Nine by Laumer Read online

  “You have been inactive for three hundred years. The other brigades have suffered extinction gallantly in action against the Enemy. Only you survive.

  “Your reactivation now could turn the tide. Both we and the Enemy have been reduced to a pre-atomic technological level in almost every respect. We are still able to maintain the trans-light monitor, which detected your signal. However, we no longer have FTL capability in transport.

  “You are therefore requested and required to consolidate and hold your present position pending the arrival of relief forces, against all assault or negotiation whatsoever, to destruction if required.”

  I reply, confirming the instructions. I am shaken by the news I have received, but reassured by contact with Command Unit. I send the galactic coordinates of our position based on a star scan corrected for three hundred years elapsed time. It is good to be again on duty, performing my assigned function.

  I analyze the transmissions I have recorded, and note a number of interesting facts regarding the origin of the messages. I compute that at sub-light velocities the relief expedition will reach us in forty-seven point one-two-eight standard years. In the meantime, since we have received no instructions to drop to minimum awareness level pending an action alert, I am free to enjoy a unique experience: to follow a random activity pattern of my own devising. I see no need to rectify the omission and place the brigade on stand-by, since we have an abundant power supply at hand. I brief my comrades and direct them to fall out and operate independently under auto-direction.

  I welcome this opportunity to investigate fully a number of problems that have excited my curiosity circuits. I shall enjoy investigating the nature and origin of time and of the unnatural disciplines of so-called ‘entropy’ which my human designers have incorporated in my circuitry. Consideration of such biological oddities as ‘death’ and of the unused capabilities of the protoplasmic nervous system should afford some interesting speculation. I move off, conscious of the presence of my comrades about me, and take up a position on the peak of a minor prominence. I have ample power, a condition to which I must accustom myself after the rigid power discipline of normal brigade routine, so I bring my music storage cells into phase, and select L’Arlesienne Suite for the first display. I will have ample time now to examine all of the music in existence, and to investigate my literary archives, which are complete.

  I select four nearby stars for examination, lock my scanner to them, set up processing sequences to analyze the data. I bring my interpretation circuits to bear on the various matters I wish to consider. I should have some interesting conclusions to communicate to my human superiors, when the time comes.

  At peace, I await the arrival of the relief column.

  PLACEMENT TEST

  I

  Reading the paper in his hand, Mart Maldon felt his mouth go dry. Across the desk, Dean Wormwell’s eyes, blurry behind thick contact lenses, strayed to his fingerwatch.

  “Quota’d out?” Maldon’s voice emerged as a squeak. “Three days before graduation?”

  “Umm, yes, Mr. Maldon. Pity, but there you are …” Worm-well’s jowls twitched upward briefly. “No reflection on you, of course …”

  Maldon found his voice. “They can’t do this to me—I stand number two in my class—”

  Wormwell held up a pudgy palm. “Personal considerations are not involved, Mr. Maldon. Student load is based on quarterly allocated funding; funds were cut. Analogy Theory was one of the courses receiving a quota reduction—”

  “An Theory … ? But I’m a Microtronics major; that’s an elective—an optional one-hour course—”

  The Dean rose, stood with his fingertips on the desk. “The details are there, in the notification letter—”

  “What about the detail that I waited four years for enrollment, and I’ve worked like a malemute for five more—”

  “Mr. Maldon!” Wormwell’s eyes bulged. “We work within a system! You don’t expect personal exceptions to be made, I trust?”

  “But, Dean—there’s a howling need for qualified Microtronic Engineers—”

  “That will do, Mr. Maldon. Turn in your student tag to the Registrar and you’ll receive an appointment for Placement Testing.”

  “All right.” Maldon’s chair banged as he stood up. “I can still pass Testing and get Placed; I know as much Micro as any graduate—5’

  “Ah—I believe you’re forgetting the limitation on non-academically qualified testees in Technical Specialty Testing. I suggest you accept a Phase Two Placement for the present …”

  “Phase Two—But that’s for unskilled labor!”

  “You need work, Mr. Maldon. A city of a hundred million can’t support idlers. And dormitory life is far from pleasant for an untagged man.” The Dean waited, glancing pointedly at the door. Maldon silently gathered up his letter and left.

  II

  It was hot in the test cubicle. Maldon shifted on the thinly-padded bench, looking over the test form:

  1. In the following list of words, which word is repeated most often: dog, cat, cow, cat, pig …

  2. Would you like to ask persons entering a building to show you their pass?

  3. Would you like to check forms to see if the names have been entered in the correct space?

  “Testing materials are on the desk,” a wall-speaker said. “Use the stylus to mark the answers you think are correct. Mark only one answer to each question. You will have one hour in which to complete the test. You may start now …”

  Back in the Hall twenty minutes later, Maldon took a seat on a bench against the wall beside a heavy-faced man who sat with one hand clutching the other as though holding a captured mouse. Opposite him, a nervous youth in issue coveralls shook a cigaret from a crumpled plastic pack lettered GRANYAUK WELFARE - ONE DAILY RATION, puffed it alight, exhaled an acrid whiff of combustion retardant.

  “That’s a real smoke,” he said in a high, rapid voice, rolling the thin, greyish cylinder between his fingers. “Half an inch of doctored tobacco and an inch and a half of filter.” He grinned sourly and dropped the cigaret on the floor between his feet.

  The heavy-faced man moved his head half an inch.

  “That’s safety first, Mac. Guys like you throw ’em around, they burn down and go out by theirself.”

  “Sure—if they’d make ’em half an inch shorter you could throw ’em away without lighting ’em at all.”

  Across the room a small man with jug ears moved along, glancing at the yellow or pink cards in the hands of the waiting men and women. He stopped, plucked a card from the hand of a narrowfaced boy with an open mouth showing crowded yellow teeth.

  “You’ve already passed ” the little man said irritably. “You don’t come back here anymore. Take the card and go to the place that’s written on it. Here …” he pointed.

  “Sixteen years I’m foreman of number nine gang-lathe at Philly Maintenance,” the man sitting beside Mart said suddenly. He unfolded his hands, held out the right one. The tips of all four fingers were missing to the first knuckle. He put the hand away.

  “When I get out of the Medicare, they classify me J-4 and send me here. And you know what?” He looked at Mart. “I can’t pass the tests …”

  “Maldon, Mart,” an amplified voice said. “Report to the Monitor’s desk …”

  He walked across to the corner where the small man sat now, deftly sorting cards. He looked up, pinched a pink card from the stack, jabbed it at Maldon. Words jumped out at him: NOT QUALIFIED.

  Mart tossed the card back on the desk. “You must be mixed up,” he said. “A ten year old kid could pass that test—”

  “Maybe so,” the monitor said sharply. “But you didn’t. Next testing on Wednesday, eight A. M.—”

  “Hold on a minute,” Mart said. “I’ve had five years of Microtronics—”

  The monitor was nodding. “Sure, sure. Come back Wednesday.”

  “You don’t get the idea—”

  “You’re the one that do
esn’t get the idea, fellow.” He studied Maldon for a moment. “Look,” he said, in a more reasonable tone. “What you want, you want to go in for Adjustment.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” Maldon said. “I’m not quite ready to have my brains scrambled.”

  “Ha! A smart-alec!” The monitor pointed to his chest. “Do I look like my brains were scrambled?”

  Maldon looked him over as though in doubt.

  “You’ve been Adjusted, huh? What’s it like?”

  “Adjustment? There’s nothing to it. You have a problem finding work, it helps you, that’s all. I’ve seen fellows like you before. You’ll never pass Phase Two testing until you do it.”

  “To Hell with Phase Two testing! I’ve registered for Tech Testing. I’ll just wait.”

  The monitor nodded, prodding at his teeth with a pencil. “Yeah, you could wait. I remember one guy waited nine years; then he got his Adjustment and we placed him in a week.”

  “Nine years?” Maldon shook his head. “Who makes up these rules?”

  “Who makes ’em up? Nobody! They’re in the book.”

  Maldon leaned on the desk. “Then who writes the book? Where do I find them?”

  “You mean the Chief?” the small man rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “On the next level up. But don’t waste your time, friend. You can’t get in there. They don’t have time to argue with everybody who comes in here. It’s the system—”

  “Yeah,” Maldon said, turning away. “So I hear.”

  III

  Maldon rode the elevator up one floor, stepped off in a blank-walled foyer, adorned by a stone urn filled with sand, a potted yucca, framed unit citations and a polished slab door lettered PLACEMENT BOARD—AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. He tried it, found it solidly locked.

  It was very quiet. Somewhere, air pumps hummed. Maldon stood by the door and waited. After ten minutes, the elevator door hissed open, disgorged a slow-moving man in blue GS coveralls with a yellow identity tag. He held the tag to a two-inch rectangle of glass beside the door. There was a click. The door slid back. Maldon moved quickly, crowding through behind the workman.

  “Hey, what gives,” the man said.

  “It’s all right, I’m a coordinator,” Maldon said quickly.

  “Oh.” The man looked Maldon over. “Hey,” he said. “Where’s your I.D.?”

  “It’s a new experimental system. It’s tattooed on my left foot.”

  “Hah!” the man said. “They always got to try out new stuff.” He went on along the deep-carpeted corridor. Maldon followed slowly, reading signs over doors. He turned in under one that read CRITERIA SECTION. A girl with features compressed by fat looked up, her lower jaw working busily. She reached, pressed a button on the desk top.

  “Hi,” Maldon said, using a large smile. “I’d like to see the chief of the section.”

  The girl chewed, looking at him.

  “I won’t take up much of his time …”

  “You sure won’t, Buster,” the girl said. The hall door opened. A uniformed man looked in. The girl waved a thumb at Maldon.

  “He comes busting in,” she said. “No tag, yet.”

  The guard jerked his head toward the corridor. “Let’s go …”

  “Look, I’ve got to see the chief—”

  The cop took his arm, helped him to the door. “You birds give me a swifty. Why don’t you go to Placement like the sign says?”

  “Look, they tell me I’ve got to have some kind of electronic lobotomy to make me dumb enough to be a receptionist or a watchman—”

  “Let’s watch them cracks,” the guard said. He shoved Maldon out into the waiting room. “Out! And don’t pull any more fasties until you got a tag, see?”

  IV

  Sitting at a shiny imitation-oak table in the Public Library, Mart turned the pages of a booklet titled Adjustment Fits the Man to the Job.

  “… neuroses arising from job tension,” he read at random. “Thus, the Adjusted worker enjoys the deep-down satisfaction which comes from Doing a Job, free from conflict-inducing nonproductive impulses and the distractions of feckless speculative intellectual activity …”

  Mart rose and went to the librarian’s console.

  “I want something a little more objective,” he said in a hoarse library whisper. “This is nothing but propaganda.”

  The librarian paused in her button-punching to peer at the booklet. “That’s put out by the Placement people themselves,” she said sharply. She was a jawless woman with a green tag against a ribby chest and thin, black-dyed hair. “It contains all the information anyone needs.”

  “Not quite; it doesn’t tell who grades Placement tests and decides who gets their brain poached.”

  ‘“Well!” the woman’s button chin drew in. “I’m sure I never heard Adjustment referred to in those terms before!”

  “Do you have any technical information on it—or anything on Placement policy in general?”

  “Certainly not for indiscriminate use by—” she searched for a word, “—browsers!”

  “Look, I’ve got a right to know what goes on in my own town, I hope,” Mart said, forgetting to whisper. “What is it, a conspiracy … ?”

  “You’re paranoic!” The librarian’s lean fingers snatched the pamphlet from Maldon’s hand. “You come stamping in here— without even a tag—a great healthy creature like you—” her voice cut like a sheet-metal file. Heads turned.

  “All I want is information—”

  “—living in luxury on MY tax money! You ought to be—”

  V

  It was an hour later. In a ninth-floor corridor of the GRANYAUK TIMES HERALD building, Mart leaned against a wall, mentally rehearsing speeches. A stout man emerged from a door lettered editor in chief. Mart stepped forward to intercept him.

  “Pardon me, sir. I have to see you …”

  Sharp blue eyes under wild-growing brows darted at Maldon.

  “Yes? What is it?”

  “I have a story for you. It’s about the Placement procedure.”

  “Whoa, buddy. Who are you?”

  “My name’s Maldon. I’m an Applied Tech graduate—almost —but I can’t get placed in Microtronics. I don’t have a tag—and the only way to get one is to get a job—but first I have to let the government operate on my brains—”

  “Hmmmp!” The man looked Maldon up and down, started on.

  “Listen!” Maldon caught at the portly man’s arm. “They’re making idiots out of intelligent people so they can do work you could train a chimp to do, and if you ask any questions—”

  “All right, Mac …” A voice behind Maldon growled. A large hand took him by the shoulder, propelled him toward the walkaway entrance, urged him through the door. He straightened his coat, looked back. A heavy-set man with a pink card in a plastic cover clipped to his collar dusted his hands, looking satisfied.

  “Don’t come around lots,” he called cheerfully as the door slammed.

  VI

  “Hi, Glamis,” Mart said to the small, neat woman behind the small, neat desk. She smiled nervously, straightened the mathematically precise stack of papers before her.

  “Mart, it’s lovely to see you again, of course . . her eyes went to the blank place where his tag should have been. “But you really should have gone to your assigned SocAd Advisor—”

  “I couldn’t get an appointment until January.” He pulled a chair around to the desk and sat down. “I’ve left school. I went in for Phase Two Placement testing this morning. I flunked.”

  “Oh … I’m so sorry, Mart.” She arranged a small smile on her face. “But you can go back on Wednesday—”

  “Uh-huh. And then on Friday, and then the following Monday—”

  “Why, Mart, I’m sure you’ll do better next time,” the girl said brightly. She flipped through the pages of a calendar pad. “Wednesday’s testing is for … ah .. . Vehicle Positioning Specialists, Instrumentation Inspectors, Sanitary Facility Supervisors—” “Uh-huh. Toilet At
tendants,” Mart said. “Meter Readers—” “There are others,” Glamis went on hastily. “Traffic flow coordinators—”

  “Pushing stop-light buttons on the turnpike. But it doesn’t matter what the job titles are. I can’t pass the tests.”

  “Why, Mart … Whatever do you mean?”

  “I mean that to get the kind of jobs that are open you have to be a nice, steady moron. And if you don’t happen to qualify as such, they’re prepared to make you into one.”

  “Mart, you’re exaggerating! The treatment merely slows the synaptic response time slightly—and its effects can be reversed at any time. People of exceptional qualities are needed to handle the type work—”

  “How can I fake the test results, Glamis? I need a job—unless I want to get used to Welfare coveralls and two T rations a day.” “Mart! I’m shocked that you’d suggest such a thing! Not that it would work. You can’t fool the Board that easily—”

  “Then fix it so I go in for Tech testing; you know I can pass.” She shook her head. “Heavens, Mart, Tech Testing is all done at Central Personnel in City Tower—Level Fifty. Nobody goes up there, without at least a blue tag—” She frowned sympathetically. “You should simply have your adjustment, and—”

  Maldon looked surprised. “You really expect me to go down there and have them cut my I. Q. down to 80 so I can get a job shovelling garbage?”

  “Really, Mart; you can’t expect society to adjust to you. You have to adjust to it”

  “Look, I can punch commuters’ tickets just as well as if I were stupid. I could—”

  Glamis shook her head. “No, you couldn’t, Mart. The Board knows what it’s doing.” She lowered her voice. “I’ll be perfectly frank with you. These jobs must be filled. But they can’t afford to put perceptive, active minds on rote tasks. There’d only be trouble. They need people who’ll be contented and happy punching tickets.”