The Penultimate Truth Read online

  The middle-aged, spinsterish lady rose. "Miss Gertrude Prout. No, it is not due to a failure of our leadership." She instantly sat down again.

  "What then," Nunes said, still addressing her, "is it due to? Would you please rise, madam, in giving your response? Thank you." Miss Prout had again risen, "Did we fail?" Nunes prompted her. "Not this tank but we tankers, producers of war material, in general."

  "Yes," Miss Prout said in her frail, obedient voice. "We failed to provide—" She faltered; she could not recall what they had failed to provide. There was a strained, unhappy silence.

  Nicholas took charge. "People, we produce the basic instrument by which the war is conducted; it's because leadies can live on a radioactive surface among a multiform culture of bacteria and chlinesterasedestroying nerve gas—"

  "Cholinesterase," Nunes corrected.

  "—that we're alive. We owe our lives to these constructs built down in our shops. That's all Commissioner Nunes means. It's vital to understand why we must—"

  "I'll handle this," Nunes said quietly.

  Nicholas said, "No, Dale. I will."

  "You already made one unpatriotic statement. The cholinesterase-destroying nerve gas was a U.S. invention. Now, I can order you to take your seat."

  "However," Nicholas said, "I won't. These people are tired; this is not the time to badger them. Souza's death—"

  "This is exactly the time to badger them," Nunes said, "because, and I am trained, Nick, from the Berlin Psychiatric Waffen-Institute, by Mrs. Morgen's own clinicians, to know." He raised his voice, addressing the audience. "As you all realize, our chief mechanic was—"

  A hostile, jeering voice sounded from the rows. "Tell you what: we'll give you a bag of turnips, Commissioner. Pol-Com Nunes, sir. And let's see the bottle of blood you can squeeze out. Okay?" People, here and there, murmured in agreement, in approval.

  "I told you," Nicholas said to the commissioner, who had flushed and was strangling his notes with his spasmodically clenching fingers. "Now will you let them go back to bed?"

  Aloud, Nunes said, "There is a disagreement between your elected president and I. As a compromise, I will ask only one more question." He paused, surveyed them all; in weary fear they waited. The sole hostile, articulated vocal entity was silent, now; Nunes had them because Nunes, alone in the tank, was not a citizen but an official of Wes-Dem itself and could, if he ordered, have living, human police slide down the chute from above or, if Brose's agents weren't immediately in the vicinity, then a commando team of General Holt's veteran armed leadies.

  "The Commissioner," Nicholas announced, "will ask one question. And then, thank god, let's go to bed." He seated himself.

  Nunes, reflecting, said in a slow, cold voice, "How can we make up to Mr. Yancy for our failure?"

  To himself Nicholas moaned. But no one, not even Nicholas, had the legal power or any kind of power to halt the man whom the hostile, earlier voice from the audience had correctly called their pol-com. And yet under the Law this was not altogether bad. Because through Commissioner Nunes a direct human link existed between their tank and the Estes Park Government; theoretically by way of Nunes they could answer back and the colloquy, even now, within the heart of the worldwide war, could exist between the tanks and the government.

  But it was hard on the tankers to be subjected to Dale Nunes' rah-rah tactics whenever Dale—or rather his superiors above ground—saw fit, such as now, at bedtime. But look at the alternative.

  It had been suggested to him (and he had promptly, at great and deliberate effort, forgotten forever the names of those who had come to him) that their pol-com be quietly dispatched some night. No, Nicholas had said. It won't work. Because they'll send another. And—Dale Nunes is a man. Not a force. And would you prefer to deal with Estes Park as a force, on your TV screen, which you could see and hear . . . but not talk back to?

  So as sore as Commissioner Nunes made him, Nicholas accepted the necessity of his presence in the Tom Mix. The radicals who had come slipping up, late one night, with their idea of instant, easy solution to the pol-com problem, had been thoroughly, firmly dissuaded. Or at least so Nicholas hoped.

  Anyhow Nunes was still alive. So apparently his argument to the radicals had been convincing . . . and this was three years ago, when Nunes had first put in his eager-beaver appearance.

  He wondered if Dale Nunes had ever guessed. Imagined how close he had come to assassination, and that it had been Nicholas who had talked them out of it.

  How interesting it would be to know what Nunes' reaction would be. Gratitude?

  Or—contempt.

  At this moment, Carol was motioning to him, beckoning in sight of the assembled community here at Wheeling Hall. While Dale Nunes looked up and down the rows for someone to answer his question, Carol—incredibly—was indicating to Nicholas that she and he leave together, now.

  Beside him his wife Rita saw the gesture, the summons; woodenfaced, she stared straight ahead, then, as if she had seen nothing. And, as he found his target, Dale Nunes saw, too, and frowned.

  However, Nicholas obediently accompanied Carol up the aisle and out of Wheeling Hall, into the deserted corridor and seclusion.

  "What in god's name," he said to her as he and she stood together, "do you want?" The way Nunes had looked at them as they departed . . . he would be hearing in due time from the commissioner.

  "I want you to certify the death papers," Carol said, walking toward the elevator. "For poor old Maury—"

  "But why now?" There was more; he knew it.

  She said nothing; both of them were silent on the trip down to the clinic, to the freeze locker in which the rigid body lay—he glanced under the wrapper briefly, then emerged from the locker to sign the forms which Carol had laid out, five copies in all, neatly typed and ready to be sent up by vidline to the bureaucrats on the surface.

  Then, from the buttoned front of her white smock, Carol brought forth a tiny electronic instrument which he recognized as a you-don'tknow-I-have-it aud-recorder. She extracted the spool of tape, unlocked the steel drawer of a cabinet of what appeared to be medical supplies— and exposed to his sight, briefly, other spools of tape and other electronic instruments, none of them related as far as he could see to her medical work.

  "What's going on?" he said, this time more controlledly. Obviously she wanted him to witness this, the aud-recorder, the reservoir of tape which she kept locked away from anyone else's sight. He knew her as well, as intimately, as did anyone in the Tom Mix, and yet this was news to him.

  Carol said, "I made an aud tape of Yancy's speech. The part I was there for, anyhow."

  "Those other spools of aud tape in that cabinet?"

  "All of Yancy. Former speeches. Dating back over the past year."

  "Is that legal to do?"

  Carol said, as she gathered the five copies of Maury Souza's death-forms together and inserted them into the slot of the Xeroxtransmitter which would put them on the wire to the Estes Park archives, "As a matter of fact it is legal. I looked it up."

  Relieved, he said, "Sometimes I think you're nuts." Her mind was always off in some odd direction, flashing and echoing in its fullness, and baffling him eternally; he could never keep up with her, and so his awe of her continually grew. "Explain," he said.

  "Have you noticed," Carol said, "that Yancy, in his speeches in late February, when he used the phrase coup de grace, he pronounced it gras. And in March he pronounced it—" From the steel-doored cabinet she brought forth a chart with entries, which she now consulted. "March twelfth. Pronounced coo de grah. Then, in April, on the fifteenth, it was gras again." She glanced up alertly, eyed Nicholas.

  He shrugged wearily, irritably. "Let me get to bed; let's talk about this some other—"

  "Then," Carol said, inflexibly, "on May third in a speech, he once more used the term. That memorable speech in which he informed us that our destruct of Leningrad completely—" She glanced up from her chart. "It could well be the coo de gra
h. No s. Back to his earlier pronunciation." She restored the chart to the cabinet, then, and relocked the cabinet. He noted that it took not only a metal insert key but the pressure of her fingerprints; even with a duplicate key—or her key— the cabinet would remain closed. It would open only for her.

  "So?"

  Carol said, "I don't know. But it means something. Who fights the surface war?"

  "Leadies."

  "And where are the humans?"

  "What is this, Commissioner Nunes all over again, interrogating people at bedtime when they ought to be—"

  "They're in ant tanks," Carol said. "Below surface. Like us. Now, when you apply for an artiforg you are told they're available only to military hospitals, presumably on the surface."

  "I don't know," he said, "or care, where the military hospitals are. All I know is that they have the priority and we don't."

  Carol said, "If leadies are fighting the war, what are in the military hospitals? Leadies? No. Because they send damaged leadies down to shops, our shop for instance. And a leady is a metal construct and it has no pancreas. There are a few humans on the surface, of course; the Estes Park Government. And in Pac-Peop, the Soviet. Are the pancreases for them?"

  He was silent; she had him completely.

  "Something," she said, "is wrong. There can't be military hospitals because there aren't civilians or soldiers who've been maimed in the fighting and who need artiforgs. Yet—they won't release the artiforgs to us. To me, for instance, for Souza; even though they know we can't survive without Souza. Think about it, Nick."

  "Hmm," he said.

  Carol said quietly. "You're going to have to come up with something better than 'Hmm,' Nick. And soon."

  CHAPTER 4

  The next morning as soon as she awoke, Rita said, "I saw you go off with that woman, last night, that Carol Tigh. Why?"

  Nicholas, grubby and confused, not yet shaved, without having had the chance to splash cold water on his face or brush his teeth, murmured, "It had to do with signing the death certificate forms of Souza. Strictly business."

  He padded off to the bathroom, which he and Rita shared with the cubby to their right—and found the door locked.

  "Okay, Stu," he said. "Finish shaving and unlock the door."

  The door opened; there was his younger brother, sure enough, at the mirror, shaving away for all he was worth, guiltily. "Don't mind me," Stu said. "Go ahead and—"

  His brother's wife, Edie, said shrilly from their cubby, "We got into the bathroom first this morning, Nick; your wife had it for a whole hour last night, showering. So would you please wait."

  Giving up he shut the bathroom door, padded to their kitchen— which they did not share with anyone, either to right or left—and started the coffee heating on the stove. Last night's to be reheated; he did not have the energy to brew a fresh pot, and anyhow their allocation of synthetic beans was low. They would be entirely out before month's end anyhow, would be begging, borrowing or bartering with fellow tankers, offering their supply of sugar—neither he nor Rita used much sugar—in exchange for the odd little brown ersatz beans.

  And of coffee beans, he thought, I could use an endless amount. If there was such a thing. But, like everything else, the (as marked on invoices) syn-cof-bnz were severely rationed. And after all these years he accepted it—intellectually. But his body craved more.

  He could still remember how real coffee, in the pretank days, had tasted. Nineteen, he remembered; I was in my first year of college, just started drinking coffee instead of malted milks, kid stuff. I had just begun to put on maturity . . . and then this.

  But, as Talbot Yancy, beaming or frowning, whatever was appropriate, would say, 'At least we weren't incinerated, as we had anticipated. Because we did have that whole year to get under, and we must never forget.' So Nicholas was not forgetting; as he stood reheating last night's synthetic coffee he thought of himself incinerated fifteen years ago, or the cholinesterase of his body destroyed by the hideous U.S. nerve gas weapon, the worst so far conjured up by insane idiots in high places in what had been Washington, D.C., themselves blessed with the antidote, atropine, and hence safe . . . safe from the nerve gas made at the Newport Chemical Plant in Western Indiana as contracted for by the still-notorious FMC Corporation, but not safe from the missiles of the USSR. And he appreciated this and was glad, appreciated the fact that he was here and alive to drink this syn-cof brew, bitter as it was.

  The bathroom door opened and Stu said, "I'm finished."

  Nicholas started for the bathroom. And then—there was a knock at the cubby's hall door.

  Going to it, bowing to the necessity created by his elected office, Nicholas opened the hall door and found himself facing what he recognized at once to be a committee. Jorgenson, Haller, Flanders— again at his door, the activists of the tank and behind them Peterson and Grandi and Martino and Giller and Christenson; their supporters. He sighed. And let them in.

  Soundlessly—they knew enough to be that—the committee entered his cubby, filled it up. As soon as the hall door was shut, Jorgenson said, "Here's how we're going to work it, President. We stayed up to four this morning thrashing it out." His voice was low, hard, determined.

  "Thrashed out what?" Nicholas said, but he knew.

  "We'll handle that pol-com, that Nunes. We'll stage a fracas on floor twenty; access to twenty is hard because of the way those crates of leady components are piled. It'll take him half an hour to break up the fight. And that'll give you time. The time you need."

  "Coffee?" Nicholas said, returning to the kitchen.

  "Today," Jorgenson said.

  Not answering, Nicholas drank his coffee. And wished he were in the bathroom. Locked in where his wife, his brother, his brother's wife and this committee—none of them could get to him. Even Carol, he thought. He wished he could—at least for a minute—lock them all out. And just sit, in the loneliness and silence of the bathroom; just be.

  And then if he could just be, maybe he could think. Find himself. Not Nicholas St. James, the president of ant tank the Tom Mix, but himself the man; and then he would know, really know, if Commissioner Nunes were right and the law was the law. Or if Carol Tigh were right, and there was something strange or wrong—whatever she had happened onto with her reservoir of aud-tapes of Yancy's speeches over the last year. Coup de grace, he thought. That's this, right here, for me, the dispatching conk over the head.

  He turned to confront the committee of activists, his coffee cup in hand. "Today," he said, mocking Jorgenson, whom he didn't particularly care for; Jorgenson was a red-necked, heavy-set type, the beer and pretzel sort.

  "We know it has to be done in a hurry," Hailer spoke up, his voice low; he was conscious of Rita, who stood at the mirror fixing her hair, and it made him nervous—in fact the whole committee was nervous. Afraid, of course, of the cop, the pol-com. And yet they had come here anyhow.

  "Let me tell you the situation as regards artiforgs," Nicholas began, but at once Flanders broke in.

  "We know all there is to know. All we want to know. Listen, President; we know the plot they've hatched up." The six or seven members of the committee glared at him with nervous anger and frustration; the small cubby—or rather, standard-sized—in which Nicholas lived and now stood writhed with their discomfort.

  "Who?" he asked.

  Jorgenson said, "The bigshot at Estes Park. Who run everything. Tell their mickey mouse size little thugs like Nunes who to put the finger on."

  "What's the plot?"

  "The plot," Flanders said, almost stammering in his ticlike tenseness, "is they're short on food and they want a pretext to abolish an ant tank here and there; we don't know how many they want to shut down, and force the tankers up to the surface to die—many tanks, maybe, or just a few . . . it depends on how much trouble they're having with rations."

  "So see," Haller said beseechingly to Nicholas, his voice rising (the man next to him punched him and he instantly dropped his voice to a whis
per), "they need a pretext. They get it as soon as we fail to supply our monthly quota of leadies. And last night after the TV films of Detroit getting it, when Yancy announced that quotas would be upped—that's how we figured it out; they're going to up the quotas and all the tanks that can't meet the new quotas will be abolished. Like us. And up there—" He gestured ceilingward. "We'll die."

  Rita, at the mirror, said harshly, "Like you want Nicholas to die when he goes up after that artiforg."

  Spinning, Haller said, "Mrs. St. James, he's our president; we elected him—that's why we elected him, so he'd—you know. Help us."

  "Nick is not your father," Rita said. "Not a magician. Not a wheel in the Estes Park Government. He can't manufacture an artificial pancreas. He can't—"

  "Here's the money," Jorgenson said. And handed Nicholas a fat white envelope. "All Wes-Dem fifty notes. Forty in all. Twenty thousand Wes-Dem dollars. Late last night while Nunes was snoozing we went all over the tank, collecting." This sum represented the wages of half the tank for—he could not compute, under the stress of the moment. But for a long, long time. The committee had worked very hard.

  Rita said to the committee, her voice harsh, "Then you do it; you collected the money. Draw lots. Don't stick my husband with this." Her voice became gentle. "Nunes is less apt to notice one of you missing than Nick. It might even be several days before he checks up, but once Nick goes Nunes will know, and—"

  "And what, Mrs. St. James?" Hailer said, determinedly but politely. "There's nothing Nunes can do, once President St. James is out of here up the chute and onto the surface."

  Rita said, "When he returns, Jack. Then Nunes will execute him." To himself Nicholas thought, And the hell of it is, I probably won't even get back.

  Jorgenson, with clear, sincere reluctance, reached into the jacket of his work overalls, brought out a small object, flat like a cigarette case.

  "Mr. President," he said huskily, in a formal, dignified tone, that of an official bearer of tidings, "Do you know what this is?"