The Penultimate Truth (13 page)

     Nicholas mumbled, "No."

     "I see," the leady said, and nodded as if satisfied. "Our next question is this. What caused you to tunnel vertically, in defiance of the familiar ordinance and the grave penalties involved?"

     Its companion, the partially damaged leady, added, "In other words, sir, kindly tell us why you are here."

     After a time Nicholas said haltingly, "I--came to get something."

     "Would you tell us the nature of this 'something'?" the intact leady asked.

     For the life of him he could not make out if he should say or not; the whole environment, the world around him and these inhabitants, metallic and yet polite, pressing at him and yet respectful, bewildered him and made him disoriented.

     "We will allow you a moment," the intact leady said, "to compose yourself. However, we must insist on your answering." It moved toward him, then, a device in its manual extremity. "I would like you to submit to a polygraphic reading of your statements; in other words, sir, a measuring by an independent percept system of the veracity of your answers. No offense is meant, sir; this is routine."

     Before he knew what was happening, the lie detector had been clamped around his wrist.

     "Now, sir," the intact leady said. "What description of conditions as they obtain here on the Earth's surface did you provide your fellow tankers below by means of the intercom system which we just now rendered inoperative; please give us ample and specific details."

     He said haltingly, "I--don't know."

     The damaged leady spoke up, directly to its companion. "There is no need to ask him that; I was near enough to monitor the conversation."

     "Please run the playback," the intact leady said.

     To Nicholas' aversion and consternation there all at once issued from the damaged leady's voice box the tape recording of his own conversation with those below. Out of the leady's mouth came the squeaky, distant but clear words, as if the leady was now himself, mimicking him horribly.

     "_Hey, President St. James! Are you through?_"

     And then his own voice, but slightly speeded-up, it seemed to him, answering. "_I'm through_."

     "_Start telling; talk to us about it_."

     "_First of all, the sky is gray because--_"

     He had to stand there, by the pair of leadies, and hear everything once over again in its entirety; and all the time he wondered to himself, again and again, _What is going on?_

     At last the total conversation had been run; the two leadies conferred. "He did not tell them anything of value," the intact leady decided.

     "I agree." The damaged leady nodded. "Ask him again if they will be coming up." Both metal heads swiveled toward Nicholas; they regarded him intently. "Mr. St. James, will you be followed either now or later?"

     "No," he said hoarsely.

     "The polygraph," the damaged leady said, "bears out his statement. Now, once more, Mr. St. James; the purpose of your tunneling to the surface. I insist respectfully, sir, that you tell us; you _must_ say why you are here."

     "No," he said.

     The damaged leady said to its companion, "Contact Mr. Lantano and inquire whether we should kill Mr. St. James or turn him over to the Runcible organization or the Berlin psychiatrists. Your transmitter is operative; mine was destroyed by Mr. St. James' weapon."

     After a pause the intact leady said, "Mr. Lantano is not at the villa; the domestic staff and yard workers say that he is at the Agency in New York City."

     "Can they contact him there?"

     A long, long pause. Then, at last, the intact leady said, "They have contacted the Agency by vidline. Mr. Lantano was there, using the 'vac, but he has left since and no one at the Agency seems to know where or when he will turn up; he left no message with them." It added, "We will have to decide on our own."

     "I disagree," the damaged leady said. "We must contact the nearest Yance-man, in Mr. Lantano's absence, and rely on his judgment, not our own. By means of the vidline at the villa we can perhaps contact Mr. Arthur B. Tauber to the east, at his demesne. Or if not him, then anyone at the New York Agency; the point is that Mr. St. James has told no one below in his tank anything as to the conditions on the surface and hence his death would be regarded by them as a bona fide war casualty. They would be satisfied."

     "Your last point is well made," the intact leady said. "I think we should go, then, and kill him, and not bother the Yance-man Mr. Arthur B. Tauber who anyhow would be at the Agency and by the time we--"

     "Agreed." The damaged leady brought forth a tubelike apparatus, and Nicholas knew that this was the dealer out of death; this would be it, for him, with no further debate: the colloquy between the two leadies--and he kept thinking over and over again, _we made them, ourselves, down in our shops; these are the products of our own hands_--this conversation was over and the decision had been made.

     He said, "Wait."

     The two leadies, as if out of formal, correct politeness, waited; did not kill him quite yet.

     "Tell me," he said, "why, if you're Wes-Dem and not Pac-Peop, and I know you're Wes-Dem; I can see the writing on both of you--why would you kill me?" Appealing to them, to the extraordinary perceptive and rational neural equipment, the highly organized cephalic capabilities of the two of them--they were type VI--he said, "I came up here to get an artiforg pancreas, so we can fulfill our quota of war work. An artiforg; you understand? For our chief mechanic. For the war effort." But, he thought, I don't see the signs of any war. I see the remains, indication of a war that has passed . . . he saw ruins, but they were inactive; there was a quality of age about the landscape, and far off he did actually see trees. And the trees looked new and young and healthy. Then that's it, he thought. _The war is over_. One side won or anyhow the fighting has ceased and now these leadies belong not to Wes-Dem, are not part of a governmental army, but are the property of the individual whose name is stamped on them, this David Lantano. And it is from him that they take their orders-- when they can find him. But he is not at the moment around to appeal to. And because of that, I have to die.

     "The polygraph," the damaged leady said, "indicates great mentation on Mr. St. James' part. Perhaps it would be humane to inform him--" It broke off. Because it had been pulverized; where it had stood a heap of disconnected fragments teetered, an upright column that toppled and rapidly came apart. The intact leady spun about, spun full-circle, like a tall metal top; it sought in a veteran expert way the origin of the force that had obliterated its companion, and while it was doing that the concentrated beam of murder touched it, too, and it ceased to whirl. It collapsed, broke apart and settled and Nicholas found himself alone, facing nothing that lived or spoke or thought, even artificial constructs; the silence, everywhere, had replaced the feral activity of the two leadies who had been about to dispatch him and he was glad of that, intensely and absolutely relieved that they had been destroyed, and yet he did not comprehend; he looked in every direction, as the intact leady had done, and he, like it, saw nothing, only the boulders, the tufts of weeds, and, far off, the ruins of Cheyenne.

     "Hey," he said loudly; he began to walk up and down, searching, as if he might stumble over it, the benign entity, any moment, as if it might be fly-sized, a bug at his feet, something insignificant that he could only locate by almost stepping on it. But--he found nothing. And the silence went on.

     A voice, magnified by a power-driven horn, boomed, "Go to Cheyenne."

     He hopped, turned; behind one of the boulders the man lurked, speaking but concealing himself. Why?

     "In Cheyenne," the booming voice said, "you'll find ex-tankers who came up previously. Not from your tank, of course. But they'll accept you. They'll show you the deep cellars where there's minimal radioactivity, where you'll be safe for a while until you can decide what you want to do."

     "I want an artiforg," he said, doggedly, like some reflex machine; it was all he could think of. "Our chief mechanic--"

     "I realize that," the booming, horn-amplified voice said. "But I still advise, _go to Cheyenne_. It'll take you hours of walking and this area is hot; you must not stay up here too long. Get down into the Cheyenne cellars!"

     "And you can't tell me who you are?"

     "Do you have to know?"

     Nicholas said, "I don't 'have to know.' But I'd like to. It would mean a lot to me." He waited. "Please," he said.

     After a pause of overt, genuine reluctance a figure stepped from behind a boulder--so close to him that he leaped; the mechanical reinforcement of the voice had been a technical deception to distract efforts to locate the origin of the sound--it had successfully given a totally false impression of great vastness and distance to both him and the latter of the two leadies. And all spurious.

     The figure who stood there was--

     Talbot Yancy.

13

     Standing at the far end of the table Verne Lindblom said, "I think these are enough." He indicated the several weapons objects and then the neatly plastic-wrapped bones and skulls. Terran and nonterran; two distinct varieties, separate now, but soon to be mingled in the soil of Utah.

     Joseph Adams was impressed. It had not taken Lindblom, the artisan, long. Even Stanton Brose, coasting up in his special wheeled chair, seemed surprised. And of course immensely pleased.

     The other person present had no reaction; he was not permitted to: he loitered in the background. Adams wondered who he was and then he realized, with a jolt of aversion, that this was the Brose today who had infiltrated Runcible's staff; this was Robert Hig, who would find one or more--begin the process of turning up-these artifacts.

     "My articles," Adams said, "aren't even in rough, yet. And here you have all the completed artifacts themselves." He had, in fact, merely begun page one of article one; it would be days before he finished the batch of three, turned them over to the Agency's shops to be printed up into their magazine form, combined with other, probably authentic, scientific articles of thirty years ago, in prewar issues of _Natural World_.

     "Don't fret," the ancient sagging mass in the motor-driven chair which was Stanton Brose muttered at him. "We don't need to produce the issues of _Natural World_ until our legal staff hauls Runcible up before the Recon Dis-In Council, and that'll take time; do them as quickly as you can, but we can go ahead and have these objects buried--we don't need to wait on you, Adams." He added, gratuitously, "Thank god."

     "Do you know," Lindblom said to Adams, "that we've established this: Footemen, employed by Runcible, have warned him--or will warn him shortly--that _something_ is being planned. Something roughly of this sort. But Foote's people won't really know what. Unless one of the four of us in this room is an agent for Webster Foote, and that's unlikely. After all, only we four know."

     "One more," Brose corrected. "The girl who did the original drawings, especially the very authentic skull remains of the nonterrans. It required enormous anthropological and anatomical knowledge to make these specs; she had to know just what alterations from Homo sapiens to indicate . . . greater ridge bones over the eye sockets, undifferentiated molars, no incisors, less of a chin, but much greater frontal area of the skull so as to indicate a highly organized brain of far more than 1,500 c.c. capacity; in other words, a race more advanced evolutionwise than ours. And the same goes for those." He pointed to the leg bones. "No amateur could sit down and draw fibula and tibia like she did."

     "And what about her?" Adams asked. "Would she leak any of this to Runcible or to Webster Foote's people?" As, he thought, I myself may well still do . . . as you, Verne Lindblom, know.

     Brose said, "She's dead."

     There was silence.

     "I'm out of this," Lindblom said. He turned, started like a somnambulist toward the door.

     Suddenly two Brose agents in shiny jackboots with their dainty cold faces materialized, blocking the door; god in heaven, where had they come from? Adams was appalled; they bad actually been in the room all this time, but, no doubt due to some technological piece of witchcraft they had been absolutely inconspicuous. Cammed, he realized; an old-time much-used espionage assist . . . chameleoned into the fabric of the room's walls.

     Brose said, "No one killed her; she had a coronary. The pressure of work; she overtaxed herself, unfortunately, because of the deadline we gave her. Christ, she was valuable; look at the quality of her work." He jabbed a flabby, pudgy finger at the Xeroxed copy of the original scroll of specs.

     Hesitating, Lindblom said, "I--"

     "It's the truth," Brose said. "You can see the medical report. Arlene Davidson; her demesne is in New Jersey. You knew her."

     "That's true," Lindblom said, finally, speaking to Adams. "It is a fact that Arlene had an enlarged heart and had been warned not to overtax herself. But they--" He glowered futilely at Brose. "They pushed her. They had to have their material by due date, on schedule." To Adams he said, "Like with us. I got mine done; I can work fast under pressure. How about you? Are you going to live through those three articles?"