To Prime the Pump - A. Bertram Chandler [38]
She smiled. "Somebody must know what happens, but quite a few of us suspect. After all, not much engineering skill would be required to convert a perfectly functioning ship into a perfectly functioning time bomb."
"I suppose not. But tell me, Marlene, just what does anybody have to do to get slung off this, insofar as you all are concerned, perfect world?"
"There was one man who still lusted for power, direct, personal power. Working in secret he tried to form a Party, with himself as Leader, of course, on the same lines as the old Fascist and Communist Parties . . . ." She almost whispered, "I was lucky not to have been involved. Anyhow, he went. And there was another man . . . We still have the record. I'll show you."
She made a slight gesture with her right hand. There was the slightest of humming noises, a hesitant click, and then misty forms and colors swirled in the depths of the big screen, slowly coalesced. And there was sound, too, a woman's voice screaming, "No! Please! No!"
Horrified, yet obsessed by a fascination of which he was afterwards bitterly ashamed, Grimes stared at the picture. It showed the interior of a cellar, and there was a naked girl, her body dreadfully elongated, stretched out on a rack, and a pale, fat slug of a man, stripped to the waist, in the act of taking a white-hot iron from a glowing brazier.
Suddenly there was an ingress of men and women, all of them armed, one of them carrying a bell-mouthed pistol like the ones Grimes had seen in Marlene's room. The report, when it was fired, was no more than a soft chuff. At once the torturer was trapped, enmeshed in a net of metal strands that seemed to be alive, that working with a sort of mechanical intelligence bound his hands and arms and legs and feet, swiftly immobilizing him. He fell against his own brazier, and the others left him there while they attended to his victim. Grimes could see the smoke and the steam that rose from his burning body, could hear his wordless screams (until the net somehow gagged him), thought (although this could have been imagination) that he could smell charred flesh.
The screen went blank.
"And who was that?" asked Grimes, with feeble, cheap humor. "The Marquis de Sade?"
"No. Oddly enough, a Mr. Jones from New Detroit."
"And did he . . . die?"
"Probably. But not on El Dorado."
"And how did you suspect?"
"Oh, we knew. But his first victims were collaborators more than martyrs, and he did them no permanent damage. And that girl, for example, was experiencing nothing worse (or better?) than a mild, sexually stimulating whipping. However, the Monitor sees all, knows all, and gave the alarm, but on the rare occasions that arrests are necessary we prefer that they be made by ourselves, not by robots."
"But if your Monitor is so highly efficient, why the human Big Brothers?"
"We monitor the Monitor. That first man I told you about, the would-be dictator, almost succeeded in subverting it."
"I'm not sure that I'd like to live here, Marlene."
"I'm not sure that we'd have you, John, at least not until you've made your first billion or produced cast-iron documentary evidence of a family tree going back to Adam. Or both." But the words were spoken without malice. "And now, John, would you like to see how your lords and masters are behaving themselves?"
"No," he should have said.
"They are guests at the Duchess of Leckhampton's masked ball—the Captain and Surgeon Commander Passifern."
"That sounds innocuous enough," he said, disappointed.
Again there was the languid wave of her slim hand, again there was the coalescing swirl of light and form and color. Again there was sound, distorted at first, that reminded Grimes of Ravel's Waltz Dream. But it was not Ravel that poured from the concealed speakers when the picture clarified; it was Strauss, rich, creamy, sensual, unbearably sweet, and to it the dancers swayed and glided over the wide, wide expanse of mirror floor, and in the background there was red plush and gilt, and overhead blazed and sparkled the crystalline