ADRIFT AMONG THE GHOSTS

IT’S THE JACK BENNY PROGRAM. WITH JACK'S VERY special guest Lucille Ball ..."

I flip on the autolock mechanism while the computer scans to see if this is one on my quota.

Oh, Donnn ...

Alas for me, it is not, and the scan is automatically resumed. I tell the command module to shift to the next available signal, which might be the next thing in line or something completely different.

The lock light goes on, and I instruct my systems management computer to stick it on for evaluation. I'm getting worried about the manager. It shouldn't have locked on to the Lucille Ball guesting on Benny's program at all; even though she was a guest several times on the program, the voiceprints should have locked this one out. If it is defective . . . No! I just can not afford to have to go through all that random stuff again and again to find a new and previously unrecorded piece. Gods of Archus, please don't let the edit system break down now!

This new one is Action in the Afternoon, a live western serial done in Philadelphia, of all places. I know the country well, and I know the absurdity of a western coming from that city at all in any time and context. I don't need this one, but I instruct the manager to stay on it anyway. We are on NBC at the right period and I've had a number of malfunctions in riding the beam at this time. I am missing at least four Atom Squad episodes and countless Howdy Doodys, and it is worth the chance. Why not? There's not much else to do out here anyway.

That, and the fact that almost all of this project can be automated, is the second greatest problem with this assignment-this sentence, if truth be told. None of us who ride the beams are really anything more, or less, than politically connected criminals, although there's nothing on our records back home; we're considered "employees" and technically paid a wage. The money is hardly a consideration-lower civil service pay, only a token to make it look all nice and proper, as if we could spend it, anyway-but the deal is one that is difficult for someone in my position to turn down. I did, after all, kill four people. I should have been vaporized; the trial lasted barely ten minutes, and the evidence was not in dispute considering that they had the club so well monitored, they had recordings of the very act. How I wish I had known that, even guessed that they were so close on my heels! The four could have been eliminated one by one under perfect conditions. It just seemed so much more efficient to take them all out at once, as they were plotting my own demise.

Death. What did I know of death, or even crime? I sit and I watch these ancient recordings-how can I help but watch?-and I see experts. I listen to their newscasts and watch their documentary histories, and I wonder how such an incredibly gentle society as ours could have bred even such a rank amateur as myself-and those even ranker people in the club.

Computers do a lot for us, of course. It is a computer that maneuvers this ship with a precision no person could hope to match, and it's a computer that prepares my meals, records these ramblings, keeps me healthy. It was a computer that maintained the surveillance on the club, a computer that tried me, another which prosecuted me, yet another that defended me, and still another that sentenced me. And, but for one thing, this whole operation could be done by computer.

I suppose it might be boiled down to taste, although that's not quite the right word. I am the supervisor. I oversee the operations, check on what is going on, act as something of a repairman or even reprogrammer when the systems inevitably fail, and I separate the relevant from the irrelevant in terms of beam content. We want everything, of course, eventually-this sort of opportunity was only discovered by the merest of chances and might never come again to us or to any other civilization out here among the stars-but the beams keep going on, forcing us to pick and choose.

We may be the only other civilization to arise in this galaxy, although probably not. We will almost certainly be the only ones using reception devices that can translate this particular series of signals broadcast so long ago and from so far away, and probably the only ones who can see and hear the transmissions much the same as those who made these broadcasts did.

We are not at all like them, of course, or so we tell ourselves, and so even they would have believed. Certainly not physically. That took a lot of getting adjusted to at the start; they seemed like some strange, surreal creatures more suited to art or animation than the sort of beings you can think of as being live and real and sentient and even technologically proficient. Once, in a biology course at university, I was assured by a professor who was the greatest expert on everything that it was impossible for a bipedal lifeform to develop a complex technology, and that the fine manipulation of complex tools required a minimum of eighteen tentacles. I often wonder what that fellow is saying now, as these transmissions are brought back and analyzed. It pleases me to think of those pompous asses who seemed so powerful and self-assured to us helpless students to now be suddenly and irrevocably placed in the same position as some ancient was ten thousand years ago when it was proved that the world was indeed round and not flat.

And yet, as strange as their shape is, and how bizarre their architecture, one quickly comes to accept and even understand these alien creatures on the screen. It is far more fascinating to me to discover just how similar we are if you ignore the physical differences. We both see optically and hear acoustically. We both have two sexes-don't I know that!-and much of what we share in social structures and behavior seems to grow right out of that. We invented totally different machines, some in totally different ways, to do exactly the same things.

Our social structures are somewhat different, but we still have state education of the young, mass entertainment, vehicles for both individual and mass locomotion, and we both squandered a great deal of natural resources in our growth and fouled up our own planets with our wastes.

In a sense, they seem very much like us, although speeded up. The social forces that seemed to constantly rip and tear at them are vastly slowed in our own history, although, alas, violence seems to be necessary to shake things up and prevent stagnancy. They did in a thousand years what it took us ten thousand to accomplish, but they did it at the expense of developing technologically at a rate so accelerated that they were still socially and emotionally closer to their ancient ancestors when they developed the means of total annihilation.

I have no trouble with their dramas; I am, however, less comfortable with their jokes and humor. The sophisticated humor is no problem, and I now understand them well enough that their domestic situations correlate with those with which I am familiar even though it is not, of course, the same at all. I cannot, however, understand why slipping on a floor and sprawling is humorous to them, or why some of their undergarments seem filled with hilarity. This should not bother me; they are in many ways nothing like us, but still, it does. I cannot quite understand why it does, but it matters very much.

When you're out here, alone, riding the beam and adrift with the ghosts, they're the only real company you have. You get to know them, even love them, because they are at once so alien and remote and at the same time so similar. They are my family. For almost twenty years they have been the only companionship I have had.

It's not easy to ride the beams, even at the speeds we can travel. It is true that the old television signals traveled in a straight line into infinity-although they have become incredibly weak at this point, and it's often been theorized that our own signals might be intercepted some day in the same way-but it's not really a straight line. Planets rotate and they also revolve; suns move in their own orbits around the galactic center. Perhaps a quarter to a third of all they broadcast is lost because they were on the wrong side of their sun, or there was something else in the way of the beam. More is simply impossible to recover for other technical reasons, for the signals are not immune to the great forces of the universe, and the signal strengths we are talking about are on the equivalent of hearing a single speck of dust fall to a floor from the next solar system. Worse, they did not have a single standard. To get the British and affiliate nations' signals one must adjust for PAL; for French and Italian and many others it's SECAM, and others like the Soviet Union and Australia use hybrids. We missed a lot, too, because of directed uplinks, limited transmissions that did not escape, and cable.

But that's why I'm here, of course, with my quota. Eight hundred perfect hours of transmission. It sounded so simple, particularly when you think that the computer can just ride the beam and then match its swing and let the stuff flow in. It's not that easy. An entire program is a rarity. It often takes many passes, possible only because the same signals were sent many times and have arrived here by many different routes simply because of those forces that can bend light and split stellar images in two. Even then, we jump in and out of null-space with regularity, trying to keep ahead of them while still maintaining enough power to get the ship and the transmissions home.

Eight hundred hours of new programming. It sounded like the easiest thing in the world, even considering all that. Compared to being vaporized, it was a wonderful offer; compared to life at hard labor it was even more so.

I didn't know about the traps, though. All the little traps, and the big one they don't tell you about because it's still classified top secret. One is that word new, of course. I have picked up tens of thousands of hours, but we are rarely updated on what the others have also sent in until we break for transmission and reception. And I have fragments of a great many programs I am still trying to track down, which is why I'm riding this particular beam now, and why I am so afraid that the computer is not remembering what it already has in its files. If I have to reprogram it, I will lose its knowledge to date-not the programs, of course, but the tagged records-and have to wait a very long time until it is restored to its previous selectivity. I sometimes suspect that they have deliberately built bugs into this program to cause this and keep me out here. I find it frightening, at least in part because I am not skilled enough to actually rewrite the master program, simply to repair and restore it.

I wonder about malice. Six billion people on my own world alone, one of many we inhabit, and the year I committed my crime there were but a hundred and three premeditated murders. We are a gentler sort. Perhaps we react in less gentle ways. I sit and watch their programs and there seem to be four premeditated murders an hour just in their entertainment, and dozens in a single big city newscast. Some of these murderers are executed, most are imprisoned, and a great many walk out of those prisons after a while for crimes far greater and with far less justification than my own. I can't see the worst of their societies offering a living trip to Hell as an alternative, but mine is a gentler race, and a more vindictive one.

And so you sit, and you make the jumps, and sit some more, and you watch and you come to love those people. I know who did it in every Perry Mason, and I've followed Superman in all his incarnations. I've suffered with them their long-ago agonies of war and terrorism and disease and other tragedies, and I have rejoiced with them their victories, discoveries, and conquests. I have come to like and even appreciate their extremely bizarre music and art forms; the personalities I see are like old friends, where in the beginning they all looked alike to me.

Kings and queens and presidents and dictators-they are as much a part of me as my own history, my local counsellor and legates. They are more than that; they are all there is of me and my universe outside of the confines of this lousy little ship. They are what is real to me. I cannot find a frame of reference that is not of their reality rather than my own. It troubles me. When one lives, eats, sleeps, breathes an alien reality with no contact or reference to one's own, it becomes difficult to differentiate the real from the unreal, the alien from the familiar.

I was always a collector with eclectic tastes, and that's why they chose me for the beams. A collector, yes; not a quivering, smelly thing locked inside a soulless cage on a ride through Hell with ghosts for companions. The ghosts are truly that and don't mind at all while I must ride and watch and forbear and somehow survive. But they will not break me; no, they will not do that. My ghosts protect me, too, and are my salvation. Yet, when we shift, when there's no beam to ride and we're in search mode, there is no one here, no one but me and my memories. The ghosts then are inside my head, and I find them curiously intermingled, as if the alien ghosts of ancient fantasy are more real than the actuality of the world I was forced to leave behind so very long ago.

What was it like to actually breathe free-flowing natural air, to let wind and water bear on the sensory nodes, to know openness first hand, and not through some monitor's sterile window looking in on a landscape that was not my own, that I had never known or experienced or even imagined? To sit upon my own estate whose rolling blue moss-covered hills were carefully arranged with crimson byuap topiary by master artisans!

Oh, yes, I had an estate. Only the leader classes go to Hell alive; the krowl and duber and nimbiat, being of lesser gene pools, are allowed to be vaporized. We Madur are supposed to be better than that, or so the geneticists claim. Bred to be the elite. When one of us goes awry it threatens the whole system. Examples must be made.

How many times have I thought of it all, gone over every second in my mind? How difficult, now, living these twenty years among alien ghosts, to separate the two, as fact and fancy blend effortlessly if incongruously in my mind. I have gone mad in order to remain sane.

I was in my spa being bathed with honey water and watching a recently retrieved episode of The A Team when he arrived. None below our class and few within it were permitted to see such things; I, however, as a ranking physician, had gained the first private access on the excuse of seeing if exposure to such alien thought and vision might be detrimental to one's mind. Idiotic, of course.

I was expecting him, but not this soon. He was a duber, a service-class individual, bred to be superb in a specific talent or occupation, but he had much impudence and no right to interrupt me. He should have waited, but impudence was also an essential part of his makeup. He stopped and stared in horror at the screen where two trucks and three jeeps blew up as they ran over some cleverly planted mines. He shuddered and averted his eyes. It took little in the way of experimentation to understand that no duber was strong enough to tolerate even short-term exposure. The masses were far too gentle and passive to understand it. The newcomer did not look back again or refer to the scenes on the screen, and seemed relieved when I muted the sound. He got straight to the point.

"She's going to leave you, sir, that's for sure," said Richard Diamond, Private Eye. "She's a bit frightened of you, and somewhat intimidated, but she's making arrangements with a disreputable bunch to hide her and spirit her away."

I was furious at this, even though I suspected it all and had hired the duber only to see how she thought she was going to manage it. "How do they intend to do it while remaining beyond my reach?"

"A club in the city. The owner there will do almost anything for a price, and he's pretty good at it. Stick her in a safe house in a low neighborhood for a few days, then to Grand Central Station with phony ID, maybe disguised as a worker. Hop a spaceship and get off when it looks promising. Pardon me, but a girl that looks like she does won't have any trouble in a strange place for long."

"I'm well aware of that. It's why I can not allow it, even if it was not also degrading to her class."

"But why fight it? She's only doing this with small amounts that aren't even petty cash to you. You don't love her. Why not just let her go?"

I raised myself up on all my tentacles and almost grabbed the man. "Because I am a collector, something you would not understand. I collect, I do not give away any part of my collection. I want the names of these persons involved in this and the address of the club. I shall attend to this personally."

"But, sir-someone in your position-you can't go there yourself! Alone, unprotected-it simply isn't done!" Holmes objected.

I came out of the spa and headed for the main house. "In affairs of business and politics this is true, but this is a personal matter, and I can not allow others to be involved beyond you. Give me the information and you are discharged." Sooner or later, everybody goes to Rick's ...

It was both not as bad and worse than I had imagined. The place itself looked respectable and catered to the middle classes, and inside it even had the proper moss pits and sweetly scented atmosphere of albis root, but the patrons did not wear their class outwardly nor have much inwardly, either.

Peter Lorre was at the bar, fetching drinks for a table seating Wallace Beery, Preston Foster, and Mr. T. The rest of the mob was more common, character actors, mostly, although here and there were potentially great enemies like Charles Middleton and Roy Barcroft. I was not in fear. In a sense, I had them cold, since they could not run, could not hide, from my power and influence should they attempt violence against me and I live-and if I died they would be automatically hunted down by the Special Police.

I could tell they were all a bit awed and unnerved that someone born with the golden headplate would even enter their miserable club, but they were a tough lot whose business was getting around the likes of me and the rule of law and society which I represented.

"Yes, sir, yes, sir, what'll it be?" asked Barton MacLaine from behind the bar.

"I doubt you would serve anything of the quality I require in this establishment," I responded icily. I was aware of a female edging near, and I rotated an eye socket on her.

"Any kind of quality you want is available at the Long Branch," Miss Kitty assured me. "We serve all classes here and fill their needs no matter what they might be."

I'll bet, I thought but didn't say. Drugs, drink, perversion-that was their stock in trade. I knew this place now, and also understood that I was not the first golden headplate to enter but only the latest. That was how they got hold of you, their evil then perverting and subverting the system. I loathed them all. They were less than people, lower than nimbiats at their worst, and yet difficult to assail, for they held no higher opinion of themselves than I held of them.

"You are the owner of this establishment, Madam?" "I'm the manager, and I ain't no madam. I can take care of anything you might want."

"I wish to see the owner. I have personal business to discuss with that individual alone."

She looked around uncertainly, and Lorre glanced up from his cards and gave her a nod and a head nudge. "Okay, buddy, follow me. Just so happens the owner's in back now..."

I could see the crowd stiffen, although the tension wasn't so much aimed at preventing me from doing anything as the instinctual obligation of even these low-lifes to protect their boss. I followed her back to a private room. The owner looked up and offered me a place. It was clear that he had overheard everything and knew just who I was and why I was there, even though he remained impassive.

"Come, come, sir. No need to be surly here with your lessers. It is beneath you," Sidney Greenstreet oozed in dangerous mock friendliness. He wore a helmet over his plate making his class impossible to distinguish, but there would be only one reason for doing so: under that idiotic cover the coloration had to be golden. Even his dialect was proper Madur, although with a roughened edge. From offworld, certainly, but also certainly one of us gone bad.

"I see no reason to be more than minimally civil," I responded. "You are plotting to take something from me that belongs to me. I am here to see that it doesn't happen."

"Come, come, sir! I haven't the faintest idea what you are talking about."

"I will not play games. No matter what she has paid you, I will triple it in untraceable precious metals and gems if you take her money and then deliver her back to me. Don't deny that you are going to do it, or that you do not know what I am talking about. You have overstepped your fertilizer pits this time. I will have this place surrounded and everyone here, including you, subjected to Thought Probes. I doubt if any of you will walk freely away after that."

J.R. gave that evil chuckle of his. "You have that power, I admit," he drawled with some amusement in his voice, "but you have not invoked it as yet, and by the time you can do so, this place will be a tabernacle for retired nuns. You think I never expected a visit from you? I spotted that tinhorn, upper-crust private eye from a mile away. I won't stop it because I've already done it. She's gone. Out of your life, off this planet, and buried so deep you'll never find her." And he laughed.

I rose on all eight tentacles, my blood pressure rising so high, my entire exoskeleton glowed green. Off the planet before I had even begun? "Who dares such impudency with a pod of the Imperial Regency?" I demanded. "I am physician to the Center!"

"I know who and what you are," responded the one-armed man. "But it means nothing to me, nor does your money. Seven times I have gone to the auction pits at Quimera in lust after some unique work of beauty and genius, and seven times you have bested me not with mere money but with influence and outright fraud. The chance to humiliate you, to take from you something that is uniquely yours, was literally thrown in my path, begging to be stolen and with no law to prevent it. Discovering she was impregnated by you only added fine sauce. I have cost you your wife and children, Doctor, and I am proud of it! Seven times I have lost to you, but you-you have never lost at all. Not until now. I wanted you to know how it feels to lose."

I stared at him. "Gomesh! You are Gomesh, Imperator Comptroller of the Litidal! I know you now!" It was worse than that. He was of equal rank and position and senior in age. I could shut down his foul club, which was obviously used in his collecting, but I could not touch him-legally or through my influence. To even press such a case against him would only subject me to embarrassment and humiliation.

And yet, he was correct. Up until that time I had never lost, and I could not accept it now. He saw my tentacles curl and uncurl and one of my eyes focus on a wooden ornament; a heavy, wooden ornament.

"Don't be ridiculous," snarled Don Corleone. "My men are everywhere and you are not in your element here, nor is this some alien horror chamber like the room in which you watch those intercepted grotesqueries. You are in an untenable position, and I intend to enjoy it."

Nobody talks that way to Charles Bronson!

I don't even remember the next minute or so very well, just a roaring blur, but something snapped inside me that I did not even suspect could ever go out of control. Tentacles snapped out, taking him completely by surprise, flipping him over with a strength I had never had before or since, while other tentacles reached for things in his compartment-bottles, pieces of furniture; a piece of rope that supported his privacy curtain became a whip in my grasp.

Naturally, this brought his bodyguard of thugs on the run. Gomesh was larger and heavier than I, yet somehow I managed to pick him up and actually throw him right over my head and into the bodyguards. Swiveling, one of the guards dropped an illegal stun gun. I spotted it with one eye and reached it before they could even move. I had never fired such a weapon before, but at that range a blind person could have committed a massacre, and this I did. I know that I did so. Later they showed me the recordings.

When it was over, Gomesh and three of his henchmen were dead, and all of a sudden, my rage simply fled me and I just remained there staring at the carnage. I offered no resistance when the Special Police arrived and led me away.

The trial was conducted very quickly with me alone in my cell. The defense computer discussed my options, which were few, and then the evidence was shown and the State made its verdict demands.

"Insanity," I said to my attorney. Even I was sickened and stunned watching the recording of the killings. We are too gentle a race for such things; the recording and most of the evidence itself was sealed to protect the public. It had to be. I was Madur. If the masses were ever to learn that one of my class was capable of such a thing, it would bring down the entire social structure, the whole of our civilization. "They have seen it and taken my mind print. They must know that this was no rational act."

"I'm afraid you wouldn't be allowed to plead insanity," my attorney replied. "You see, you are technically above the law in your class, and the justification for that status and indeed the justification for Madur rule is that you are genetically perfect. Madur are by definition incapable of such acts. Madur are, by definition, always sane and rational. Therefore, your crime is by definition premeditated."

"But it was not! You and they both know that!"

He sighed. "Sir, it is beside the point what actually occurred. What matters is that it could not have occurred. Interestingly, because of the necessity of your sanity and the evidence of the deceased's bad moral character and provocations against you, I probably could have gotten you off with a sentence of exile to some remote little planet somewhere. But Gomesh is not the issue. You did not simply kill Gomesh, you killed three other people."

"Who would have killed me or done me grave injury saving their employer! It was self-defense!"

"You miss the point. These men were duber. They were born and bred to be bodyguards and henchmen just as you were to be Imperial Physician. As such, they were acting as they had to act, genetically, mentally, socially, and morally, while your action was against all things that Madur stand for. They had a right to injure or kill you. You had no right to prevent them, just as it is your own responsibility for placing them in a position where they were forced to take such action against you." Perry Mason sighed. "I'm sorry, but even I had to lose one sooner or later."

I was dumbstruck by the implications of what he was saying, and the rightness of it. I was responsible for their attempt on me, and as a result I did not have any right to stop it. My crime was not that I murdered four people; four people who I still thought deserved it. My crime was in not killing Gomesh, thus avenging my honor, and then allowing his bodyguards to kill me. This was no petty crime, not even murder; this was a crime against civilization as we knew it. If the lower classes ever even suspected a Madur was capable of even thinking emotionally, of losing control even in privacy and without harm, let alone insanity, no matter how temporary, no one could feel safe or secure again.

"In sentencing you I am faced with a dilemma for which the codes have no guidance," Judge Wapner told me sternly. "As a result, I must break new ground. I could have you vaporized for the murder of Gomesh, of course, but that would not preserve the symmetry necessary here. There is another, perhaps more appropriate way, than that. It is clear that you yourself are not defective, but that exposure to these alien signals has somehow conflicted with your primary intellectual imperatives. That places us in a quandary but also makes you uniquely qualified to aid your people. We need to continue collecting those signals, those programs. Yet, how can we risk prolonged exposure by others to them? What we need is an experienced expert on the subject who can make the proper selections.

"The collection may be automatic," Judge Roy Bean continued, "but that is the trouble with it. Automatic. Someone must eventually go through it all and make decisions on what is worthy and what is not, what is redundant and what is new. It is a vital project-the only contact ever with another sentient race even if the contact is only one way-and there is much to learn. Computers can do some of it, but in the end it is a highly subjective process. It requires someone with a collector's sense and a high analytical and appreciatory background. It requires a Madur. We realize that your tortured soul craves vaporizing, but would you consider committing yourself to this project, which will help your race, instead? We would outfit a special ship and send you out as collector-and critic. It is too much to ask of some here, considering the mental price we might pay, but you have already paid it."

The last thing my soul craved then was vaporization no matter what I should have felt. If my soul went that way, I would have let them kill me and given everyone but myself and Gomesh a happy ending. I was very stupid then. I leapt at the chance.

"I live to serve my people," I spouted nobly.

I did not understand what they were doing then, either. I was no mere murderer, no mere abuser of trust, for which simple vaporizing would have been a quick and easy answer. I had committed an impossible act, an act which threatened everything. Damn those machines!

Make the punishment fit the crime ...

The beam sensor alarm sounded, and I moved to check the monitoring station. I flicked on the recorders and attached the visual translators and it started to roll. Immediately I knew where we'd drifted, and immediately I tried to stop it, but the damned computer refused and flashed NEW MATERIAL-PICKUP REQUIRED. Damn that thing! Not new, not new at all! How many times had I seen it? How many times had I been forced to watch it when that mechanical mind of Hell insisted?

"This is the emergency broadcast system. This is not -repeat, not-a test." He was sweating and nervous, even though he was the best-known newscaster of his day delivering the biggest story of his or any career.

"No, no! Not my people! Not my family! Not my beautiful, beautiful ghosts!"

"... tactical nuclear exchange involved the elimination of almost forty percent of the Soviet Army, resulting in..."

"Lucy! Desi! Uncle Millie! Come! Tell us it was all just a joke! Tell me when to laugh!"

"... six hundred multiple warhead missiles. Washington, New York, San Diego, Norfolk, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle have already been obliterated by submarine-based ..."

"We are a gentle race!" I screamed, my exoskeleton glowing green as always. "Were you all mad? Were you all seized by a fit of insanity? You can not do this to me!"

"... midwestern cities such as here in Chicago in seven minutes or less. If you have a shelter, get to it immediately. Do not hesitate. If you have a storm cellar or basement, go to it. Sewer tunnels, subways. Do not let yourself be exposed to direct blast. Do not venture outside again for at least two to four weeks. Take what provisions you can ..."

"Not even a crime against civilization can deserve this! Computer, get me control. Tell them to blow this ship. Jettison life support! I will take anything, anything except this! How many times must I watch? How many times must I know?

"Please! Central Computer! In the name of all that's holy, you can not make me watch them all die again!"