Bob Shaw - The Shadow of Heaven

Stirling's first story of the day was a routine job. The bodies of a young man and woman, hand-cuffed together, had been fished out of the Merrimack during the night. It was worth two or three paragraphs as it stood, more when he had established who and whymdashbut nothing was working out that morning.

His best contacts at police control and the morgue were off for the day, and his second-best contacts really were second-bestmdashprobably because they were getting better sweeteners from some other newspaper. Stirling had wasted thirty minutes on futile phone calls when one of the copy girls dropped a note from the news editor, Sam McLeod, onto his desk. McLeod was a gloomy little man who, in a lifetime in the newspaper business, had put a million slips of copy through his hands, yet never failed to summon up a fresh look of savage hatred for each new sheet that was handed to him. He sat within fifteen feet of Stirling and the other city reporters, but always communicated by means of hand-written notes. This one said:

"What's the holdup on the John and Jane Doe story?"

Stirling swore despairingly and crammed paper into his machine. "Tell Sam I'm gummed up on it. I'll put through a holding story for the noon edition." He glanced up at the copy girl and sniffed. "Nice perfume, Jean. Smells expensive. What is it?"

Jean smiled, highlights moving on her fashionably pearlized skin. "It's called Roast Beef."

Stirling sniffed again, even more appreciatively, because he had once smelled real roast beef when he was a boy.

"It beats me how you can buy that sort of merchandise on a copy girl's salary." Stirling raised one eyebrow speculatively. "Do you work nights?"

Jean compressed her lips and stalked away haughtily on invisible, paramagnetic high heels. Stirling called after her to wait for his copy, but she ignored him and vanished from sight among the seriate desks and screens of the long room. Huge, oblong prisms of morning sunlight sloped from the side windows, picked out columns of cigarette smoke, and occasionally exploded silently over the white-shirted figures.

Stirling savored the spaciousness of the Record's editorial offices. The room was about one-hundred-feet-by-forty and housed a staff of two hundredmdashwhich meant that each member of the editorial team had a five-foot-by-four space to himself. He guessed that a hundred years earlier, in the twentieth century, that area would have seemed impossibly cramped; but when he compared it to the choking claustrophobia of his apartment he felt like staying in the office till bedtime. He had actually tried it a few times, but when the place emptied in the evening it began to seem too big. At those times he was glad he had been born after the Compression, and not before.

Stirling typed two single-sentence paragraphs giving the facts he had and carried the copy slips to the news desk himself. McLeod picked up the sheets and stared at them in professional disgust.

"Is that it? Is that one hour's output for a supposedly senior and experienced reporter on the Record?" He buried his face in cupped hands and sat waiting for an answer.

"I can't make the stuff up, Sam. That's all I've been able to get so far."

"Have you checked the files?" McLeod's voice was blurred as it filtered through his fingers.

"We haven't got the names," Stirling said patiently. "We file people under their names, and when we have no names we can't check the files. It's an inherent flaw in the system, Sam."

"Don't try to be smart with me, Victor." McLeod raised his slightly yellowed eyes and stared at a point on Stirling's collar. "Have you checked the latest missing-persons cards?"

Stirling felt his grip on his temper begin to slide a little. "Well, you see, Sam, there's this name business again. I hate to bring it up since it seems to bother you, but the missing-persons cards are indexed by name as well. Names are really catching on, you know. Nearly everybody has one now."

An unexpectedly angelic smile spread over McLeod's face, and Stirling knew the little man was going to score a point.

"I know that, Victor. And they're cross-indexed as well. If two people who are connected in some way disappear, it shows on our cards. Doesn't it? You just might get a lead on the identities that way, Victor. That's why the Record goes to the trouble of getting stats from police headquarters every day. Have you checked the cards from that angle?"

"Of course, I have," Stirling lied. "I'll go over them again though, if it'll make you happy."

McLeod's smile grew even more seraphic, showing he had not been deceived. "That's my boy," he murmured. "Well make a reporter of you yet." He raised a white cup of synthejuice to his lips and stared over the rim with jaundiced eyes as Stirling threaded his way across to the file bank.

Stirling checked himself from swearing as he squeezed his huge and rather overweight body through the crowded aisles. He treated swearing as being like antibiotics: indiscriminate use produced a tolerance which left the patient stranded when a real emergency cropped up. And he had a feeling he was going to need some reserves before the day was over.

Technically speaking, McLeod was right about the cards. They were cross-referenced to show up the connections between two or more missing persons, but usually only when they were related to each other, worked for the same business, or were members of the same organization. Stirling had not bothered to check the cards because his instincts told him the only connection between the two pitiful human shells taken from the river was that they had once looked on each other with love. In spite of the conditioning, some people still wanted to set up house together and bring up their children togethermdashthe way it had been before the Compressionmdashand they were not prepared to settle for anything less. Feelings like these were not recorded in the stat-computers; so, Stirling had not checked the cards. He had to admit, however, that John and Jane Doe might have met each other while working in the same plant, in which case there was a chance of getting something on them.

As the card sorter went through that week's heavy crop of missing persons, Stirling wondered how anybody's emotions could get so much out of control that they would jump into a river. The choice of method was significant, of course. Just as the ancient Roman aristocracy had regarded it as a privilege to run onto their swords when they found circumstances intolerable, so a citizen of the Twenty-first Century could slip quietly away from life, peacefully, almost pleasantly, with the aid of a handful of pills. And hardly anyone would notice his departure. But this couple must have wanted to make a protestmdashand so they had done it the old-fashioned way, the hard waymdashchoking as the black, stinking waters slopped into their lungs.

The fools, Stirling thought, angry at himself for getting involved even to this extent. All that their big, dramatic protest was going to get them was a few column-inches on a middle page of that day's Record. Less than that if he failed to get a lead on their identities before McLeod handed him a bigger story.

As he waited for the sorter to nominate any likely couples it might have, Stirling absent-mindedly lifted a bundle of the rejected cards and riffled through them. The undistinguished names flickered under his thumb, each name representing an undistinguished life, or death. Feeling himself sink further into depression, Stirling squared the cards up and dropped them back in the tray. As he did so, one of the names registered, belatedly, on the part of his mind that was always alert for such things. John Considine.