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.Harben felt the thrill, electric and disturbing, yet gratifying, of stumbling upon the edge of the unknown.Ford was exactly the man to be a member of SA.D.A.R.: inconspicuous, completely normal, a boring nonentity whom the police would never bother to watch.A moment later Harben was brought down to earth with a jolt.The girl was speaking again.“So you’d do all this just because of the baby coming? I’ve told you he’ll accept it as his.He knows nothing about our.friendship.”Her voice trembled and almost broke on the last word.Quite clearly, the impending arrival of a baby had caused the “friendship” to turn somewhat sour.“When he finds he’s paying double tax, he’ll want to know the reason why.You know that every husband has the statutory right to consult his wife’s Records.Only a complete swine would invoke that right.But by your account, Trafford is just such a swine.”“I never said he was a swine.” The girl was almost in tears.“At least he’s sane, which is more than you seem to be.”“Sane!” Ford was clearly needled.“Look, I’ve explained the whole thing to you in detail.The magnetic bomb.”“How do you know it will work?”“The thing is absolutely straightforward.Conversion of heat energy to magnetic energy.Any schoolboy could construct a device.In this case the heat energy is released by a thermal charge.”“All right.But how do you get it into position?”“Inside the Records Centre ? That’s the only part which is at all tricky.I shall simply pose as a technician working in the supply tunnel.”Harben relaxed.That old ploy.! Nobody had ever got into the Records Centre as easily as that.The guard on the perimeter was absolute.It was a well-kept secret that no human being could ever penetrate the Records Centre and live.There was a zone of destructive radiation which screened every approach, above, below, all round.Only mechanisms could ply to and fro, bringing in the necessary supplies.Harben was the only living thing to exist deep inside the lethal zone.“No, my friend,” thought Harben, as he casually switched off the channel, “you’ll have to do better than that.”It was evident, from the fact that the police were checking his Record, that Ford had not done better than that.By now he was, no doubt, the late unlamented Ford.The police were merely making sure that he had no fellow conspirators, that he was not in fact linked to the legendary S.A.D.A.R.network of saboteurs.Ford was nothing more than a clown, a clumsy bungling buffoon.But the thought of S.A.D.A.R.sent a shiver down Harben’s spine.The destruction of all Records!It was not so much that Harben himself would probably perish in a holocaust of the Records Centre.That was an abstract consideration which did not worry him unduly.What really hurt were the emotional implications: the fact that anyone could want to destroy the Records.To Harben the Records were sacred, the most beautiful and precious things in the world.His Records! He lived only for them.He was a mere human, with a life-span of two centuries at the most.But the Records were eternal.Harben felt a warm gush of almost religious emotion as he contemplated the ageless beauty of the Records.May they last for ever, their preciousness increasing from age to age.* * * *Where was he? That strange shifting of consciousness again.Whenever Harben became lost in contemplation of the transcendental beauty of the Records, he was liable to lose track of time.Did he go into some kind of trance, in which he lost normal consciousness ? He looked at the softly glowing face of the clock.Three hours unaccounted for.But why did he have the metal fuser in his hand? His knees and elbows felt sore, as though he had spent hours crawling along the narrow corridors which penetrated the Records Centre in all directions.The corridors were there mainly for the maintenance mechanisms to whirr along.But Harben also had the freedom of the corridors, supervising the activities of the robots.He could crawl along a maze of narrow tunnels for vast distances, right up to the fringes of the lethal perimeter zone itself.He had to check, at intervals, the work of the maintenance mechanisms.They were supposed, in theory, to keep all the equipment in tip-top condition, and they did just that.But there was always the faint possibility that someday, somewhere, an unforeseen failure would occur.It was almost a formality, but one couldn’t be too careful where the Records were concerned.So Harben made routine checks at intervals to see that everything was in order.It entailed several days of tedious crawling along the narrow tunnels, peering and squinting into the complex wiring system, searching for the faulty connection or unserviceable sub-assembly that was never there.Harben tended to feel as if he were looking for a nonexistent needle in an infinitely large haystack.This was not a job which Harben ever undertook eagerly.But his almost fanatical devotion to the safety of the Records drove him to perform it with agonizing thoroughness.Anyway, the next routine check was not due for another two months, so why the bruised knees and elbows ? The facts just didn’t add up, or make any kind of sense.While he was musing on this problem, a disagreeable interruption occurred.The large screen to the right of his chair flickered and glowed into life.An oversized three-dimensional image of the Sub-Assistant Overseer of Records looked squarely at Harben.His huge, oval, rather self-satisfied face appeared to be less than arms-length away.Harben flinched.He always resented these intrusions into what he considered the privacy of his recording cubicle.He himself preferred to use the impersonal medium of the message tape when he wanted to get in touch with Headquarters.The time-lag entailed was negligible.The Sub-Assistant cleared his throat portentously.If he was aware of Harben’s resentment at his using the visual channel, he gave no hint of it.His beefy face conveyed the unsquashable, bouncy good-humour of one who is accustomed to issuing orders and having them instantly obeyed.The synthetic friendliness of the Overseer’s manner made Harben recoil inwardly.“And how are we, Harben, old man?” he said breezily.“Ticking over smoothly, I trust
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