Dick, Philip K - The Penultimate Truth

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THE PENULTIMATE TRUTH

by Philip K. Dick

Cover art by Barclay Shaw

A Bluejay Book, published by arrangement with the Author's Estate.

For information, contact Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, New

York 10022.

means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage

or retrieval system, without the express written permission of the Publisher, except where

permitted by law. For information, contact Bluejay Books Inc., 130 West Forty-second Street, New

York, New York 10036.

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Bluejay printing, January 1984

For information about the Philip K. Dick Society, write to the Society at Box 611, Glen Ellen,

California 95442.

THE PENULTIMATE TRUTH

A fog can drift in from outside and get you; it can invade. At the long high window of his

library--an Ozymandiasian structure built from concrete chunks that had once in another age formed

an entrance ramp to the Bayshore Freeway--Joseph Adams pondered, watched the fog, that of the

Pacific. And because this was evening and the world was darkening, this fog scared him as much as

that other fog, the one inside which did not invade but stretched and stirred and filled the empty

portions of the body. Usually the latter fog is called loneliness.

"Fix me a drink," Colleen said plaintively from behind him.

"Your arm," he said, "it fell off? You can't squeeze the lemon?" He turned from the window

with its view of dead trees, the Pacific beyond and its layer in the sky, darkness hanging and

approaching, and for a moment actually considered fixing her the drink. And then he knew what he

had to do, where he had to be:

At the marble-top desk which had been salvaged from a bombed-out house in the Russian Hill

section of the former city of San Francisco he seated himself at the rhetorizor, touched its _on_-

tab.

Groaning, Colleen disappeared to search for a leady to fix her the drink. Joseph Adams, at

his desk and rhetorizor, heard her go and was glad. For some reason--but here he did not care to

probe his own mind too deeply--he was lonelier with Colleen Hackett than without her, and anyhow

late on Sunday night he fixed a dreadful drink; it was always too sweet, as if by mistake one of

his leadies had dug up a bottle of Tokay and he had used it, not dry vermouth, in the martinis.

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Ironically, left to themselves, the leadies never made that error . . . was this an omen? Joe

Adams wondered. Are they getting smarter than us?

At the keyboard of the rhetorizor he typed, carefully, the substantive he wanted.

_Squirrel_. Then, after a good two minutes of sluggish, deep thought, the limiting adjective

_smart_.

"Okay," he said, aloud, and sat back, touched the rerun tab.

The rhetorizor, as Colleen reentered the library with her tall gin drink, began to

construct for him in the auddimension. "It is a wise old squirrel," it said tinnily (it possessed

only a two-inch speaker), "and yet this little fellow's wisdom is not its own; nature has endowed

it--"

"Aw god," Joe Adams said savagely, and slapped off the sleek, steel and plastic machine

with all its many microcomponents; it became silent. He then noticed Colleen. "Sorry. But I'm

tired. Why can't they, Brose or General Holt or Marshal Harenzany, _somebody_ in a position of

responsibility, put Sunday night somewhere between Friday noon and--"

"Dear," Colleen said, and sighed. "I heard you type out only two semantic units. Give it

more to ogpon."

"I'll give it plenty to ogpon." He touched the _no_-tab, typed a whole sentence, as

Colleen stood behind him, sipping and watching. "Okay?"

"I just can never tell about you," Colleen said. "If you passionately love your job or

hate it." She read the sentence aloud. " 'The well-informed dead rat romped under the tongue-tied

pink log.'"

"Listen," he said grimly. "I want to see what this stupid assist that cost me fifteen

thousand Wes-Dem dollars is going to do with that. I'm serious; I'm waiting." He jabbed the rerun

tab of the machine.

"When's the speech due?" she asked.

"Tomorrow."

"Get up early."

"Oh no." He thought, I hate it even more when it's early.

The rhetorizor, in its cricket's voice, intoned folksily. "We think of rats, of course, as

our enemy. But consider their vast value to us in cancer research alone. The lowly rat has done

yeoman's service for huma--"

Again, at his savage instigation, it died into silence.

"--nity," Colleen said distantly; she was inspecting the authentic long-ago dug up Epstein

bust in the niche that divided the west wall shelves of books, where Joseph Adams kept his

reference texts on TV commercials of the last, past, great twentieth century, in particular the

religious and the Mars candy bar inspired creations of Stan Freberg. "A miserable metaphor," she

murmured. "A yeoman rat . . . yeomen were young villagers during the Medieval period, and I bet

even though you're such a pro you didn't know that." She nodded to a leady which had come to the

library door at her request. "Get my cloak and have my flapple brought to the main entrance." To

Joe she said, "I'm flapping back to my own villa." When he didn't answer she said, "Joe, try it,

the entire speech, without that assist; write it in your own words. And then you won't have

'yeoman rats' to make you so cross."

He thought, I don't think honestly I could do it, in my own words, without this machine;

I'm hooked on it now.

Outside, the fog had managed a complete success; he saw, with one brief sideways glance,

that it inhabited the world right to the window of his library. Well, he thought, anyhow we're

spared another one of those brilliant, radioactive-particles-in-suspension-for-all-eternity

sunsets.

"Your flapple, Miss Hackett," the leady announced, "is at the main entrance and I hear by

remote that your type II chauffeur holds the door open for you. And due to the evening vapors one

of Mr. Adams' household servants will shed warm air about you until you are tucked safely inside."

"Jeez," Joseph Adams said, and shook his head.

Colleen said, "You teached it, dear. It got its precious jargony linguistic habits

straight out of you."

"Because," he said bitterly, "I like style and pomp and ritual." Turning to her,

appealing, he said, "Brose told me in a memo, it showed up at the Agency directly from his own

bureau in Geneva, that this speech has to use a squirrel as the operational entity. What can you

say about them that hasn't already been said? They save; they're thrifty. We know that. Do they do

anything else good that you know of, that you could _hang_ a goddam _moral_ on?" And he thought,

they're all dead. There just isn't such a life form any more. But we still extol its virtues . . .

after having exterminated it as a race.

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On the keyboard of the rhetorizor he vigorously, with deliberation, punched two new

semantic units. _Squirrel_. And--_genocide_.

The machine, presently, declared, "The funniest thing happened to me on my way to the

bank, yesterday. I happened to pass through Central Park, and you know how--"

Incredulous, staring at the machine, Joe said, "_You_ passed through Central Park

yesterday? Central Park's been gone forty years."

"Joe, it's just a machine." Cloak on, she returned momentarily to kiss him goodnight.

"But the thing's insane," he protested. "And it said 'funny' when I fed in _genocide_. Did

you--"

"It's reminiscing," Colleen said, trying to explain it to him; she knelt briefly, touched

his face with her fingers and peered at him, eye to eye. "I love you," she said, "but you're going

to die; you're going to rupture yourself working. Through my office at the Agency I'll file a

formal petition to Brose, asking if you can take two weeks off. I have something for you, a gift;

one of my leadies dug it up near my villa; legally within the boundaries of my demesne, as per

that recent little interchange my leadies had with those of my north neighbor's."

"A book." He felt a flicker within him, the peaked flame of life.

"An especially good book, the real prewar thing, not a Xeroxed copy. Know what of?"

"_Alice in Wonderland_." He had heard so much about that, had always wanted to own it and

read it.

"Better. One of those outrageously funny books from the 1960s--in good shape: both front

and back covers intact. A self-help book; _How I Tranquilized Myself by Drinking Onion Juice_ or

some such thing. _I Made a Million Dollars by Leading Two-And-a-Half Lives For the FBI_. Or--"

He said, "Colleen, one day I looked out the window and I saw a squirrel."

Staring at him she said, "No."

"The tail; you can't mistake the tail. It's as round and fat and gray as a bottle brush.

And they hop like this." He made a wicket-motion with his hand, showing her, trying to recapture

it, for himself, too. "I squalled; I got four of my leadies out there with--" He shrugged. "Anyhow

they finally came back and said, 'There's no such thing out there, dominus,' or some darn remark."

He was silent a moment. It had, of course, been a hypnagogic hallucination, based on too many

drinks and too little sleep. He knew it. The leadies knew it. And now Colleen knew it. "But just

suppose," he said, then.

"Write, in your own words, how you felt. By hand on paper--not dictated into a recorder.

What finding a thriving, living squirrel would have meant to you." She gestured scathingly at his

fifteen thousand dollar rhetorizor. "Not what it thinks. And--"

"And Brose himself," he said, "would strike it. Maybe I could get it through the 'vac, to

the sim and then on tape; I think it'd go that far. But never past Geneva. Because I wouldn't be

saying, in effect, 'Come on, fellas; carry on.' I'd be saying--" He considered feeling peaceful

for a moment now. "I'll try," he decided, and rose to his feet, pushing his old-California wicker

chair back. "Okay, I'll even do it in longhand; I'll find a--what do you call them?"

"Ballpoint pen. Think of your cousin who was killed in the war: Ken. Then remember you're

both men. Then you have it: pen."

He nodded. "And program the 'vac direct from that. You might be right; it'd be depressing

but at least it wouldn't make me sick stomachwise; I wouldn't get those pyloric spasms." He began

searching around the library for--what had she called it?

Still on rerun, the rhetorizor squeaked to itself, ". . . and that little fellow; inside

that head was packed a powerful lot of savvy. Maybe even more than you or I can ever guess. And I

think we can learn from him." It droned on. Inside it thousands of microcomponents spun the

problem from a dozen drums of info-data; it could go on forever, but Joe Adams was busy; now he

had found a pen and all he needed was blank white paper. Hell, he surely had _that_; he beckoned

to the leady waiting to escort Colleen to her flapple.

"Get the staff," he instructed it, "to search up paper for me to write on. Go through

every room of the villa, including all the bedrooms, even those not currently in use. I distinctly

remember seeing a folio or packet of it, however it used to come. It was dug up."

By direct radio contact the leady passed on his command and he felt the building stir,

through the villa's fifty-odd rooms, his staff moving into activity from the spot where each had

halted after its last task. He, the dominus, sensed, with the soles of his feet, the burgeoning

life of this his building and some of the inside fog went away, even though they were only what

the Czechs had called _robots_, their crazy word for _workers_.

But, outside, the fog scratched at the window.

And when Colleen left, he knew, it would pluck and scrape, try to get in, more

determinedly.

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He wished it were Monday and he were at the Agency, in New York at his office, with other

Yance-men around him. And the life there would not be the movement of dead--or rather, to be fair,

unliving--things. But the reality itself.

"I can tell you," he said suddenly. "I love my work. In fact I've got to have it; there's

nothing else. Not this--" He gestured at the room in which they stood, then at the murky, clouded-

over window.

"Like a drug," Colleen said, perceptively.

"Okay." He nodded. "To use the archaic expression, 'I'll purchase that.'"

"Some linguist," she said gently. "It's _buy_. Maybe you ought to use that machine after

all."

"No," he said, at once. "You were right; I'm going all the way back to trying it direct,

on my own." Any moment now one of his staff of leadies would come clanking in with blank white

paper; he was sure he possessed it, somewhere. And if he didn't he could swap some item with a

neighbor, make a trip, surrounded and protected, of course, by his entourage of leadies, to the

demesne and villa to the south, that of Ferris Granville. Ferris would have paper; he had told

them on the open-channel vidline last week, composing his--god forbid--memoirs.

Whatever in, on or over Earth memoirs were.

Time for bed. The clock said so, but--suppose the power had been off again, as it had for

almost a whole day last week; the clock might be hours wrong. It might in fact, Nicholas St. James

thought morbidly, really be time to get up. And the metabolism of his body, even after all these

years underground, told him nothing.

In the shared bathroom of their cubby, 67-B of the Tom Mix, water ran; his wife was taking

a shower. So Nicholas searched about her vanity table until he found her wristwatch, read it; both

timepieces agreed, therefore that was that. And yet he felt wide-awake. The Maury Souza affair, he

realized; it preyed vulturely on him, made a trough of his brain. This is how it must feel, he

thought, to contract the Bag Plague, where those virtues get in and cause your head to expand

until it pops like a blown-up paper bag. Maybe I'm sick, he thought. Actually. Even more so than

Souza. And Maury Souza, the chief mechanic of their ant tank, now in his seventies, was dying.

"I'm out," Rita called from the bathroom. However, the shower still ran; she was not out.

"I mean, you can come in and brush your teeth or put them in a glass or whatever it is you do."

What I do, he thought, is get the Bag Plague . . . probably that last damaged leady they

sent down hadn't been 'cided properly. Or I've picked up the Stink of Shrink, and from that he

physically cringed; imagine, he thought, having your head diminish in size, features included, to

the circumference of a marble. "Okay," he said, reflexively, and began to unlace his work boots.

He felt the need to be clean; he would shower, too, despite the severe water ration currently in

force at the Tom Mix, and by his own edict. When you do not feel clean, he realized, you are

doomed. Considering exactly what we could be made unclean by, the microscopic _things_ downfalling

to us that some careless ambulatory metal hunk of handmade parts had failed to 'cide out of

existence before yanking the drop switch, shooting three hundred pounds of contaminated matter to

us, something both hot and dirty at the same time . . . hot with radioactivity and dirty with

germs. Great combination, he thought.

And, in the back part of his mind, again he recalled: _Souza is dying_. What else matters?

Because--how long can we last without that one grumpy old man?

Approximately two weeks. Because their quota came up for auditing in two weeks. And this

time, if he knew his luck and his tank's, it would be one of the Minister of the Interior Stanton

Brose's agents, not General Holt's. They rotated. It prevented, the image of Yancy on the big

screen had once said, corruption.

Picking up the audphone he dialed the tank's clinic.

"How is he?"

On the other end Dr. Carol Tigh, their G.P. in charge of their small clinic, said, "No

change. He's conscious. Come on down; he tells me he'd like to talk to you."

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"Okay." Nicholas rang off, shouted--through the noise of running water--to Rita that he

was going, and left their cubby; outside in the common corridor he bumped past other tankers on

their ways from the shops and recreation rooms to their cubbies for bed: the clocks had been

right, because he saw numerous bathrobes and standard issue synthetic wubfur-fuzz slippers. This

really is bedtime, he decided. But he knew he still could not sleep.

Three floors down, at the clinic, he passed through empty waiting rooms--the clinic was

closed, except for its bed patients--and then passed the nurses' station; the nurse stood up

respectfully to greet him because after all Nicholas was their elected president, and then he

found himself at the closed door of Maury Souza's room with its _Quiet--Do Not Disturb!_ sign on

the door. He entered.

In the wide white bed lay something flat, something so squashed that it could only gaze

up, as if it were a reflection, something dimly seen in a pool that absorbed light rather than

reflected it. The pool in which the old man lay was a consumer of energy of all kinds, Nicholas

realized as he walked to the bed. This is only a husk left here; it has been drained as if a

spider got to it; a world-spider or for us, rather, a subworld, underspider. But still a drinker

of human existence. Even below this far.

From his supine immobility the old man moved his lips. "Hi."

"Hi, you old knurlheaded frab," Nicholas said, and drew a chair up beside the bed. "How do

you feel?"

After a time, as if it had taken that long for Nicholas' words to reach him--that great

journey across space--the old mechanic said, "Not so good, Nick."

You don't know, Nicholas thought, what you've got. Unless Carol has told you since I last

discussed you with her. He eyed the old mechanic, wondering if there was an instinct. Pancreatitis

was fatal in almost one hundred percent of its cases, he knew; Carol had told him. But of course

no one had or would tell Souza, because the miracle might happen.

"You'll pick up," Nicholas said clumsily.

"Listen, Nick. How many leadies we made this month?"

He considered whether to lie or tell the truth. Souza had been here in this bed eight

days; surely he had lost contact, could not check and trip him up. So he lied. "Fifteen."

"Then--" A labored pause; Souza stared upward, never turned his eyes toward Nicholas, as

if he were looking away in shame. "We could still make our quota."

"What do I care," Nicholas said, "if we make our quota?" He had known Souza, been shut up

with him here at the Tom Mix, for the total war-period: fifteen years. "I care whether--" God, a

misspoken word; impossible to amend, too.

"'Whether I get out of here,'" Souza whispered.

"Naturally I mean _when_." He felt furious with himself. And, now, he saw Carol at the

door, looking professional in her white smock, her low-heeled shoes, carrying her clipboard on

which, no doubt, she had Souza's chart. Without a word Nicholas rose, walked away from the bed and

past Carol and out into the corridor.

She followed. They stood together in the empty corridor and then Carol said, "He'll live

one more week and then he'll die. Whether your tongue wags and says 'whether' or if you--"

"I told him our shops had turned out fifteen leadies so far this month; make sure nobody

else tells him different."

"I hear," she said, "it's more like five."

"Seven." He told her not because she was their doctor and someone they depended on, but

because of The Relationship. Always he told Carol everything; that was one of the emotional hooks

that gaffed him, held him to her: she, and this was so rare, could see through any sham, even the

little daily innocences. So why try this now? Carol never wanted pretty words; she lived by the

truth. Here now she had once again gotten it.

"Then we can't meet the quota," she said. Matter-of-factly.

He nodded. "Partly it's because they've asked for three type VIIs and that's hard; that

strains our shops. If it had all been the III or IV types--" But it hadn't; it never was, nor

would be. Ever.

So long as the surface lasted.

"You know," Carol said presently, "that on the surface artificial pancreases--artiforgs--

are available. You've considered this possibility, of course, in your official capacity."

Nicholas said, "It's illegal. Military hospitals only. Priority. Rating 2-A. We don't

qualify."

"There is said to be--"

"And get caught." It would no doubt be a quick kangaroo-court military tribunal session

and then execution, if one were caught trading on the blackmarket. In fact if one were caught up

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there at all.

"Are you afeared to go up?" Carol asked, with her brisk, brilliant hard scrutiny.

"Yep." He nodded: it was so. Two weeks: death by destruction of the red bloodcell-making

capacity of the bone marrow. One week: the Bag Plague or the Stink of Shrink or Raw-Claw-Paw and

he already felt germphobic; already, a few moments ago, he had quaked with the trauma of it--as

did virtually every tanker, although in actual fact not one case of any of the poxes had broken

out at the Tom Mix.

"You can," Carol said, "call a meeting of those--you know-- those you can trust. And ask

for a volunteer."

"Goddam it, I'll go if anyone does." But he didn't want to send anyone because he knew

what was up there. No one would return because a homotropic weapon, if not the tribunal, would

flush him out of hiding and it would follow him until he died. And that in a matter of minutes,

perhaps.

And homotropic weapons were vile things; they did it in a vile way.

Carol said, "I know how badly you want to save old Souza."

"I love him," he said. "Above and beyond the shops, the quota, all of that. Did he ever,

in all the time we've been locked up down below here, refuse anyone anything? Any time of the

night, a leaking water pipe, break in power, clogged protine chute--he always came and hammered

and patched and stitched and rewrapped it back into operation." And, since Souza was, officially,

Chief Mechanic, he could have dispatched any one of fifty assistants and snoozed on. From the old

man Nicholas had learned; you did the job yourself--you did not drop it in the lap of a

subordinate.

As, he thought, the warwork's devolved down here to us. Building the metal fighters in

eight basic types, and so on, with the Estes Park Government, the functionaries of WesDem and of

Brose personally, breathing at us at close, close range.

And, as if the words magically impelled the unseen presence, a gray, faint shape moved

urgently down the hall toward him and Carol. Commissioner Dale Nunes, all right; eager, busy,

pressed on by his business.

"Nick!" Panting, Nunes read straight from a slip of paper. "A big speech in ten minutes;

get on the all-cubby circuit and get everyone into Wheeling Hall; we'll watch in unison because

there'll be questions. This is serious." His fast bird eyes flew in their spasm of alarm. "Honest

to god, Nick, the way I got it over the coax it's all of Detroit; they penetrated the final ring."

"Jesus," Nicholas said. And moved, reflexively, toward a nearby aud-tap of the circuit

which ran, speakerwise, throughout each floor and chamber of the Tom Mix. "But it's bedtime," he

said to Commissioner Nunes. "A lot of them are undressing or in bed; couldn't they watch on their

own individual cub-sets?"

"The questions," Nunes said, agitatedly. "They're going to up the quotas because of this

Detroit fiasco--that's what I'm afraid of. And I want to be sure everyone knows why, if that's the

case." He did not look happy.

Nicholas said, "But Dale; you know our situation. We can't even--"

"Just get them into Wheeling Hall. Okay? We can talk later."

Lifting the microphone Nicholas said, addressing every cubby in the tank, "People, this is

President St. James and I'm sorry but we've all got to be at Wheeling Hall in ten minutes. Come as

you are; don't worry about that--a bathrobe is fine. It's grave news."

Nunes murmured, "Yancy'll speak. For sure; they told me."

"The Protector," Nicholas said into the mike, and heard his voice boom from each end of

the deserted clinic corridor, as it was everywhere else in the great subsurface ant tank of

fifteen hundred human souls, "is going to address us, I understand. And he'll accept questions."

He rang off, feeling defeated. It was not a reasonable time to give them bad news. And

with Souza and the quota and the audit to come--

"I can't leave my patient," Carol said.

Upset, Nunes said, "But I was told to assemble everyone, Doctor."

"Then," Carol said, with that superlative intelligence that made Nicholas both fear and

adore her, "Mr. Souza must get up and come, too. If the edict is to be fully obeyed."

It got through; Nunes, for all his bureaucratic rigidity, his almost neurotic

determination to fulfill to the letter each order coaxed down to them--via him--nodded. "Okay, you

stay here." To Nicholas he said, "Let's go." He started off, burdened by their mass consciences;

his main task was to supervise their loyalty: Nunes was the tank's pol-com, its political

commissioner.

Five minutes later Nicholas St. James sat stiffly, formally, in his President's chair,

slightly elevated, in row one of Wheeling Hall; behind him they had all assembled, shifted and

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rustled, murmured and stirred, everyone, including himself, gazing at the floor-to-ceiling

vidscreen. This was their window--their sole window--on the above world, and they took rather

seriously what was received on its giant surface.

He wondered if Rita had heard the announcement or if she still blissfully loitered in the

shower, calling a few remarks to him now and then.

"Any improvement? Nunes whispered to Nicholas. "In old Souza?"

"In pancreatitis--are you kidding?" The Commissioner was an idiot.

"I've passed on fifteen memos," Nunes said, "to them up top."

"And not one of the fifteen," Nicholas said, "was a formal request for an artiforg

pancreas that Carol could surgically graft in."

"I just begged for a suspension on the audit." Pleadingly, Nunes said, "Nick, politics is

the art of the possible; we might get a suspension, but we won't get on artiforg pancreas; they're

just not available. Instead we've got to write off Souza and escalate one of the lesser mechanics

like Winton or Bobbs or--"

All at once the great communal screen turned from lusterless gray to beaming white. And

the speaker system said, "Good evening."

In Wheeling Hall the audience of fifteen hundred mumbled, "Good evening." It was a legal

formality, in that no aud-receptor carried anything up; the lines carried data only one way: down.

From above to below.

"News bulletin," the announcer's voice continued. On the screen a stopped-tape: buildings

caught and suspended in half-disintegration. And then the tape traveled on. And the buildings,

with a roar like the odious tap-tap-tapping of distant, alien drums, pitched into dust and rained

down, dissolved; smoke took their place, and, like ants, countless leadies who had inhabited

Detroit spilled out and ran, as if from a tipped-over quart jar. They were squashed systematically

by invisible forces.

The aud-track grew; the drums drifted foward and the camera, no doubt from an eye-spy Wes-

Dem satellite, panned up on one great public building, library, church, school or bank; perhaps

all of these combined. It showed, somewhat slowed down, the solidity of the structure as it

demolecularized. Objects have been carried back to their dust-origin again. And it could have been

us up there, not leadies, because he himself had lived a year in Detroit as a child.

Thank god for all of them, Commies and U.S. citizens alike, that the war had broken out on

a colony world, in a hassle as to which bloc, Wes-Dem or Pac-Peop, held the bigger-dog's share.

Because in that first year of war on Mars the populations of Earth had been hurried underground.

And, he thought, we're still here and it isn't good but it beats _that_; he watched the screen

fixedly, saw a flock of leadies melt--hence the name--and, to his horror, still try to run while

melting. He looked away.

"Awful," Commissioner Nunes, beside him, muttered, gray-faced. All at once in the empty

seat to Nicholas' right Rita appeared, in bathrobe and slippers; with her came Nicholas' kid

brother, Stu. Both, staring at the screen, said nothing to him, as if he weren't there. In fact

each person in Wheeling Hall was isolated, now, by the catastrophe on the giant TV screen, and the

announcer, then, said it for them.

"This--was--Detroit. May 19th. Year of God 2025. Amen."

It only took a few seconds, once the defensive shield around a city had been broken, to

get in and do this.

For fifteen years Detroit had existed intact. Well, Marshal Harenzany, meeting in the

thoroughly protected Kremlin with the Supreme Soviet, could pay a painter to paint, as symbol of a

direct hit, a tiny spire on the door of their chamber. Chalk up one more U.S. city for their side.

And, in Nicholas' mind, through the horror of seeing this decapitation of one of the few-

remaining heads of Western Civilization--which he really did believe in and love--there came the

niggling, selfish, personal thought once more. _It means a higher quota_. More must be achieved

underground as less, every day, remained above.

Nunes murmured, "Yancy will explain, now. How it happened to happen. So get ready." And

Nunes of course was right, because the Protector never gave up; he had that grand turtlelike

unwillingness, which Nicholas admired in the man, to admit that this blow was mortal. And yet--

They did get to us, Nicholas realized . . . . and even you, Talbot Yancy, our spir-pol-mil

leader, brave enough to live in your surface fortress in the Rockies: even you, good friend, can't

undo what's just been done.

"My fellow Americans," Yancy' s voice came, and it was not even weary. Nicholas blinked,

startled by the vigor. Yancy seemed almost unaffected, to have remained true to the _stoa_, to his

West Point heritage; he viewed it all, accepted and understood, but no emotion unhinged his calm

reason.

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"You have seen," Yancy continued in his low, late middle-age voice, that of a seasoned old

warrior, ramrod in body, clear in mind; good for a few more years . . . not like the husk, the

dying thing in the clinic bed over which Carol watched. "--a terrible thing. Nothing is left of

Detroit and as you know a good deal of war material has emerged by her fair autofacs, all these

years, and now that is lost. But we have sacrificed no human life, the one commodity which we

cannot, will not, relinquish."

"Good point," Nunes muttered, jotting notes.

Beside Nicholas, all at once, Carol Tigh appeared, in her white smock, low shoes; he rose,

instinctively, stood to face her.

"He passed away," Carol said. "Souza. Just now. I at once froze him; I was right there at

the bed, so there was no time loss. Braintissue won't have suffered. He just--went." She tried to

smile, and then tears filled her eyes. It shocked him; he had never seen Carol cry, and something

in him was horrified, as if it was wicked, this that he saw.

"We shall endure this," the aud-track of the coax transmission from the Estes Park

fortress continued, and now, on the screen, Yancy's face appeared and the war, the rolling clouds

of matter in suspension or turned to hot gas, faded. And it was a stiff, firm man at a large oak

desk in some hidden spot where Soviet, even the awful deadly new Sino-twenty red-dot missiles, had

never found him.

Nicholas got Carol seated, got her attention turned to the screen.

"With each passing day," Yancy said, and he spoke with pride, a good and reasonable pride,

"we grow stronger. Not weaker. _You_ are stronger." And by god he looked, then, directly at

Nicholas and Carol and Dale Nunes and Stu and Rita and all the rest of them at the Tom Mix, at

every one of them except Souza, who was dead; and when you are dead, Nicholas realized, no one,

not even the Protector, can tell you that you are growing stronger. And when you died just now, we

also died. Unless that pancreas, at whatever cost, from whatever ugly blackmarket source which

robs a military hospital, can be obtained.

Sooner or later, Nicholas realized, despite the law against it, I will have to go up to

the surface.

When the I-am-larger-than-you image of Talbot Yancy's leather and iron face had left the

screen and the lackluster gray had returned, Commissioner Dale Nunes hopped to his feet and said

to the assembly, "And now, folks. Questions."

The audience remained inert. As inert as it could manage--and get away with it.

Required to by his elected status, Nicholas rose and stood by Dale. "It must be a colloquy

between us and the Estes Park Government," he said.

From the back of Wheeling Hall a sharp voice--it could have been male or female--said,

"President St. James, did Maury Souza die? I see Dr. Tigh here."

Nicholas said, "Yes. But he's in quick-freeze so there's still hope. Now, people, you've

listened to the Protector. Before that you saw the infiltration and demolition of Detroit. You

know we're already behind in our quota; we must supply twenty-five leadies this month, and next--"

"What next month?" a voice from the multitude, bitter and dispirited, said. "We won't be

here next month."

"Oh yes," Nicholas answered. "We can survive an audit. Let me remind you. The initial

penalty is only a cut in food supply of five percent. Only after that can draft notices be served

on any of us, and even then it would halt at a decimation--one man from each group of ten. Only if

we fail three months running do we face possible--I say _possible_--closure. But we always have

legal remedy; we can send our attorney before the High Court at Estes Park, and I assure you we

will, before we surrender to a closure."

A voice called, "Have you again asked for a replacement chief mechanic?"

"Yes," Nicholas said. But there are no more Maury Souzas in the world, he thought. Except

in other tanks. And out of--what is the number last given?--out of one hundred and sixty thousand

ant tanks in the Western Hemisphere none is going to negotiate a release of a really adequate

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chief mechanic, even if we could somehow make contact with a few of those other tanks. Any more

than five years ago when that tank to the north, the Judy Garland, bored that horizontal shaft

through to us and pleaded--literally pleaded--just for a loan of Souza. For one month. And we said

no.

"All right," Commissioner Nunes said briskly, since no voluntary questions had arisen.

"I'll make a spotcheck to see if the Protector's message got across." He pointed to a young

married couple. "What was the cause of the failure of our defensive screen around Detroit? Rise

and give your names, please."

The young couple reluctantly rose; the husband said, "Jack and Myra Frankis. Our failure

was due to the introduction of the new Pac-Peop Type Three Galatea spatter-missile that

infiltrated in submolecular particles. I guess. Something like that." He hopefully reseated

himself, drawing his wife down beside him.

"All right," Nunes said; that was acceptable. "And why has Pac-Peop technology forged

ahead of ours temporarily?" He glanced around, spied a victim to be interrogated. "Is it a failure

of our leadership?"

The middle-aged, spinsterish lady rose. "Miss Gertrude Prout. No, it is not due to a

failure of our leadership." She instantly sat down again.

"What then," Nunes said, still addressing her, "is it due to? Would you please rise,

madam, in giving your response? Thank you." Miss Prout had again risen, "Did _we_ fail?" Nunes

prompted her. "Not this tank but we tankers, producers of war material, in general."

"Yes," Miss Prout said in her frail, obedient voice. "We failed to provide--" She

faltered; she could not recall what they had failed to provide. There was a strained, unhappy

silence.

Nicholas took charge. "People, we produce the basic instrument by which the war is

conducted; it's because leadies can live on a radioactive surface among a multiform culture of

bacteria and chlinesterasedestroying nerve gas--"

"Cholinesterase," Nunes corrected.

"--that we're alive. We owe our lives to these constructs built down in our shops. That's

all Commissioner Nunes means. It's vital to understand why we must--"

"I'll handle this," Nunes said quietly.

Nicholas said, "No, Dale. I will."

"You already made one unpatriotic statement. The cholinesterase-destroying nerve gas was a

U.S. invention. Now, I can _order_ you to take your seat."

"However," Nicholas said, "I won't. These people are tired; this is not the time to badger

them. Souza's death--"

"This is _exactly_ the time to badger them," Nunes said, "because, and I am trained, Nick,

from the Berlin Psychiatric Waffen-Institute, by Mrs. Morgen's own clinicians, to know." He raised

his voice, addressing the audience. "As you all realize, our chief mechanic was--"

A hostile, jeering voice sounded from the rows. "Tell you what: we'll give you a bag of

turnips, Commissioner. Pol-Com Nunes, _sir_. And let's see the bottle of blood you can squeeze

out. Okay?" People, here and there, murmured in agreement, in approval.

"I told you," Nicholas said to the commissioner, who had flushed and was strangling his

notes with his spasmodically clenching fingers. "Now will you let them go back to bed?"

Aloud, Nunes said, "There is a disagreement between your elected president and I. As a

compromise, I will ask only one more question." He paused, surveyed them all; in weary fear they

waited. The sole hostile, articulated vocal entity was silent, now; Nunes had them because Nunes,

alone in the tank, was not a citizen but an official of Wes-Dem itself and could, if he ordered,

have living, human police slide down the chute from above or, if Brose's agents weren't

immediately in the vicinity, then a commando team of General Holt's veteran armed leadies.

"The Commissioner," Nicholas announced, "will ask one question. And then, thank god, let's

go to bed." He seated himself.

Nunes, reflecting, said in a slow, cold voice, "How can we make up to Mr. Yancy for our

failure?"

To himself Nicholas moaned. But no one, not even Nicholas, had the legal power or any kind

of power to halt the man whom the hostile, earlier voice from the audience had correctly called

their pol-com. And yet under the Law this was not altogether bad. Because through Commissioner

Nunes a direct human link existed between their tank and the Estes Park Government; theoretically

by way of Nunes they could answer back and the colloquy, even now, within the heart of the

worldwide war, could exist between the tanks and the government.

But it was hard on the tankers to be subjected to Dale Nunes' rah-rah tactics whenever

Dale--or rather his superiors above ground--saw fit, such as now, at bedtime. But look at the

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alternative.

It had been suggested to him (and he had promptly, at great and deliberate effort,

forgotten forever the names of those who had come to him) that their pol-com be quietly dispatched

some night. No, Nicholas had said. It won't work. Because they'll send another. And--Dale Nunes is

a man. Not a force. And would you prefer to deal with Estes Park as a _force_, on your TV screen,

which you could see and hear . . . but not talk back to?

So as sore as Commissioner Nunes made him, Nicholas accepted the necessity of his presence

in the Tom Mix. The radicals who had come slipping up, late one night, with their idea of instant,

easy solution to the pol-com problem, had been thoroughly, firmly dissuaded. Or at least so

Nicholas hoped.

Anyhow Nunes was still alive. So apparently his argument to the radicals had been

convincing . . . and this was three years ago, when Nunes had first put in his eager-beaver

appearance.

He wondered if Dale Nunes had ever guessed. Imagined how close he had come to

assassination, and that it had been Nicholas who had talked them out of it.

How interesting it would be to know what Nunes' reaction would be. Gratitude?

Or--contempt.

At this moment, Carol was motioning to him, beckoning in sight of the assembled community

here at Wheeling Hall. While Dale Nunes looked up and down the rows for someone to answer his

question, Carol--incredibly--was indicating to Nicholas that she and he leave together, now.

Beside him his wife Rita saw the gesture, the summons; woodenfaced, she stared straight

ahead, then, as if she had seen nothing. And, as he found his target, Dale Nunes saw, too, and

frowned.

However, Nicholas obediently accompanied Carol up the aisle and out of Wheeling Hall, into

the deserted corridor and seclusion.

"What in god's name," he said to her as he and she stood together, "do you want?" The way

Nunes had looked at them as they departed . . . he would be hearing in due time from the

commissioner.

"I want you to certify the death papers," Carol said, walking toward the elevator. "For

poor old Maury--"

"But why now?" There was more; he knew it.

She said nothing; both of them were silent on the trip down to the clinic, to the freeze

locker in which the rigid body lay--he glanced under the wrapper briefly, then emerged from the

locker to sign the forms which Carol had laid out, five copies in all, neatly typed and ready to

be sent up by vidline to the bureaucrats on the surface.

Then, from the buttoned front of her white smock, Carol brought forth a tiny electronic

instrument which he recognized as a you-don'tknow-I-have-it aud-recorder. She extracted the spool

of tape, unlocked the steel drawer of a cabinet of what appeared to be medical supplies-- and

exposed to his sight, briefly, other spools of tape and other electronic instruments, none of them

related as far as he could see to her medical work.

"What's going on?" he said, this time more controlledly. Obviously she wanted him to

witness this, the aud-recorder, the reservoir of tape which she kept locked away from anyone

else's sight. He knew her as well, as intimately, as did anyone in the Tom Mix, and yet this was

news to him.

Carol said, "I made an aud tape of Yancy's speech. The part I was there for, anyhow."

"Those other spools of aud tape in that cabinet?"

"All of Yancy. Former speeches. Dating back over the past year."

"Is that legal to do?"

Carol said, as she gathered the five copies of Maury Souza's death-forms together and

inserted them into the slot of the Xeroxtransmitter which would put them on the wire to the Estes

Park archives, "As a matter of fact it _is_ legal. I looked it up."

Relieved, he said, "Sometimes I think you're nuts." Her mind was always off in some odd

direction, flashing and echoing in its fullness, and baffling him eternally; he could never keep

up with her, and so his awe of her continually grew. "Explain," he said.

"Have you noticed," Carol said, "that Yancy, in his speeches in late February, when he

used the phrase _coup de grace_, he pronounced it _gras_. And in March he pronounced it--" From

the steel-doored cabinet she brought forth a chart with entries, which she now consulted. "March

twelfth. Pronounced _coo de grah_. Then, in April, on the fifteenth, it was _gras_ again." She

glanced up alertly, eyed Nicholas.

He shrugged wearily, irritably. "Let me get to bed; let's talk about this some other--"

"Then," Carol said, inflexibly, "on May third in a speech, he once more used the term.

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