ONCE UPON A TIME THE BUILDING THAT WAS NOW KNOWN as DoD Temp Restraining Quarters 7—you might as well call it with the right word, "jail," Knefhausen thought —had been a luxury hotel in the Hilton chain. He had once addressed a General Assembly of the World Future Society in its Grand Ballroom, not twenty yards from where he sat—such days! Such grand prospects! In those days the future was something one could contemplate with awe and joy. But now the rooms below the ground level, which had been for meetings and other frolicking, had become maximum security cells. There were no doors or windows to the outside. If you did storm out of the door of your own room in some way, you had then a flight of stairs to get up before you were at ground level, and then the guards to break through to get to the open streets, and then what? One had gained very little. Even if there happened not to be an active siege going on at the moment, one took one's chances with the roaming addicts and activists outside.
Knefhausen did not concern himself with thoughts of escape, or at least didn't after the first few panicky moments when he realized he was under arrest. He stopped demanding to see the President after the first few days. There was no point in appealing to the White House for help when it was the White House that had put him there. He was still sure that if he could only talk to the President privately for a few moments he could clear everything up. But as a realist he had faced the fact that the President would never talk to him privately again; and then, as time wore on, more painful doubts occurred to him. Was the President even still alive? There were hints that he was no longer ever seen; orders were issued in his name, but was there still a living being behind the orders?
And, in any case, did it matter?
So he counted his blessings. First, it was comfortable here. His bed was good. His room was warm. His food came still from the banquet kitchen of the hotel, and though it was simple it was quite often edible. For jailhouse fare, excellent.
Second, the kids were still in space and still doing some things, even if they did not report what. His ultimate vindication could still be hoped for.
Third, the jailers let him have writing materials and occasionally a book, although they would not bring him newspapers or a television set.
He missed his own books, but nothing else. He didn't need TV to tell him what was going on outside. He didn't even need the newspapers, ragged, thin, and censored as they were. He could hear all the news that mattered for himself. Every day there was a rattle of small-arms fire, mostly far-off and sporadic, but once or twice sustained and heavy and almost overhead. M-60s against AK-74s, it sounded like, and now and then the slap and smash of grenade launchers. Sometimes he heard sirens hooting through the streets, punctuated by clanging bells, and wondered that there was still a civilian fire department left to bother. (Or was it still civilian?) Sometimes he heard the grinding of heavy motors that had to be tanks. When he became curious he would sometimes press his ear to the door and listen for chance remarks from the patrols in the corridors outside; they said little to fill in the details, but Knefhausen was good at reading between the lines. The Administration was still in some sort of control, at least of part of the country, but it was holed up somewhere—Camp David or the Florida Keys, no one was saying where. The cities were all in red revolt. Herr Omnes had taken over. At least there had not been, as far as he knew, a major war or an invasion from some other country; perhaps their own cities were to be thanked for that.
For any part in these disasters Knefhausen felt unjustly blamed. No one had, in so many words, accused him. Nevertheless, in the early days he composed endless letters to the President, pointing out that the serious troubles of the administration had nothing to do with Alpha-Aleph. The cities had been increasingly lawless for most of a generation, the dollar had been each year more ludicrous ever since the Indochinese wars. Some letters he destroyed, some were taken from him, a few he managed to dispatch—and got no answers.
Once or twice a week a man from the Justice Department came to ask him the same thousand pointless questions once again. It was a self-sustaining bureaucratic phenomenon, Knefhausen was sure; it had been begun, perhaps in the attempt to build up a dossier to prove that it was all his fault, and no one had remembered to terminate it. Well, let it be. Knefhausen would defend himself if charges were ever laid. Or history would defend him. The record was clear. With respect to moral issues, not wholly clear, he conceded; there were certain deceptions and quite difficult acts he had performed even within the grand deception itself, but no matter. One could not speak of moral issues in an area so vital to the search for knowledge as this. The dispatches from the Constitution, when the Constitution was still reporting to its masters on Earth, had already produced so much! Although, admittedly, not so much as one would like of a practical value. Some of the most significant parts were hard to understand, and that great Godel message, which would surely unlock so much, remained mostly unscrambled. The computers had slogged on through primes of five and six digits, each day producing a little less than the day before, and then something never explained had happened—an attack of some sort on the decrypting facilities in Langley, Knefhausen was sure—and it had all stopped. The last bits had seemed to deal with reconciling the tuning of a piano keyboard to the true frequencies of the harmonic scale! The hints of its greater contents remained only hints.
So unruly, those young heroes!
Sometimes Knefhausen dozed and dreamed of projecting himself somehow to join them on the Constitution. It had been a year or more since the last message, and that received nearly a year after they transmitted it because of the slow crawl of radio waves. He tried to imagine what they might be doing now. They would be well past the midpoint now, no doubt decelerating. The starbow would be broadening and diffusing every day. The circles of blackness before and behind them would be shrinking. Soon they would see Alpha Centauri as no man had ever seen it. To be sure, they would then see with even the naked eye that there was no planet that could be called Aleph circling the primary, but they had discovered that in some unguessable fashion long since.
Brave, wonderful kids! Even so, they had decided to go on. This foolishness with drugs and sex that had so disturbed the President, making him bite at his lip with those rabbit teeth, what of it? Such misplaced prudery! One opposed such goings-on when they occurred in the common run of humanity, and indeed punished them severely; that was for the orderly running of the state. But it had always been so that those who excelled and stood out from the herd could make their own rules. As a child he had learned that the plump, proud air leader frequently sniffed cocaine, that the great warriors took their sexual pleasure sometimes with each other. And of what importance was that? An intelligent man did not concern himself with such questions, which was one more indication that the man from the Justice Department, with his constant hinting and prying into Knefhausen's own sexual interests, was not really very intelligent.
The good thing about the visits of the man from the Justice Department was that one could sometimes deduce things from his questions, and rarely—oh, very rarely—he would sometimes answer a question himself. "Has there been a message from the Constitution?" "No, of course not, Dr. Knefhausen; now, tell me again, who suggested this fraudulent scheme to you in the first place?"
Those were the highlights of his days. Mostly the days passed unmarked.
He did not even scratch them off on the wall of his cell, like the prisoner in the Chateau d'If. It would have been a pity to mar the hardwood paneling. Also, he had other clocks and calendars. There was the ticking of the arriving meals, the turning of the season as the man from the Justice Department paid his visits. Each of these was like a holiday—a holy day, not joyous but solemn. First there would be a visit from the captain of the guards, with two armed soldiers standing in the door. They would search his person and his cell on the chance that he had been able to smuggle in a—a what? A nuclear bomb, maybe. Or a pound of pepper to throw in the Justice man's eyes. They would find nothing, because there was nothing to find. And then they would go away, and for a long time there would be nothing. Not even a meal, even if a mealtime then happened to be due. Nothing at all, until an hour or three hours later the Justice man would come in with his own guard squad at the door, equally vigilant inside and out, and his engineer manning the tape recorders, and the questions.
And—once in a very great while—his answers. Knefhausen had lost track of the days; on one visit he asked, then begged', to be told the date. The Justice Department man refused curtly, but on the next visit relented. Some superior had decided, no doubt, that after ail such information could not cause harm. Knefhausen thanked him profusely and then, after he had left and Knefhausen was greedily eating his long-delayed breakfast, he realized what the date was. It was his birthday! He was sixty-five years old that day!
Surely a significant age for one to attain, he thought; the traditional age of retirement, an age at which a man should be able to look back on a career and count up its prides and failures. How frustrating that in his own case neither the world nor he himself could yet be sure what those were.
It was an age, too, only five years short of the Biblical three score and ten. Knefhausen's life would in no great time be over.
He put down his spoon and regarded the rest of his oatmeal with loathing. Those ruffians on the Constitution! How dare they not report? To close out the ledgers of his own life with proper accounting of credits and losses they must render their statement! For months now, even years, he had thought of them with jealous sorrow, but now it was only rage. Let them come to him now, and he would wring their impudent, ruffianly necks!