The Penultimate Truth Read online

  He could only wait. And pray.

  And prayer, he thought caustically, went out twenty years ago, even before the war.

  The field technician of the private police corporation Webster Foote, Limited, crouched in his cramped bunker and said into his aud receiver which transmitted to headquarters in London, "Sir, I have on tape a two-way conversation."

  "On that same matter we discussed?" Webster Foote's voice came, distantly.

  "Evidently."

  "All right. You know who's the acting contact with Louis Runcible; see that he gets it."

  "I'm sorry to say that this—"

  "Convey it anyhow. We do what we can with what we have." The far-off voice of Webster Foote was authoritative; this, coming from him, was a pronouncement of judgment as well as an order.

  "Yes, Mr. Foote, S.A.P."

  "Indeed," Webster Foote agreed. "Soon as possible." And, in London, at his end, he broke the aud-transmission.

  The Webster Foote, Limited field technician turned at once back to his banks of detection and recording apparatuses, economically operating at low gain but satisfactory output level; he examined the visual, graphic tapes appearing ceaselessly to be certain that during the audcontact with his superior he had missed nothing. Now was not the time to miss anything.

  He had not.

  CHAPTER 7

  And meanwhile, the superb handwrought speech, untouched, remained in Joseph Adams' briefcase.

  Lindblom remained, shakily lighting a cigarette and trying not to involve himself—for the moment—in further conversation. He had had enough; he remained because he was too exhausted to go.

  "You have it in your power," Adams said as he seated himself at his desk, opened his briefcase and got out his speech, "to get me picked off."

  "I know," Lindblom muttered.

  Walking toward the door Adams said, "I'm going to 'vac this. Get it to the sim and on tape and then the hell with it. Then—what do we call the new project, this forging of nonterran artifacts to put a man in prison whose whole life is devoted to seeing that decent housing is—"

  "The Nazis," Lindblom interrupted, "had no written orders regarding the Final Solution, the genocide of the Jews. It was done orally. Told by superior to subordinate, handed down by word of mouth, if you don't object to an abs-urd mixed metaphor. You probably do."

  "Let's go have a cup of coffee," Adams said.

  Lindblom shrugged. "What the hell. They've decided it's Runcible; who are we to say it isn't? Show me—conjure up—someone else who would benefit by tipping off tanks."

  "I'd be glad to," Adams said, and saw Lindblom look disconcerted. "Any one of the thousands of tankers living in Runcible's conapts. All it would take would be one who got away, wasn't picked up by Brose's agents or Footemen, made his way back to his own ant tank. Then, from it, contacted a neighboring tank, then from that tank to—"

  "Yeah," Lindblom agreed, stolidly. "Sure. Why not? Except would his fellow tankers let him back into his tank? Wouldn't they think he was hot or had—what name did we make up to call it?—the Bag Plague. They'd massacre him on sight. Because they believe the reading matter we give them on TV every damn day of the week and twice on Saturday night, just in case; they'd think he was a living missile. And anyhow, there's more you don't know. You ought to hand over a few bucks to the Foote organization now and then; pick up a little inside news. These tankers that had been tipped off about conditions up here—they weren't tipped off by anybody they knew; it wasn't one of their own members coming back."

  "Okay, the tanker couldn't reach his own tank; so instead—"

  "They got it," Lindblom said, "over the coax."

  For a moment Adams failed to understand; he stared at Lindblom.

  "That's right," Lindblom said. "On their TV set. For about one minute, and very feeble. But enough."

  "Good god," Adams said, and he thought, There are millions of them down there. What would it be like if someone cut into the main coax, the chief, sole and central trunk from Estes Park that reaches all the tanks. What would it be like to have the earth open and millions of humans, imprisoned subsurface for fifteen years, believing in a radioactive waste above, with missiles and bacteria and rubble and warring armies—the demesne system would sustain a death blow and the great park over which he flappled twice daily would become a densely populated civilization once more, not quite as before the war, but close enough. Roads would reappear. Cities.

  And—ultimately there would be another war.

  That was the rationale. The masses had egged their leaders on to war in both Wes-Dem and Pac-Peop. But once the masses were out of the way, stuffed down below into antiseptic tanks, the ruling elite of both East and West were free to conclude a deal . . . although, strangely, in a sense it had not been them at all, not Brose, not General Holt who had been C. in C. of Wes-Dem or even Marshal Harenzany, the top officer in the hierarchy of Soviet brass. But the fact that both Holt and Harenzany knew when it was time to use the missiles (and had done so) and when time had come to quit—this was all true, and without it, without their joint reasonability, peace would not have been possible, but underneath this collaboration of the two top military men lay something else, something which to Adams was real and strange and in a sense deeply moving.

  The Recon Dis-In Council of leadies in Mexico City/Amecameca. It had assisted in the job of forcing peace on the planet. And as a governing body, a final arbiter, it had not gone away. Man has built a weapon that could think for itself, and after it had thought a while, two years in which vile destruction had occurred, with the leadies locked hip and thigh each with the other, two huge artificial armies from two land masses . . . advanced varieties of leadies, who had been constructed with an eye toward utilizing their analytical brains for planning tactics and finally overall strategy—these advanced types, the X, XI and XII varieties, had figured out that the best strategy was something which the Phoenicians had learned five thousand years ago. It was summed up, Adams reflected, in The Mikado. If merely saying that a man had been executed was enough to satisfy everyone, why not merely say it instead of doing it? The problem was really—to the advanced leadies—that simple. They were not Gilbert and Sullivan buffs, and Gilbert's words were not in their artificial brains; the text of The Mikado had not been programmed into them as operational data. But they had arrived at the same conclusion—and had in addition acted on it, in conjunction with Marshal Harenzany and C. in C. General Holt.

  Aloud, Adams said, "But they didn't see the advantage."

  "Pardon?" Lindblom murmured, still shaky, still unwilling to engage in any more talk; he looked tired.

  "What the Recon Dis-In Council didn't see," Adams said, "and can't see now, because there's no libido-component to their perceptmentation systems, is that the maxim, Why execute someone-"

  "Aw, shut up," Lindblom said, and, turning, stalked out of Joseph Adams' office. Leaving him standing there alone, speech in hand, idea in mind; doubly frustrated.

  But he could hardly blame Lindblom for being upset. Because all the Yance-men had this streak. They were selfish; they had made the world into their deer park at the expense of the millions of tankers below; it was wrong and they knew it and they felt guilt—not quite enough guilt to cause them to knock off Brose and let the tankers up, but enough guilt to make their late evenings a thrashing agony of loneliness, emptiness, and their nights impossible. And they knew that if anyone could be said to be amending the crime committed, the theft of an entire planet from its rightful owners, it was Louis Runcible. They gained by keeping the tankers down, and he gained by luring them up; the Yance-man elite confronted Runcible as an antagonist, but one whom they knew, deep down inside, was morally in the right. It was not a sanguine feeling, at least not to Joe Adams as he stood alone in his office, gripping his superb speech which was to be 'vacked, run through the sim, taped, then castrated from Brose's office. This speech: it did not tell the truth, but it was not a pastiche of cliches, lies, bromides, euphemisms�
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  And, more sinister ingredients, which Adams had noticed in speeches dreamed up by his fellow Yance-men; after all, he was only one speech writer from among a pack.

  Carrying his highly prized new speech—so regarded by him, anyhow, in the absence of a contrary consensual validation—he left his office and, by express elevator, dropped to the floor where Megavac 6-V chugged away; floors, rather, in that the total works of the organism had undergone accretive changes over the years, refinements that had added to it whole new parts occupying entire new layers. Megavac 6-V was huge, but in contrast, the sim itself remained the same as always.

  Two uniformed toughs, Brose's hand-picked but oddly effete, physiognomically dainty roughnecks, eyed him as he emerged from the elevator. They knew him; they understood that his presence on Megavac 6-V's programming floor was mandatory in view of his job.

  He approached the keyboard of Megavac 6-V, saw that it was in use; another Yance-man, unfamiliar to him, was whacking away at the keys like a virtuoso pianist at the end of a Franz Liszt opus, with double octaves and all, everything but hammering with the fist.

  Above the Yance-man his written copy was suspended, and Adams gave in to the impulse; he moved close to inspect it.

  At once the Yance-man ceased typing.

  "Sorry," Adams said.

  "Let's see your authorization." The Yance-man, quite dark, youthful and small, with almost Mexican-like hair, held out his hand peremptorily.

  Sighing, Adams got out of his briefcase the memo from Geneva, from Brose's bureau, entitling him to 'vac this particular speech; the document had a stamped code number, entered on the memo as well—the dark, small Yance-man compared the document with the memo, seemed satisfied, returned both to Adams.

  "I'll be through in forty minutes." The youth resumed typing.

  "So bounce off and leave me alone." His tone was neutral but forbidding.

  Adams said, "I rather like your style." He had quickly, briefly, scanned the page of script on top. It was good stuff; unusually so.

  Again the Yance-man ceased typing. "You're Adams." Once more he extended his hand, this time for shaking purposes; they shook, then, and the strained atmosphere reduced to a tolerable level. But there was always the I'm-bigger-than-you competitiveness in the air when two Yance-men met, either away from the Agency at their demesnes or here right on the job. It always made the day just that much tougher to get through, and yet Adams thrived on it—if not, he realized, he would long since have gone under. "You've done some good pieces; I've watched the final tapes." Studying him with his sharp, bright, black, deeply-set Mexican-type eyes, the young Yance-man said, "But a lot of your work has been axed at Geneva, or so I hear."

  "Well," Adams said stoically, "it's either axed or it's coaxed in this business; there's no such thing as half-transmitting."

  "You want to bet?" The youth's tone was brittle, penetrating; it disconcerted Adams.

  Guardedly, because after all both of them in essence were competing for the same prize, Adams said, "I suppose a jejune, watereddown speech could be considered—"

  "Let me show you something." The dark young Yance-man rose, yanked shut the master circuit breaker so that the 'vac began processing what he had fed it up to now.

  Together, Adams and the dark young Yance-man walked over to view the sim.

  There it sat. Solely, at its large oak desk, with the American flag behind it. In Moscow another and identical sim sat, with a duplicate of Megavac 6-V, the flag of the USSR behind it; otherwise everything, the clothes, the gray hair, the competent, fatherly, mature but soldierly features, the strong chin—it was the same sim all over again, both having been built simultaneously in Germany, wired by the finest Yance-man technicians alive. And here maintenance men perpetually skulked, watching with trained, narrow eyes for any sign of failure, even a fraction-of-a-second hesitation. Anything which might mitigate the quality striven for, that of free and easy authenticity; this simulacrum, out of all which they, the Yance-men, were involved in, required the greatest semblance of the actuality which it mimicked.

  A breakdown here, Adams realized soberly, however minute, would be catastrophic. Like the time its left hand, in reaching out—

  A huge red warning light on the wall lit, a buzzer buzzed; a dozen main-men for the simulacrum materialized to scrutinize.

  Catastrophic—as the time the reaching left hand went into a spasm of pseudo-Parkinsonism, a neutral-motor tremor . . . indicating, had the tapes been put on the cable, the insidious start of senility; yes, that would have been the tankers' interpretation, most probably. He's getting old, they would have muttered to each other as they sat in their communal halls, overseen by their pol-coms. Look; he's shaky. The strain. Remember Roosevelt; the strain of the war got him, finally; it'll get the Protector, and then what'll we do?

  But it hadn't been put on the coaxial cable, of course; the tankers had never seen that sequence. The sim had been opened up, thoroughly gone over, tested and checked and certified; a miniaturized component had been spat on, denounced as the malefactor—and, at a work bench in one of the shops of Runcible's conapts, a workman had been quietly relieved of his duties and possibly his life . . . without ever knowing why or what—because in the first place he hadn't known what the tiny output coil or diode or just plain thing had been used for.

  The sim began to move. And Joseph Adams shut his eyes, standing as he was, out of range of the cameras, hidden with this small, dark, very young but expert Yance-man, the author of the words about to be uttered. Maybe it'll go out of its mind, Adams thought wildly, and began to recite pornographic ballads. Or, like one of those antique disc records of the previous century: repeat a word repeat a word repeat a word . . .

  "My fellow Americans," the sim said in its firm, familiar, nearhoarse but utterly controlled voice.

  To himself Joseph Adams said, Yes, Mr. Yancy. Yes sir.

  CHAPTER 8

  Joseph Adams listened to the partial text of the speech, up to the point where the dark young Yance-man had ceased feeding the script to the 'vac, and then, when the sim became rigid and the cameras—at the precise second—shut down, he turned to the man beside him, the author, and said:

  "I take off my hat to you. You're good." He had almost been captured himself, as he had stood watching the simulacrum of the Protector Talbot Yancy deliver with absolutely the proper intonation, in the exact and correct manner, the text modified and augmented— meddled with—by Megavac 6-V from what it had received—even though he could see Megavac 6-V and although this was not visible could sense the emanation of the reading matter directed by the 'vac toward the simulacrum. Could in fact witness the true source which animated the purely artificial construct seated at the oak desk with the American flag behind it. Eerie, he thought.

  But a good speech is a good speech. Whoever delivers it. A kid in high school, reciting Tom Paine . . . the material is still great, and this reciter doesn't falter or stumble or get the words wrong. The 'vac and all these main-men standing around see to that. And, he thought, so do we. We know what we're doing.

  "Who are you?" he asked this strangely capable young Yance-man.

  "Dave something. I forget," the man said, almost mystically absorbed, even now that the sim had become inoperative once more.

  "You forget your name?" Puzzled, he waited, and then he realized that this was merely an elliptical way by which the dark young man was telling him something: that he was a relatively new Yance-man, not yet fully established in the hierarchy. "Lantano," Adams said. "You're David Lantano, living in the hotspot near Cheyenne."

  "That's right."

  "No wonder you're black." Radiation-burned, Adams realized. The youth, eager to acquire land for a demesne, had gone in too soon; all the rumors, passed back and forth in the idle hours of evening by the worldwide elite, appeared true: it had been far too soon, and physically young David Lantano was suffering.

  Philosophically, Lantano said, "I'm alive."

  "But loo
k at you. What about your bone marrow?"

  "Tests show there's not too much impairment of red-cell production. I expect to recuperate. And it's cooling daily. I've gotten over the worst part." Wryly, Lantano said, "You should come and visit me, Adams; I've had my leadies working night and day; the villa itself is almost complete."

  Adams said, "I wouldn't go into the Cheyenne hot-spot for a pile of poscreds ten miles high. That speech of yours shows how very much you can contribute; why risk your health, your life? You could stay here in New York City, live in a conapt of the Agency, until—"

  "Until," Lantano said, "the Cheyenne hot-spot cooled down enough in ten years, fifteen years . . . and then someone grabbed it ahead of me." My only chance, he was saying in other words, was deliberately to go in prematurely. As has been attempted in the past by Yance-men in the exact same position, before me. And—so often those premature investments, those hasty, anxious entries into still-hot areas, meant— death. And not a mercifully quick death but a gruesome slow deterioration over a period of years.

  Viewing the dark—in truth severely scorched—youth, Adams realized how fortunate he himself was. To be fully established; his villa was long-built, his grounds were fully planted, green throughout. And he had entered the West Coast hot-spot south of San Francisco at a safe time; he had relied on Footemen reports, brought at great cost, and look how it had all worked out. In contrast to this.

  Lantano would have his fine villa, his vast stone building made out of the rubble, the concrete that had been the city of Cheyenne. But Lantano would be dead.

  And that, according to the Recon Dis-In Council's ruling, put the area up for grabs once again; it would be a rush by eager Yance-men to get in and acquire what Lantano had left behind. An ultimate end to Adams pathetic irony: the youth's villa, built at such cost—at the expense of his life-would go to someone else who did not have to build, supervise a gang of leadies day after day .