The Penultimate Truth

23

Poring over the segment of positive, Cencio, the loupe in his right eye, said, "Two men. Ten leadies. Walking through the Cheyenne ruins in the direction of Lantano's incomplete villa. Want a blowup?"

"Yes," Webster Foote said, instantly. It had been worth instructing the corporation's satellite briefly to reenter; they would possess a much better picture, now.

The room darkened and then the square of white appeared on the wall, and then that square was modified as the film segment was fed into the projector which at the same time, at 1200x, magnified. The animator, his dearly prized gadget, began to work; the twelve figures shuffled forward.

"The same man," Cencio said, "who was with the two destructed leadies. But that's not Lantano with him; Lantano is a young man, in his twenties. That man there is middle-aged. I'll get the folio on him and show you." He disappeared. Webster Foote, alone, continued to watch the animated, developing episode; the twelve figures in motion, toiling along, the ex-tanker clearly quite tired, the man with him-- certainly it was David Lantano. Yet, as Cencio said, clearly a man in his late middle-age. Strange, Webster Foote said to himself. The radiation must account for it. It's killing him and this is the fashion that his death is taking; a premature aging. Lantano had better get out of there before it's too late; before it doesn't matter.

"See?" Cencio said, returning with the Lantano folio; he switched on the room lights, halted the animation of the film segment. "Born in 2002; that makes him twenty-three. So how can that man there--" He shut the room lights off once more. "That is _not_ David Lantano."

"His father?"

"According to the folio his father died before the war." Cencio, under a small lamp at the desk, examined the records which the corporation had gathered pertaining to the Yance-man David Lantano. "Evidently Lantano, interestingly, is an ex-tanker. Anyhow walked out of the San Francisco ruins one day, asked for asylum in one of Runcible's conapts. Sent, routinely, to the Berlin Psychiatric WaffenInstitute. Mrs. Morgen found him to be of unusual aptitude; recommended that he be admitted to the Agency on a trial basis. Began writing speeches; is doing so now. Brilliant speeches, it says here."

"That's him on that screen," Webster Foote said, "and the radiation is killing him. So due to his greed to acquire a demesne he's not going to live, and the Agency loses a brilliant speech writer and he his life."

"He's got a wife and two children. So he's not sterile. They all walked out of the S .F. ruins together, a little family. Touching."

"They'll probably die with him. Before the year's up. Start the animator going again, my boy."

Obligingly, Cencio started the animator once more into action. The tired ex-tanker still lagged behind. For an interval the two men were lost behind and within a great semi-standing building; then, once more, they emerged into the light of day, the leadies stringing in a file behind them.

Suddenly Webster Foote exclaimed, leaned forward: "My god. Stop the animator."

Again Cencio stopped the action of the scene; the figures froze as they were.

"Can you get a greater enlargement of just Lantano?" Foote asked.

With great skill Cencio maneuvered the magnifying stages of lenses, manipulated both coarse and fine focuses; the figure on the screen, the first, darker human grew until there was nothing but him on the screen. Only the one obviously youthful, vigorous man.

Both Cencio and Webster Foote gazed in disconcerted, agitated silence.

"Well, my boy," Foote said at last. "That knocks the radiation damage theory."

"That's how he ought to look. Like he does now. That fits his chronological age."

Foote said, "There is, in the advanced weapons archives at the New York Agency, some kind of time travel weapon which has been tinkered with until it's a scoop they can use for depositing objects into the past. Only Brose has access to it. But what we're seeing now suggests that Lantano has got his hands on either the original weapon or the adaptation made of it by the Agency. I think we would be well advised to have a perpetual vid monitor kept on Lantano if it's at all possible. Could we plant one on a leady of his immediate entourage? It's risky, I realize, but if he finds it all he can do is rip it off; he can't prove who put it there. And we only need a few more shots; just another handful." The animator, meanwhile, had run the sequence to its limit; unable to carry it any further it merely buzzed, while on the screen the figures once more were frozen. Cencio put on the room lights; both men moved about, stretching, pondering.

"What few more shots?" Cencio asked.

"Of him as old as he gets in his oscillations," Foote said.

"Maybe we've seen it. Already."

"But maybe not. Do you know," Foote said, suddenly gripped by his extrasensory hunch experience; it overpowered him--never had it struck him with such force. "That man is not white; he's a Negro or an Indian or something."

"But there aren't any more Indians," Cencio said. "Remember that article circulated just before the war; the ethnic resettlement program established on Mars involved virtually all of them, and they were killed in the first year, when the fighting was confined to Mars; those who remained behind on Earth--"

"Well, this one's still here," Foote said. "So that's that. We don't need twenty Indians; we need just one--overlooked, I mean."

One of his lab technicians came to the door of the room, knocked respectfully. "Mr. Foote, sir. A report of that portable TV set. That you wanted torn down."

Foote said, "You got it open and it's a standard model prewar Philco 3-D color TV portable with--"

"Can't open it."

"What about those rexeroid bits?" Rexeroid, a compound from Jupiter, generally could penetrate anything. And he had kept one in his London labs for just such occasions as this.

"The case of the object, sir, is rexeroid; the bit goes in a quarter inch and then--the substance took the edge off the bit so it won't cut. In other words we're out one rexeroid bit. We've sent for more, but they'll have to come from Luna; that's where the nearest available supply exists. None of the Yance-men have any, including Eisenbludt in Moscow. Or if they do have any they won't release them; you know how competitive the Yance-men are. Afraid if they lend you--"

"Don't sermonize," Foote said. "Just keep trying. Anyhow I took a look at that case; it's not an alloy at all--it's plastic."

"Then it's a plastic we've never before seen."

Foote said, "It's an advanced weapon, undoubtedly from the Agency's closed archives, although possibly someone dug it up. Anyhow developed at the end of the war and never used. Do you mean to say you don't recognize the fine German hand when you see it? That's a Gestalt-macher; I know it." He tapped his forehead. "This extra knob on my frontal lobe says so. _Without proof_. You get into it and you'll see; ejectors that spout blood, hair, words, brain waves, threads, handprints." And, he thought, a cyanide-tipped homeostatic, homotropic dart. The first and last; that most of all. "You've tried heating it, of course."

"Not too high. To about 240; afraid if we go higher--"

"Try up to 350. And report if it shows any sign of flow."

"All right, sir." The lab technician departed.

Foote said to Cencio, "They'll never get it open. It's not rexeroid; it's a thermoplastic. But that clever German thermoplastic that flows at one precise split half degree; above and below it's even harder than rexeroid. You have to get exactly the proper temperature; inside it's got a heating coil that melts it when it wants to change shape. If they keep trying long enough--"

"Or," Cencio said, "if they get it too hot there won't be anything left inside it but ash."

That was true. The Germans had even thought of that; the mechanism was built so that unusual pressures--such as heat, drills, probes of any sort--acted to trigger a demolition circuit. And the thing did not even burst in a visible way; its works simply disintegrated... so that one still continued to strive to gain entry--entry into a gadget which had already long, long ago fused itself into a shapeless nothing, workswise.

Those late wartime units, Foote thought, are too clever. Just too damn clever for us mortals; can you imagine what would have been dreamed up in another year? _If_ the autofacs hadn't been destroyed, all the surface shops and labs and proving grounds... like that one, sole outfit that made artiforgs.

The intercom clicked on and Miss Grey said, "Sir, Yance-man David Lantano is on the line wanting you. Are you in?"

Foote glanced at Cencio. "Saw the satellite reenter. Knows we took extra-careful shots of him. He's going to ask why." Rapidly, he tried to think why. The ex-tanker? Good; he had something there, because, according to law Lantano had to turn over any tanker who bored through within his demesne area to the Berlin psychiatrists. Into the intercom he said, "Put Lantano on, Miss Grey."

On the big vidscreen the face of David Lantano appeared, and Webster Foote saw, fascinated, that it was the youthful phase of the age-oscillation or cycle; in any case it was the proper twenty-three-year-old man who confronted him.

"I have never had the pleasure of making your acquaintance," Foote said politely (Yance-men, as a general rule, enjoyed this sort of bending-the-knee). "However I know your reading matter. Extraordinary."

Lantano said, "We would like an artiforg. A pancreas."

"Oh dear."

"You can locate one. Dug up. We will pay highly."

"There aren't any." Foote thought, _Why? Who needs it? You? Did your ex-tanker friend bore to the surface for it? Probably the latter, and you are being charitable or anyhow going through the motions_. "Not a chance, Mr. Lantano." And then an idea came to him. "Allow me," he said, "to visit your villa, however, for a few moments. I have some maps, military maps from the war, which indicate areas not dug into which conceivably might contain stored artiforgs; these were U.S. Air Force hospitals in remote places. Alaska, North Canada. On the old picket line fringes and on the East Coast. Perhaps between us--"

"Fine," Lantano agreed. "What about nine p.m. at my villa? Nine as computed by my time-zone here. For you that would be--"

"Sir, I can count time," Foote said. "I'll be there. And I'm sure, with your extraordinary abilities, you'll be able to make use of these maps. You can dispatch your own leadies if you wish, or my corporation can--"

"At nine tonight, my time, then," Lantano said, and rang off.

"Why?" Cencio asked Foote, after a pause.

Foote said, "To plant the continual vid monitor."

"Of course." Cencio flushed.

"Run that animated sequence again," Foote said thoughtfully, "of Lantano at middle-age. Stop it at the point where he is aged the most. I noticed a quality about him, just now, on the vidscreen..."

As he again set up the magnifying equipment, the film, the animator, the projector, Cencio said, "What quality?"

"It seemed to me," Foote said, "that Lantano, as he aged, began to resemble someone. I could not place who, but someone I know well." As he had faced even the young Lantano on the big vidscreen he had experienced it, the _déjâ vu_.

A moment later, in the darkened room, he was viewing a still of Lantano at middle-age, but seen from above; again the angle was bad, and always would be, when the photographing instrument was so vertically oriented, as a satellite naturally had to be. But--he could discern it anyhow, because, as the satellite made its pass, both Lantano and the ex-tanker came to a halt and peered up.

"I know who," Cencio said, suddenly. "Talbot Yancy."

"Except that he's dark," Foote said. "This man here."

"But if that skin-bleach were applied, that wartime dermal--"

"No, Yancy is considerably older. When we get a good shot of Lantano at say sixty-five, not fifty, then maybe we'll have something." _And when I have got inside his villa_, Foote knew, _we will thereafter have operating the equipment to produce that shot. And this will be tonight; only a few more hours_.

_What is this Lantano?_ he asked himself.

And got no answer.

At least--not yet.

But over the years he had learned to be patient. He was a professional; he would, in Lantano's incomplete villa, establish a video monitor which sooner or later would tell him additional facts, and ultimately one day, hopefully not too long from now, the pivotal fact would emerge, and all would be tied together: the deaths of Davidson, Hig and Lindblom, the destruct of the two leadies, the peculiar aging of Lantano--and, as he aged, that even queerer fact that he grew more and more to resemble a plastic and metal dummy bolted to a wooden desk in New York City... oh, Foote thought; then that would explain that peculiar and up to now anomalous strip of film which showed the origin of the destruct beam that took out the two leadies. It was we had thought, someone _resembling_ Talbot Yancy.

It was David Lantano at the extreme old end of his oscillation; _we have seen it already_. The key fact had already emerged.

Brose, he thought, you have made a major mismove; you have lost your monopoly on the contents of the advanced weapons archives. Someone else has gotten hold of time-travel equipment and he is using it to destroy you. How did he get hold of it? That doesn't matter; _that he has it_: that's the point.

"Gottlieb Fischer," he said aloud. "The idea for Yancy originated with him; so the crisis is actually in the past." And he who possesses the ability to travel in time has access to the past, he realized. There is a junction, a connection, between David Lantano, who or whatever he is, and Gottlieb Fischer, back in 1982 or '4 or right up to Fischer's death; but no later than his death... and probably slightly before Fischer began his work on the Yancy _Prinzip_, his variation on the _Führer Prinzip_: his new solution to the problem of who shall lead, since, if men are too blind to govern themselves, how can they be trusted to govern others? The answer is der Führer, as every German knows, and Gottlieb Fischer was a German. Brose then stole the idea from Fischer, as we all know, and turned that idea into an actuality; the dummy, one in Moscow and one in New York, bolted to the oak desk, programmed by the computer which in turn is fed speeches by well trained elite idea men--all that can be legitimately credited to Stanton Brose, but what we did not guess is that Gottlieb Fischer stole _his_ part, the original germinal concept, from someone else.

Sometime near the year 1982, the German film producer _saw Talbot Yancy_. And derived his Führer, not from his own creativity, his artistic genius, but from simple observation. And who would Gottlieb Fischer, circa 1982, be seeing? Actors. Hundreds of them. Sorted over to play roles in his two vast phony documentaries--actors picked especially for their ability to portray world leaders. In other words, actors who had that _charisma_, the magic.

To Cencio he said slowly, thoughtfully, plucking his lower lip, "I think, if I comb versions A and B, the two Fischer works of invention, I will in one of the faked scenes, sooner or later, come across a Talbot Yancy. In makeup, of course; doing a character role." Playing Stalin, he decided. Or Roosevelt. Any of them--or all. What the documentaries lacked were proper credits; who played what great world leader: we need that list, and that list does not and never did exist; it was carefully _not_ made.

Cencio said, "We own our own prints of the two versions, you realize."

"All right. Go through them and extract each of the faked scenes. Separate them from the authentic clips that--"

Cencio laughed sardonically. "Good lord. Save us." He shut his eyes, rocked back and forth. "Who, honestly, can _ever_ do that? No one knew then, knows now, will know--"

True; a good point. The _whole_ point, in fact. "All right," Foote said. "Just start running them. Until you catch a glimpse of the Protector. He'll be one of the great charismatic leaders, one of the big four; he won't be Mussolini or Chamberlain, so you can bypass them." God in heaven, he thought; suppose he's the "Hitler" who lands in the Boeing 707 fanjet at Washington, D.C. to hold secret conversations with F. D . R.? _Is that what rules the millions of tankers today_, the actor who struck Gottlieb Fischer as just right to undertake the task of impersonating Adolf Hitler?

It could, however, be a bit part. The role of some general. Even one of those "G.I. Joe" scenes in the foxholes.

"It'll take me weeks," Cencio said, obviously realizing the same thing. "And do we have weeks? If people are being killed--"

"Joseph Adams is protected," Foote said. "And Brose--too bad if he gets it; more power to his hidden enemy."

--His hidden enemy who is obviously and clearly David Lantano. But that merely led back to his original inquiry; who or what is David Lantano?

Anyhow now he had a partial answer--at least ad hoc. It had yet to be tested. David Lantano, at the extreme old age end of his oscillation, was hired by Gottlieb Fischer to play a part--or was at least interviewed--in one or the other versions of the 1982 documentaries; there, that was his hypothesis. And now to test it.

And the next step was going to be hard--the step which followed the positive identification of Yancy--that is, David Lantano--in one or both of the 1982 documentaries.

The next step, and this fitted the talents of Webster Foote, Limited of London, was to chisel with highly specialized equipment undetected and silently into the incomplete villa of David Lantano while Lantano was at the Agency in New York. And gain at least momentary possession of the time travel instrumentality which Lantano utilized.

It'll be tough, Foote knew. But we have the machines to track it down; it's been our job since 2014. And this time we're not merely doing a job for a client; this is for ourselves.

Because, he realized, our own lives are currently--and involuntarily-- posted as stakes in this; it is, has already proven to be, the ultimate pot for which the players are wagering, striving, lying, faking and haggling.

"A law firm," he said aloud. "Wagering, Striving, Lying, Faking and Haggling. Associates. They can represent us before the Recon Dis-In Council when we sue Brose."

"On what grounds?"

"On the grounds," Foote said quietly, "that the duly elected world leader is the Protector, Talbot Yancy, as every tanker knows; as the Estes Park Government has asserted for fifteen consecutive straight years. And such a man really exists. Hence--_Brose holds no legal power_." Since the legal power, he said to himself, is Q.E.D. all Yancy's and Pac-Peop as well as Wes-Dem has been claiming, chanting, this.

And, I think, Yancy has begun to put forth a request for the validation of that claim, Foote decided. At last.