The Penultimate Truth (18 page)

     But perhaps there was someone else, someone not afraid of Brose.

     "We will know whether such a person exists," Foote said, "when and only when a Yance-man valuable to Brose is killed." As, with his parapsychological talent, he foresaw.

     "What sort of person?"

     "A new sort," Foote said. "Of the kind we have never seen." That, as far as he knew, did not exist.

     _I will sit here at my desk_, Foote said to himself, _and wait and hope to get a vidcall from fat, horrid old spiderish Stanton B rose. Telling me in lugubrious terms that an essential Yance-man in his immediate circle has been dispatched, and in no crude, barbaric but on the contrary highly--as they like to phrase it--sophisticated manner. And when that call comes, I will go out on a two week binge_.

     He began the wait as of now. By his round, archaic pocket watch, nine a.m., London time. And, in just a minuscule way, he initiated the celebration: he took one small pinch, one for each nostril, of Mrs. Cluny's Superfine Preferred Mixture high-grade snuff.

     On the main floor public corridor of the New York Agency, Joseph Adams, seeing no one in sight, stepped rapidly into a pay vidphone booth. He shut the door, managed to deposit the metal poscred coin.

     "Capetown, please. The villa of Louis Runcible." He was shaking so badly that he could barely hold the aud receiver to his ear.

     "Seven dollars for the first--" the operator said; it was a leady, highly efficient and brisk.

     "Okay." Quickly he shoved a five and two ones into the slot, and then, as the connection was put through, Adams, with a convulsive, hasty but thorough motion, covered the vidscreen with a handkerchief; he had now blocked the visual portion of the transmission, leaving only the aud.

     In his ear a female voice said, "Miss Lombard, Mr. Runcible's secretary; who is calling, please?"

     Joseph Adams said hoarsely, not having to alter deliberately his voice to make it unrecognizable; it emerged that way on its own, "I have an absolutely urgent message for Mr. Runcible's ears alone."

     "Who is this, please? If you--"

     "I can't do it," Joseph Adams grated. "Maybe the line is tapped. Maybe--"

     "What is it, sir? Could you speak up, please? And the visual signal doesn't seem to be coming through at all. Could you reconnect in a better channel?"

     "Goodbye," Joseph Adams said. _I just can't take the chance_, he thought in fear.

     "I'll put you through, sir; if you'll just wait--"

     He hung up the receiver.

     Removing the handkerchief, still shaking, he got to his feet, left the public vidphone booth. Well, he almost had done it. Tried; I did try, he said to himself. So close.

     Then a wire? Or a special registered 'stant mail letter, no name signed, letters cut from homeopapes.

     Can't, he realized; can't ever do it. Darn sorry, Louis Runcible; the bonds are too strong. The ties; they're too long, old, tight. I have introjected them and now they act as a part of me; they live here inside, within me. Life-long. Now and now on.

     He walked unhastily, feeling a membrane of numbness transport itself with him, hovering as he walked up the corridor away from the vidphone booth. Back to his own office. As if nothing had happened.

     Nothing had. It was gall-bitter truth: nothing, nothing at all.

     So it would progress on its own, the thing. Force he did not understand, substantial but remote, eluding, butterflylike, his perception even at the edge: shapes that winged across the sky of his life and left no trail, no sensation; he felt blind and afraid and helpless. And still he walked. Because it was natural. And, for him, there was nothing else.

     And as he walked, it moved. Stirred; he felt it roll forth. Coasting in a direction which was unveering: straight ahead.

18

     Across the cropped green lawn, temporarily abandoned now because this was night and the leady gardeners had gone off elsewhere into storage sheds and immobility, the machine coasted on rubber, hard wheels; it made no noise, orienting itself by the rebound of the radarlike signals which it emitted at a frequency not customarily utilized. The signals had begun to return now in a succession which informed the machine that the large stone building--the tropism of phase one of its homeostatic but many-sectioned journey--lay properly on its path, and it began to slow until at last it bumped soundlessly against the wall of the building, came to rest for a moment as the next stage of its cycle rotated, in the form of a cam, into position.

     Click. Phase two had begun.

     By means of suction discs extended from stiff radii of a power-driven revolving central shaft the machine ascended the vertical surface until it arrived at a window.

     Entering the building by means of the window posed no problem, despite the fact that the window, in its aluminum frame, was securely locked; the machine simply subjected the glass to sudden enormous heat--the glass became molten, dripped away like honey, leaving a wide, empty hole dead center, where the core of the heat beam had been directed. The machine, with no difficulty, traveled off the vertical, over the aluminum frame--

     And, poised momentarily on the aluminum frame, it performed phase four of its total operation; it exerted the precise pressure on the rather soft metal that a two-hundred-and-twenty pound weight, if resting there, would create; the frame yielded, bent until warped-- satisfied, the machine then crawled on vertically once more by means of its radii of suction cups, until it reached the floor of the room.

     An interval passed in which the machine remained inoperative, at least from external appearances. But within it seletoidal switches opened and shut. At last an iron oxide tape moved past a playback head; through an audio system current passed from transformer to speaker and the machine abruptly said in a low, muffled, but whiny voice, "Damn it." The tape, expended, fell into a reservoir within the machine and was incinerated.

     The machine, on its small hard-rubber wheels, again rolled forward, again orienting itself batlike, by its radar emanations. To its right lay a low table. The machine halted at the table and seletoidal switches once more opened and shut. And then the machine extended a pseudopodium, the end of which it pressed firmly against the edge of the table, as if, for a moment, it had involuntarily eased itself of the burden of its own excessive weight, had rested there before going on. And now it went on. Carefully. Because the ultimate tropism, the man, was not far off. The man slept in the next room; the machine had picked up the sound of his respiration and the emanations of warmth from his body. Attracted by both, tropisms of each sort operating in synchronicity, the machine turned in that direction.

     As it passed a closet door it paused, click-clicked, and then released an electrical impulse corresponding to the Alpha wave of a human brain--of, in fact, one particular human brain.

     Within the closet a recording instrument received the impulse, deposited it as a permanent record sealed within a locked case buried deep within the wall, inaccessible except through extensive drilling or by the proper key. The machine, however, did not know that and if it had it would not have cared; it did not inquire into these ramifications; they were not its proper concern.

     It rolled on.

     As it passed through the open doorway into the bedroom it halted, reared back on its hind wheels, extended a pseudopodium which deftly--but at the loss of several seconds--lodged a single strand of artificial cloth-fiber into the brass lock fittings of the frame. This done to its satisfaction it again continued on, pausing once to excrete three hairs and a fleck of dried scalp material; otherwise it had no need to interrupt its double tropism toward the man asleep in the bed.

     At the edge of the bed it stopped entirely. The most intricate part of its overall cycle now came, by means of a rapid series of switch openings and closings, into play. The case forming the hull of the machine radically changed shape as a slow, fastidiously regulated warmth softened the plastic; the machine became thin, extended, and then, this accomplished again tipped back onto its rear wheels. The effect, had anyone seen it, would have been comic; the machine now swayed like a snake, barely able to maintain its balance--it came to the verge of falling first to one side and then to the other, for, slender and elongated as it was, it no longer possessed a wide resting base. However, it was too busy to preoccupy itself with the problem of its lateral oscillations; the master circuit which controlled it, the _clock_, as the wartime technicians who had built it had called that assembly, endeavored to obtain something more vital than upright balance.

     The machine, having completed its mobile, ambulatory phases, based on the doubly reinforcing tropisms of heat and respiratory rhythm, was attempting to locate exactly the beating heart of the man asleep in the bed.

     This, after an interval of minutes, it accomplished; it locked its percept system, focused on the beating heart: the stethoscopic effect of its sensors registered deep within it, and then the next phase came swiftly. It could not hesitate, now that the beating heart had been located; it had to act at once or not at all.

     It released, from an aperture at its upper lid, a cyanide-tipped self-propelling dart. Traveling at extremely slow speed, so that corrections of its trajectory could be achieved even at the last fractional second, the dart made its way from the upended machine, veered slightly as signals from the machine indicated the need of a minor correction--and then its needle nose penetrated the chest of the sleeping man.

     Instantly the dart ejected its freight of poison.

     The man, without waking, died.

     And, at his throat, a complicated but extremely fine band, as fine as gold wire, but containing a variety of functioning electronic valves and surge gates, emitted an elaborate series of radio signals which were without time lapse accepted by larger units bolted to the underside of the bed. These larger units, triggered off by the fine-spun collar which had reacted immediately upon the cessation of blood circulation and heart action, at once sent out their own signals.

     An alarm--audibly--sounded; the room clanged with the racket. In other parts of the villa leadies hopped into activity, churning windmilllike at full throttle toward the upstairs bedroom. A further signal tripped an automatic coded call to leadies stationed on the grounds outside the building; they, ceasing to be immobile, sprinted toward the building, lined up at the wall by the bedroom window.

     The man's death rattle had awakened fifty diverse leadies comprising his entourage, and every leady, guided by the rapid impulses from the larger units bolted to the underside of the bed, thanostropically converged on the scene of the assassination.

     The machine, having released its dart, now registered the cessation of heartbeat; it thereupon again warmed its frame, sank back, became square as before. It began to roll away from the bed, its job done.

     And then--minute cilialike antennae on its anterior surface detected the radio signals emitted by the large unit bolted to the underside of the bed. And it knew it would never get away.

     From outside, below the window with its empty, fused-away entry hole where glass had been, a type VI leady called up at full voiceamplification, "Sir, we are aware that you're in there. Make no attempt to escape. A police agency individual is on the way; please remain where you are until he comes."

     The machine rolled on its small wheels away from the bed in which the dead man lay; it detected the leadies beyond the bedroom door, waiting out in the hall, and the leadies below the window, leadies everywhere, deployed in precise and expert pattern; it reentered the room adjoining the bedroom, the first room through which it had traveled. There, pausing, as a sort of ejaculatory afterthought, it released one drop of blood which fell to the carpet--the machine swiveled, started first in one direction, then another, then at last all switches operated by the _clock_ within it shut down as the master circuit accepted the totality of the situation; all exits were barred and no motion was possible. Hence, one final-optional--phase of its circuit clicked into play.

     Once more the plastic form which housed the components of the machine warmed, flowed, reshaped. This time into the conventional figure of--a portable television set, including handle, screen, v-shaped antenna.

     In that form the machine settled into inertness; every active portion of its electronic anatomy closed down in finality.

     Nothing remained; the end had been reached. A neurotic oscillation between two opposing impulses--the tropism toward flight, the tropism toward camming--had been settled in favor of the latter; the machine, in the darkness of the room, appeared externally to be an ordinary television receiver, as its wartime makers had intended, under such conditions as these: when, due to overly rapid defensive response on the part of the defenders, the machine, although having completed its task of assassination, could not then--as had been hoped for--escape.