The Penultimate Truth Page 12

  "I wish," Nicholas said, "I had a cigarette."

  The four bearded men consulted, and then, reluctantly, a pack of Lucky Strikes was held out to Nicholas; he carefully took only one of the cigarettes, let them regain the remainder of the precious pack.

  "We're short on everything," Blair said apologetically as he lit Nicholas' cigarette for him. "See, this new dominus who's starting his demesne here, this David Lantano; he's not a bad guy. He sort of, like I said, holds his leadies back, when he's around to do it, so they don't wipe us out or get us into one of those conapts; he sort of looks out for us. He gives us food." Blair was silent for a time, then; his expression, to Nicholas, was unreadable. "And cigarettes. Yeah, he's really trying to help us. And pills; he personally drops by with anti-radiation pills; they help restore the red blood cells or something. He takes them himself. I mean, he really has to."

  "He's sick," another bearded ex-tanker added. "He's badly burned; see, the law requires he's got to be here on the hot-spot twelve hours out of every twenty-four; he can't get down subsurface into cellars like we can; we stay below—we just came up because we spotted you."

  To Blair he said, nervously, "In fact we better get back to the hovel right now. We've been exposed long enough for one day." He gestured at Nicholas. "And him, especially; he's been walking on the surface for hours."

  "You're going to take me in?" Nicholas said. "I can live with you fellas; is that what I'm to understand?"

  "Sure." Blair nodded. "That's how our colony formed, here; you think we're going to boot you out? Why would we?" He seemed genuinely angry. "For some leady to kill, or—" He broke off. "Some charity that would be. You're welcome to stay here all you want. Later, after you know more, if you want to turn yourself in, you can go live in a conapt; must be hundreds of thousands of ex-tankers in those conapts—that's up to you entirely. But wait. Get your bearings." He started off along a meager trail among the rubble, a sort of goat path; the others, including Nicholas, followed single file. "It takes weeks sometimes," Blair said, over his shoulder, "to really sober up, to shake off what you've been fed over what they call the 'coax' for fifteen years." Pausing, halting for a moment and turning, he said earnestly, "Intellectually maybe you accept it, but I know; emotionally you can't right away, it's just too much. There's no Yancy and never was—never was, Mr. St. Nicholas—"

  "No," Nicholas corrected. "Nicholas St. James."

  "There never was a Yancy. There was a war, though, anyhow, at first; as you can see." He gestured at the miles of ruins ahead of them. At Cheyenne. "But Yancy was made up by Stanton Brose, based on an idea of a West German film producer of the last century; you probably have heard of him, only he died before your time, but they still were showing his documentary, The Winning in the West, that twenty-five part series on TV about World War Two. I remember it when I was a kid."

  "Gottleib Fischer," Nicholas said. "Sure." He had seen that great classic documentary, not once but several times; it was considered in the same category with The Blue Angel and All Quiet On the Western Front and The Dizzy Man. "And he made up Yancy? Gottleib Fischer?" He followed the four of them, eager and anxious; perplexed. "But why?"

  "To rule," Blair said, without stopping; the four of them hurried, now, eager to get back down into what they called their hovel, their deep-chamber which had not been contaminated by the H-bombs that had made this region what it was.

  "'Rule,'" Nicholas echoed, understanding. "I see."

  "Only as you maybe remember, Fischer disappeared on that illfated flight to Venus; he was eager to be one of the first travelers into space, he just had to go, and that was that, because—"

  "I remember," Nicholas said. The event had made huge headlines in the homeopapes at the time. Gottlieb Fischer's untimely tragic death; his spaceship's fuel igniting during reentry . . . Fischer had died in his late thirties, and so there had been no more documentaries, no more films equal to The Winning in the West. After that only nonentities had followed, except, slightly before the war, the interesting experimental films of some Russian, a Soviet film producer whose work had been banned from Wes-Dem . . . what had been his name?

  As he struggled to keep up with the swiftly moving bearded men, Nicholas remembered the Russian film producer's name. Eisenbludt. The man Blair had just now said did the faking of the war scenes for the tankers, in both Wes-Dem and Pac-Peop, the visual "confirmation" of the lies that comprised Yancy's speeches. So at last the people of Wes-Dem had gotten to see Eisenbludt's films.

  Obviously there was no more hostility between East and West. Eisenbludt was no longer an "enemy" film producer as he had been at the time Nicholas St. James and his wife Rita and his kid brother Stu had been prodded virtually at gun-point into descending into the Tom Mix for what they had believed, at the time, to be for perhaps a year at the longest . . . or, as real pessimists had forecast, two years.

  Fifteen. And out of that fifteen—

  "Tell me exactly," Nicholas said, "when the war ended. How many years ago?"

  "It's going to make you hurt," Blair said.

  "Say. Anyhow."

  Blair nodded. "Thirteen years ago. The war lasted only two years on Earth, after the first one year on Mars. So-thirteen years you've been snow-jobbed, Nicholas, or whatever you said; sorry, I forgot again. Nick. How's that: Nick."

  "Fine," Nicholas murmured, and thought of Carol and Rita and old Maury Souza and Stu and all the others, Jorgenson and Flanders and Haller, Giller and Christenson, Peterson and Grandi and Martino and on and on, even to Dale Nunes; even to the Tom Mix's pol-com. Did Nunes know? Nicholas thought. If Nunes knows, I swear; I affirm; I will in god's name kill him—I will do it with my hands so as to feel it, and nothing will stop me. But it was impossible, because Commissioner Nunes had been shut up there with them. But—not for all that time. Only for—

  Nunes had known. He had only a few years ago descended the chute, from the "Estes Park Government," from Yancy.

  "Listen, Mr. James," one of the bearded men said, "I was wondering; if you didn't guess, then what'd you come up for? I mean, you'd expect to find nothing but the war, and they tell you on TV—boy, how I remember—they'd shoot you on sight—"

  "And that's what practically happened to him," Blair said.

  "—because of the Bag Plague and the Stink of Shrink, neither of which exists in reality; that's another fink snow-job they made up, those two bacterial plagues, although there really was that hideous nerve gas we invented, that New Jersey Chemical Corporation or whatever its name was; a Soviet missile got it, I'm glad to say, right off, including everyone in it. But it's radioactive in this spot, although the rest of the surface—"

  "I came up," Nicholas said, "to buy an artificial pancreas. An artiforg. From the blackmarket."

  "There aren't any," Blair said.

  Nicholas said, "I'm prepared to—"

  "There aren't any! Nowhere! Even the Yance-men can't get them; Brose has them attached; he owns them all, legally." Blair turned, his face wild with rage; distorted like a handpuppet writhing from the twisting fingers contained within. "All for Brose, who's eighty-two or -three and's full of artiforgs, all but the brain. The company's gone and now nobody knows how to make them; we're degenerate, I mean, that's what war does. The Yance-men tried, but they didn't work, grafted in, for more than a month or so. A lot of very specialized techniques depending on what they call 'highly sophisticated' equipment, you know, delicate tools and all—I mean, it was a real war while it lasted; don't forget that. The Yance-men have their demesnes, and you guys down below make leadies for them, and they fly around in their goddam little flapples, the Agency in New York cranks out speeches and Megavac 6-V is kept functioning but—sheoot." He gave up, walked on in silence.

  Nicholas said presently, "I've got to get the pancreas."

  "You'll never get it," Blair said.

  "Then," he said, "I've got to get back to the Tom Mix and tell them. They can come up; they can forget the quota and the threat of having
the tank abolished."

  "Sure they can come up. And be prisoners above ground. It's better; I agree. Runcible is starting a whole new constellation of conapts in the Southern Utah region; see, we hear a lot of news because David Lantano gave us a wide-band radio receiver, just aud, not vid, but we pick up the stuff that's transmitted not to the ant tanks but like between demesnes; they're always blabbing away to each other in the evening because they're lonely. Just maybe one guy in his fifty-thousand-acre demesne with his leadies."

  "No families?" Nicholas said. "No children?"

  "They're most of them sterile," Blair said. "See, they were on the surface during the war, remember. Mostly at the Air Arm Academy at Estes Park. And they lived; they were the elite of the U.S., the young Air Arm cadets. But—they can't reproduce. So in a way they paid. Real high. For what they've got. For having been the elite cadets in that great bomb-proof structure in the Rockies."

  "We paid, too," Nicholas said. "And look what we got."

  "You wait a while," Blair said. "Think it over about trying to get back to your ant tank to tell them. Because the way the system up here is run—"

  "They'd be better off," one of his bearded compatriots put in, defiantly. "You've forgotten what it's like down there; you're getting senile like old Brose. Runcible's made sure they're better off; he's a darn good construction man, they have ping-pong and swimming pools and wall-to-wall carpet of that funny plastic imitation—"

  "Then how come," Blair said, "you're squatting here in these ruins instead of lounging at a swimming pooi in one of those conapt constellations?"

  The man grunted, gestured. "I just—like to be free."

  No one commented; it did not require it.

  But another topic did seem to require additional comment, and Blair, musingly, supplied it. To Nicholas he said, "I just don't get it. Nick. How could Talbot Yancy have rescued you if Talbot Yancy doesn't exist?"

  Nicholas said nothing. He was too weary to speak.

  And anyhow he did not know.

  CHAPTER 16

  The first giant autonomic 'dozer groaned like a stiff old man. And, as it dipped stink-buglike head down, tail up, the first scoop of earth— and a huge scoop, too-was gathered, pried loose, swung up and then off to one side; the scoop of dirt was dropped into a waiting converter, also on autocircuit, operating homeostatically, without human attention. Within its field the dirt was transformed into energy, and that energy, which did not deserve to be wasted, was carried by cable to a major storage meta-battery assembly a quarter mile away. The meta-battery, a development which had come shortly before the war, could store up power which, when read off as ergs, consisted of billions of units. And—it could store that power for decades.

  The energy from the meta-battery would provide electricity to run the completed dwelling units of the conapt buildings; it would be the source for everything that lit up, heated, cooled or turned.

  Over the years Runcible had made his modus operandi a highly efficient one. Nothing was discarded.

  And the real profit, Robert Hig reflected as he stood near the automatic 'dozer-or rather near the first one; twelve had gone into operation simultaneously-came ultimately from the people who would live in the conapts. Because, as they had worked below ground in their ant tanks, assembling leadies to augment the entourages, the private armies of the demesne owners, now they would work for Runcible.

  The lower floors of each conapt building consisted of shops, and in these shops the components for the leadies were made. The components, turned out by hand—the intricate network of the surface autofac system having been wiped out by the war. Below ground the tankers of course did not know this, had no idea where their supply of components originated. Because to let them know this would have been to let them know—god forbid—that humans could live on the surface.

  And the whole point, Hig reflected, is to see that they don't know, because just as soon as they come up we will have another war.

  At least so he had been told. And he did not question this; he was, after all, not a Yance-man; he was merely an employee of the Agency, of Brose. Someday, if he were lucky and did his job properly, Brose would advance his name as candidate; he would be legally entitled to seek out a hot-spot for his demesne . . . assuming any hot-spots still existed by then.

  Perhaps, Hig thought, as a result of this one job, this major special Agency project, I'll be a Yance-man. And then I can start paying those private cops of Webster Foote to keep readings going for me in the hot-spots that remain; I can start the long vigil like David Lantano did up until just recently. If he could do it, so can I, because who ever heard of him before?

  "How's it look, Mr. Hig?" a human workman yelled at him, as all the 'dozers dug, dropped their dirt into the converters, dug again.

  "Okay," Hig yelled back.

  He walked closer to examine the exposed hard brown dirt; the 'dozers were to go down fifty feet, create a flat depression five square miles wide. In no sense was this an unusual excavation task, in terms of what Runcible's rigs could accomplish; the problem here at the start was merely to produce level ground, rather than excavate as such. Surveying teams, high-type leadies, could be observed here and there, utilizing their tripod-mounted theodolites to determine the true horizontal plane. The digging, then, would not take much time; this was not like the days before the war when the ant tanks had been buried—this was nothing in comparison.

  Hence the buried artifacts had to appear soon. Or they would not be found at all. In less than two days in fact the digging would be done.

  I hope, Hig thought, there's been no foul-up, that the damn things aren't too deep. Because if they are, then so ends the special project; it's over as soon as the first load of concrete is poured, the first vertical steel shafts go in; in fact when the first plastic forms are laid to contain the concrete. And already the forms were arriving by air-lift. From the site of the last construction job.

  To himself he said, So I better be ready. Any minute. To halt the 'dozers, stop the scooping and digging and whirring and wheezing; bring it all to a grinding halt. and then—

  Be gin to yell my head off.

  He tensed himself. Because, within the brown hard surface, below the level of dead tree roots, he already saw something glint, something smeared and dark, that would have passed unnoticed except for his vigil. The leadies wouldn't notice; the rigs wouldn't notice; even the other human engineers wouldn't notice—they all had their jobs.

  As he had his. He peered. Was it just a rock, or was it the first of the—

  It was. A rusted dark weapon; hard to believe, but the same that he had seen last night, shiny and new, just out of Yance-man Lindblom's expert hands. What a change six centuries had brought: Hig felt a terrible forbidding distrust of his senses—it couldn't be what Lindblom had made, what he and Adams and Brose and Lindblom had stood together viewing on the table. It was barely recognizable . . . he walked toward it, squinting in the sun. Rock or artifact? Hig waved to the 'dozer nearby, which automatically backed, leaving the area vacant for a moment. Descending into the depression, Hig walked to the spot, stopped by the embedded, dark, formless object.

  He knelt, "Hey," he yelled, looking around, trying to find another human—not just rigs and leadies. There was Dick Patterson, another human, an engineer employed by Runcible, like himself. "Hey Patterson!" Hig began to yell. And then he discovered that, goddam it, the thing was not an artifact; he had made his move too soon. Oh christ! He had flubbed it!

  Approaching, Patterson said, "Whazit?"

  "Nothing." Furious, Hig strode back, out of the depression; he signaled the 'dozer to start up again and it did; it groaned back into operation and the black object—nothing but a rock—disappeared under the tread of the rig.

  Ten minutes later the 'dozer exposed something that shone white and metallic in the early-morning sun, and this time there was no doubt; at the ten foot level the first artifact had come to light.

  "Hey, Patterson!" Hig yell
ed. But Patterson, this time, was not within sound of his voice. Reaching, Hig picked up a nearby walkie-talkie, started to broadcast a general call. Then he changed his mind. I better not cry wolf again, he realized. So he waved the 'dozer back—it seemed reluctantly, grumpily, to retreat under protest—and this time, when he strode over to the object he saw with furious excitement that yes; this was it—a gun of a peculiar sort, deeply stuck, thoroughly lodged in the soil. The mouth of the 'dozer's scoop had actually shaved off the top layer of rust, of soft corrosion, exposing still hard metal beneath.

  Goodbye, Mr. Runcible, Hig said to himself in exultation. Now I will be a Yance-man—he felt intuitively positive of it—and you are going to learn what prison is like, you who've been building prisons for others. Again waving to the 'dozer, this time to shut down entirely, he strode with vigor toward the walkie-talkie; it was his intention now to broadcast the code which would halt all operations— and would bring every engineer on the site and half the leadies on the run, demanding to know what was up.

  Secretly, he switched on his shirt-button camera and, at the same time, started the aud recorder. Runcible was not here, but Brose had at the last moment decided he wanted the entire sequence recorded, from the moment Hig first called attention to the find.

  He bent, picked up the walkie-talkie.

  A laser beam cut him, severed the right lobe of his brain and the skull and passed on through his scalp and he dropped to the ground, the walkie-talkie falling and shattering. There he lay. There he died.

  The autonomic 'dozer, which he had halted, waited patiently for a signal to resume work. At last, from another human engineer on the far side, the signal came; the 'dozer, with a grateful roar, started up.

  Under its treads the shining, small metal object embedded in the earth at the ten foot level, exposed briefly to the sun after six hundred years, disappeared.