John Brunner by A Planet of Your Own Read Free Book Online

yardweed and blockweed , bringing the huge vats of gelantinized fortified nutriment for the pelts.
    He came awake with a jolt. Somewhere at the
edge of consciousness he'd detected a shrilling noise. What the—?
    Oh
no! He 'd heard that noise before, at the very beginning
of his stay. They'd turned a switch somewhere in the bowels of the main
station, and an alarm siren had started to squall. The man who'd been showing
him around (what was the name?—oh yes: Executive Shuster) had let it sound for
half a minute and then turned it off.
    And
he'd said, "Remember that noise, Evan! It may go off at any time, day or
night. It indicates a malfunction of the automatics. One of the two reasons
you're here at all is that such a malfunction may occur. It never has yet, but
if it does, the problem is in your lap. Which is why I'm
stressing the importance of recognizing the alarm. "
    Evan
had scuffled at the deck with his feet a bit and then said wonderingly,
"But—there's no other noise I'm likely to confuse it with, is there there ?"
    "No,
there isn't." Shuster had smiled blandly, rather oilily .
"But you heard how long I let it run for—thirty seconds?"
    « YeS "
    "It
may sound at any time with or without a
malfunction. The point of this is to make sure you're on your toes. If it
sounds, you have exactly those thirty seconds to reach this switch and cut it
off—survey the operation from spawn to finished pelts—and report what you find.
It may be that everything is in order; in that case, you'll know it was only a
test. But I warn you quite bluntly that if you fail to reach it in thirty
seconds—"
    Evan
leapt to his feet and headed for the switch at a dead run.
    His
trembling hand missed on the first grab, got it on the second. The clamor died
instantly. But his skin was prickly with sweat. How long had it been sounding
before he'd caught on—more than thirty seconds?
    No,
please! It's not possible for me to have lost everything after eleven months!
    Frantically
he surveyed the telltale boards which relayed the information from all the
substations and monitors. As far as he could tell, everything was as it ought
to be. So this had been a dummy alarm, a test to make sure he was on his toes.
    The bastards! The radiated pigs! To leave him
eleven months without a test at all, then catch him napping!
    Heart sinking, he reported to the computers
that eveiything seemed to be in order despite the
siren. He hesitated, breathing deeply until he was in a fair approximation of
the state in which the alarm had caught him, made his way back to where he had
been dozing, and timed himself on the run to the
switch.
    The run alone took him fifteen seconds. He
tried again, and registered seventeen.
    He
exhaled gustily. Well, there was no choice then. Unless he was to be cheated
of his pay and passage home, he had to doctor the record of the time the alarm
had sounded. It was a terrible decision to make, since unwarranted tampering
with any of the automatics constituted sabotage and voided the contract of
employment, but he wasn't going to let one lapse cancel nearly a year of his
life.
    He
slid up the front panel of the alarm unit and peered cautiously into its
bowels. Ah: straightforward enough. A band of white tape had reeled out like a
dry tongue from the base of the siren, and it was clearly calibrated in
one-second intervals. All he needed to do was ease it back so that about
twenty-five of the gradations showed, instead of—he counted —the damning total
of forty-nine at present visible.
    He stretched out his arm
and grasped the tape.
    Instantly
the front panel of the alarm unit slammed down, smashing the bones of his
forearm a few inches below the elbow. He screamed and tried to tear himself
free, straining to claw the panel up again with his other hand, feeling the raw
ends of bone rub and scrape agonizingly. Through a white fire of pain he heard
a majestic impersonal voice seal his doom.
    "You
are reminded that unauthorized tampering