The Penultimate Truth

13

Standing at the far end of the table Verne Lindblom said, "I think these are enough." He indicated the several weapons objects and then the neatly plastic-wrapped bones and skulls. Terran and nonterran; two distinct varieties, separate now, but soon to be mingled in the soil of Utah.

Joseph Adams was impressed. It had not taken Lindblom, the artisan, long. Even Stanton Brose, coasting up in his special wheeled chair, seemed surprised. And of course immensely pleased.

The other person present had no reaction; he was not permitted to: he loitered in the background. Adams wondered who he was and then he realized, with a jolt of aversion, that this was the Brose today who had infiltrated Runcible's staff; this was Robert Hig, who would find one or more--begin the process of turning up-these artifacts.

"My articles," Adams said, "aren't even in rough, yet. And here you have all the completed artifacts themselves." He had, in fact, merely begun page one of article one; it would be days before he finished the batch of three, turned them over to the Agency's shops to be printed up into their magazine form, combined with other, probably authentic, scientific articles of thirty years ago, in prewar issues of _Natural World_.

"Don't fret," the ancient sagging mass in the motor-driven chair which was Stanton Brose muttered at him. "We don't need to produce the issues of _Natural World_ until our legal staff hauls Runcible up before the Recon Dis-In Council, and that'll take time; do them as quickly as you can, but we can go ahead and have these objects buried--we don't need to wait on you, Adams." He added, gratuitously, "Thank god."

"Do you know," Lindblom said to Adams, "that we've established this: Footemen, employed by Runcible, have warned him--or will warn him shortly--that _something_ is being planned. Something roughly of this sort. But Foote's people won't really know what. Unless one of the four of us in this room is an agent for Webster Foote, and that's unlikely. After all, only we four know."

"One more," Brose corrected. "The girl who did the original drawings, especially the very authentic skull remains of the nonterrans. It required enormous anthropological and anatomical knowledge to make these specs; she had to know just what alterations from Homo sapiens to indicate... greater ridge bones over the eye sockets, undifferentiated molars, no incisors, less of a chin, but much greater frontal area of the skull so as to indicate a highly organized brain of far more than 1,500 c.c. capacity; in other words, a race more advanced evolutionwise than ours. And the same goes for those." He pointed to the leg bones. "No amateur could sit down and draw fibula and tibia like she did."

"And what about her?" Adams asked. "Would she leak any of this to Runcible or to Webster Foote's people?" As, he thought, I myself may well still do... as you, Verne Lindblom, know.

Brose said, "She's dead."

There was silence.

"I'm out of this," Lindblom said. He turned, started like a somnambulist toward the door.

Suddenly two Brose agents in shiny jackboots with their dainty cold faces materialized, blocking the door; god in heaven, where had they come from? Adams was appalled; they bad actually been in the room all this time, but, no doubt due to some technological piece of witchcraft they had been absolutely inconspicuous. Cammed, he realized; an old-time much-used espionage assist... chameleoned into the fabric of the room's walls.

Brose said, "No one killed her; she had a coronary. The pressure of work; she overtaxed herself, unfortunately, because of the deadline we gave her. Christ, she was valuable; look at the quality of her work." He jabbed a flabby, pudgy finger at the Xeroxed copy of the original scroll of specs.

Hesitating, Lindblom said, "I--"

"It's the truth," Brose said. "You can see the medical report. Arlene Davidson; her demesne is in New Jersey. You knew her."

"That's true," Lindblom said, finally, speaking to Adams. "It is a fact that Arlene had an enlarged heart and had been warned not to overtax herself. But they--" He glowered futilely at Brose. "They pushed her. They had to have their material by due date, on schedule." To Adams he said, "Like with us. I got mine done; I can work fast under pressure. How about you? Are you going to live through those three articles?"

Adams said, "I'll live through it." I don't have an enlarged heart, he said to himself; I didn't have rheumatic fever as a child, like Arlene. But if I had, they'd push me anyhow, as Verne said, as they did with Arlene, even if it killed me; just so long as I died _after_ I delivered the goods. He felt weak, powerless and sad. Our fakeproducing factory, he thought, demands a lot from us; _we may be the ruling elite, but we are not idle_. Even Brose himself needs to be tireless. And at his age.

"Why didn't Arlene get an artiforg heart?" Robert Hig spoke up, astonishing them all. His tone was diffident, but it remained a good question.

"No hearts left," Brose murmured, displeased that Hig had entered the conversation. And in such a way.

"I understood that at least two-" Hig went on, but Brose cut in harshly.

"None _available_," Brose amended.

In other words, Adams realized, they exist there in that subsurface warehouse in Colorado. But they're for you, you hulking, wheezing, dribbling, rotting old sack of fat; you need every artiforg heart there can be, to keep that carcass functioning. Too bad we can't duplicate the processes that sole licensed prewar manufacturer had developed

too bad we can't produce heart after heart here at the Agency's shops, or send an order by coax to one of the bigger ant tanks for them to put together a batch for us.

Oh hell, we could produce a heart, here, he thought. But--it'd be a simulated heart; it would look like the real thing, beat like it... but when you had it surgically installed it would turn out like everything we make turns out. And the patient wouldn't get much life out of _that_.

Our products, he realized soberly, could not sustain life for even a second. Commentary on us, on our efficacy. Good lord. And his sense of sadness grew; that vast, awful internal fog plucked at him as he stood here in this busy chamber of the Agency with his fellow Yance-man. Verne Lindblom, who was also his friend, and his employer, Stanton Brose, and the nullity, Robert Hig who, surprisingly, had asked the one pointed question; good for Hig, Adams thought. For having the guts to ask it. One never knows; you can never write off a person entirely, no matter how colorless and empty and bought he seems.

Lindblom, with gravity and reluctance, at last returned to the table of new-looking artifacts. His tone was low and slowed-down; he spoke mechanically, without effect. "Anyhow, Joe, since Runcible will immediately carbon-date these, they must not only look six hundred years old--they'll have to be six hundred years old."

"You understand," Brose said to Adams, "that otherwise we'd hardly have had Verne here produce shiny new artifacts? Like your magazine articles, they'd have had to be aged. And you can see; these are not."

Because aging, Adams realized, as Brose said, can't be faked; Runcible would ferret it out. So--it's true, then. To Brose he said, "The rumors. About a time scoop of some sort. We always heard, but we didn't--couldn't be sure."

"It'll carry them back," Brose said to him. "It can move objects into the past but not return anything; it's one-way only. Do you know why that is, Verne?" He eyed Lindblom.

"No," Verne Lindblom said. To Joseph Adams he explained, "It was a wartime weapon, developed by a relatively small firm in Chicago. A Soviet missile got the firm, including all its personnel; we have the time scoop, but we don't know how it works or how to duplicate it."

"But it does work," Brose said. "It'll carry very small items back; we'll feed these artifacts, skulls, bones, all this on the table, piece by piece, into the scoop; that'll be done late at night on Runcible's land in Southern Utah--we'll have geologists present to show us how deep to sink them, and a leady team to dig. This part has to be highly precise, because if they're too deep Runcible's autonomic 'dozers won't turn them up. You see?"

"Yep," Adams said. And thought, What a use to put an invention like that to. We could shoot back scientific data, constructs of unfathomable value, to civilizations in the past--formulae for medicines... we could be of infinite aid to former societies and peoples; just a few reference books translated into Latin or Greek or Old English... we could head off wars, we could provide remedies that might halt the great plagues of the Middle Ages. We could communicate with Oppenheimer and Teller, persuade them not to develop the A-bomb and the H-bomb--a few film sequences of the war that we just lived through would do that. But no. It's to be for this, to concoct a fraud, one implement in a series of implements by which Stanton Brose gains more personal power. And originally the invention was even worse than that; it was a weapon of war.

We are, Adams realized, a cursed race. Genesis is right; there is a stigma on us, a mark. Because only a cursed, marked, flawed species would use its discoveries as we are using them.

"As a matter of fact," Verne Lindblom said, and bent to pick up another of the bizarre "nonterran" weapons from the table, "based on what I know of the time scoop as a weapon--that little Chicago firm called it a Reverse Metabolic Distributor or some such thing--I've based this on its design." He held the tubelike device out to Adams. "The Reverse Metabolic Distributor never saw action in the war," he said, "so we don't know how it would have functioned. But anyhow I needed a source for--"

"I can't see your lips," Brose complained; he swung his powerdriven chair rapidly, so that he now sat where he could watch Lindblom's face.

Lindblom said, "As I was explaining to Adams, I needed a source for 'nonterran' weapons; obviously I couldn't merely put a grotesque outer-frame on our own familiar weapons from World War Three, because Runcible's experts might find enough components intact to pinpoint the resemblance. In other words--"

"Yes," Brose agreed. "It would be an odd coincidence indeed if the 'nonterrans' who invaded Earth six centuries ago just happened to have employed weaponry precisely like our own of the last war... the only difference being, as Verne says, the outer case; what Arlene drew."

"I had to fill them with components unfamiliar to our time," Verne Lindblom said. "And there wasn't the opportunity for me to invent them, so I turned to the advanced weapons archives here at the Agency that contains prototypes that never saw use." He glanced at Brose. "Mr. Brose," he said, "provided me entree. Otherwise I couldn't have gotten in." The advanced weapons archives of the Agency was one of the many sections of New York which Brose had "attached," just as he had attached the artiforgs in the Colorado subsurface warehouse. Everything spurious was available to all Yance men. But the real thing--this was reserved for Brose alone. Or, in this case, by extension, to a small staff working under his immediate direction on a secret project. Unknown to the class of Yance-men as a whole.

"So these really are weapons," Adams said, absorbed in an almost frightened contemplation of the bizarrely shaped artifacts. _The fakery had gone that deep_. "I could then pick up one of these and--"

"Sure," Brose said genially. "Shoot me. Take any one of them, point it at me, or if you're tired of Verne, get him."

Verne Lindblom said, "They don't work, Joe. But after six centuries of being buried in the soil of Utah--" He grinned at Joseph Adams. "If I could make them really work I could take over the world."

"That's right," Brose chuckled. "And you'd be working for Verne, instead of me. We had to get the--what did they call it?--the Reverse Metabolic Distributor prototype out of the advanced weapons archives in order to make use of it retrograde scoopwise, so Verne had a good long opportunity to open it up and fuss--" He corrected himself. "No, that's right; you were forbidden to fuss, weren't you, Verne? My memory's slipping."

Woodenly, Verne said, "I got to look. But not to touch."

"It hurts a manual type like Verne," Brose said to Adams. "To be limited to just looking; he likes to feel things with his fingers." He chuckled. "That must have been painful, Verne, that glimpse you had of the prototype weapons from the war, the advanced hardware that never got into production, never reached our autofacts or the Soviets'. Well, someday my brain will give out... arteriosclerosis or some such thing, a clot or a tumor, and then you can beat out every other Yance-man and replace me. And _then_ you can go into the advanced prototypes section of the weapon archives and putter and fuss and fondle with your fingers all day long."

From his respectfully distant place, Robert Hig said, "I'd like to be sure of a couple of points, Mr. Brose. Now, I find one or two of these objects. All corroded and decayed, of course. Should I recognize them as nonterran? I mean, when I take them to Mr. Runcible--"

"You tell him," Brose said harshly, "that you know, because you're an engineer, that what you have is _not_ terran-made. No American Indians of the year 1425 made objects like that--hell, anybody would know that: you won't have to back up your report to Runcible with any engineering or scientific jargon; you show him the weapons and tell him they came from the six-hundred-year stratum and look at them--are these flint-tipped arrows? Are these unbaked clay pitchers or granite hollowed-out grinding stones? You say that and then you get the hell right back to the 'dozers and see that more and more, especially the non-Homo sapiens skulls, get turned up."

"Yes, Mr. Brose," Robert Hig said, and nodded obediently.

Brose said, "I certainly would like to see Louis Runcible's face when you show him those finds." His rubbery old eyes were wet with anticipation.

"You will," Lindblom reminded him. "Since Hig will have one of those shirt-button cameras going, complete with aud track. So when the litigation begins we can supply proof that Runcible was not ignorant of either the discoveries or their scientific value." His voice was faintly edged with contempt--contempt for an aging brain which could not retain all the facts, which had already forgotten this vital part of the pcoject. To Joseph Adams, Lindblom said, "You know those little action cameras. Gottlieb Fischer always used them in his documentaries; that's how all the 'blurred fuzzy secret espionage shots' were obtained."

"Oh yes," Adams said somberly. "I know." How little chance there was that he would forget the existence of the famous shirt-button camera. Circa 1943, he thought acidly, according to Fischer. "Are you sure," he said, "you haven't made these finds _too_ valuable? Of such fantastically great scientific worth that even Runcible--"

"According to the Berlin psychiatrists," Brose said, "the more the scientific worth the more fear he'll have of losing his land. So the more he'll be inclined to hide the find."

"You'd have gone to a lot of work for nothing," Adams said, "if your Berlin psychiatrists have guessed wrong." And he felt within him the hope that they had. The hope that Runcible would do the reputable thing, would at once proclaim the finds to the world--instead of delivering himself over to his enemies via his weaknesses, his fears and lusts, his greed.

But he had a feeling that the Berlin psychiatrists were right.

Unless someone--and god knew who that might be--came to Louis Runcible's aid, the man was doomed.