01-Human Space Read online

  Ron nodded vigorously. “Of course it all depends on whether they use the kind of circuits I think they use. Look for yourself; the copseyes aren’t supposed to be foolproof. They’re supposed to be cheap. If one gets knocked down, the taxes don’t go up much. The other way is to make them expensive and foolproof, and frustrate a lot of people. People aren’t supposed to be frustrated in a Free Park.”

  “So?”

  “Well, there's a cheap way to make the circuitry for the power system. If they did it that way, I can blow the whole thing. We’ll see.” Ron pulled thin copper wire from the cuffs of his shirt.

  “How long will this take?”

  “Oh, half an hour—maybe more.”

  That decided me. “I’ve got to be going. I’m meeting Jill Hayes at the Wilshire exits. You’ve met her, a big blond girl, my height—”

  But he wasn’t listening. “Okay, see you,” he muttered. He began placing the copper wire inside the copseye, with tweezers. I left.

  Crowds tend to draw crowds. A few minutes after leaving Ron, I joined a semicircle of the curious to see what they were watching.

  A balding, lantern-jawed individual was putting something together—an archaic machine, with blades and a small gasoline motor. The T-shaped wooden handle was brand new and unpainted. The metal parts were dull with the look of ancient rust recently removed.

  The crowd speculated in half-whispers. What was it? Not part of a car; not an outboard motor, though it had blades; too small for a motor scooter, too big for a motor skateboard —

  “Lawn mower,” said the white-haired lady next to me. She was one of those small, birdlike people who shrivel and grow weightless as they age, and live forever. Her words meant nothing to me. I was about to ask, when —

  The lantern-jawed man finished his work, and twisted something, and the motor started with a roar. Black smoke puffed out. In triumph he gripped the handles. Outside, it was a prison offense to build a working internal combustion machine. Here —

  With the fire of dedication burning in his eyes, he wheeled his infernal machine across the grass. He left a path as flat as a rug. It was a Free Park, wasn’t it?

  The smell hit everyone at once: black dirt in the air, a stink of half-burned hydrocarbons attacking nose and eyes. I gasped and coughed. I’d never smelled anything like it.

  The crowd roared and converged.

  He squawked when they picked up his machine. Someone found a switch and stopped it. Two men confiscated the tool kit and went to work with screwdriver and hammer. The owner objected. He picked up a heavy pair of pliers and tried to commit murder.

  A copseye zapped him and the man with the hammer, and they both hit the lawn without bouncing. The rest of them pulled the lawn mower apart and bent and broke the pieces.

  “I’m half sorry they did that,” said the old woman. “Sometimes I miss the sound of lawn mowers. My dad used to mow the lawn on Sunday mornings.”

  I said, “It’s a Free Park.”

  “Then why can’t he build anything he pleases?”

  “He can. He did. Anything he’s free to build, we're free to kick apart.” And my mind finished, Like Ron’s rigged copseye.

  Ron was good with tools. It would not surprise me a bit if he knew enough about copseyes to knock out the, whole system.

  Maybe someone ought to stop him.

  But knocking down copseyes wasn’t illegal. It happened all the time. It was part of the freedom of the Park. If Ron could knock them all down at once, well —

  Maybe someone ought to stop him.

  I passed a flock of high school girls, all chattering like birds, all about sixteen. It might have been their first trip inside a Free Park. I looked back because they were so cute, and caught them staring in awe and wonder at the dragon on my back.

  A few years and they’d be too blasé to notice. It had taken Jill almost half an hour to apply it this morning: a glorious red-and-gold dragon breathing flames across my shoulder, flames that seemed to glow by their own light. Lower down were a princess and a knight in golden armor, the princess tied to a stake, the knight fleeing for his life. I smiled back at the girls, and two of them waved.

  Short blond hair and golden skin, the tallest girl in sight, wearing not even a nudist’s shoulder pouch: Jill Hayes stood squarely in front of the Wilshire entrance, visibly wondering where I was. It was five minutes after three.

  There was this about living with a physical culture nut. Jill insisted on getting me into shape. The daily exercises were part of that, and so was this business of walking half the length of King’s Free Park …

  I’d balked at doing it briskly, though. Who walks briskly in a Free Park? There’s too much to see. She’d given me an hour; I’d held out for three. It was a compromise, like the paper slacks I was wearing despite Jill’s nudist beliefs.

  Sooner or later she’d find someone with muscles, or I’d relapse into laziness, and we’d split. Meanwhile … we got along. It seemed only sensible to let her finish my training.

  She spotted me, yelled, “Russel! Here!” in a voice that must have reached both ends of the Park.

  In answer I lifted my arm, semaphore-style, slowly over my head and back down.

  And every copseye in King’s Free Park fell out of the sky, dead.

  Jill looked about her at all the startled faces and all the golden bubbles resting in bushes and on the grass. She approached me somewhat uncertainly. She asked, “Did you do that?”

  I said, “Yah. If I wave my arms again, they’ll all go back up.”

  “I think you’d better do it,” she said primly. Jill had a fine poker face. I waved my arm grandly over my head and down, but of course, the copseyes stayed where they had fallen.

  Jill said, “I wonder what happened to them?”

  “It was Ron Cole. You remember him. He’s the one who engraved some old Michelob beer bottles for Steuben—”

  “Oh, yes. But how?”

  We went off to ask him.

  A brawny college man howled and charged past us at a dead run. We saw him kick a copseye like a soccer ball. The golden cover split, but the man howled again and hopped up and down hugging his foot.

  We passed dented golden shells and broken resonators and bent parabolic reflectors. One woman looked flushed and proud; she was wearing several of the copper toroids as bracelets. A kid was collecting the cameras. Maybe he thought he could sell them outside.

  I never saw an intact copseye after the first minute.

  They weren’t all busy kicking copseyes apart. Jill stared at the conservatively dressed group carrying POPULATION BY COPULATION Signs, and wanted to know if they were serious. Their grim-faced leader handed us pamphlets that spoke of the evil and the blasphemy of Man’s attempts to alter himself through gene tampering and extra-uterine growth experiments. If it was a put-on, it was a good one.

  We passed seven little men, each three to four feet high, traveling with a single tall, pretty brunette. They wore medieval garb. We both stared; but I was the one who noticed the makeup and the use of UnTan. African pigmies, probably part of a UN-sponsored tourist group; and the girl must be their guide.

  Ron Cole was not where I had left him.

  “He must have decided that discretion is the better part of cowardice. May be right, too,” I surmised. “Nobody’s every knocked down all the copseyes before.”

  “It’s not illegal, is it?”

  “Not illegal, but excessive. They can bar him from the Park, at the very least.”

  Jill stretched in the sun. She was all golden, and big. She said, “I’m thirsty. Is there a fountain around?”

  “Sure, unless someones plugged it by now. It’s a—”

  “Free Park. Do you mean to tell me they don’t even protect the fountains?”

  “You make one exception, its like a wedge. When someone ruins a fountain, they wait and fix it that night. That way … If I see someone trying to wreck a fountain, I’ll generally throw a punch at him. A lot of us do. Aft
er a guy’s lost enough of his holiday to the copseye stunners, he’ll get the idea, sooner or later.”

  The fountain was a solid cube of concrete with four spigots and a hand-sized metal button. It was hard to jam, hard to hurt. Ron Cole stood near it, looking lost.

  He seemed glad to see me, but still lost. I introduced him —“You remember Jill Hayes.” He said, “Certainly. Hello, Jill,” and, having put her name to its intended purpose, promptly forgot it.

  Jill said, “We thought you’d made a break for it.”

  “I did.”

  “0h?”

  “You know how complicated the exits are. They have to be, to keep anyone from getting in through an exit with—like a shotgun.” Ron ran both hands through his hair, without making it any more or less neat. “Well, all the exits have stopped working. They must be on the same circuits as the copseyes. I wasn’t expecting that.”

  “Then we’re locked in,” I said. That was irritating. But underneath the irritation was a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “How long do you think—”

  “No telling. They’ll have to get new copseyes in somehow. And repair the beamed power system, and figure out how I bollixed it, and fix it so it doesn’t happen again. I suppose someone must have kicked my rigged copseye to pieces by now, but the police don’t know that.”

  “Oh, they’ll just send in some cops,” said Jill

  “Look around you.”

  There were pieces of copseyes in all directions. Not one remained whole. A cop would have to be out of his mind to enter a Free Park.

  Not to mention the damage to the spirit of the Park.

  “I wish I’d brought a bag lunch,” said Ron.

  I saw the cloak off to my right: a ribbon of glowing blue velvet hovering at five feet, like a carpeted path in the air. I didn’t yell, or point, or anything. For Ron it might be pushing the wrong buttons.

  Ron didn’t see it. “Actually I’m kind of glad this happened,” he said animatedly. “I’ve always thought that anarchy ought to be a viable form of society.”

  Jill made polite sounds of encouragement.

  “After all, anarchy is only the last word in free enterprise. What can a government do for people that people can’t do for themselves? Protection from other countries? If all the other countries are anarchies, too, you don’t need armies. Police, maybe; but what’s wrong with privately owned police?”

  “Fire departments used to work that way,” Jill remembered. “They were hired by the insurance companies. They only protected houses that belonged to their own clients.”

  “Right! So you buy theft and murder insurance, and the insurance companies hire a police force. The client carries a credit card—”

  “Suppose the robber steals the card, too?”

  “He can’t use it. He doesn’t have the right retina prints.”

  “But if the client doesn’t have the credit card, he can’t sic the cops on the thief.”

  “Oh.” A noticeable pause. “Well—”

  Half-listening, for I had heard it all before, I looked for the end points of the cloak. I found empty space at one end and a lovely red-haired girl at the other. She was talking to two men as outré as herself.

  One can get the impression that a Free Park is one gigantic costume party. It isn’t. Not one person in ten wears anything but street clothes; but the costumes are what get noticed.

  These guys were part bird.

  Their eyebrows and eyelashes were tiny feathers, green on one, golden on the other. Larger feathers covered their heads, blue and green and gold, and ran in a crest down their spines. They were bare to the waist, showing physiques Jill would find acceptable.

  Ron was lecturing. “What does a government do for anyone except the people who run the government? Once there were private post offices, and they were cheaper than what we’ve got now. Anything the government takes over gets more expensive, immediately. There’s no reason why private enterprise can’t do anything a government—”

  Jill gasped. She said, “Ooh! How lovely.”

  Ron turned to look.

  As if on cue, the girl in the cloak slapped one of the feathered men hard across the mouth. She tried to hit the other one, but he caught her wrist. Then all three froze.

  I said, “See? Nobody wins. She doesn’t even like standing still. She—” and I realized why they weren’t moving.

  In a Free Park it’s easy for a girl to turn down an offer. If the guy won’t take No for an answer, he gets slapped. The stun beam gets him and the girl. When she wakes up, she walks away.

  Simple.

  The girl recovered first. She gasped and jerked her wrist loose and turned to run. One of the feathered men didn’t bother to chase her. He simply took a double handful of the cloak.

  This was getting serious.

  The cloak jerked her sharply backward. She didn’t hesitate. She reached for the big gold disks at her shoulders, ripped them loose and ran on. The feathered men chased her, laughing.

  The redhead wasn’t laughing. She was running all out. Two drops of blood ran down her shoulders. I thought of trying to stop the feathered men, decided in favor of it—but they were already past.

  The cloak hung like a carpeted path in the air, empty at both ends.

  Jill hugged herself uneasily. “Ron, just how does one go about hiring your private police force?”

  “Well, you can’t expect it to form spontaneously—”

  "Let’s try the entrances. Maybe we can get out.”

  __________

  It was slow to build. Everyone knew what a copseye did. Nobody thought it through. Two feathered men chasing a lovely nude? A pretty sight: and why interfere? If she didn’t want to be chased, she need only … what? And nothing else had changed. The costumes, the people with causes, the people looking for causes, the people-watchers, and pranksters—

  Blank Sign had joined the POPULATION BY COPULATION faction. His grass-stained pink street tunic jarred strangely with their conservative suits, but he showed no sign of mockery; his face was as preternaturally solemn as theirs. Nonetheless they did not seem glad of his company.

  It was crowded near the Wilshire exits. I saw enough bewildered and frustrated faces to guess that they were closed. The little vestibule area was so packed that we didn’t even try to find out what was wrong with the doors.

  “I don’t think we ought to stay here,” Jill said uneasily.

  I noticed the way she was hugging herself. “Are you cold?”

  “No.” She shivered. “But I wish I were dressed.”

  “How about a strip of that velvet cloak?”

  “Good!”

  We were too late. The cloak was gone.

  It was a warm September day, near sunset. Clad only in paper slacks, I was not cold in the least. I said, “Take my slacks.”

  “No, hon, I’m the nudist.” But Jill hugged herself with both arms.

  “Here,” said Ron, and handed her his sweater. She flashed him a grateful look, then, clearly embarrassed, she wrapped the sweater around her waist and knotted the sleeves.

  Ron didn’t get it at all. I asked him, “Do you know the difference between nude and naked?”

  He shook his head.

  “Nude is artistic. Naked is defenseless.”

  Nudity was popular in a Free Park. That night, nakedness was not. There must have been pieces of that cloak all over King’s Free Park. I saw at least four that night: one worn as a kilt, two being used as crude sarongs, and one as a bandage.

  __________

  On a normal day, the entrances to King’s Free Park close at six. Those who want to stay, stay as long as they like. Usually there are not many, because there are no lights to be broken in a Free Park; but light does seep in from the city beyond. The copseyes float about, guided by infrared, but most of them are not manned.

  Tonight would be different.

  It was after sunset, but still light. A small and ancient lady came stumping towar
d us with a look of murder on her lined face. At first I thought it was meant for us; but that wasn’t it. She was so mad she couldn’t see straight.

  She saw my feet and looked up. “Oh, it’s you. The one who helped break the lawn mower,” she said—which was unjust. “A Free Park, is it? A Free Park! Two men just took away my dinner!”

  I spread my hands. “I’m sorry. I really am. If you still had it, we could try to talk you into sharing it.”

  She lost some of her mad; which brought her embarrassingly close to tears. “Then we’re all hungry together. I brought it in a plastic bag. Next time I’ll use something that isn’t transparent, by d-damn!” She noticed Jill and her improvised sweater-skirt, and added, I’m sorry, dear, I gave my towel to a girl who needed it even more.”

  “Thank you anyway.”

  “Please, may I stay with you people until the copseyes start working again? I don’t feel safe, somehow. I’m Glenda Hawthorne.”

  We introduced ourselves. Glenda Hawthorne shook our hands. By now it was quite dark. We couldn’t see the city beyond the high green hedges, but the change was startling when the lights of Westwood and Santa Monica flashed on.

  The police were taking their own good time getting us some copseyes.

  We reached the grassy field sometimes used by the Society for Creative Anachronism for their tournaments. They fight on foot with weighted and padded weapons designed to behave like swords, broad-axes, morningstars, et cetera. The weapons are bugged so that they won’t fall into the wrong hands. The field is big and flat and bare of trees, sloping upward at the edges.

  On one of the slopes, something moved.

  I stopped. It didn’t move again, but it showed clearly in light reflected down from the white clouds. I made out something man-shaped and faintly pink, and a pale rectangle nearby.

  I spoke low. “Stay here.”

  Jill said, “Don’t be silly. There’s nothing for anyone to hide under. Come on.”

  The blank sign was bent and marked with shoe prints. The man who had been carrying it looked up at us with pain in his eyes. Drying blood ran from his nose. With effort he whispered, “I think they dislocated my shoulder.”