Master of Life and Death

V

The new sign on the office door said:

He had argued against putting it up there, on the grounds that his appointment was strictly temporary, pending a meeting of the General Assembly to choose a new head for Popeek. But Ludwig had maintained it might be weeks or months before such a meeting could be held, and that there was no harm in identifying his office.

“Everything under control?” the UN man asked.

Walton eyed him unhappily. “I guess so. Now all I have to do is start figuring out how Mr. FitzMaugham’s filing system worked, and I’ll be all set.”

“You mean you don’t know?”

“Mr. FitzMaugham took very few people into his confidence,” Walton said. “Popeek was his special brainchild. He had lived with it so long he thought its workings were self-evident to everyone. There’ll be a period of adjustment.”

“Of course,” Ludwig said.

“This conference you were going to have with the director yesterday when he—ah, what was it about?” Walton asked.

The UN man shrugged. “It’s irrelevant now, I suppose. I wanted to find out how Popeek’s subsidiary research lines were coming along. But I guess you’ll have to go through Mr. FitzMaugham’s files before you know anything, eh?” Ludwig stared at him sharply.

Suddenly, Walton did not like the cheerful UN man.

“There’ll be a certain period of adjustment,” he repeated. “I’ll let you know when I’m ready to answer questions about Popeek.”

“Of course. I didn’t mean to imply any criticism of you or of the late director or of Popeek, Mr. Walton.”

“Naturally. I understand, Mr. Ludwig.”

Ludwig took his leave at last, and Walton was alone in the late Mr. FitzMaugham’s office for the first time since the assassination. He spread his hands on the highly polished desk and twisted his wrists outward in a tense gesture. His fingers made squeaking sounds as they rubbed the wooden surface.

It had been an uneasy afternoon yesterday, after the nightmare of the assassination and the subsequent security inquisition. Walton, wrung dry, had gone home early, leaving Popeek headless for two hours. The newsblares in the jetbus had been programmed with nothing but talk of the killing.

“A brutal hand today struck down the revered D. F. FitzMaugham, eighty-one, Director of Population Equalization. Security officials report definite prospects of solution of the shocking crime, and…”

The other riders in the bus had been vehemently outspoken.

“It’s about time they let him have it,” a fat woman in sleazy old clothes said. “That baby killer!”

“I knew they’d get him sooner or later,” offered a thin, wispy-haired old man. “They had to.”

“Rumor going around he was really a Herschelite…”

“Some new kid is taking over Popeek, they say. They’ll get him too, mark my words.”

Walton, huddling in his seat, pulled up his collar, and tried to shut his ears. It didn’t work.

They’ll get him too, mark my words.

He hadn’t forgotten that prophecy by the time he reached his cubicle in upper Manhattan. The harsh words had drifted through his restless sleep all night.

Now, behind the safety of his office door, he thought of them again.

He couldn’t hide. It hadn’t worked for FitzMaugham, and it wouldn’t for him.

Hiding wasn’t the answer. Walton smiled grimly. If martyrdom were in store for him, let martyrdom come. The work of Popeek had to go forward. He decided he would conduct as much of his official business as possible by screen; but when personal contact was necessary, he would make no attempt to avoid it.

He glanced around FitzMaugham’s office. The director had been a product of the last century, and he had seen nothing ugly in the furnishings of the Cullen Building. Unlike Walton, then, he had not had his office remodeled.

That would be one of the first tasks—to replace the clumsy battery of tungsten-filament incandescents with a wall of electroluminescents, to replace the creaking sash windows with some decent opaquers, to get rid of the accursed gingerbread trimming that offended the eye in every direction. The thunkety-thunk air-conditioner would have to go too; he’d have a molecusorter installed in a day or two.

The redecorating problems were the minor ones. It was the task of filling FitzMaugham’s giant shoes, even on an interim basis, that staggered Walton.

He fumbled in the desk for a pad and stylus. This was going to call for an agenda. Hastily he wrote:

He thought for a moment, then erased a few of his numbers and changed Press conference to 6. and Redecorate office to 4. He licked the stylus and wrote in at the very top of the paper:

In a way, FitzMaugham’s assassination had taken Walton off the hook on the Prior case. Whatever FitzMaugham suspected about Walton’s activities yesterday morning no longer need trouble him. If the director had jotted down a memorandum on the subject, Walton would be able to find and destroy it when he went through FitzMaugham’s files later. And if the dead man had merely kept the matter in his head, well, then it was safely at rest in the crematorium.

Walton groped in his jacket pocket and found the note his brother had slipped to him at lunchtime the day before. In the rush of events, Walton had not had a chance to destroy it.

Now, he read it once more, ripped it in half, ripped it again, and fed one quarter of the note into the disposal chute. He would get rid of the rest at fifteen-minute intervals, and he would defy anyone monitoring the disposal units to locate all four fragments.

Actually, he realized he was being overcautious. This was Director FitzMaugham’s office and FitzMaugham’s disposal chute. The director wouldn’t have arranged to have his own chute monitored, would he?

Or would he? There was never any telling, with FitzMaugham. The old man had been terribly devious in every maneuver he made.

The room had the dry, crisp smell of the detecting devices that had been used—the close-to-the-ground, ugly metering-robots that had crawled all over the floor, sniffing up footprints and stray dandruff flakes for analysis, the chemical cleansers that had mopped the blood out of the rug. Walton cursed at the air-conditioner that was so inefficiently removing these smells from the air.

The annunciator chimed. Walton waited impatiently for a voice, then remembered that FitzMaugham had doggedly required an acknowledgment. He opened the channel and said, “This is Walton. In the future no acknowledgment will be necessary.”

“Yes, sir. There’s a reporter from Citizen here, and one from Globe Telefax.”

“Tell them I’m not seeing anyone today. Here, I’ll give them a statement. Tell them the gargantuan task of picking up the reins where the late, great Director FitzMaugham dropped them is one that will require my full energy for the next several days. I’ll be happy to hold my first official press conference as soon as Popeek is once again moving on an even keel. Got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Make sure they print it. And—oh, listen. If anyone shows up today or tomorrow who had an appointment with Director FitzMaugham, tell him approximately the same thing. Not in those flowery words, of course, but give him the gist of it. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do before I can see people.”

“Certainly, Director Walton.”

He grinned at the sound of those words, Director Walton. Turning away from the annunciator, he took out his agenda and checked off number one, Cancel FitzMaugham’s appointments.

Frowning, he realized he had better add a seventh item to the list: Appoint new assistant administrator. Someone would have to handle his old job.

But now, top priority went to the item ticketed zero on the list: Finish Prior affair. He’d never be in a better position to erase the evidence of yesterday’s illegality than he was right now.

“Connect me with euthanasia files, please.”

A moment later a dry voice said, “Files.”

“Files, this is Acting Director Walton. I’d like a complete transcript of your computer’s activities for yesterday morning between 0900 and 1200, with each separate activity itemized. How soon can I have it?”

“Within minutes, Director Walton.”

“Good. Send it sealed, by closed circuit. There’s some top-level stuff on that transcript. If the seal’s not intact when it gets here. I’ll shake up the whole department.”

“Yes, sir. Anything else, sir?”

“No, that’ll be—on second thought, yes. Send up a list of all doctors who were examining babies in the clinic yesterday morning.”

He waited. While he waited, he went through the top layer of memoranda in FitzMaugham’s desk.

There was a note on top which read, Appointment with Lamarre, 11 June —1215. Must be firm with him, and must handle with great delicacy. Perhaps time to let Walton know.

Hmm, that was interesting, Walton thought. He had no idea who Lamarre might be, but FitzMaugham had drawn a spidery little star in the upper-right-hand corner of the memo sheet, indicating crash priority.

He flipped on the annunciator. “There’s a Mr. Lamarre who had an appointment with Director FitzMaugham for 1215 today. If he calls, tell him I can’t see him today but will honor the appointment tomorrow at the same time. If he shows up, tell him the same thing.”

His watch said it was time to dispose of another fragment of Fred’s message. He stuffed it into the disposal chute.

A moment later the green light flashed over the arrival bin; FitzMaugham had not been subject, as Walton had been in his previous office, to cascades of material arriving without warning.

Walton drew a sealed packet from the bin. He examined the seal and found it untampered, which was good; it meant the packet had come straight from the computer, and had not even been read by the technician in charge. With it was a typed list of five names—the doctors who had been in the lab the day before.

Breaking open the packet, Walton discovered seven closely-typed sheets with a series of itemized actions on them. He ran through them quickly, discarding sheets one, two, and three, which dealt with routine activities of the computer in the early hours of the previous day.

Item seventy-three was his request for Philip Prior’s record card. He checked that one off.

Item seventy-four was his requisition for the key to the clinic’s gene-sorting code.

Item seventy-five was his revision of Philip Prior’s records, omitting all reference to his tubercular condition and to the euthanasia recommendation. Item seventy-six was the acknowledgment of this revision.

Item seventy-seven was his request for the boy’s record card—this time, the amended one. The five items were dated and timed; the earliest was 1025, the latest 1037, all on June tenth.

Walton bracketed the five items thoughtfully, and scanned the rest of the page. Nothing of interest there, just more routine business. But item ninety-two, timed at 1102, was an intriguing one:

Fred hadn’t been bluffing, then; he actually had possession of all the damning evidence. But when one dealt with a computer and with Donnerson micro-memory-tubes, the past was an extremely fluid entity.

“I want a direct line to the computer on floor twenty,” he said.

After a brief lag a technician appeared on the screen. It was the same one he had spoken to earlier.

“There’s been an error in the records,” Walton said. “An error I wouldn’t want to perpetuate. Will you set me up so I can feed a direct order into the machine?”

“Certainly, sir. Go ahead, sir.”

“This is top secret. Vanish.”

The technician vanished. Walton said, “Items seventy-three through seventy-seven on yesterday morning’s record tape are to be deleted, and the information carried in those tubes is to be deleted as well. Furthermore, there is to be no record made of this transaction.”

The voicewrite on floor twenty clattered briefly, and the order funneled into the computer. Walton waited a moment, tensely. Then he said, “All right, technician. Come back in where I can see you.”

The technician appeared. Walton said, “I’m running a check now. Have the machine prepare another transcript of yesterday’s activities between 0900 and 1200 and also one of today’s doings for the last fifteen minutes.”

“Right away, sir.”

While he waited for the new transcripts to arrive, Walton studied the list of names on his desk. Five doctors—Gunther, Raymond, Archer, Hsi, Rein. He didn’t know which one of them had examined the Prior baby, nor did he care to find out. All five would have to be transferred.

Meticulously, he took up his stylus and pad again, and plotted a destination for each:

He nodded. That was optimum dissemination; he would put through notice of the transfers later in the day, and by nightfall the men would be on their way to their new scenes of operation. Perhaps they would never understand why they had been uprooted and sent away from New York.

The new transcripts arrived. Impatiently Walton checked through them.

In the June tenth transcript, item seventy-one dealt with smallpox statistics for North America 1822-68, and item seventy-two with the tally of antihistamine supply for requisitions for Clinic Three. There was no sign of any of Walton’s requests. They had vanished from the record as completely as if they had never been.

Walton searched carefully through the June eleventh transcript for any mention of his deletion order. No, that hadn’t been recorded either.

He smiled, his first honest smile since FitzMaugham’s assassination. Now, with the computer records erased, the director dead, and the doctors on their way elsewhere, only Fred stood in the way of his chance of escaping punishment for the Prior business.

He decided he’d have to take his chances with Fred. Perhaps brotherly love would seal his lips after all.