The Penultimate Truth Read online

  In the wide white bed lay something flat, something so squashed that it could only gaze up, as if it were a reflection, something dimly seen in a pool that absorbed light rather than reflected it. The pool in which the old man lay was a consumer of energy of all kinds, Nicholas realized as he walked to the bed. This is only a husk left here; it has been drained as if a spider got to it; a world-spider or for us, rather, a subworld, underspider. But still a drinker of human existence. Even below this far.

  From his supine immobility the old man moved his lips. "Hi."

  "Hi, you old knurlheaded frab," Nicholas said, and drew a chair up beside the bed. "How do you feel?"

  After a time, as if it had taken that long for Nicholas' words to reach him—that great journey across space—the old mechanic said, "Not so good, Nick."

  You don't know, Nicholas thought, what you've got. Unless Carol has told you since I last discussed you with her. He eyed the old mechanic, wondering if there was an instinct. Pancreatitis was fatal in almost one hundred percent of its cases, he knew; Carol had told him. But of course no one had or would tell Souza, because the miracle might happen.

  "You'll pick up," Nicholas said clumsily.

  "Listen, Nick. How many leadies we made this month?"

  He considered whether to lie or tell the truth. Souza had been here in this bed eight days; surely he had lost contact, could not check and trip him up. So he lied. "Fifteen."

  "Then—" A labored pause; Souza stared upward, never turned his eyes toward Nicholas, as if he were looking away in shame. "We could still make our quota."

  "What do I care," Nicholas said, "if we make our quota?" He had known Souza, been shut up with him here at the Tom Mix, for the total war-period: fifteen years. "I care whether—" God, a misspoken word; impossible to amend, too.

  "'Whether I get out of here,'" Souza whispered.

  "Naturally I mean when." He felt furious with himself. And, now, he saw Carol at the door, looking professional in her white smock, her low-heeled shoes, carrying her clipboard on which, no doubt, she had Souza's chart. Without a word Nicholas rose, walked away from the bed and past Carol and out into the corridor.

  She followed. They stood together in the empty corridor and then Carol said, "He'll live one more week and then he'll die. Whether your tongue wags and says 'whether' or if you—"

  "I told him our shops had turned out fifteen leadies so far this month; make sure nobody else tells him different."

  "I hear," she said, "it's more like five."

  "Seven." He told her not because she was their doctor and someone they depended on, but because of The Relationship. Always he told Carol everything; that was one of the emotional hooks that gaffed him, held him to her: she, and this was so rare, could see through any sham, even the little daily innocences. So why try this now? Carol never wanted pretty words; she lived by the truth. Here now she had once again gotten it.

  "Then we can't meet the quota," she said. Matter-of-factly.

  He nodded. "Partly it's because they've asked for three type VIIs and that's hard; that strains our shops. If it had all been the III or IV types—" But it hadn't; it never was, nor would be. Ever.

  So long as the surface lasted.

  "You know," Carol said presently, "that on the surface artificial pancreases—artiforgs—are available. You've considered this possibility, of course, in your official capacity."

  Nicholas said, "It's illegal. Military hospitals only. Priority. Rating 2-A. We don't qualify."

  "There is said to be—"

  "And get caught." It would no doubt be a quick kangaroo-court military tribunal session and then execution, if one were caught trading on the blackmarket. In fact if one were caught up there at all.

  "Are you afeared to go up?" Carol asked, with her brisk, brilliant hard scrutiny.

  "Yep." He nodded: it was so. Two weeks: death by destruction of the red bloodcell-making capacity of the bone marrow. One week: the Bag Plague or the Stink of Shrink or Raw-Claw-Paw and he already felt germphobic; already, a few moments ago, he had quaked with the trauma of it—as did virtually every tanker, although in actual fact not one case of any of the poxes had broken out at the Tom Mix.

  "You can," Carol said, "call a meeting of those—you know— those you can trust. And ask for a volunteer."

  "Goddam it, I'll go if anyone does." But he didn't want to send anyone because he knew what was up there. No one would return because a homotropic weapon, if not the tribunal, would flush him out of hiding and it would follow him until he died. And that in a matter of minutes, perhaps.

  And homotropic weapons were vile things; they did it in a vile way.

  Carol said, "I know how badly you want to save old Souza."

  "I love him," he said. "Above and beyond the shops, the quota, all of that. Did he ever, in all the time we've been locked up down below here, refuse anyone anything? Any time of the night, a leaking water pipe, break in power, clogged protine chute—he always came and hammered and patched and stitched and rewrapped it back into operation." And, since Souza was, officially, Chief Mechanic, he could have dispatched any one of fifty assistants and snoozed on. From the old man Nicholas had learned; you did the job yourself—you did not drop it in the lap of a subordinate.

  As, he thought, the warwork's devolved down here to us. Building the metal fighters in eight basic types, and so on, with the Estes Park Government, the functionaries of WesDem and of Brose personally, breathing at us at close, close range.

  And, as if the words magically impelled the unseen presence, a gray, faint shape moved urgently down the hall toward him and Carol. Commissioner Dale Nunes, all right; eager, busy, pressed on by his business.

  "Nick!" Panting, Nunes read straight from a slip of paper. "A big speech in ten minutes; get on the all-cubby circuit and get everyone into Wheeling Hall; we'll watch in unison because there'll be questions. This is serious." His fast bird eyes flew in their spasm of alarm. "Honest to god, Nick, the way I got it over the coax it's all of Detroit; they penetrated the final ring."

  "Jesus," Nicholas said. And moved, reflexively, toward a nearby aud-tap of the circuit which ran, speakerwise, throughout each floor and chamber of the Tom Mix. "But it's bedtime," he said to Commissioner Nunes. "A lot of them are undressing or in bed; couldn't they watch on their own individual cub-sets?"

  "The questions," Nunes said, agitatedly. "They're going to up the quotas because of this Detroit fiasco—that's what I'm afraid of. And I want to be sure everyone knows why, if that's the case." He did not look happy.

  Nicholas said, "But Dale; you know our situation. We can't even—"

  "Just get them into Wheeling Hall. Okay? We can talk later."

  Lifting the microphone Nicholas said, addressing every cubby in the tank, "People, this is President St. James and I'm sorry but we've all got to be at Wheeling Hall in ten minutes. Come as you are; don't worry about that—a bathrobe is fine. It's grave news."

  Nunes murmured, "Yancy'll speak. For sure; they told me."

  "The Protector," Nicholas said into the mike, and heard his voice boom from each end of the deserted clinic corridor, as it was everywhere else in the great subsurface ant tank of fifteen hundred human souls, "is going to address us, I understand. And he'll accept questions."

  He rang off, feeling defeated. It was not a reasonable time to give them bad news. And with Souza and the quota and the audit to come—

  "I can't leave my patient," Carol said.

  Upset, Nunes said, "But I was told to assemble everyone, Doctor."

  "Then," Carol said, with that superlative intelligence that made Nicholas both fear and adore her, "Mr. Souza must get up and come, too. If the edict is to be fully obeyed."

  It got through; Nunes, for all his bureaucratic rigidity, his almost neurotic determination to fulfill to the letter each order coaxed down to them—via him—nodded. "Okay, you stay here." To Nicholas he said, "Let's go." He started off, burdened by their mass consciences; his main task was to su
pervise their loyalty: Nunes was the tank's pol-com, its political commissioner.

  Five minutes later Nicholas St. James sat stiffly, formally, in his President's chair, slightly elevated, in row one of Wheeling Hall; behind him they had all assembled, shifted and rustled, murmured and stirred, everyone, including himself, gazing at the floor-to-ceiling vidscreen. This was their window—their sole window—on the above world, and they took rather seriously what was received on its giant surface.

  He wondered if Rita had heard the announcement or if she still blissfully loitered in the shower, calling a few remarks to him now and then.

  "Any improvement? Nunes whispered to Nicholas. "In old Souza?"

  "In pancreatitis—are you kidding?" The Commissioner was an idiot.

  "I've passed on fifteen memos," Nunes said, "to them up top."

  "And not one of the fifteen," Nicholas said, "was a formal request for an artiforg pancreas that Carol could surgically graft in."

  "I just begged for a suspension on the audit." Pleadingly, Nunes said, "Nick, politics is the art of the possible; we might get a suspension, but we won't get on artiforg pancreas; they're just not available. Instead we've got to write off Souza and escalate one of the lesser mechanics like Winton or Bobbs or—"

  All at once the great communal screen turned from lusterless gray to beaming white. And the speaker system said, "Good evening."

  In Wheeling Hall the audience of fifteen hundred mumbled, "Good evening." It was a legal formality, in that no aud-receptor carried anything up; the lines carried data only one way: down. From above to below.

  "News bulletin," the announcer's voice continued. On the screen a stopped-tape: buildings caught and suspended in half-disintegration. And then the tape traveled on. And the buildings, with a roar like the odious tap-tap-tapping of distant, alien drums, pitched into dust and rained down, dissolved; smoke took their place, and, like ants, countless leadies who had inhabited Detroit spilled out and ran, as if from a tipped-over quart jar. They were squashed systematically by invisible forces.

  The aud-track grew; the drums drifted foward and the camera, no doubt from an eye-spy Wes-Dem satellite, panned up on one great public building, library, church, school or bank; perhaps all of these combined. It showed, somewhat slowed down, the solidity of the structure as it demolecularized. Objects have been carried back to their dust-origin again. And it could have been us up there, not leadies, because he himself had lived a year in Detroit as a child.

  Thank god for all of them, Commies and U.S. citizens alike, that the war had broken out on a colony world, in a hassle as to which bloc, Wes-Dem or Pac-Peop, held the bigger-dog's share. Because in that first year of war on Mars the populations of Earth had been hurried underground. And, he thought, we're still here and it isn't good but it beats that; he watched the screen fixedly, saw a flock of leadies melt—hence the name—and, to his horror, still try to run while melting. He looked away.

  "Awful," Commissioner Nunes, beside him, muttered, gray-faced. All at once in the empty seat to Nicholas' right Rita appeared, in bathrobe and slippers; with her came Nicholas' kid brother, Stu. Both, staring at the screen, said nothing to him, as if he weren't there. In fact each person in Wheeling Hall was isolated, now, by the catastrophe on the giant TV screen, and the announcer, then, said it for them.

  "This—was—Detroit. May 19th. Year of God 2025. Amen."

  It only took a few seconds, once the defensive shield around a city had been broken, to get in and do this.

  For fifteen years Detroit had existed intact. Well, Marshal Harenzany, meeting in the thoroughly protected Kremlin with the Supreme Soviet, could pay a painter to paint, as symbol of a direct hit, a tiny spire on the door of their chamber. Chalk up one more U.S. city for their side.

  And, in Nicholas' mind, through the horror of seeing this decapitation of one of the few-remaining heads of Western Civilization—which he really did believe in and love—there came the niggling, selfish, personal thought once more. It means a higher quota. More must be achieved underground as less, every day, remained above.

  Nunes murmured, "Yancy will explain, now. How it happened to happen. So get ready." And Nunes of course was right, because the Protector never gave up; he had that grand turtlelike unwillingness, which Nicholas admired in the man, to admit that this blow was mortal. And yet—

  They did get to us, Nicholas realized . . . . and even you, Talbot Yancy, our spir-pol-mil leader, brave enough to live in your surface fortress in the Rockies: even you, good friend, can't undo what's just been done.

  "My fellow Americans," Yancy' s voice came, and it was not even weary. Nicholas blinked, startled by the vigor. Yancy seemed almost unaffected, to have remained true to the stoa, to his West Point heritage; he viewed it all, accepted and understood, but no emotion unhinged his calm reason.

  "You have seen," Yancy continued in his low, late middle-age voice, that of a seasoned old warrior, ramrod in body, clear in mind; good for a few more years . . . not like the husk, the dying thing in the clinic bed over which Carol watched. "—a terrible thing. Nothing is left of Detroit and as you know a good deal of war material has emerged by her fair autofacs, all these years, and now that is lost. But we have sacrificed no human life, the one commodity which we cannot, will not, relinquish."

  "Good point," Nunes muttered, jotting notes.

  Beside Nicholas, all at once, Carol Tigh appeared, in her white smock, low shoes; he rose, instinctively, stood to face her.

  "He passed away," Carol said. "Souza. Just now. I at once froze him; I was right there at the bed, so there was no time loss. Braintissue won't have suffered. He just—went." She tried to smile, and then tears filled her eyes. It shocked him; he had never seen Carol cry, and something in him was horrified, as if it was wicked, this that he saw.

  "We shall endure this," the aud-track of the coax transmission from the Estes Park fortress continued, and now, on the screen, Yancy's face appeared and the war, the rolling clouds of matter in suspension or turned to hot gas, faded. And it was a stiff, firm man at a large oak desk in some hidden spot where Soviet, even the awful deadly new Sino-twenty red-dot missiles, had never found him.

  Nicholas got Carol seated, got her attention turned to the screen.

  "With each passing day," Yancy said, and he spoke with pride, a good and reasonable pride, "we grow stronger. Not weaker. You are stronger." And by god he looked, then, directly at Nicholas and Carol and Dale Nunes and Stu and Rita and all the rest of them at the Tom Mix, at every one of them except Souza, who was dead; and when you are dead, Nicholas realized, no one, not even the Protector, can tell you that you are growing stronger. And when you died just now, we also died. Unless that pancreas, at whatever cost, from whatever ugly blackmarket source which robs a military hospital, can be obtained.

  Sooner or later, Nicholas realized, despite the law against it, I will have to go up to the surface.

  CHAPTER 3

  When the I-am-larger-than-you image of Talbot Yancy's leather and iron face had left the screen and the lackluster gray had returned, Commissioner Dale Nunes hopped to his feet and said to the assembly, "And now, folks. Questions."

  The audience remained inert. As inert as it could manage—and get away with it.

  Required to by his elected status, Nicholas rose and stood by Dale. "It must be a colloquy between us and the Estes Park Government," he said.

  From the back of Wheeling Hall a sharp voice—it could have been male or female—said, "President St. James, did Maury Souza die? I see Dr. Tigh here."

  Nicholas said, "Yes. But he's in quick-freeze so there's still hope. Now, people, you've listened to the Protector. Before that you saw the infiltration and demolition of Detroit. You know we're already behind in our quota; we must supply twenty-five leadies this month, and next—"

  "What next month?" a voice from the multitude, bitter and dispirited, said. "We won't be here next month."

  "Oh yes," Nicholas answered. "We can survive an audit. Le
t me remind you. The initial penalty is only a cut in food supply of five percent. Only after that can draft notices be served on any of us, and even then it would halt at a decimation—one man from each group of ten. Only if we fail three months running do we face possible—I say possible—closure. But we always have legal remedy; we can send our attorney before the High Court at Estes Park, and I assure you we will, before we surrender to a closure."

  A voice called, "Have you again asked for a replacement chief mechanic?"

  "Yes," Nicholas said. But there are no more Maury Souzas in the world, he thought. Except in other tanks. And out of—what is the number last given?—out of one hundred and sixty thousand ant tanks in the Western Hemisphere none is going to negotiate a release of a really adequate chief mechanic, even if we could somehow make contact with a few of those other tanks. Any more than five years ago when that tank to the north, the Judy Garland, bored that horizontal shaft through to us and pleaded—literally pleaded—just for a loan of Souza. For one month. And we said no.

  "All right," Commissioner Nunes said briskly, since no voluntary questions had arisen. "I'll make a spotcheck to see if the Protector's message got across." He pointed to a young married couple. "What was the cause of the failure of our defensive screen around Detroit? Rise and give your names, please."

  The young couple reluctantly rose; the husband said, "Jack and Myra Frankis. Our failure was due to the introduction of the new Pac-Peop Type Three Galatea spatter-missile that infiltrated in submolecular particles. I guess. Something like that." He hopefully reseated himself, drawing his wife down beside him.

  "All right," Nunes said; that was acceptable. "And why has Pac-Peop technology forged ahead of ours temporarily?" He glanced around, spied a victim to be interrogated. "Is it a failure of our leadership?"