Manalone by Colin Kapp Read Free Book Online Page B

And that goes for the rest of the junk you operate. You don’t want production expertise – far kinder you have a damn good fire.’
    ‘Harsh words, Manny boy. Fortunately I know you don’t mean them. I’ll offer you five thousand for the full set of new software. That’s my last offer, and I may go broke because of it.’
    ‘Do that small thing,’ said Manalone. ‘Can’t you get it through your thick skull that it isn’t a matter of the price.’
    ‘Six thousand.’
    ‘You don’t listen to a damn thing I say!’
    ‘What are you saying, Manny? You don’t like money? You can’t tell me you can keep an ultra-expensive pet like Sandra happy on peanuts. She must be costing you a fortune.’
    ‘All I’m saying is I don’t like your organization or your methods. No programme, Victor, and that’s final. So stay out of my hair!’
    Manalone cut the connection and decided it was time to go out for a stroll before Blackman thought up a new line of approach. As usual, his exchange with Blackman had put him in a good humour, and, leaving his cape on the rack, he walked out into the soft sunshine dressed only in his informal leisurewear. At the Chichester Road he had intended turning right, but a glance towards Elbridge gave him an idea and set him on a different course of action. The sight of the huge excavators in action on the site made him again curious about the past and its systematic prohibition.
    Watchingthe progress on the site was a common pastime for many of those dispossessed of work either partly or completely by high-level automation. Manalone had been to the site a few times before, watching the gigantic machines churning the soil like feverish moles driven by an inescapable compulsion to reduce every feature of the landscape to a common muddy plain. Later, when the deeply milled ground had settled, the builders would come and cover everything with concrete and erect their close-planned and incredibly unimaginative spires of steel and ceramic. Maximum-population-density housing was a soul-destroying concept, but it now occurred to Manalone that the exercise might also have a second function. Where the great machines had dug and where the concrete had been poured – there the elements of the past had been irretrievably shattered and then locked down certainly beyond the reach of the next three generations.
    As he approached the excavators, Manalone found himself viewing their function in a very different way from hitherto. Formerly he had marvelled at the vast cutting wheels, the diamond-tipped teeth, and the tremendous motors which drove the cutters unhesitatingly through bricks, rock, soil and stones alike to the depth of several men. Now he was watching only the way the teeth pulverized and broke the raised material, allowing no fragment to remain which was larger than a clenched fist. The cutters were currently working down to a bed of wet flints and sand. The hundred or so workers attending the operation paid no attention to him as he worked his way to the very edge of the trench to obtain a better view. To the workmen, it was just simply a job; only Manalone read any significance into the rasp and rattle of the flintstones as they were shattered by the diamond teeth.
    ‘Manalone, could the past have been so terrible that they need deliberately grind it down before they cover it with concrete? Or is it here and now that’s so terrible that they daren’t allow comparison?’
    There was noanswer to the question. The former housing estate on the area had been demolished to make way for the maximum-population-density housing which was now to be established, and traces of even older roads and tracks were being dredged up and destroyed by the remorseless wheels.
    ‘The past is usually buried by Mankind’s inability to communicate it accurately from one generation to the next – and by geological events and atmospheric fallout. But here the process is a deliberate one: the suppression of knowledge,