly boxed myself into an uninformed generality, I grimaced, took a dozer and slept all the way to Nork.

Back in my stag cubicle at the dorm, I fingered my chin in what must have been pure atavism; it wasn't even close to time for a depilatory booster. Sara--Sara, Sara, Sara--once urged me to skip the pill some month and grow a beard, a mustache or something, like her Four-Great-Grandfather Isaac, Elias Witherill's son. The one that was a war major, in 1861.

I told her it was an aberration for her to have our sort of relationship with a grandfather image, and besides a beard did mean body hair in general and that itched. She said, well, I could instead get a false beard, like Santa Claus, and then we had a really big argument about what sorts of vulgarity were amusing, and which were not.

That broke off our second engagement, I think it was. Yes, the second. Now she was pregnant, on purpose, we were going to get wed, and I had just seven minutes to get to work.

* * * * *

My Scoop is in the usual sound-proofed, glass-walled isol-booth you'll see anywhere in Nork. The fact that it is in a plaza at the 75th level and thus under the open sky, a thing that bothers a lot of Nork people, is to me more than mitigated by the view from the vestibule. You can see, beyond the Liberty Statue International Memorial floating in New York Bay over the former site of Times Square, to the Long Island shore at Mineola and up into Conicut.

Today there wasn't time to look around. I formally relieved Vern, the late-nightside Reporter, and had barely punched my ID against the time clock when the District Reporter's face came on the viewer for visual check.

"Reporter One-C Ben Marli. US-6044-230 988 368GN 0800/24 Deck 2047," I said. The face nodded, faded.

Vern was still there when the viewer went blank. Most of us punch in exactly on time and punch out exactly four hours later, to the minute. Vern always comes on early and leaves late because, I think, his father was convicted of advertising under the Edict, and Vern is still trying to clear the family number.

"Quiet night, Ben. Just one accident," he said. I was leafing through the little pile of dupes--simultypes of the stories that had gone into the Scoop, with the ibems of the Source and his or her Second--and was seeing this for myself, so I just grunted.

Then one, the accident he'd spoken of, brought me up sharp.

On the face it was a straight item: the Source, Retailer Mark Neman, US2109-590-412 663CC, a visitor to Nork, had told of an accident involving one Housewife Ela Brand in a store on the 24th level, unnamed, of course. She fell on an antique glass bowl, which broke and cut her neck severely. The store's security guard substantiated the story, adding that the woman had nearly bled to death from a severed carotid artery before arrival of the store doctor. He had been delayed by the nearly unheard-of circumstance of the birth of twins in the store's infirmary.

First aid by an unidentified passerby saved the accident victim's life, according to both Source and Second.

The doctor was unable to perform as Second because, while the victim was physically able to go on her way after normal treatment, she had had to be clinicked for "irrational grief reaction" over loss of the bowl she had fallen on. Even so, the novel injury, rare these days, would have made it a play story in _Sun_ editions across the nation, at a quiet time like the end of the year.

"Vern, Vern," I said. "Don't you know a Plant when you hear one? Surely you should recognize a Flack's work, if anybody could," I told him. Maybe it was unkind to talk about Flacks, when his father had been one; but any time the truth hurts, it's the pain of healing.

"It's a pretty elaborate plant, but phony as faith," I said more gently. "That bowl fairly screams 'Gift.' Are you forgetting tomorrow's Crimmus, and that all over the country Flacks are pulling tricks like this?"

Vern, pale, said defensively, "Ben, look. The Source's ID checked without a hitch. He's a retailer in Dals, Tex. The guard's cleared too. The doctor verified by phone, from the clinic. You going to tell me that a doctor would lie or be mistaken about an accident like that, or that it could be faked in a crowded store, or that any woman'd risk bleeding to death for Flack money?

"I know the Flacks are out in droves. But this has got to be a legitimate story."

"It's a phony," I said. "The gift is just too integral. Don't be slow to punch the button on a deal like this."