“Want an assistant?”

  “No, thanks. I just want not to be bothered.”

  Thornberg resumed his way across the floor. Hardness resounded dully under his shoes. The main coordinator was in a special armored booth nestled against the great pyramid. He must go through a second scan before the door admitted him. Not many were allowed in here. The complete archives of the nation were too valuable to risk.

  Thornberg’s loyalty rating was AAB-2—not absolutely perfect, but the best available among men and women of his professional caliber. His last drugged checkup had revealed certain doubts and reservations about government policy, but there was no question of disobedience. Prima facie, he was certainly bound to be loyal. He had served with distinction in the war against Brazil, losing a leg in action; his wife had been killed in the abortive Chinese rocket raids ten years ago; his son was a rising young Space Guard officer on Venus. He had read and listened to illegal stuff, blacklisted books, underground and foreign propaganda—but then, every intellectual dabbled with that; it was not a serious offense if your record was otherwise good and if you laughed off what the things said.

  He sat for a moment regarding the board inside the booth. Its complexity would have baffled most engineers, but he had been with Matilda so long that he didn’t even need the reference tables.

  Well…

  It took nerve, this. A hypnoquiz was sure to reveal what he was about to do. But such raids were, necessarily, in a random pattern. He wouldn’t likely be called up again for years, especially given his rating. By the time he was found out, Jack should have risen far enough in the guard ranks to be safe.

  In the privacy of the booth Thornberg permitted himself a harsh grin. “This,” he murmured to the machine, “will hurt me worse than it does you.”

  He began punching buttons.

  Here were circuits which could alter the records, take out an entire spool and write whatever was desired in the molecules. Thornberg had done the job a few times for high officials. Now he was doing it for himself.

  Jimmy Obrenowicz, son of his second cousin, had been hustled off at night by Security Police on suspicion of treason. The file showed what no private citizen was supposed to know: the prisoner was in Camp Fieldstone. Those who returned from there, not a big percentage, were very quiet, and said absolutely nothing about their experiences. Sometimes they were incapable of speech.

  The chief of the Technical Division, Central Records, had damn well better not have a relative in Fieldstone. Thornberg toiled at the screens and buttons for an hour, erasing, changing. The job was tough; he had to go back several generations, altering lines of descent. But when he was through, James Obrenowicz had no kinship whatsoever to the Thornbergs.

  And I thought the world of that boy. Well, I’m not doing this for me, Jimmy. It’s for Jack. When the cops pull your file, later today no doubt, I can’t let them find you’re related to Captain Thornberg on Venus and a friend of his father.

  He slapped the switch that returned the spool to the memory banks. With this act do I disown thee.

  After that he sat for a while, relishing the quiet of the booth and the clean impersonality of the instruments. He didn’t even want to smoke. Presently, though, he began to think.

  So now they were going to give every citizen a number, one number for everything. Already they discussed tattooing it on. Thornberg foresaw popular slang referring to the numbers as “brands” and Security cracking down on those who used the term. Disloyal language.

  Well, the underground was dangerous. It was supported by foreign countries who didn’t like an American-dominated world—at least, not one dominated by today’s kind of America, though once “U.S.A.” had meant “hope.” The rebels were said to have their own base out in space somewhere and to have honeycombed the country with their agents. That could well be. Their propaganda was subtle: we don’t want to overthrow the nation; we simply want to restore the Bill of Rights. It could attract a lot of unstable souls. But Security’s spy hunt was bound to drag in any number of citizens who had never meditated treason. Like Jimmy—or had Jimmy been an undergrounder after all? You never knew. Nobody ever told you.

  There was a sour taste in Thornberg’s mouth. He grimaced. A line of a song came back to him. “I hate you one and all.” How had it gone? They used to sing it in his college days: Something about a very bitter character who’d committed a murder.

  Oh, yes. “Sam Hall.” How did it go, now? You needed a gravelly bass to sing it properly.

  Oh, my name it is Sam Hall, it is Sam Hall.

  Yes, my name is Sam Hall, it is Sam Hall.

  Oh, my name it is Sam Hall,

  And I hate you one and all,

  Yes, I hate you one and all, God damn your eyes.

  That was it. And Sam Hall was about to swing for murder. Thornberg remembered now. He felt like Sam Hall himself. He looked at the machine and wondered how many Sam Halls were in it.

  Idly, postponing his return to work, he punched for the data-name, Samuel Hall, no further specifications. The machine mumbled. Presently it spewed out a stack of papers, microprinted on the spot from the memory banks. Complete dossier on every Sam Hall, living and dead, from the time the records began to be kept. To hell with it. Thornberg chucked the sheets down the incinerator slot.

  “Oh, I killed a man, they say, so they say—”

  The impulse was blinding in its savagery. They were dealing with Jimmy at this moment, probably pounding him over the kidneys, and he, Thornberg, sat here waiting for the cops to requisition Jimmy’s file, and there was nothing he could do. His hands were empty.

  By God, he thought, I’ll give them Sam Hall!

  His fingers began to race; he lost his nausea in the intricate technical problem. Slipping a fake spool into Matilda wasn’t easy. You couldn’t duplicate numbers, and every citizen had a lot of them. You had to account for each day of his life.

  Well, some of that could be simplified The machine had only existed for twenty-five years; before then, records had been kept in a dozen different offices. Let’s make Sam Hall a resident of New York, his dossier there lost in the bombing thirty years ago. Such of his papers as were in New Washington had also been lost, in the Chinese attack. That meant he simply reported as much detail as he could remember, which needn’t be a lot.

  Let’s see. “Sam Hall” was an English song, so Sam Hall should be British himself. Came over with his parents, oh, thirty-eight years ago, when he was three, and got naturalized with them; that was before the total ban on immigration. Grew up on New York’s Lower East Side, a tough kid, a slum kid. School records lost in the bombing, but he claimed to have gone through the tenth grade. No living relatives. No family. No definite occupation, just a series of unskilled jobs. Loyalty rating BBA-O, which meant that purely routine questions showed him to have no political opinions that mattered.

  Too colorless. Give him some violence in his background. Thornberg punched for information on New York police stations and civilian-police officers destroyed in the last raids. He used them as the source of records that Sam Hall had been continually in trouble—drunkenness, disorderly conduct, brawls, a suspicion of holdups and burglary, but not strong enough to warrant calling in Security’s hypnotechnicians for quizzing him.

  Hmm. Better make him 4-F, no military service. Reason? Well, a slight drug addiction; men weren’t so badly needed nowadays that hop heads had to be cured. Neo-coke didn’t impair the faculties too much. Indeed, the addict was abnormally fast and strong under the influence, though he suffered a tough reaction afterwards.

  Then he would have had to put in an additional term of civilian service. Let’s see. He spent his four years as a common laborer on the Colorado Dam project. In such a mess of men, who would remember him? At any rate, it would be hard finding somebody who did.

  Now to fill in. Thornberg called on a number of automatic devices to help him. He must account for every day in twenty-five years; but of course the majority would show no change of circumstances. Thornberg punched for cheap hotels, the kind which didn’t bother keeping records of their own after the data went to Matilda. Who could remember a shabby individual patron? For Sam Hall’s current address he chose the Triton, a glorified flophouse on the East Side not far from the craters. At present his man was unemployed, putatively living off savings, likelier off odd jobs and petty crime. Oh, blast! Income tax returns. Thornberg could be sketchy in creating those, however. The poor weren’t expected to be meticulous, nor were they audited annually like the middle class and the rich.

  Hmm…physical ID. Make him of average height, stocky, black-haired and black-eyed, a bent nose, a scar on his forehead—tough-looking, though not enough to be unusually memorable. Thornberg entered the precise measurements. Fingerprints and retinals being encoded, they were easy to fake; he wrote a censor into his ongoing program, lest he duplicate somebody else’s by chance.

  Finally he leaned back and sighed. The record was still shot full of holes, but he could plug those at his leisure. The main job was done—a couple of hours’ hard work, utterly pointless, except that he had blown off steam. He felt a lot better.

  He glanced at his watch. Time to get back on the job, son. For a rebellious moment he wished no one had ever invented clocks. They had made possible the science he loved, but they had then proceeded to mechanize man. Oh, well, too late now. He left the booth. The door closed itself behind him.

  About a month later, Sam Hall committed his first murder.

  The night before, Thornberg had been at home. His rank entitled him to good housing in spite of his living alone: two rooms and bath on the ninety-eighth floor of a unit in town not far from the camouflaged entrance to Matilda’s underground domain. The fact that he was in Security, even if he didn’t belong to the man-hunting branch, got him so much deference that he often felt lonely. The superintendent had offered him his daughter once—“Only twenty-three, sir, just released by a gentleman of marshal’s rank, and looking for a nice patron, sir.” Thornberg had refused, trying not to be prissy about it. Autres temps, autres moeurs—but still, she wouldn’t have had any choice about getting client status, the first time anyway. And Thornberg’s marriage had been a long and happy one.

  He had been looking through his bookshelves for something to read. The Literary Bureau was trumpeting Whitman as an early example of Americanism, but though Thornberg had always liked the poet, his hands strayed perversely to a dog-eared volume of Marlowe. Was that escapism? The L.B. was very down on escapism. These were tough times. It wasn’t easy to belong to the nation which was enforcing peace on a sullen world. You must be realistic and energetic and, all the rest, no doubt.

  The phone buzzed. He clicked on the receiver. Martha Obrenowicz’s plain plump face showed in the screen: her gray hair was wild and her voice a harsh croak.

  “Uh—hello,” he said uneasily. He hadn’t called her since the news of her son’s arrest. “How are you?”

  “Jimmy is dead,” she told him.

  He stood for a long while. His skull felt hollow.

  “I got word today that he died in camp,” said Martha. “I thought you’d want to know.”

  Thornberg shook his head, back and forth, quite slowly. “That isn’t news I ever wanted, Martha,” he said.

  “It isn’t right!” she shrieked. “Jimmy wasn’t a traitor. I knew my son. Who ought to know him better? He had some friends I was kind of doubtful of, but Jimmy, he wouldn’t ever—”

  Something cold formed in Thornberg’s breast. You never knew when calls were being tapped.

  “I’m sorry, Martha,” he said without tone. “But the police are careful about these things. They wouldn’t act till they were sure. Justice is in our traditions.”

  She regarded him for a long time. Her eyes held a hard glitter. “You too,” she said at last.

  “Be careful, Martha,” he warned her. “I know this is a blow to you, but don’t say anything you might regret later. After all, Jimmy may have died accidentally. Those things happen.”

  “I—forgot,” she said jerkily. “You…are in Security…yourself.”

  “Be calm,” he said. “Think of it as a sacrifice for the national interest.”

  She switched off on him. He knew she wouldn’t call him again. And he couldn’t safely see her.

  “Good-bye, Martha,” he said aloud. It was like a stranger speaking.

  He turned back to the bookshelf. Not for me, he told himself. For Jack. He touched the binding of Leaves of Grass. Oh, Whitman, old rebel, he thought, a curious dry laughter in him, are they calling you Whirling Walt now?

  That night he took an extra sleeping pill. His head still felt fuzzy when he reported for work, and after a while he gave up trying to answer the mail and went down to the lab.

  While he was engaged with Rodney, and making a poor job of understanding the technical problem under discussion, his eyes strayed to Matilda. Suddenly he realized what he needed for a cathartic. He broke off as soon as possible and went into the coordinator booth.

  For a moment he paused at the keyboard. The day-by-day creation of Sam Hall had been an odd experience. He, quiet and introverted, had shaped a rowdy life and painted a rugged personality. Sam Hall was more real to him than many of his associates. Well, I’m a schizoid type myself. Maybe I should have been a writer. No, that would have meant too many restrictions, too much fear of offending the censor. He had done exactly as he pleased with Sam Hall.

  He drew a breath and punched for unsolved murders of Security officers, New York City area, during the past month. They were surprisingly common. Could dissatisfaction be more general than the government admitted? But when the bulk of a nation harbors thoughts labeled treasonous, does the label still apply?

  He found what he wanted. Sergeant Brady had incautiously entered the Crater district after dark on the twenty-seventh on a routine checkup mission; he had worn the black uniform, presumably to give himself the full weight of authority. The next morning he had been found in an alley, his skull shattered.

  Oh, I killed a man, they say, so they say.

  Yes, I killed a man, they say, so they say.

  I beat him on the head,

  And I left him there for dead,

  Yes, I left him there for dead, God damn his eyes.

  Newspapers had no doubt deplored this brutality perpetrated by the treacherous agent of enemy powers. (“Oh, the parson, he did come, he did come.”) A number of suspects had been rounded up and given a stiff quizzing. (“And the sheriff, he came too, he came too.”) Nothing was proven as yet, though a Joe Nikolsky (fifth generation American, mechanic, married, four children, underground pamphlets found in his room) had been arrested yesterday on suspicion.

  Thornberg sighed. He knew enough of Security methods to be sure they would get somebody for such a killing. They couldn’t allow their reputation for infallibility to be smirched by a lack of conclusive evidence. Maybe Nikolsky had done the crime—he couldn’t prove he had simply been out for a walk that evening—and maybe he hadn’t. But, hell’s fire, why not give him a break? He had four kids. With such a black mark, their mother would find work only in a recreation house.

  Thornberg scratched his head. This had to be done carefully. Let’s see. Brady’s body would have been cremated by now, but of course there had been a thorough study first. Thornberg withdrew the dead man’s file from the machine and micro-printed a replica of the evidence—zero. Erasing that, he entered the statement that a blurred thumbprint had been found on the victim’s collar and referred to ID labs for reconstruction. In the ID file he inserted the report of such a job, finished only yesterday due to a great press of work. (Plausible. They were busy lately on material sent from Mars, seized in a raid on a rebel meeting place.) The probable pattern of the whorls was—and here he inserted Sam Hall’s right thumb.

  He returned the spools and leaned back in his chair. It was risky; if anyone thought to query the ID lab, he was in trouble. But that was unlikely. The chances were that New York would accept the findings with a routine acknowledgement which some clerk at the lab would file without studying. The more obvious dangers were not too great either: a busy police force would not stop to ask if any of their fingerprint men had actually developed that smudge; and as for hypnoquizzing showing Nikolsky really was the murderer, well, then the print would be assumed that of a passerby who had found the body and not reported it.

  So now Sam Hall had killed a Security officer—grabbed him by the neck and smashed his brainpan with a weighted club. Thornberg felt considerably happier.

  New York Security shot a request to Central Records for any new material on the Brady case. An automaton compared the codes and saw that fresh information had been added. The message flashed back, plus the dossier on Sam Hall and two others—for the reconstruction could not be absolutely accurate.

  The two were safe, as it turned out. Both had alibis. The squad that stormed into the Triton Hotel and demanded Sam Hall met blank stares. No such person was registered. No one of that description was known there. A thorough quizzing corroborated this. Then Sam Hall had managed to fake an address. He could have done that easily by punching the buttons on the hotel register when nobody was looking. Sam Hall could be anywhere!

  Joe Nikolsky, having been hypnoed and found harmless, was released. The fine for possessing subversive literature would put him in debt for the next few years—he had no influential friends to get it suspended—but he’d be all right if he watched his step. Security sent out an alarm for Sam Hall.

  Thornberg derived a sardonic amusement from watching the progress of the hunt as it came to Matilda. No man with that ID card had bought tickets on any public transportation. That proved nothing. Of the hundreds who vanished every year, some at least must have been murdered for their cards, and their bodies disposed of. Matilda was set to give the alarm when the ID of a disappeared person showed up somewhere. Thornberg faked a few such reports, just to give the police something to do.