The Penultimate Truth

11

A sensitive rugged little device, operating on a sonarlike principle and attached to his suit, a sort of geologic version of what a submarine might employ, told Nicholas St. James as he labored away with the undersized portable scoop that he had toiled at last to within a yard of the surface.

He ceased work, trying to become at least temporarily calm. Because, he realized, in approximately fifteen minutes from now I will break through and then I will be stalked.

It hardly appealed to him, this instinctive knowledge that very quickly now he would become a quarry.

Something artificial and complicated, with thousands of accurate miniaturized components, with feedback and backup systems, with percept-extensors, power sources that were self-contained and virtually eternal, and, worst of all, tropisms that involved the essential quality of life: the factor called _warmth_.

The unhappy fact was simply this: that by being alive he attracted attention; this was the reality of the surface of Earth, and he had to be prepared for it, because he was going to have to enter into a dodge, a flight. He could not fight. There was no way to win. Either he evaded or he died. And the evasion must begin the instant he broke through, and, here in the stuffy darkness of the narrow tunnel, as he breathed canned air and clung insectlike to the spikes driven into the tunnel side itself, he thought that perhaps it's already too late.

Perhaps already, even before he broke through, he had been detected. The vibrations of his little overworked heated-up, about-to-give-out portable scoop. Or his breathing. Or--and always to this, the grotesque basic malign misuse of the basis of life--his body-heat might have triggered off an autonomic mine (he had seen them on TV) and the mine would already have detached itself from the spot at which it had screwed itself in until it had become invisible... detached itself and was now crawling over the rubble that littered Earth's surface like the bad remains of some dirty, gigantic, psychopathic, everybody-stewedand-falling-down all-night party. Crawling so that it would intersect, meet him at the locus, the exact point, at which he broke through. Utter perfection, he thought, in the synchronization of time and space as coordinates between himself and it. Between what he was doing and what _it_ was doing.

He knew it was there. Had known, really, from the moment he entered the tunnel and was, from below, at once sealed in. "You activists," he said, "you committee people; you ought to be here now."

His oxygen mask stifled his voice; it scarcely reached his own ears; he experienced it as a vibration transmitted through his facial bones. _I wish Dale Nunes had stopped me, he thought. How could I know, he thought, that I could be this afraid?_

This must be the neurological spring that sets psychotic paranoia going, he reflected. The acute, unpleasant awareness of being watched. It was, he decided, the most ugly feeling he had ever had; even the fear component was minor; the sense of conspicuousness itself was the overwhelming factor, the unbearable part.

He started up the scoop; it groaned, once more began to dig; dirt and rock gave way above him, and pulverized, burned, converted into energy or whatever the scoop did--a waste product like fine ash filtered from the posterior of the scoop, nothing more. Its mechanical metabolism had used up the rest, and so the tunnel did not simply fill behind him.

Therefore--he could turn back.

But he didn't. He went on.

Whining, the insignificantly sized speaker of his intercom to the committee in the Tom Mix ant tank below said, "Hey, President St. James; are you okay? We've been waiting an hour and you haven't said a word."

He said, "The only word I have to say," and then he shut up; why say it? They had heard the word before and anyhow they already knew how he felt. And anyhow--I am their elected President, he realized, and elected Presidents, even of subsurface ant tanks, don't officially use words like that. He scooped on. The intercom was silent; they had gotten the message.

Ten minutes later light flashed down at him; a mass of dirt, roots and stones tumbled into his face, and although his goggles and mask, in fact his entire helmet-structure protected him, he cringed. Sunlight. Horrible and gray and so sharp that he felt urgent hatred at it; he clawed upward, trying to lacerate it as if it were an eye, an eye that would never close. Sunlight. The diurnal, nocturnal cycle again, after fifteen years. If I could pray, he thought, I would. Pray, I suppose, that the sight of this, one of the oldest of gods, the solar deity, is not the forerunner of death; that I will live long enough to see this rhythm of day and night, not just one scalding, paltry glance.

"I'm through," he said into the intercom.

There was no answer. Either the battery had at last run down--but his helmet light still shone, although minutely, now, in the presence of the overhead midday sky. He shook the intercom savagely; all at once it seemed more important to find his way back to contact with the tank below than to go on--my god, he thought, my wife and my brother, my people; _I'm cut off_.

The urge to scramble back down; it was panic; it made him struggle beetlelike: he tossed dirt and stones up onto the surface and sent others raining down--he tore himself loose from the tunnel, scrabbled and clutched at the clammy, flat earth which was surface earth; horizontal, with no end. And he lay on it, fully, all parts of him pressed down as if he meant to imprint his form; I will leave an impression, he thought wildly. A dent the size of a human; it'll never go away, even if Ido.

Opening his eyes he looked north--it was easy to tell north; he found it indicated in the rocks and grass, the dry, brown, desperately sick tufts of weedy grass under and around him; the polar field drew everything, rotated all life toward itself--and then he looked up and was amazed that the sky appeared so gray, not blue at all. Dust, he decided. From, of course, the war; the particles have never completely settled. He felt disappointed.

But the ground. Something alive staggered over his hand; it was a chitinous life form which he admired anyhow, just in his memory and knowledge of it. The ant held some small white particle in its mandibles and he watched it go; they were not bright, as a race, but at least they didn't give up. And--they had stayed up here; fifteen years ago they hadn't run: they had faced the Dies Irae, the Day of Wrath, and were still here. As witness this sample, this representative; he had, in it, seen not one ant but all ants, and eternally, as if it had staggered by him outside of time.

His intercom sputtered on, then. "Hey, President St. James! Are you through?" Jabbering excitement, contained in the miniscule apparatus.

"I'm through."

"Start telling; talk to us about it."

"First of all," he said, "the sky is gray because of the suspension of particles. That's sort of disappointing."

"Yeah, that's a shame!" They scuffled, hovered, at the other end.

Nicholas said, "I can't make out much. The ruins of Cheyenne are to my right; I see a couple of buildings still standing, but otherwise it's pretty bad. It's a long way off, the ruins; on the horizon. Closer to me are boulders. Actually--" It could be worse, and he was puzzled. Because far off he saw what appeared to be trees. "According to TV," he said, "there should be that big military base just across the Nebraska border; as we had planned I'll start northeast and hope--"

"Don't forget," the speaker rattled excitedly, "that according to all the rumors the blackmarket guys are supposed to be living in city ruins, in cellars and old H-bomb shelters. So if it doesn't look promising northeast head up directly north toward the remains of Cheyenne and see if you can contact someone there. I mean, there ought to be a lot of real deep cellars in a big city like that; a lot of local protection you know, on an individual basis, for one or two fellas here and there. And I mean, don't forget; they know how to keep away from the leadies; they'd have to. Right? Can you hear me?"

Nicholas said, "I hear you. All right; I'll--"

"And you have that box of hot-foil scatter particles to throw the thermotropic killing machines off; right? And the pellets for the constructs that are iserntropic--start flinging them around as you go. Ha-ha. Hansel and Gretel; right? Only you _want_ the breadcrumbs eaten up."

He got warily, unsteadily to his feet.

And then they had him. He heard them move; released by his change of position they came and he turned with the meager weapon provided him by the smart shop boys from the tank. The first leady soared up as if helium-filled and utterly weightless, so that the beam of his handmade laser pistol passed beneath it; the leady was an old pro and it descended, spiraled so that it was slightly behind him as the other, bent over centipedelike, traveling at enormous speed directly at him, extended something which he could not make out: it was not firing at him, it was trying to nip him. He backed away, fired the miserable handmade laser pistol once more, uselessly, saw a portion of the leady's anatomy go, and then the other one, behind him, hooked him. The hook, he thought, of termination; the hook dragged him and he bounced over the rocks and tufts of weeds, as if caught by a vehicle that would not stop. He tried to disengage the hook; it had his suit and some of the flesh of his upper back and clearly the leady knew that he was helpless; he could not even turn over.

And then he understood why. What they were doing.

They were dragging him away from the tunnel as fast as possible; first, the leady which had gaffed him from behind, and the other, although no longer intact, which was still managing to fill in the tunnel entrance, sealing it; the leady turned some sort of beam on the ground, and the soil and rocks and tufts of weeds bubbled, boiled; steam rose and the entrance was gone, disfigured and obliterated. And then the dragging ceased. The leady halted, shoved him upright, knocked the intercom from his hand and crunched it with its pedal extremity. Systematically, the leady tore everything from him, gun, helmet, mask, oxygen tank, spaceman's suit--it ripped and shredded until, satisfied, it came to a halt. Stopped.

"You're Soviet leadies?" Nicholas said, then, gasping. Obviously they were. Wes-Dem leadies would hardly--

And then he saw stamped on the frame of the leady closest to him, not Cyrillic script, not Russian words, but English. Clearly enameled words, done with a stencil and one swipe of a wide brush--but not done in a tank subsurface; this had been added later, when the leady had risen to the surface by chute. Perhaps it had even been made in the Tom Mix, but that was over, changed, because the weird enameled notice read:

PROPERTY OF DAVID LANTANO

AGENCY IDENT 3-567-587-1

IF RETURNED NO QUESTIONS ASKED

BUT CONDITION MUST VARY BETWEEN

GOOD AND EXCELLENT