Sam Hall

  by Poul Anderson

  Illustrations by Stockwell

  From : Astounding Science Fiction , August 1953.

  Hugo 1954 Nominee Novelette

  Note: Note that the original version of this story was revised for The Best of Poul Anderson, probably by Anderson himself.

  For example: In the opening paragraphs no longer has a “punched card” which is checked for “holes,” but simply a “card” that’s checked for “magnetic encodings.” He’s no longer bound for “New Pittsburgh,” but for “Cincinnati.” Superfluous words have been removed from many sentences, etc.

  This conversion was made from a scan of the original magazine story, which received the nomination for the 1954 Hugo Award.

  A revolution takes planning, organization, careful detail work. and the more organized the force to be overthrown, the more organization it takes. But it takes something more than that; it needs the fire and the lift of a Legend!

  Click. Bsssz. Whrrrr.

  Citizen Blank Blank, Anytown, Somewhere, U. S. A., approaches the hotel desk. “Single, with bath.”

  “ Sorry, sir, our fuel ration doesn’t permit individual baths. One can be drawn for you; that will be twenty-five dollars extra.”

  “Oh, is that all? O.K.”

  Citizen Blank reaches into hh pocket with an automatic gesture and withdraws his punched card and gives it to the registry machine. Aluminum jaws close on it, copper teeth feel for the holes, electronic tongue tastes the life of Citizen Blank.

  Place and date of birth. Parents Race. Religion. Educational, military and civilian-service record. Marita status. Occupations, up to and in eluding current one. Affiliations. Physical measurements, fingerprints, retinals, blood type. Basic psychotype. Loyalty rating. Loyalty index as a function of time to moment of last checkup. Click, click Bzzz.

  “Why are you here, sir?” “Salesman. I expect to be in New Pittsburgh tomorrow night”

  The clerk—thirty-two years old, married, two children; N.B, confidential: Jewish; to be kept out of key occupations—punches the buttons.

  Click, click. The machine returns the card. Citizen Blank puts it back in his wallet.

  “Front!”

  The bellboy—nineteen years old, unmarried; NB, confidential: Catholic; to be kept out of key occupations —takes the guest’s trunk. The elevator creaks upstairs. The clerk resumes his reading. The article is entitled “Has Britain Betrayed Us?” Other articles in the magazine include “New Indoctrination Program for the Armed Forces,” “Labor Hunting on Mars,” “I Was a Union Man for the Security Police,” “New Plans for YOUR Future.”

  The machine talks to itself. Click, click. A tube winks at its neighbor as if they shared a private joke. The total signal goes out over the wires.

  With a thousand other signals, it shoots down the last cable and into the sorter unit of Central Records. Click, click, Bzzz. Whrrr. Wink and glow. A scanner sweeps through the memory circuits. The distorted molecules of one spool show the pattern of Citizen Blank Blank and this is sent back. It enters the comparison unit, to which the incoming signal corresponding to Citizen Blank Blank has also been shunted. The two are perfectly in phase; nothing wrong. Citizen Blank Blank is staying in the town where, last night, he said he would, so he has not had to file a correction.

  The new information is added to the record of Citizen Blank Blank. The whole of his life returns to the memory bank. It is wiped from the scanner and comparison units, so that these may be free for the next arriving signal.

  The machine has swallowed and digested another day. It is content.

  Thornberg came into his office at the usual time. His secretary glanced up to say, “Good morning,” and looked closer. She had been with him for enough years to read the nuances in his carefully controlled face. “Anything wrong, chief?”

  “No.” He spoke it harshly, which was also peculiar. “No, nothing wrong. I feel a bit under the weather, maybe.” “Oh.” The secretary nodded. You learned discretion in the government. “Well, I hope you get better soon.” “Thanks. It’s nothing.” Thornberg limped over to his desk, sat down, and took out a pack of cigarettes. He held one for a moment in nicotine-yellowed fingers before lighting it, and there was an emptiness in his eyes. Then he puffed ferociously and turned to his mail. As chief technician of Central Records, he got a generous tobacco ration, and used all of it.

  The office was not large—a windowless cubicle, furnished with gaunt orderliness, its only decoration a picture of his son and one of his late wife. Thornberg seemed too big for it. He was tall and lean, with thin straight features and neatly brushed graying hair. He wore a plain version of the Security uniform, with his insignia of Technical Division and major’s rank but no other decoration, none of the ribbons to which he was entitled. The priesthood of Matilda the Machine were a pretty informal lot for these days.

  He chain-smoked his way through the mail. Routine stuff, most of it having to do with the necessary change-overs for installing the new identification system. “ Come on, June,” he said to his secretary. Irrationally, he preferred dictating to her rather than a recorder. “ Let’s get this out of the way fast. I’ve got work to do.”

  He held one letter before him. “To Senator E. W. Harmison, S.O.B., New Washington. Dear Sir: In re your communication of the 14th inst., requesting my personal opinion of the new ID system, may I say that it is not a technician’s business to express opinions. The directive ordering that every citizen shall have one number applying to all his papers and functions—birth certificate, education, rations, social security, service, et cetera —has obvious long-range advantages, but naturally entails a good deal of work in reconverting all our electronic records. The President having decided that the gain in the long run justifies the present difficulties, it behooves all citizens to obey. Yours, and so forth.” He smiled with a certain coldness. “There, that’ll fix him! I don’t know what good Congress is anyway, except to plague honest bureaucrats.”

  Privately, June decided to modify the letter. Maybe a senator was only a rubber stamp, but you couldn’t brush him off so curtly. It is part of a secretary’s job to keep the boss out of trouble.

  “O.K., let’s get to the next,” said Thornberg. “To Colonel M. R. Hubert, Director of Liaison Division, Central Records Agency, Security Police, et cetera. Dear Sir: In re your memorandum of the 14th inst., requiring a definite date for completion of the ID conversion, may I respectfully state that it is impossible for me honestly to set one. It is necessary for us to develop a memory-modification unit which will make the change-over in all our records without our having to take out and alter each of the three hundred million or so spools in the machine. You realize that one cannot predict the exact time needed to complete such a project. However, research is progressing satisfactorily (refer him to my last report, will you?), and I can confidently say that conversion will be finished and all citizens notified of their numbers within two months at the latest. Respectfully, and so on. Put that in a nice form, June.”

  She nodded. Thornberg went on through his mail, throwing most of it into the basket for her to answer alone. When he was done, he yawned and lit another cigarette. “Praise Allah that’s over. Now I can get down to the lab.”

  “You have some afternoon appointments,” she reminded him.

  “I’ll be back after lunch. See you.” He got up and went out of the office.

  Down an escalator to a still lower subterranean level, along a corridor, returning the salutes of passing technicians without thinking about it. His face was immobile, and perhaps only the stiff swinging of his arms said anything.

  Jimmy, he thought. Jimmy, kid.

  He entered the guard chamber, pressing hand and eye to the scanners in the farther door. Finger and retinal patterns were his pass; no alarm sounded; the door opened for him and he walked into the temple of Matilda.

  She crouched hugely before him, tier upon tier of control panels, instruments, blinking lights, like an Aztec pyramid. The gods murmured within her and winked red eyes at the tiny men who crawled over her monstrous flanks. Thornberg stood for a moment regarding the spectacle. Then he smiled, a tired smile creasing his face along one side. A sardonic memory came back to him, bootlegged stuff from the ’40s and ’50s of the last century which he had read, French, German, British, Italian. The intellectuals had been all hot and bothered about the Americanization of Europe, the crumbling of old culture before the mechanized barbarism of soft drinks, advertising, chrome-plated automobiles—dollar grins, the Danes had called them—chewing gum, plastics… . None of them had protested the simultaneous Europeanization of America: government control, a military caste, light-years of bureaucratic records and red tape,-censors, secret police, nationalism and racialism.

  Oh, well.

  But Jimmy, boy, where are you now, what are they doing to you?

  Thornberg went over to the bench where his best engineer, Rodney, was testing a unit. “How’s it coming?” he asked.

  “Pretty good, chief,” said Rodney. He didn’t bother to salute; Thornberg had, in fact, forbidden it in the labs as a waste of time. “A few bugs yet, but we’re getting them out.”

  You had to have a gimmick which would change numbers without altering anything else. Not too easy a task, when the memory banks depended on individual magnetic domains. “O.K.,” said Thornberg. “Look, I’m going up to the main controls. Going to run a few tests myself—some of the tubes have been acting funny over in Section Thirteen.”

  “Want an assistant?”
  “No, thanks. I just want not to be bothered.”

  Thornberg resumed his way across the floor, its hardness echoed dully under his shoes. The main controls were in a special armored booth nestling against the great pyramid, and he had to be scanned again before the door opened for him. Not many were allowed in here. The complete archives of the nation were too valuable to take chances with.

  Thoraberg’s loyalty rating was AAB-2—-not absolutely perfect, but the best available among men of his professional caliber. His last drugged checkup had revealed certain doubts and reservations about government policy, but there was no question of disobedience. Prime 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 forbidden 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 prohibited things said.

  He sat for a moment regarding the control 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; it was unlikely that he would be called up again for years, especially with 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.

  There were circuits installed which could alter the records— take an entire on&out and write whatever was desired in the magnetic fields. Thorn-berg had done the job a few times for high officials. Now he was doing it for himself.

  Jimmy Obrenowicz, son of his second cousin, hustled off at night by Security police on suspicion of treason. The records showed what no private citizen was supposed to know: Jimmy was in Camp Fieldstone. Those who returned from there were very quiet and said nothing about where they had been; sometimes they

  were incapable of speech.

  It wouldn’t do for the chief of Central Records to have a relative in Fieldstone. Thornberg punched buttons for half an hour, erasing, changing. It was a tough job—he had to go back several generations, altering lines of descent. But when he was through, Jimmy Obrenowicz was no relation whatsoever to the Thorn-bergs.

  And I thought the world of that kid. But I’m not doing it for myself, Jimmy. It’s for Jack. When the cops go through your file, later today no doubt, I can’t let them find out you’re related to Captain Thornberg on Venus and a friend of his father.

  He slapped the switch which returned the spool to its place in the memory bank. 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.

  So now they were going to give every citizen a number, tattooed on him no doubt. One number for everything. 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. It could be. Their propaganda was subtle—we don’t want to overthrow the nation, we only want to liberate it, we 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 Thorn-berg’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 is Samuel Hall, Samuel Hall.

  Yes, my name is Samuel Hall, Samuel Hall.

  Oh, my name is Samuel Hall,

  And I hate you one and all.

  You’re a gang of muckers all, damn your hide.”

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

  Idly, postponing his return to work, he punched for the file—name, Samuel Hall, no other specifications. The machine mumbled to itself. Presently it spewed out a file of papers, micro-printed 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. Thornberg chucked the papers 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.

  No, 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—it wasn’t easy. You couldn’t duplicate numbers, and every citizen had a lot of them. You had to account for every day of his life.

  Well, some of that could be simplified. The machine had only existed for twenty-five years, before then the files had been kept on paper 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 on file 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 only three, and 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 at all 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.

  Hm-m-m. Better make him 4-F, no military service. Reason? Well, a slight drug addiction; men weren’t so badly needed nowadays that hopheads had to be cured. Neocoke—that didn’t impair the faculties too much, indeed the addict was abnormally fast and strong under the influence, though there was a tough reaction afterwards.

  Then he would have had to put in a term in civilian service. Let’s see. He spent his three years as a common laborer on the Colorado Dam project; so many men had been involved there that no one would remember him, or at least it would be hard finding a supervisor who did.

  Now to fill in. Thornberg used a number of automatic machines to help him. Every day had to be accounted for, in twenty-five years; but of course the majority would show no travel or change of residence. Thorn-berg punched for cheap hotels housing many at a time—no record would be kept there, everything being filed in Matilda, and no one would remember a shabby individual patron. Sam Hall’s present address was given as the Triton, a glorified flophouse on the East Side, not far from the craters. At present unemployed, doubtless living off past savings. Oh, blast! It was necessary to file income tax returns. Thornberg did so.

 

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