The Penultimate Truth

27

After he had stopped by Verne Lindblom's demesne and had picked up the Alpha-wave pattern of Stanton Brose' s brain once more from the type VI senior leady, Joseph Adams with his retinue of personal leadies and his bodyguard from the Foote organization flew aimlessly, not toward New York; not in any particular direction.

He got away with that for just a few minutes. And then one of the four Footemen leaned toward him from the seat behind and said distinctly and grimly, "Go the Agency in New York. Without delay. Or I'll kill you with my laser beam." He thereupon placed the cold, round muzzle of his laser pistol to the back of Joseph Adams' head.

"Some bodyguard," Adams said, bitterly.

"You have an appointment with Mr. Foote and Mr. Lantano at your office," the Footeman commando said. "Please keep it."

On Joseph Adams' person, in the form of a dead man's throttle strapped to his left wrist, he possessed--had rigged this up as a result of Verne Lindblom's death--an emergency signaling device that connected him by microwave with his retinue of leadies now squeezed in on each side of him here in this oversized flapple. He wondered, if he were to trigger the signal, which would come first; would the Footeman commando, an expert, kill him, or would his leadies, who were war veterans, take out the four Footemen?

An interesting question.

And on it nothing more or less than his life depended.

But why _not_ fly on to the Agency? What held him back?

I'm afraid of Lantano, he realized. Lantano knew too much, had too many pieces of detailed knowledge about Verne Lindblom's death at his disposal. But I'm afraid, he realized, of Stanton Brose, too; I'm afraid of both of them, but of the two Brose is the known fear and Lantano the unknown. So for me, Lantano creates an even greater sense of that grisly all-encompassing devouring inner and outer fog that sweeps life away from me... and god knows, Brose has been bad enough. His special project was the epitome of wickedness and cynicism, plus Brose's own unique blend of senile cunning, of drooling, glint-eyed, almost childishly mischievous doing-of-wrong _and enjoying it_.

And Brose, he realized, will get worse. As that brain rots more and more, as those miscroscopic strictures of minute blood vessels continue to occur. As bit after bit of brain tissue, clogged, deprived of oxygen and nutrition, perishes. And leaves the remnants just that more revolting, that much less to be depended on, ethically and pragmatically.

The next twenty years, under the decaying rule of Stanton Brose, would be even more profoundly ghastly as the decay of the central, guiding organ penetrated deeper, ceaselessly deeper, and lured the world along with it. And he--all the Yance-men--all of them would be jerked and dangled by the conclusive twitches on the deranged master string; as Brose's brain degenerated, as extensions of Brose, would all of them degenerate in resonance. God, what a prospect...

The force which Lantano had unique control over--time--was the force which was corrupting the organic tissue of Stanton Brose. Hence-- With one stroke, the release of one high velocity homeostatic Alpha-wave-tropic cyanide dart, that corrupting force would he abolish from their lives. And wasn't that the whole rational reason for this flight to New York, to his office, where Lantano and Foote waited?

But Joseph Adams' body, unconvinced, threw its metabolic secretions of fear through and through his sympathetic nervous system. Struggling for relief--in other words, he realized, for escape. _I want to get away_.

And Foote, too, he realized acutely, if that look on his face meant anything, felt something of this. Only not as strongly as I'm feeling it now, because if he did he would not be in New York; he'd be out here long ago. Webster Foote would know how. And, he realized, I don't; I'm not equipped, as he is, for this.

"Okay," Adams said to the Footeman commando behind him who held the laser pistol to Adams' head. "I was disoriented for a minute; now I'm all right." He turned the flapple then toward New York.

Behind him the Footeman commando withdrew the laser pistol, restored it to its shoulder holster as the flapple streaked northeast.

At his left wrist Joseph Adams released the dead man's throttle signaling device. The microwave impulse, to his leadies, automatically and instantly became perceptible, although his own sense receptors picked up nothing. Nor did those of the four Footemen.

As Adams stared fixedly at the control before him, his leadies in a brief skirmish--almost gruesomely silent--killed the four Footemen. The noise, after a time so short that Adams could not really believe or accept that the act had been accomplished, came to its termination; a rear door of the flapple was opened, and with much straining and groaning and clanking, the leadies dumped out the bodies of the four Footemen, out into the emptiness of space and the remoteness of a night, which, it seemed to Adams had begun but would never end.

Adams said, "I just couldn't go to New York." He shuts his eyes. _In nomine Domini_, he thought. Four men dead; awful, and he would always wear, carry with him, the mark: _he_ had ordered it--and without using his own hands. Which made it just that much worse. _But they put that gun to my head_, he realized, _and in my fear I went insane; they threatened to kill me if! didn't go to New York, and since / can't do that--god help each of us, he thought. That to live we have to destroy; this price has to be paid, this bad bargain: four lives for one_.

Anyhow it was done. And so he turned the flapple toward the south; it moved southeast, now, toward the Carolinas. Instead of toward New York. Which he would never see again.

It took him hours to sight the illuminated blotch in the darkness below which was the scene of the diggings.

The flapple, at Adams' instruction, began its spiral down. Toward the spot where Nicholas St. James, the ex-tanker, dug with the assistance of David Lantano's leadies, seeking the possible buried U.S. Army prewar medical storehouse and the artiforgs--if they existed, and if this was the correct spot--somewhere below the surface.

Once landed, Adams made his way toward the diggings. Off to one side, the ex-tanker Nicholas St. James sat among cartons and boxes and Adams realized that the location had proved correct. The U.S. Army dump had been located; already prewar supplies were being recovered. It was, in Yance-man argot, christmas morning.

Glancing up at the sight of the first leady, Nicholas peered. "Who is it?" he said. Simultaneously, Lantano's leadies ceased their toiling; without command they moved toward Nicholas, to protect him; their manual extensors dropped so as to make contact with the weapons which they, at their mid-sections, carried. It was done swiftly, smoothly, and of course at once.

Adams gave an order and his own leadies moved about him, too, in an equally defensive pattern. The two men, now, were separated each by his own leadies; only leady faced leady--neither man could see the other.

"St. James--remember me? Joe Adams; I met you at Dave Lantano's demesne. I've come by to see what luck you had. In getting your artiforg."

"Real luck," Nicholas yelled back. "But what's this deploying of these leadies for? Who's fighting who and what for?"

"I don't want to fight," Adams said. "Can I retire my leadies? Will you do the same with yours and give me your word there won't be any hostile interaction?"

Sounding genuinely puzzled, Nicholas said, "But there's no war; Blair said so, and I saw the demesnes. Why should there by any 'hostile interaction' between you and me?"

"No reasons." Adams signaled his leadies; they withdrew reluctantly, because after all, each of them was a veteran of the war, the true war which had been fought thirteen years ago.

Alone, as a single human, Adams approached the ex-tanker. "Did you find the particular artiforg you need?"

Excitedly, like an overjoyed, enthralled small boy, Nicholas said, "Yes! Three artiforgs, a heart, a kidney, I found it--an artiforg pancreas, still in its original protective carton--it's sealed in an aluminum drum." He displayed it proudly. "Plastic-dipped to keep out air; undoubtedly it's as good as when it was first made. This container was built to protect its contents for, look, right here; for fifty years."

"Then you did it," Adams said. _You got it_, he thought to himself, _what you emerged into the light of day for. Your journey is over. You lucky guy_, he thought. _If only it were that simple for me. If what I needed, lacked, required so that I might live, could be held in the hand, inspected, its ink markings read. Picked up and manually gripped; some object, material and hard-and my fears equally concrete. Limited, as has been your case, to the fear of not finding one specific clearly defined wartime construct, and that construct now found and possessed, as much as we can in this life ever possess anything, really retain and keep it. And look what I have lost_, he thought. _My demesne, my job; I am going to give up the surface of Earth. In order not to follow Verne Lindblom. Because_, he said to himself, _I know it was David Lantano who did it. I knew that the moment Lantano admitted that he had the weapon assembly in his possession. The components that make up the killing agent known to us all: the high velocity--or as in Verne's case, low velocity--cyanide-tipped homeostatic dart. And not rusty but in working order... as was the one which reached Verne Lindblom's heart._

_Mint condition, as Lantano had said. Derived directly from the war-years, from thirteen years ago, by means of Lantano's time-travel equipment. And to be set up in my office to kill B rose exactly as Verne was killed; admittedly it will be instantaneous and painless, but it is still murder, as was mine of the four Footemen commandos. But--this is how we stand. And I'm leaving. Descending. lf I can._

"You're going back to your tank?" he asked Nicholas.

"Right away. The shorter a time old Souza is in freeze the better; there's always the chance of some brain decay. I'm going to leave Lantano's leadies here to keep on digging, get the rest up; I guess Lantano and Foote can split it or anyhow come to an agreement."

"They seem," Adams said, "able to agree. Foote supplied the map; Lantano the leadies and the digging equipment. They'll find some way to divide the trove." _What's amazing_, he thought, _is that you are getting your pancreas without conditions. They've asked nothing in exchange. So they're not bad _men_, not in any typical, ordinary sense; together Foote and Lantano, with dignity and caritas, arranged for you to obtain what B rose has deprived you-and everyone else on the planet--of, what he has hoarded for himself. B rose-- who was absolutely without _caritas__.

"I thought you were supposed to meet them in New York," Nicholas said to Adams.

"They'll make out." From Megavac 6-V they could get Stanton Brose's Alpha-wave pattern; they would think of that sooner or later, when he did not show--in fact probably already had. And, if they could not mount the dart weapon in his office, if they, using Foote's tools and skills, could not pick the intricate door lock, could not enter, they could--and would--find a serviceable place in the corridor, the sole passage to the office, the route which Stanton Brose would have to follow to reach the office. He knew, intuited on a very deep, absolute level, that together Foote and Lantano would manage somehow to work it out.

They would never forget, however, that he had failed to show. If they did not get Brose then the old, half-senile mass of fat would no doubt destroy them, and possibly Adams as well; if they did--well, probably at some convenient later date, when Foote and Lantano, especially Lantano, had gained power, replaced Brose, they would track him down. There would be plenty of time for vengeance. Ultimately, in either case, _it would come_. Whatever the outcome of the weapon planting which at this moment was taking place in the agency hallway or office at 580 Fifth Avenue, New York City.

"Did you ever tell Lantano," he asked Nicholas, "which ant tank you came from?"

"Hell no," Nicholas said. "I have to protect the people down there; I've got a wife and a kid brother, down in--" He broke off. "I told that ex-tanker in the Cheyenne ruins, though. That Jack Blair." He shrugged stoically. "But Blair probably won't remember; they all, there in those ruins, seemed a little scrambled witwise." Soberly, he said to Adams then, "I'm the elected President of the tank. I carry a terrific responsibility. That's why it was me they sent up to the surface to get this artiforg." He turned, started toward the parked flapple.

Adams said, "Can I go along?"

"To--" Nicholas looked startled, but principally preoccupied; it was the artiforg that concerned him--the object and the task of getting it back intact with him to his tank. "You want to go below with me, you mean? Why?"

"I want to hide," Adams said, simply.

After a pause Nicholas said, "You mean Lantano."

"I mean," Adams said, "everyone. They got my one and only living friend; they'll get me. But if I'm down below, and they won't know which tank, maybe, unles your pol-com happens to report--"

"My pol-com," Nicholas said tonelessly, "came from the surface, from Estes Park, after the end of the war. He knew. So there isn't going to be any pol-com at the Tom Mix. Anyhow, not that one."

Another death, Adams realized. And also "necessary." Like each of the others; like mine will be, eventually. And yet--this rule, this necessity, has always existed, and for everything that has ever lived. What we've got here is only a special case, only a hastening of the natural, organic process.

"Sure," Nicholas said. "You're welcome. I know from what you said at Lantano's demesne you're as unhappy as hell up here."

"'Hell,' " Adams echoed. Yes, it was, literally, the burning place of the dead; the place of fires, the flicker of red, the charred background, the pits, summed up and summoned up by the war of thirteen years ago-he had been living it, first in the scorching blaze of the war itself, then in its other, later form, the cool, approaching mist, and then once more in its more awful searing aspect; igniting him, cramming him with this time a new, entirely new, agony: from the moment he had learned of Verne Lindblom's death.

"You'll have to get used to the overcrowding down there," Nicholas said as the two of them made their way toward the parked flapple, Adams' leadies trailing behind. "And you can't bring them--" He gestured at the retinue of leadies. "--with you; you'll have to come alone. There's no room; in fact in our cubby we share the bathroom--"

"Good enough," Adams said. He would agree to anything, give up his last leady, be stripped of that, too, and gladly. And--he would be more than willing to share the bathroom with those inhabiting the adjoining room. He would not endure it; he would thrive. Because it would make up for the loneliness of his years as dominus of his vast, silent, forest-surrounded demesne, with its ocean fog; the gruesome, empty Pacific fog.

The tankers would not understand that. Maybe they would even marvel at his ability to adjust to such crowded conditions--after having been a functionary, as he would tell them, _have_ to tell them, of the Estes Park Wes-Dem Government. Like the pol-coms he had descended into their tank to share their deprivations with them... or so they would think.

Ironic.