The Penultimate Truth

26

With his cumbersome human and leady entourage surrounding him, Joseph Adams left the living room of the villa; Foote and Lantano followed, the two of them together.

"Did Brose program the macher?" Foote said to the dark young man--young now, but as he had seen on the animated sequences of the satellite-obtained photographic record, capable of or victim of an oscillation into any section of his life track.

Lantano said, "Since the machine came equipped with the Alphawave pattern of--"

"Which can be obtained by any Yance-man from any of the three major computers," Foote said, in a voice that did not carry to Joseph Adams, who was insulated by the clankings of his entourage. "And Lantano, let's face it; _you know that_. Are you responsible for Lindblom's death? I'd like to know before we go into this."

"Is it important? Does it really make a difference?"

Foote said, "Yes. But I'll go ahead anyhow." Because of the danger of not going ahead, the menace to their lives; the moral issue had no bearing, not at this late point. Not since he had installed the aud-vid bug. If ever anyone became the victim of his own professional ingenuity...

"I programmed the macher," Lantano said, then.

"Why? What had Lindblom done?"

"Nothing. In fact I was deeply in his debt, since through him I obtained the time travel rig; I wouldn't be here now without him. And before him I--" The most brief, short-lingering hesitation. "I killed Hig."

"Why?"

"Hig I killed," Lantano said matter-of-factly, "to stop the special project. To save Runcible. So the special project would misfire. Which it did."

"But why Lindblom? Hig I can understand. But--" He gestured.

Lantano said, "For this. To indict Brose. To provide delineation that would convince Adams that Brose had killed his best friend, the only friend, as near as I can make out, that Adams had left in the world. I expected the macher to escape; I didn't think Lindblom's leadies were that efficient, had been trained to move that fast. Evidently Lindblom suspected something, but perhaps from some other quarter."

"And what does this accomplish, this death?"

"It forces Adams to act. Brose is wary; Brose, without having a rational, conscious reason, distrusts me and avoids me. _Brose has never come within weapons distance of me, will never_; I couldn't have reached him alone, by myself, without Adams' help. I've looked ahead; I know. Brose either dies tomorrow morning when he visits Adams' office--which is one of the few places Brose will go--or Brose continues on, if you can accept and believe this, _another twenty years_."

"In that case," Foote said, "you did the proper thing." If this was true. And no way existed by which he could check. Twenty years. Until Brose was one-hundred-and-two years old. A nightmare, Foote said to himself. And we are not out of it yet; we still must awake.

"What Adams does not know," Lantano said, "will never find out, is a deplorable fact that should never have come into existence. Lindblom, up to the time of his death, was agonizing over a decision. Had actually reached a decision; he was finally prepared to report on Adams' moral reservations toward the special project. He knew that Adams was on the verge of leaking enough information to Louis Runcible to keep Runcible from being gaffed, from falling onto the hook; Runcible would have, based on Adam's tip, made the archeological finds public. He would have lost his Utah land, but not his overall economic syndrome. Nor his political freedom. Lindblom--he was loyal, when it came down to it, to the Agency. To Brose. Not to his friend. I have seen this, Foote; believe me. Within the next day Lindblom would go through channels--and he knew exactly how, exactly which mediatory agency to make use of--to approach Brose at his _Festung_ in Geneva, and Adams himself was afraid of this; he knew that Lindblom held his life in his hands... Adams' life. Due to Adams' rather unusual--among Yance-men--higher inclinations, his scruples. His awareness of the evil underlying the special project from start to finish." He was silent as Joseph Adams, in his overloaded commercial model flapple, managed to get off the ground, to depart into the night sky.

Foote said, "If it had been me I wouldn't have done it. Killed Hig or Lindblom. Anybody." In his business he had seen enough of killing.

"But," Lantano said, "you are willing to participate in this now. In Brose's death. So even you, at a point, feel--recognize--that no other resource can be turned to, except the ultimate one. I've lived six hundred years, Foote; I know when it is and isn't necessary to kill."

Yes, Foote thought. Evidently you do.

But where, he wondered, does this sequence terminate? Will Brose be the last? There's no guarantee extended, here.

His intuition told him that there would be more. Once this sort of thinking, this method of problem solving, began it tended to develop its own momentum. Lantano--or Talbot Yancy as he would soon be calling himself, and not, evidently, for the first time--had worked centuries to achieve this. Obviously after Brose might come Runcible or Adams and, as he had thought from the start of this, himself. Whoever, as Lantano had put it, was "necessary."

A favorite word, Foote reflected, of those driven by a yearning for power. The only necessity was an internal one, that of fulfilling their drives. Brose had it; Lantano had it; countless little Yance-men and would-be Yance-men had it; hundreds if not thousands of pol-coms down in the ant tanks below, Foote realized, are ruling as true tyrants, through their link with the surface, through their possession of the _gnosis_, the secret knowledge of the actual state of affairs that obtain here.

But with this particular man the drive spans centuries.

Who, then, Foote asked himself as he followed Lantano toward a parked and waiting express flapple, is the greater menace? Six-hundredyear-old Lantano/Yancy/Running Red Feather or whatever his original Cherokee name was, who in the dotage stage of his cycle will become what is now merely a synthetic dummy based on him, bolted to an oak desk--a dummy which, and this will convulse a fairly extensive number of Agency people, of demesne domini, all at once will be- come ambulatory and real... this, or the rule by an aging, genuinely senile monstrosity who hides out in Geneva, blubbering over with plans to heighten and strengthen the dikes which support his existence-- how can a sane man choose between these and still stay sane? We are cursed as a race, all right, Foote said to himself; Genesis is right. If this is the decision we are stuck with; if there are no choices but this, in which we must all become instruments of one or the other, units which either Lantano or Stanton Brose picks up and moves about, according to the direction of his grand design.

But is this all? Foote asked himself as, reflexively, he entered the flapple, seated himself beside Lantano, who at once started up the engine; the flapple rose into the gloom, leaving the hot-spot of Cheyenne behind, and the half-completed villa with its glowing lights... which, no doubt, would after all see completion.

"The assembly," Lantano said, "which constitutes the weapon, is in the back seat. Carefully packaged in its original autofac carton."

Foote said, "Then you knew what I would choose."

"Time travel," Lantano said, "is valuable." That was the extent of his laconic reply; they flew on in silence.

There is a third choice, Foote said to himself. A third person, of enormous power, who is not a unit moved about by Lantano and not by Stanton Brose either. In his Capetown resort villa, sunning himself in his vine-walled villa patio, lies Louis Runcible, and if we are out to locate sane men and sane decisions we may find both there in Capetown.

"I'll go through with it, as I said," Foote said aloud. "The setting up of the weapon assembly in Adams' office in New York." _And then_, he decided, _I'm heading for Capetown. For Louis Runcible_.

_l'm physically sick_, he realized, _made so by the aura of "necessity" that surrounds this man beside me-an order of political and moral reality which I'm too simple to fathom; after all, I've lived only forty-two years. Not six hundred._

_And as soon as I've arrived safely in Capetown_, Foote said to himself, _I will get my ear up against news transmitters of every kind, waiting without break, without interruption, to hear, out of New York, that Stanton Brose, fat and putty-like and senile-cunning, is dead--if the coup from within the Agency itself by its youngest (good god, six hundred years was young?) brightest idea man, speech writer, has been successful._

_After that perhaps I--and, hopefully, Louis Runcible, if we can make a deal--will have some idea of what to do. Will see our "necessity."_

Because at the moment, lord knew, he did not.

Aloud he said, "You personally are ready, the moment Brose is dead, to claim, before the Recon Dis-In Council, to constitute the sole legitimate governing body? The planetwide Protector, outranking General Holt here in Wes-Dem and Marshal--"

"Doesn't every one of the several hundreds of millions of tankers know that? Hasn't the Protector's supreme authority been established for years back?"

"And the leadies," Foote said. "They'll obey you? Not Holt or Harenzany? If it comes to that?"

"What you are overlooking is this: my legal access to the simulacrum, that _thing_ at the oak desk; I program it--I feed reading matter to it by way of Megavac 6-V. So I've in a sense begun to make the transition already; I will simply blend with it, not by an abrupt abolition of it, but by--" Lantano gestured spasmodically. "The word is--_fusion_."

Foote said, "You won't enjoy it, being bolted to that desk."

"I think that part can happily be eliminated. Yancy may in fact begin visiting representative ant tanks. As Churchill did the bombedout areas of England in World War Two. Gottlieb Fischer did not have to counterfeit _those_ sequences."

"Did you, in your centuries of past life, limit your public appearance to one faked scene in Gottlieb Fischer's documentary? One impersonation of an American general of World War Two? Or--" And his extrasensory insight was keen, now; it had sniffed something into the light. "Did you at one or more times already hold power-- power to some extent... not like this, not that of the planetwide supreme Protector--"

"I have to some extent been active. On a number of occasions. There is an evolutionary, historic continuity of my role."

"Any name I would recognize?"

The man beside him said, "Yes. Several." He did not amplify, and it was obvious that he was not going to; he remained silent as the express flapple flew above the unlit surface of Earth, toward New York City.

"Not too long ago," Foote said cautiously, not really expecting to obtain an answer to this direct query, "some of my better interrogators, working with tankers who had bored through to the surface, extracted the--to me--fascinating fact that a weak TV signal, not the normal one from Estes Park, carried by the coax, had elliptically alluded, shall we say, to certain irregularities in previous official, supposedly authentic--"

"There I erred," Lantano said.

"Then it was you." So now he knew the origin of that. Once more a hunch of his had proved correct.

"Yes, it was my mistake," Lantano said. "And I almost cost Runcible his free existence, which for him would have meant his physical life. It was obvious I had to stop--once I discovered that Brose blamed the splice and the transmission on Runcible. All I was really doing was to set up Runcible for extinction by Brose's agents. And I didn't want that. I removed the lash-up cut into one of the peripheral shielded coax cables--but I was too late. Brose had already in that weird, worn-out, crafty, infantile brain hatched up the special project. The gear teeth had begun to turn, and it was my--mine, all my--fault; I was obsessed by what I had initiated. And at that point--"

"You managed," Foote said tartly, "to impede it rather well."

"I had to; the responsibility was so clearly mine. I had transformed a latent suspicion on Brose's part into a crisis. Of course, it goes without saying, I couldn't come forth. So I started with Hig. That seemed the only way to approach it at that late date; the only way to handle it so that it came to a stop, a real stop-not just a temporary one."

"And without, as you say, exposing yourself."

Lantano said, "It was a difficult situation and dangerous, not only to Runcible--" He glanced at Foote. "But to me. And I did not intend to have that."

_God help me_, Foote thought, _to get away from this man. And out over the Atlantic in a flapple, alone, in contact with Runcible by vidphone, telling him I'm on my way._

_Suppose Runcible didn't listen_.

That anxiety-inducing thought, with every one of its ramifications, remained central in Foote's mind, all the way across the United States to the Agency buildings and the office of Joseph Adams in New York City.

The office was dark. Adams had not yet arrived.

"Naturally it'll take him a little while," Lantano said, "to get the Alpha-wave pattern." Nervously, looking--for him unusually--taut, he examined his wristwatch, checked the dial which gave New York time. "Maybe, we should get the Alpha-wave pattern from Megavac 6-V instead. You begin setting up the assembly." The two of them stood briefly in the hallway outside Adams' office at 580 Fifth Avenue. "Go on in while I get the pattern." Lantano started off, rapidly.

Foote said, "There's no way I can get in. Adams and Brose have, as far as I know, the only keys."

Staring at him, Lantano said, "Can't you--"

"My corporation," Foote said, "possesses tools to obviate any lock in the world, no matter how intricate or obstinate. But--" He had none with him; they were all in London or scattered at field stations around the world.

"Then we might as well just stand here and wait," Lantano said, not pleased at all, but accommodating himself to the fact; they had to have Adams, not only for the Alpha-pattern of Stanton Brose by which to render the weapon tropic but simply and literally to gain access to the premises, the office, which evidently fat, huge, aging Brose would enter bright and early in the morning, ahead of its owner. One of the few places outside of Geneva where he apparently felt safe. And Geneva itself was impossible; if they had to alter their plans and make a try at Brose there they were already finished.

They waited.

"Suppose," Foote said presently, "Adams changes his mind. And does not come."

Lantano glared at him. "He'll come." The black deep-set eyes were envenomed even at mention of the possibility.

"I'm waiting exactly fifeen more minutes," Foote said, with quiet dignity, unafraid of the furious dark eyes, "and then I'm getting out of here."

The two of them continued to wait, minute after minute.

And, as each minute ticked past, Foote thought, he's not coming; he's backed out. And if he's backed out we must assume he's contacted Geneva: we can't afford to make any other assumption than that we're waiting here for Brose's killers. Waiting in this hall for our deaths.

"The future," he said to Lantano, "it's a series of alternatives, is it? Some more probable than others?"

Lantano grunted.

"Do you foresee, as one alternative future, Adams informing Brose and saving himself at our expense?"

Lantano said, tightly, "Yes. But it's unlikely. About one chance in forty."

"I have my extrasensory hunch faculty," Foote said. And, he thought, it tells me that those are not the odds; the odds are far, far greater that we are trapped like pink-eared baby mice, floating, drowning, in a dish of honey. Served up for extermination. For greedy, lipsmacking consumption.

It was a very arduous, and, psychosomatically, very unfortunate wait.

And, despite what Lantano' s watch said, very long.

Foote wondered if he could endure it.

Could--or, in the face of Brose's ability to move his agents about rapidly from this place to that, would.