The Fellowship of the Hand Read Online Free PDF Page B

director of the USAC Venus Colony. He’d accomplished much with the domed cities of Venus, changing their entire concept from that of a penal colony to a new frontier. Although the population of the Russo-Chinese Venus Colony still exceeded that of the USAC sector, under Ambrose’s farsighted direction there was hope at last that the Americans might someday emerge as the planet’s dominant force.
    Earl Jazine pondered all this, and decided this Ambrose was the best place to begin. He had no wife or family living, and the Washington file showed only one close friend back on earth—a woman named Mildred Norris who’d been his mistress in the years prior to his Venus assignment. She seemed the only link to the missing Ambrose. It took him another hour to locate her present address, in the medium-sized planned community of Sunsite, Ohio.
    That was just an hour away by rocketcopter.
    Jazine had never visited Sunsite before, but he’d been in dozens of planned communities amazingly like it. There was always the town square, a throwback to colonial days, with the town hall on one side, a courthouse opposite, and a church between. The fact that the church was only sparsely attended made no difference to the community planners, who felt it to be an integral part of the American scene.
    From this center radiated the streets of the community, striking out like the spokes of a wheel, intersecting every quarter-mile with cross-streets where shopping plazas and community centers and even an amusement park blossomed. From the air, the town of Sunsite seemed like a giant spider’s web—or more accurately, thought Jazine, like a computer’s core unit. More accurately, because Sunsite and the other communities like it were the ultimate in computerized living. Everything from traffic lights to teleprinters were controlled by machine. Even the goods on the supermarket shelves were carefully inventoried by computers that electronically printed out reorders whenever the supply of an item dropped below a preprogrammed level. And most people ate computerized meals right in their offices.
    In such a place, Jazine was not surprised to find Mildred Norris, the woman he sought, working as a computer programmer in the local tax office. He often thought that half the people in America must be employed in programming computers that regulated the lives of the other half.
    She was a slim, pretty woman in her early thirties, with hair dyed a soft blue in keeping with a fad of some months back. Her mouth had a sad softness about it that seemed always about to break into a smile, and he could imagine men striving mightily for the reward of that smile.
    “Ms. Norris, my name is Earl Jazine. I’m with the Computer Investigation Bureau.”
    The smile came easily. “Computer Cops.”
    “That’s what the papers call us sometimes.”
    “What do you want here? Somebody complaining about their taxes?”
    “No, it’s nothing like that. Actually, I wanted to ask you about Stanley Ambrose.”
    The smile faded. “That was six years ago. Your records must be very complete.”
    “They are.” He glanced around the sterile white room. “Where can we talk?”
    “I’ll be finished for the day in twenty minutes. If you want to hear about Stanley Ambrose, you’ll have to buy me a drink.”
    “Good enough. I’ll meet you outside at four thirty.”
    She came out with two other girls, younger than herself, and left them to join Jazine. “Here I am, right on time!”
    “Know a place where we can get that drink?”
    “There’s an automated bar just down the street, if you don’t mind your drinks being mixed by machine.”
    “I’m used to it. If the mix is bad I’ll arrest them,” he said with a grin.
    The place was no better or worse than a hundred others he’d been in. He bought four large metal tokens as they entered, and dropped two of them in the table slot to order Scotch for himself and a bleaker cocktail for Mildred Norris. The drinks were