The Penultimate Truth

15

From the mangled, badly distributed chunks that once had been high buildings, streets, the intricate, strong structures of a major city, four men rose to intercept Nicholas St. James. "How come," the first of them said, and all were bearded, ragged, but evidently healthy, "no leadies detected you?"

Utterly weary, Nicholas stood for a time and then he seated himself on a broken stone, fished futilely in his coat pocket for a cigarette-- the pack had been ripped away by the leady--and then said, "Two did. When I broke through. They must have picked up the vibrations of the scoop."

"They're very sensitive to that," the leader of the group agreed. "To any machinery. And any radio signals, if you for instance--"

"I was. An intercom to below. They recorded the whole thing."

"Why'd they let you go?"

"They were destroyed," Nicholas said.

"Your fellow tankers came up after you and got them. That's what we did: there were five of us originally, and they got the first one up. They weren't killing him; they were going to drag him off to one of those--you wouldn't know. Runcible's conapts. Those prisons." He eyed Nicholas. "But we got them from behind. Only, they killed that first man, or actually what happened was he got killed when we fired on the leadies. I guess it was our fault." The man paused. "My name's Jack Blair."

One of the other bearded men said, "What tank are you from?"

"The Tom Mix," Nicholas said.

"And that's near here?"

"Four hours' walk." He was silent. They, too, seemed not to know what to say; it was awkward, and all of them stared at the ground and then at last Nicholas said, "The two leadies who had me were destroyed by Talbot Yancy."

The bearded men stared at him fixedly. Unwinkingly.

"It's god's truth," Nicholas said. "I know it's hard to believe, but I saw him. He hadn't intended to come out; he didn't want to, but I got him to. I got a good close look at him. There was no doubt." Around him the four bearded men continued to stare. "How could I not recognize him?" Nicholas said, then. "I've seen him on TV for fifteen years, three or four and even five nights a week."

After a time Jack Blair said, "But--the thing is, there is no Talbot Yancy."

One of the other men spoke up, explaining. "See, what it is, is that it's a fake; you know?"

"What is?" Nicholas said, and yet he did know; he sensed the enormity of it in a flash: a fake so vast that it could not even be described. It truly beggared description; it was hopeless for these men to try and he was going to have to see, to experience it, for himself.

Jack Blair said, "What you're looking at on your TV screen every night, down there in--what'd you say? The Tom Mix?--down in your tank, what you call 'Yancy,' the Protector, that's a robot."

"Not even a robot," one of the other bearded men corrected. "Not even independent, or what they call intrinsic or homeo; it's just a dummy that sits there at that desk."

"But it talks," Nicholas said, reasonably. "It says heroic things. I mean, I'm not arguing with you. I just don't understand."

"It talks," Jack Blair said, "because a big computer called Megavac 6-V or something like that programs it."

"Who programs the computer?" Nicholas asked presently. The whole conversation had a slow, dreamlike, heavy quality to it, as if they were trying to talk under water; as if a great weight filled them all. "Someone," he said, "would have to feed those speeches to it; the computer didn't--"

"They have a lot of trained guys," Jack Blair said. "Yance-men, they're called. The Yance-men who are idea men, they write the speeches and feed them to Megavac 6-V and it does something to the words, adds the right intonations and gestures for the dummy to do. So it looks authentic. And it all goes on tape, and it's reviewed in Geneva by the top Yance-man who runs it all, a jerk named Brose. And when he approves the tape then it's put over the coaxial cable and transmitted to all the ant tanks in Wes-Dem."

One of the other men added, "There's one in Russia, too."

Nicholas said, "But the war."

"It's been over for years," Jack Blair said.

Nodding, Nicholas said, "I see."

"They share film studios in Moscow," Blair said. "Just like they share the New York Agency. Some talented Commie producer named Eisenbludt; he stages all the scenes of destruct you see on your TV screen. Usually it's in mm--done in scale. Sometimes, though, it's life-size. Like when they show leadies fighting. He does a good job. I mean, its convincing; I remember and sometimes, when the TV set we have up here is working, we manage to catch it. We were fooled, too, when we were below. He, that Eisenbludt, and all the Yancemen; they've fooled everybody almost, except sometimes tankers do come up anyhow. Like you did."

Nicholas said, "But I didn't come up because I guessed." Carol began to, he said to himself; Carol was right. She's smarter than I am; _she knew_. "Is all the world like this?" He gestured at the ruins of Cheyenne around them. "Radioactive? Just rubble?"

"Oh hell no," Blair said agitatedly. "This is a hot-spot; there now aren't very many left. The rest is a park. They've made the world into a great park and it's split up into their demesnes, their estates; they, the Yance-men--they each have entourages of leadies. Like Medieval kings. It's sort of interesting." His voice died away. "But I mean, it's not fair. At least I don't think so."

The other bearded men nodded vigorously; they agreed. It was not fair. No doubt of that.

Nicholas said, "How do you people live?" He pointed at the four of them. "Where do you get food?" And then he thought of something else. "Are there more of you?"

"In our bunch there's two hundred ex-tankers," Blair said. "Living here in the ruins of Cheyenne. We're all supposed to be in prisons, in huge condominium apartment buildings that this guy I mentioned named Runcible builds; they're not bad, not like the tanks--I mean, you don't feel like a rat trapped in a tin box. But we want--" He gestured. "I can't explain it."

"We want to be able to come and go," one of the other bearded men explained. "But actually we can't, living this way. We can't risk leaving the Cheyenne area, because then leadies would catch us."

"Why don't they come here?" Nicholas said.

"They do," Blair said, "but they sort of don't--try very hard; you know what I mean? They just go through the motions. Because see, this is part of a new demesne that's being formed; the villa, the building, isn't finished yet or anything, and it's still hot. But a Yance-man has moved in here, taking a chance. Trying to live, and if he does, if the r.a. fails to kill him, then this is his; it becomes his demesne and he's the dominus."

Nicholas said, "David Lantano."

"Right." Blair stared at him oddly. "How'd you know?"

"It was two of his leadies," Nicholas said, "that hooked me."

"And they were going to _kill_ you?"

He nodded.

The four bearded men exchanged apprehensive, disconcerted glances. "Was Lantano at his villa? Did he okay it?"

"No," Nicholas said. "They tried to contact him but they weren't able to. So they decided on their own."

"The dumb saps," Blair said, and cursed. "Lantano wouldn't have let them; I'm positive. He'd have been sore. But they were built to kill; I mean, a lot of leadies are veterans of the war: they have the reflex to destroy life. Unless their dominus tells them otherwise. But you're lucky to get away; that's dreadful--I mean, that gets me. It does."

"But," one of the other men said, "what he said about Yancy; how can that be?"

"I saw him," Nicholas repeated. "I know it was him."

Jack Blair said, quoting an obscure text, " 'I saw God. Do you doubt it? Do you dare to doubt it?' What kind of weapon did he, this guy who saved you, use? A laser pistol?"

"No. The leadies were pulverized. Into dust." He tried to make it clear, how violent and sudden an abolition of the two leadies it had been. "Just mounds," he said. "Of old dry flakes, like rust. Does that make any sense?"

"That's a Yance-man advanced type weapon, all right," Blair said, nodding slowly. "So it was a Yance-man who saved you; no extankers have that weapon; I don't even know what it's called but it's left over from the war I suppose--they've got a lot, and every now and then a couple of Yance-men who're neighbors get into a beef over the property line, you know, where one's land ends and the next guy's starts. And they make a dive for the open section of the weapons archives at the Agency in New York--that's where all that reading matter is put together--and they come flying back to their demesnes as fast as hell aboard those little flapples. And they lead their retinues of leadies into battle; it's really funny--they plug away at each other, potshot like mad, destroy a dozen or so leadies or maim them, and even a Yance-man now and then gets it. And then they send the maimed leady down below to the nearest tank to fix it up in its shops. And they're always sequestering the brand-new leadies made down below, to add to their retinues."

Another of the bearded men chimed in, "Some Yance-men at their demesnes have like two thousand leadies. A whole army."

"Brose for instance," Blair said, "he's supposed to have ten or eleven thousand, but technically _all_ the leadies in Wes-Dem are under the military command of General Holt; he can pre-empt, you know: supersede the orders of any Yance-man, any dominus of a demesne, and call for its leadies. Except of course Brose." His voice sank. "No one can supersede Brose. Brose is above them all, like for instance he's the only one who has access to the weapons archives where the advanced types, the ones that never saw action, the really terrible prototypes are, that if they had used there'd be no planet. The war just barely stopped in time. Another month and--nothing." He gestured.

"I wish," Nicholas said, "I had a cigarette."

The four bearded men consulted, and then, reluctantly, a pack of Lucky Strikes was held out to Nicholas; he carefully took only one of the cigarettes, let them regain the remainder of the precious pack.

"We're short on everything," Blair said apologetically as he lit Nicholas' cigarette for him. "See, this new dominus who's starting his demesne here, this David Lantano; he's not a bad guy. He sort of, like I said, holds his leadies back, when he's around to do it, so they don't wipe us out or get us into one of those conapts; he sort of looks out for us. He gives us food." Blair was silent for a time, then; his expression, to Nicholas, was unreadable. "And cigarettes. Yeah, he's really trying to help us. And pills; he personally drops by with anti-radiation pills; they help restore the red blood cells or something. He takes them himself. I mean, he really has to."

"He's sick," another bearded ex-tanker added. "He's badly burned; see, the law requires he's got to be here on the hot-spot twelve hours out of every twenty-four; he can't get down subsurface into cellars like we can; we stay below--we just came up because we spotted you."

To Blair he said, nervously, "In fact we better get back to the hovel right now. We've been exposed long enough for one day." He gestured at Nicholas. "And him, especially; he's been walking on the surface for hours."

"You're going to take me in?" Nicholas said. "I can live with you fellas; is that what I'm to understand?"

"Sure." Blair nodded. "That's how our colony formed, here; you think we're going to boot you out? Why would we?" He seemed genuinely angry. "For some leady to kill, or--" He broke off. "Some charity that would be. You're welcome to stay here all you want. Later, after you know more, if you want to turn yourself in, you can go live in a conapt; must be hundreds of thousands of ex-tankers in those conapts--that's up to you entirely. But _wait_. Get your bearings." He started off along a meager trail among the rubble, a sort of goat path; the others, including Nicholas, followed single file. "It takes weeks sometimes," Blair said, over his shoulder, "to really sober up, to shake off what you've been fed over what they call the 'coax' for fifteen years." Pausing, halting for a moment and turning, he said earnestly, "Intellectually maybe you accept it, but I know; emotionally you can't right away, it's just too much. There's no Yancy and never was--_never_ was, Mr. St. Nicholas--"

"No," Nicholas corrected. "Nicholas St. James."

"There never was a Yancy. There _was_ a war, though, anyhow, at first; as you can see." He gestured at the miles of ruins ahead of them. At Cheyenne. "But Yancy was made up by Stanton Brose, based on an idea of a West German film producer of the last century; you probably have heard of him, only he died before your time, but they still were showing his documentary, _The Winning in the West_, that twenty-five part series on TV about World War Two. I remember it when I was a kid."

"Gottleib Fischer," Nicholas said. "Sure." He had seen that great classic documentary, not once but several times; it was considered in the same category with _The Blue Angel_ and _All Quiet On the Western Front_ and _The Dizzy Man_. "And he made up Yancy? Gottleib Fischer?" He followed the four of them, eager and anxious; perplexed. "But why?"

"To rule," Blair said, without stopping; the four of them hurried, now, eager to get back down into what they called their hovel, their deep-chamber which had not been contaminated by the H-bombs that had made this region what it was.

"'Rule,'" Nicholas echoed, understanding. "I see."

"Only as you maybe remember, Fischer disappeared on that illfated flight to Venus; he was eager to be one of the first travelers into space, he just had to go, and that was that, because--"

"I remember," Nicholas said. The event had made huge headlines in the homeopapes at the time. Gottlieb Fischer's untimely tragic death; his spaceship's fuel igniting during reentry... Fischer had died in his late thirties, and so there had been no more documentaries, no more films equal to _The Winning in the West_. After that only nonentities had followed, except, slightly before the war, the interesting experimental films of some Russian, a Soviet film producer whose work had been banned from Wes-Dem... what had been his name?

As he struggled to keep up with the swiftly moving bearded men, Nicholas remembered the Russian film producer's name. Eisenbludt. The man Blair had just now said did the faking of the war scenes for the tankers, in both Wes-Dem and Pac-Peop, the visual "confirmation" of the lies that comprised Yancy's speeches. So at last the people of Wes-Dem had gotten to see Eisenbludt's films.

Obviously there was no more hostility between East and West. Eisenbludt was no longer an "enemy" film producer as he had been at the time Nicholas St. James and his wife Rita and his kid brother Stu had been prodded virtually at gun-point into descending into the Tom Mix for what they had believed, at the time, to be for perhaps a year at the longest... or, as real pessimists had forecast, two years.

Fifteen. And out of that fifteen--

"Tell me exactly," Nicholas said, "when the war ended. How many years ago?"

"It's going to make you hurt," Blair said.

"Say. Anyhow."

Blair nodded. "Thirteen years ago. The war lasted only two years on Earth, after the first one year on Mars. So-thirteen years you've been snow-jobbed, Nicholas, or whatever you said; sorry, I forgot again. Nick. How's that: Nick."

"Fine," Nicholas murmured, and thought of Carol and Rita and old Maury Souza and Stu and all the others, Jorgenson and Flanders and Haller, Giller and Christenson, Peterson and Grandi and Martino and on and on, even to Dale Nunes; even to the Tom Mix's pol-com. Did Nunes know? Nicholas thought. If Nunes knows, I swear; I affirm; I will in god's name kill him--I will do it with my hands so as to feel it, and nothing will stop me. But it was impossible, because Commissioner Nunes had been shut up there with them. But--not for all that time. Only for--

Nunes had known. He had only a few years ago descended the chute, from the "Estes Park Government," from Yancy.

"Listen, Mr. James," one of the bearded men said, "I was wondering; if you didn't guess, then what'd you come up for? I mean, you'd expect to find nothing but the war, and they tell you on TV--boy, how I remember--they'd shoot you on sight--"

"And that's what practically happened to him," Blair said.

"--because of the Bag Plague and the Stink of Shrink, neither of which exists in reality; that's another fink snow-job they made up, those two bacterial plagues, although there really was that hideous nerve gas we invented, that New Jersey Chemical Corporation or whatever its name was; a Soviet missile got it, I'm glad to say, right off, including everyone in it. But it's radioactive in this spot, although the rest of the surface--"

"I came up," Nicholas said, "to buy an artificial pancreas. An artiforg. From the blackmarket."

"There aren't any," Blair said.

Nicholas said, "I'm prepared to--"

"There aren't any! Nowhere! Even the Yance-men can't get them; Brose has them attached; he owns them all, legally." Blair turned, his face wild with rage; distorted like a handpuppet writhing from the twisting fingers contained within. "All for Brose, who's eighty-two or -three and's full of artiforgs, all but the brain. The company's gone and now nobody knows how to make them; we're degenerate, I mean, that's what war does. The Yance-men tried, but they didn't work, grafted in, for more than a month or so. A lot of very specialized techniques depending on what they call 'highly sophisticated' equipment, you know, delicate tools and all--I mean, it was a _real war_ while it lasted; don't forget that. The Yance-men have their demesnes, and you guys down below make leadies for them, and they fly around in their goddam little flapples, the Agency in New York cranks out speeches and Megavac 6-V is kept functioning but--sheoot." He gave up, walked on in silence.

Nicholas said presently, "I've got to get the pancreas."

"You'll never get it," Blair said.

"Then," he said, "I've got to get back to the Tom Mix and tell them. They can come up; they can forget the quota and the threat of having the tank abolished."

"Sure they can come up. And be prisoners above ground. It's better; I agree. Runcible is starting a whole new constellation of conapts in the Southern Utah region; see, we hear a lot of news because David Lantano gave us a wide-band radio receiver, just aud, not vid, but we pick up the stuff that's transmitted not to the ant tanks but like between demesnes; they're always blabbing away to each other in the evening because they're lonely. Just maybe one guy in his fifty-thousand-acre demesne with his leadies."

"No families?" Nicholas said. "No children?"

"They're most of them sterile," Blair said. "See, they were on the surface during the war, remember. Mostly at the Air Arm Academy at Estes Park. And they lived; they were the elite of the U.S., the young Air Arm cadets. But--they can't reproduce. So in a way they paid. Real high. For what they've got. For having been the elite cadets in that great bomb-proof structure in the Rockies."

"We paid, too," Nicholas said. "And look what _we_ got."

"You wait a while," Blair said. "Think it over about trying to get back to your ant tank to tell them. Because the way the system up here is run--"

"They'd be better off," one of his bearded compatriots put in, defiantly. "You've forgotten what it's like down there; you're getting senile like old Brose. Runcible's made sure they're better off; he's a darn good construction man, they have ping-pong and swimming pools and wall-to-wall carpet of that funny plastic imitation--"

"Then how come," Blair said, "you're squatting here in these ruins instead of lounging at a swimming pooi in one of those conapt constellations?"

The man grunted, gestured. "I just--like to be free."

No one commented; it did not require it.

But another topic did seem to require additional comment, and Blair, musingly, supplied it. To Nicholas he said, "I just don't get it. Nick. How could Talbot Yancy have rescued you if Talbot Yancy doesn't exist?"

Nicholas said nothing. He was too weary to speak.

And anyhow he did not know.