Preferred Risk

by Lester Del Rey

  I held it to the radiation-seared body of Benedetto dell’Angela.

  And it didn’t change.

  Radiation-seared? Not unless the instrument lied! If dell’Angela had ever in his life been within the disaster radius of an atomic explosion, it had been so long before that every trace of radioactive byproduct was gone!

  Rena was right!

  * * * *

  I worked like a machine, hardly thinking. I stood up and hurriedly touched the ion-tasting snout of the counter to the body on the shelf above Benedetto, the one above that, a dozen chosen at random up and down the aisle.

  Two of them sent the needle surging clear off the scale; three were as untainted by radioactivity as Benedetto himself. A few others gave readings from “mild” to “lethal”—but all in the danger area.

  Most were as untainted by radiation as Benedetto himself.

  It was possible, I told myself frantically, that there were mysteries here I did not understand. Perhaps after a few months or a year, the radiation level would drop, so that the victim was still in deadly danger while the emitted radiation of his body was too slight to affect the counter. I didn’t see how, but it was worth a thought. Anything was worth a thought that promised another explanation to this than the one Rena had given!

  There had been, I remembered, a score or more of new suspendees in the main receiving vault at the juncture of the corridors. I hurried back to it. Here were fresh cases, bound to show on the gauge.

  I leaned over the nearest one, first checking to make sure its identification tag was the cross-hatched red one that marked “radiation.” I brought the counter close to the shriveled face—

  But I didn’t read the dial, not at first. I didn’t have to. For I recognized that face. I had seen it, contorted in terror, mumbling frantic pleas for mercy, weeping and howling, on the old Class E uninsurable the expediters had found hiding in the vaults.

  He had no radiation poisoning…unless a bomb had exploded in these very vaults in the past twelve hours.

  It wasn’t pleasant to stand there and stare around the vaults that were designed for the single purpose of saving human life—and to wonder how many of the eighty thousand souls it held were also prisoners.

  And it wasn’t even tolerable to think the thought that followed. If the Company was corrupt, and I had worked to do the Company’s business, how much of this guilt was mine?

  The Company, I had said and thought and tried to force others to agree, was the hope of humanity—the force that had permanently ended war (almost), driven out disease (nearly), destroyed the threat to any human of hunger or homelessness (in spite of the starving old man who slept in the shadow of the crypt, and others like him).

  But I had to face the facts that controverted the Big Lie. If war was ended, what about Naples and Sicily, and Prague and Vienna, and all the squabbles in the Far East? If there was no danger from disease, why had Marianna died?

  Rena had said that if there was no danger of disaster, no one would have paid their premiums. Obviously the Company could not have wanted that, but why had I never seen it before? Sample wars, sample deaths—the Company needed them. And no one, least of all me, fretted about how the samples felt about it.

  Well, that was behind me. I’d made a bet with Rena, and I’d lost, and I had to pay off.

  I opened the cased hypodermic kit Rena had given me and examined it uncomfortably. I had never used the old-fashioned sort of needle hypodermic; I knew a little something about the high-pressure spray type that forced its contents into the skin without leaving a mark, but I was very far from sure that I could manage this one without doing something wrong. Besides, there wasn’t much of the fluid left, only the few drops left in the bottom of the bottle after Rena had loaded the needle that had been smashed.

  I hurried back along the corridor toward Benedetto dell’Angela. I neared again the red-labeled door marked Bay 100, glanced at it in passing—and stopped.

  This was the door that only a handful of people could open. It was labeled in five languages: “Entrance Strictly Prohibited. Experimental Section.”

  Why was it standing ajar?

  And I heard a faint whisper of a moan: “Aiutemi, aiutemi.”

  Someone inside was calling for help!

  If I had been a hardened conspirator, I would never have stopped to investigate. But, of course, I wasn’t. I pushed the door aside, against resistance, and peered in.

  And that was my third major shock in the past quarter of an hour, because, writhing feebly just inside the door, staring up at me with an expression of pain and anger, was Luigi Zorchi.

  He propped himself up on his hands, the rags of his plastic cocoon dangling from his shoulders.

  “Oho,” he said faintly. “The apprentice assassin again.”

  I found water for him at a bubble-fountain by the ramp; he drank at least a quart before I made him stop. Then he lay back, panting, staring at me. Except for the shreds of plastic and the bandages around the stumps of his legs, he was nude, like all the other suspendees inside their sacks. The luxuriant hair had already begun to grow back.

  He licked his lips. More vigorous now, he snarled: “The plan fails, does it not? You think you have Zorchi out of the way, but he will not stay there.”

  I said, “Zorchi, I’m sorry about all this. I—I know more now than I did yesterday.”

  He gaped. “Yesterday? Only yesterday?” He shook his head. “I would have thought a month, at the least. I have been crawling, assassin. Crawling for days, I thought.” He tried to shrug—not easy, because he was leaning on his elbows. “Very well, Weels. You may take me back to finish the job now. Sticking me with a needle and putting me on ice will not work. Perhaps you should kill me outright.”

  “Listen, Zorchi, I said I was sorry. Let’s let it go at that for a moment. I—I admit you shouldn’t be here. The question is, how do you come to be awake?”

  “How not? I am Zorchi, Weels. Cut me and I heal; poison me and I cure myself.” He spat furiously. “Starve me, however, and I no doubt will die, and it is true that you have come very near to starving me down here.” He glowered at the shelves of cocooned bodies in the locked bay. “A pity, with all this pork and beef on the rack, waiting for me, but I find I am not a monster, Weels. It is a weakness; I do not suppose it would stop any Company man for a moment.”

  “Look, Zorchi,” I begged, “take my word for it—I want to help you. You might as well believe me, you know. You can’t be any worse off than you are.”

  He stared at me sullenly for a moment. Then, “True enough,” he admitted. “What then, Weels?”

  I said hesitantly, “Well, I’d like to get you out of here…”

  “Oh, yes. I would like that, too. How shall we do it?”

  I rubbed the back of my neck thoughtfully, staring at him. I had had a sort of half-baked, partly worked out plan for rescuing Benedetto. Wake him up with the needle; find a medical orderly’s whites somewhere; dress him; and walk him out.

  It wasn’t the best of all possible plans, but I had rank enough, particularly with Defoe off in Rome, to take a few liberties or stop questions if it became necessary. And besides, I hadn’t really thought I’d have to do it. I had fully expected—as recently as half an hour ago!—that I would find Benedetto raddled with gamma rays, a certainty for death if revived before the half-life period of the radioelements in his body had brought the level down to safety.

  That plan might work for Benedetto. But Zorchi, to mention only one possible obstacle, couldn’t walk. And Benedetto, once I took off his beard with the razor Rena had insisted I bring for that purpose, would not be likely to be recognized by anyone.

  Zorchi, on the other hand, was very nearly unforgettable.

  I said honestly, “I don’t know.”

  He nodded! “Nor do I, Weels. Take me then to your Defoe.” His face wrinkled in an expression of fury and fear. “Die I can, if I must, but I do not wish to starve. It is good to be able to grow a leg, but
do you understand that the leg must come from somewhere? I cannot make it out of air, Weels—I must eat. When I am in my home at Naples, I eat five, six, eight times a day; it is the way my body must have it. So if Defoe wishes to kill me, we will let him, but I must leave here now.”

  I shook my head. “Please understand me, Zorchi—I can’t even do that for you. I can’t have anybody asking me what I was doing down in this level.” I hesitated only briefly; then, realizing that I was already in so deeply that secrecy no longer mattered, I told him about Benedetto dell’Angela, and the riot that failed, and my promise.

  His reaction was incredulity. “You did not know, Weels? The arms and legs of the Company do not know what thoughts pass through its brain? Truly, the Company is a wonderful thing! Even the peasants know this much—the Company will do anything it must.”

  “I admit I never guessed. Now what?”

  “That is up to you, Weels. If you try to take the two of us out, it endangers you. It is for you to decide.”

  So, of course, I could decide only one way.

  I hid the hypodermic behind one of the bodies in Bay 100; it was no longer useful to me. I persuaded Zorchi to lie quietly in one of the tiers near Benedetto, slammed the heavy door to Bay 100, and heard the locks snap. That was the crossing of the Rubicon. You could open that door easily enough from inside—that was to protect any personnel who might be caught in there. But only Defoe and a couple of others could open it from without, and the hypodermic was now as far out of reach as the Moon.

  I opened Benedetto dell’Angela’s face mask and shaved him, then sealed it again. I found another suspendee of about the same build, made sure the man was not radioactive, and transferred them. I switched tags: Benedetto dell’Angela was now Elio Barletteria. Then I walked unsteadily to the ramp, picked up the intercom and ordered the medical officer in charge to come down.

  * * * *

  It was not Dr. Lawton who came, fortunately, but one of his helpers who had seen me before. I pointed to the pseudo-Barletteria. “I want this man revived.”

  He sputtered, “You—you can’t just take a suspendee out of his trance, Mr. Wills. It’s a violation of medical ethics! These men are sick. They—”

  “They’ll be sicker still if we don’t get some information from this one,” I said grimly. “Are you going to obey Mr. Defoe’s orders or not?”

  He sputtered some more, but he gave in. His orderlies took Benedetto to the receiving station at the foot of the vault; one of them stood by while the doctor worriedly went through his routine. I sat and smoked, watching the procedure.

  It was simple enough. One injection, a little chafing of the hands and feet by the bored orderly while the doctor glowered and I stonily refused to answer his questions, and a lot of waiting. And then the “casualty” stirred and moaned.

  All the stand-by apparatus was there—the oxygen tent and the pulmotor and the heart stimulator and so on. But none of it was needed.

  I said: “Fine, Doctor. Now send the orderly to have an ambulance standing by at the main entrance, and make out an exit pass for this casualty.”

  “No!” the doctor shouted. “This is against every rule, Mr. Wills. I insist on calling Dr. Lawton—”

  “By all means,” I said. “But there isn’t much time. Make out the pass and get the ambulance, and we’ll clear it with Dr. Lawton on the way out.” He was all ready to say no again when I added: “This is by direct order of Mr. Defoe. Are you questioning his orders?”

  He wasn’t—not as long as I was going to clear it with Dr. Lawton. He did as I asked. One of the advantages of the Company’s rigid regulations was that it was hard to enforce strict security on its personnel. If you didn’t tell the staff that they were working for something needing covering up, you couldn’t expect them to be constantly on guard.

  When the orderly was gone and the doctor had scrawled out the pass, I said cordially, “Thank you, Doctor. Now would you like to know what all the fuss was about?”

  “I certainly would,” he snapped. “If you think—”

  “I’m sorry,” I apologized. “Come over here and take a look at this man.”

  I juggled the radiation counter in my hand as he stalked over. “Take a look at his eyes,” I invited.

  “Are you trying to tell me that this is a dangerously radioactive case? I warn you, Mr. Wills—”

  “No, no,” I said. “See for yourself. Look at the right eye, just beside the nose.”

  He bent over the awakening body, searchingly.

  I clonked him with the radiation counter on the back of the head. They must have retired that particular counter from service after that; it wasn’t likely to be very accurate any more.

  The orderly found me bending over the doctor’s body and calling for help. He bent, too, and he got the same treatment. Benedetto by then was awake; he listened to me and didn’t ask questions. The blessings of dealing with conspirators—it was not necessary to explain things more than once.

  And so, with a correctly uniformed orderly, who happened to be Benedetto dell’Angela, pushing the stretcher, and with myself displaying a properly made out pass to the expediter at the door, we rolled the sham-unconscious body of Luigi Zorchi out to a waiting ambulance.

  I felt my pulse hammering as we passed the expediter at the door. I had thrown my coat over the place where legs should have been on “Barletteria,” and Benedetto’s old plastic cocoon, into which we had squeezed Zorchi, concealed most of him.

  * * * *

  I needn’t have worried. The expediter not only wasn’t suspicious, he wasn’t even interested.

  Benedetto and I lifted Zorchi into the ambulance. Benedetto climbed in after him and closed the doors, and I went to the front. “You’re dismissed,” I told the driver. “I’ll drive.”

  As soon as we were out of sight of the clinic, I found a phone, got Rena at the hotel, told her to meet me under the marquee. In five minutes, she was beside me and we were heading for the roads to the north.

  “You win,” I told her. “Your father’s in back—along with somebody else. Now what? Do we just try to get lost in the hills somewhere?”

  “No, Tom,” she said breathlessly. “I—I have made arrangements.” She giggled. “I walked around the square and around, until someone came up to me. You do not know how many gentlemen came before that! But then one of my—friends showed up, to see if I was all right, and I arranged it. We go up the Rome highway two miles and there will be a truck.”

  “Fine,” I said, stepping on the gas. “Now do you want to climb back and tell your father—”

  I stopped in the middle of the word. Rena peered at me. “Tom,” she asked anxiously, “is something wrong?”

  I swallowed, staring after a disappearing limousine in the rearview mirror. “I—hope not,” I said. “But your friends had better be there, because we don’t have much time. I saw Defoe in the back of that limousine.”

  CHAPTER X

  Rena craned her neck around the door and peered into the nave of the church. “He’s kissing the Book,” she reported. “It will be perhaps twenty minutes yet.”

  Her father said mildly, “I am in no hurry. It is good to rest here. Though truthfully, Mr. Wills, I thought I had been rested sufficiently by your Company.”

  I think we were all grateful for the rest. It had been a hectic drive up from Anzio. Even though Rena’s “friends” were thoughtful people, they had not anticipated that we would have a legless man with us.

  They had passports for Rena and myself and Benedetto; for Zorchi they had none. It had been necessary for him to hide under a dirty tarpaulin in the trunk of the ancient charcoal-burning car, while Rena charmed the Swiss Guards at the border. And it was risky. But the Guards charmed easily, and we got through.

  Zorchi did not much appreciate it. He swore a ragged blue streak when we stopped in the shade of an olive grove and lugged him to the front seat again, and he didn’t stop swearing until we hit the Appian Way. When the old gas-g
enerator limped up a hill, he swore at its slowness; when it whizzed along the downgrades and level stretches, he swore at the way he was being bounced around.

  I didn’t regret rescuing Zorchi from the clinic—it was a matter of simple justice since I had helped trick him into it. But I did wish that it had been some more companionable personality that I had been obligated to.

  Benedetto, on the other hand, shook my hand and said: “For God, I thank you,” and I felt well repaid. But he was in the back seat being brought up to date by his daughter; I had the honor of Zorchi’s company next to me…

  There was a long Latin period from the church, a response from the altar boy, and then the final Ite, missa est. We heard the worshipers moving out of the church.

  The priest came through the room we were waiting in, his robes swirling. He didn’t look around, or give any sign that he knew we were there, though he almost stepped on Zorchi, sitting propped against a wall.

  A moment later, another man in vaguely clerical robes entered and nodded to us. “Now we go below,” he ordered.

  Benedetto and I flanked Zorchi and carried him, an arm around each of our necks. We followed the sexton, or whatever he was, back into the church, before the altar—Benedetto automatically genuflected with the others, nearly making me spill Zorchi onto the floor—to a tapestry-hung door. He pushed aside the tapestry, and a cool, musty draft came up from darkness.

  The sexton lit a taper with a pocket cigarette lighter and led us down winding, rickety steps. There was no one left in the church to notice us; if anyone had walked in, we were tourists, doing as countless millions of tourists had done before us over the centuries.

  We were visiting the Catacombs.

  Around us were the bones of the Christians of a very different Rome. Rena had told me about them: How they rambled under the modern city, the only entrances where churches had been built over them. How they had been nearly untouched for two thousand years. I even felt a little as though I really were a tourist as we descended, she had made me that curious to see them.

  But I was disappointed. We lugged the muttering Zorchi through the narrow, musty corridors, with the bones of martyrs at our elbows, in the flickering light of the taper, and I had the curious feeling that I had been there before.