Ring Around the Sun

CHAPTER FORTY

So he was supposed to stop Crawford.

He was supposed to hunch him.

But first he had to figure out the angles. He had to take the factors and balance one against another and see where the weak spots were and the strong points, too. There was the might of industry, not one industry alone, but the might of all the industry in the entire world. There was the fact that Crawford and industry had declared open war upon the mutants. And there was the matter of the secret weapon.

"Desperation and a secret weapon," Crawford had said, sitting in the hotel room. But the secret weapon, he had added, wasn't good enough.

First of all, Vickers had to know what the weapon was. Until he knew that, there would be no point in making any plans.

He lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and sorted out the facts and laid them in orderly rows and had a Iook at them. Then he juggled them a bit, changing their position in regard to one another and he balanced the strength of normal human against the strength of mutant and there were many places where they canceled one another and there were other instances where one stood forth, unassailable and uncancelable.

He got exactly nowhere.

"And of course I won't," he said. "This is the old awkward normal human way of doing. This is reasoning.

Hunch was the thing.

And how to do the hunching?

He swept the factors clean away, swept them from his mind, and lay upon the bed, staring at the darkness where the ceiling was and did not try to think.

He could feel the factors bumping in his brain, bouncing together, then fleeing from each other, but he kept himself from recognizing them.

An idea came: War.

He thought about it and it grew and gripped him.

War, but a different kind of war than the world had ever known. What was that phrase from the old history of World War II? A phoney war. And yet, not a phoney war.

It was a disturbing thing to think about something that you couldn't place — to have a hunch — that was it, a hunch grawing at you and not know what it was.

He tried to think about it and it retreated from him. He stopped thinking and it came back again.

Another idea came: Poverty.

And poverty was somehow tied up with war and he sensed the two of them, the two ideas, circling likecoyotes around the campfire that was himself, snarling and growling at each other in the darkness beyond the flame of his understanding.

He tried to banish them utterly into the darkness and they would not go.

After a time he grew accustomed to them and it seemed that the campfire flickered lower and the coyote-ideas did not run so fast nor snap so viciously.

There was another factor, too, said his sleeping mind. The mutants were short on manpower. That's why they had the robots and the androids.

There would be ways you could get around a manpower shortage. You could take one life and split it into many lives. You could take one mutant life and you could spread it thin, stretch it out and make it last longer and go further. In the economy of manpower, you could do many things if you just knew how.

The coyotes were circling more slowly now and the fire was growing dimmer and I'll stop you, Crawford, I'll get the answer and I'll stop you cold and I love you, Ann, and -

Then, not knowing, he had slept, he woke and sat bolt upright in the bed.

He knew!

He shivered in the slight chill of summer dawn and swung his legs from beneath the covers and felt the bite of the cold floor against his bare feet.

Vickers ran to the door and jerked it open and came out on the landing, with the stairway winding down into the hall below him.

"Flanders!" he shouted. "Flanders."

Hezekiah appeared from somewhere and began to climb the stairs, calling: "What is the matter, sir? Is there something that you want?"

"I want Horton Flanders!"

Another door opened and Horton Flanders stood there, bony ankles showing beneath the hem of nightshirt, sparse hair standing almost erect.

"What's going on?" he mumbled, tongue still thick with sleep. "What's all the racket?"

Vickers strode across the hall and grabbed him by the shoulders and demanded: "How many of us are there? How many ways was Jay Vickers' life divided?"

"If you'll stop shaking me —»

"I will when you tell me the truth."

"Oh, gladly," Flanders said. "There are three of us. There's you and I and…"

"_You?_"

"Certainly. Does it surprise you?"

"But you're so much older than I."

"We can do a great deal with synthetic flesh," said Flanders. "I don't see why you should be surprised at all."

And he wasn't, Vickers suddenly realized. It was as if he had always been aware of it.

"But the third one?" Vickers asked. "You said there are why they had the three. Who's the other one?"

"I can't tell you yet," Flanders said. "I won't tell you who it is. I've told you too much already."

Vickers reached out and grasped the front of Flanders' nightshirt and twisted the fabric until it tightened on his throat.

"There's no use in violence," Flanders said. "No possible use in violence. It was only because we reached a crisis sooner than expected that I've told you what I have. You weren't ready for even that much. You weren't fit to know. We were taking quite a chance of pushing you too fast. I couldn't possibly tell you more."

"Not fit to know!" Vickers repeated savagely.

"Not ready. You should have had more time. And to tell you what you ask, to tell you now, just isn't possible. It would — create complications for you. Impair your efficiency and your value."

"But I know _that_ answer already," Vickers told him angrily. "Ready or not, I know the answer to Crawford and his friends, and that's more than the rest of you have done, with all the time you've spent on it. I have the answer now, everything you'd hoped for; I know the secret weapon and I know how to counteract it. You said I should stop Crawford and I can."

"You're sure of that?"

"Completely sure," Vickers said. "But this other person, this third person…"

There was a suspicion creeping into his mind, a frightful suspicion.

"I have to know," he said.

"I just can't tell you; I can't possibly tell you," Flanders repeated.

Vickers' grip on the nightshirt had loosened; now he let his hand drop. The nagging thing tearing at his mind was a torture, a terrible, rising torture. Slowly he turned away.

"Yes, I'm sure," Vickers said again. "I'm sure I know _all_ the answers. I know, but what the hell's the use."

He went into his room and shut the door.