The Penultimate Truth (6 page)

     Conscience.

     Stanton Brose, holed up in his castlelike _Festung_ in Geneva like some pointed-hat alchemist, like a corrupted, decayed but, as they say, shining and stinking, glowing pale white fish of the sea, a dead mackerel with clouded-over glaucomalike eyes . . . or did Brose look like this?

     Only twice in his life had he, Joseph Adams, actually seen Brose in the flesh. Brose was old. What was it, eighty-two? And not lean. Not a stick, ribboned with the streamers of smoked, dried flesh; Brose at eighty-two weighed a ton, waddled and rolled, pitched, with his mouth drizzling and his nose as well . . . and yet the heart still beat, because of course it was an artiforg heart, and an artiforg spleen and an artiforg and so on.

     But yet the authentic Brose remained. Because the brain was not artiforg; there was no such thing; to manufacture an artiforg brain--to have done so, when that firm, Arti-Gan Corporation of Phoenix, existed, back before the war--would have been to go into what Adams liked to think of as the "genuine simulated silver" business . . . his term for what he considered with its multiform spawned offspring: the universe of authentic fakes.

     And that universe, he reflected, which you would think you could enter the IN door of, pass through and then exit by the OUT door of in say roughly two minutes . . . that universe, like Eisenbludt's propheaps in the Moscow film studios, was endless, was room beyond room; the OUT door of one room was only the IN door for the next.

     And now, if Verne Lindblom were correct, if the man from the private intelligence corporation, Webster Foote, Limited of London, were correct some new IN door had swung open, given momentum by the hand that reached in all its trembling senility from Geneva . . . in Adams' mind the metaphor, growing, became visual and frightening; he actually experienced the doorway ahead, felt the darkness breathed by it--room lacking light, into which he would soon tread, faced by god knew what task that was not a nightmare, not, like the black, listless fogs from within and without, formless, but--

     Too distinct. Spelled out, in graphically unambiguous words, in a memo originating from that damn monster pit, Geneva. General Holt, even Marshal Harenzany who after all was a Red Army officer and not in any sense a Bunthorne sniffing at a sunflower, even Harenzany sometimes _listened_. But the waddling, drizzling, eye-rolling old hulk chuck-full of artiforgs--Brose had greedily ingested artiforg after artiforg of the world's small and dwindling supply--was earless.

     Literally. Years ago the organs of that sense had withered away. And Brose had declined artiforg replacements; he _liked_ not to hear.

     When Brose reviewed each and every TV tape of Yancy's speeches, he did not listen; horribly, or so it seemed to Adams, the fat, semidead organism received the aud-portion by direct wire: through electrodes grafted, skillfully implanted years ago, in the proper section of his elderly brain . . . in the one original organ, which _was_ Brose, the rest now being, tin-woodmanwise, a mere procession of Arti-Gan Corporation's plastic, complex, never-failing (they had, before the war, proudly carried lifetime guarantees, and in the artiforg business the meaning of the word "lifetime," that is, whether it applied to the life of the object or of the owner was delightfully clear) replacements which lesser men, the Yance-men as a whole had a kind of nominal, formal claim on--in that, while still warehoused in the subsurface storage vaults under Estes Park, the artiforg supplies belonged to the Yancemen as a class and not merely to Brose.

     But it didn't quite work out that way. Because when a kidney failed, as had occurred to Shelby Lane, whose demesne up in Oregon Adams had frequently visited--there was no artiforg kidney for Mr. Lane, although in the warehouse three were known to exist. It seemed, and for some reason as he lay in his bed in the master bedroom of his demesne, surrounded by his entourage of worrying leadies, Lane had not seemed convinced by the argument, Brose had put on these three artiforg kidneys what legally was called an _attachment_. He had attached the goddam organs, tied them up, stopped their use, by a complex quasi-legal "prior" claim . . . Lane, pathetically, had taken it to the Recon Dis-In Council which sat perpetually in session at Mexico City, passing judgment on the land-boundary quarrels between demesne owners, a council on which one leady of each type sat; Lane had not exactly lost, but he had quite certainly not won, in that he was dead. He had died while waiting for the issue of attachment to be settled. And--Brose lived on, with the knowledge that he could suffer three more total kidney-failures and survive. And anyone who chose to go before the Recon Dis-In Council would undoubtedly be dead, like Lane, and the litigation would, with the plaintiff, expire.

     _The fat old louse_, Adams thought, and he saw ahead New York City, the spires, the postwar high-rise buildings, the ramps and tunnels, the hovering fruit fly flapples, which, like his own, carried Yance-men to their offices to begin Monday.

     And, a moment later, he hovered fruit-fly-like himself, over the especially tall cardinal building 580 Fifth Avenue and the Agency.

     The entire city was the Agency, of course; the buildings on each side were as much a part of the machinery as this one omphalos. But here his particular office lay; here he entrenched himself against the competing members of his own class. It was a top job that he held . . . and in his briefcase, which he now picked up expectantly, lay as he well knew top-drawer material.

     Maybe Lindblom was right. Maybe the Russians were about to bomb Carthage.

     He reached the down ramp of the roof field, touched the hi-speed button, and dropped like a plumb line for his floor and office.

     When he entered his office, briefcase in hand, he utterly without a shade or glimpse of warning faced a mound of rubber, winking and blinking, flapping seal-like its pseudopodia and peeping at him while with its slitlike mouth it gaped and grinned, pleased at his dismay; pleased to horrify both by how it physically looked and who it was.

     "Mr. Adams. A word with you, sir."

     The thing, which had somehow managed to wedge itself into the chair at his desk, was Stanton Brose.

6

     "Why certainly, Mr. Brose," Joseph Adams said, and under his tongue his salivary glands strained with sickness; he turned his back, then, and set his briefcase down and was amazed at his somatic nausea, his response to finding Brose here in his own office. He was not frightened; not intimidated, not even angered that Brose had managed to walk in despite the elaborate locks, walked in and taken over--none of that counted, because the ill convulsion of his body startled every other reaction out of existence.

     "Would you like a moment to compose yourself, Mr. Adams?" The voice, wheedling, thin, like a guy wire plucked by an evil pneumatic spirit.

     "Y-yes," Adams said.

     "Pardon? I can't hear, you know; I must see your lips."

     _My lips_, Adams thought. He turned. "I need," he said, "a moment. I had flapple trouble." Then he remembered that he had left the four loyal companions, the veteran leadies of his retinue, in the parked flapple. "Would you--" he began, but Brose cut him off, not impolitely but simply as if he were not talking.

     "A new project of some importance has arisen," Brose said in his plucked-wire, strumming voice. "You're to do the reading matter on it. It consists of this . . ."Brose paused, then found a vast ugly handkerchief which he dabbled at his mouth with, as if molding the flesh of his face like soft, toothpastelike plastic into proper shape. "No written documents or line transmissions are to exist as to this project; _no records_. All, only, oral face-to-face exchanges between the principals; myself, you, Lindblom who will build the artifacts."

     Ha, Adams thought, and exulted. Webster Foote, Limited, the London-based planetwide private police investigation agency had already snooped, nosed the news into being; Brose, despite his obviously psychopathic security precautions, had lost even as he began. Nothing could have pleased Adams more; he felt the nausea drain away and he lit a cigar, paced about, nodding soberly, showing his willingness to participate in this most vital, secret enterprise. "Yes sir," he said.

     "You know Louis Runcible."

     "The conapt building man," Adams said.

     "Look toward me, Adams."

     Looking toward him, Joseph Adams said, "I passed over one of his conapt centers. His dungeons."

     "Well," Brose strummed, "they chose to come up. And they didn't have the ability to join us; we couldn't use them so what else but those row-on-row little apts? At least they've got Chinese checkers. And components are more restful to build than assembling complete leadies."

     "It is just," Adams said, "that there is a three thousand mile stretch of grass between my demesne and here that I have to pass over every day. Twice. And I wonder sometimes. And I remember how it looked in the old days before the war and before they were induced to go down into those tanks."

     "Had they not, Adams, they would be dead."

     "Oh," Adams said slowly, "I know they'd be dead; they'd be ash and the leadies would be using that ash to make mortar out of. It's just that sometimes I think of Route 66."

     "Whazzat, Adams?"

     "A highway. That connected cities."

     "A freeway!"

     "No, sir, Just a highway; let it pass." And he felt a weariness so strong that he actually thought for a split second that he'd suffered a cardiac arrest or some other fundamental physical collapse; he very carefully stopped inhaling his cigar and seated himself in a guest-type chair facing the desk, and blinked, breathed, wondered what had occurred.

     "Okay," Adams continued, "I know Runcible; he's basking in Capetown and he really does try--I know he does--to adequately provide for the tankers who surface; they've got built-in electric ranges, swibbles, wubfur carpeting wall-to-wall, 3-D TV, each group of ten living units has a leady to do chores such as cleaning . what's up, Mr. Brose?" He waited, panting with fright.

     Brose said, "Recently a hot-spot cooled off in southern Utah, near St. George, where it was . . . the maps still give it. Near the Arizona border. Red rock hills in that area. Runcible's geigers picked up the drop in r.a. before anybody else's, and he got it, staked his claim; the rest." Brose gestured deprecatingly, but with resignation. "In a few days he intends to send in his autonomic 'dozers and start breaking ground for a new constellation of conapts . . . you know, he has all that big primitive heavy-duty construction equipment that he carts all over the world."

     "You need that," Adams said, "to build the kind of structures he erects. Those conapts go up fast."

     "Well," Brose said, "we want that area."

     _You liar_, Adams thought to himself. He got up, turned his back to Brose and said aloud, "You liar!"

     "I can't hear."

     Turning back, Adams said, "It's just rock, there. Who wants to put a demesne there? My god, some of us have demesnes that contain a million and a half acres!" He stared at Brose. It can't be true, he said to himself. Runcible got in there first because no one cared enough about that region to want to know the readings; no one paid Webster Foote to have Foote field reps and techs keep tabs on that hot-spot and Runcible got it by default. So don't try to jolly me along, he said to himself, and felt hatred for Brose, now; the nausea was gone and an authentic emotion had replaced it inside him.

     Evidently Brose perceived some of this on Adams' face. "I guess that is pretty no-good land, there," Brose admitted. "War or no war."

     "If you want me to manage the aud-portion of the project," Adams said, and was almost unhinged to hear himself actually say this to Brose, to the man's face, "you had better tell me the truth. Because I don't feel very good. I was up all night writing a speech--by hand. And the fog bothered me. Fog gets to me; I should never have set up my demesne on the Pacific south of San Francisco. I should have tried down by San Diego."

     Brose said, "I'll tell you. Correct; we don't care--no Yance-man with all his marbles could possibly care--about that arid land at the old Utah-Arizona border. Look at these." He managed to flap his pseudopodialike flippers until they connected with a packet which he carried; like a roll of wallpaper samples the document was spread out.

     Peering, he saw careful, really lovely drawings. It was like looking over an Oriental silk screen scroll from the--future? Now he saw that the objects depicted were--unnatural. Freak guns with spurious knobs and warts. Electronic hardware that--he intuited from experience-- served no purpose. "I don't get it," he said.

     "These are artifacts," Brose said, "which Mr. Lindblom will make; superb craftsman that he is he will have no difficulty."

     "But what do they do?" All at once Adams understood. These were fake crypto-weapons. And not just that; he saw, as the scroll-like document unrolled in Brose's flippers, additional artifacts.

     Skulls.

     Some were Homo sapiens.

     Some were not.

     "All these," Brose said, "Lindblom will manufacture. But you must be consulted first. Because before they are found--"