And then we were in old Pompeii’s drainage sewer, the arched stone tunnel that once had carried sewage from the Roman town to the sea. It was a hiding place, and then a tunnel to freedom, for the two of us.
We waited there all of that day, Benedetto mumbling almost inaudibly beside me. In lucid moments, he told me the name of the hotel where Rena had gone when the Observatory was abandoned, but there seemed few lucid moments. Toward evening, he began to recover.
We found our way to the seashore just as darkness fell. There was a lateen-rigged fishing vessel of some sort left untended. I do not suppose the owner was far away, but he did not return in time to stop us.
Benedetto was very weak. He was muttering to himself, words that I could hardly understand. “Wasted, wasted, wasted,” was the burden of his complaint. I did not know what he thought was wasted—except, perhaps, the world.
We slipped in to one of the deserted wharves under cover of darkness, and I left Benedetto to find a phone. It was risky, but what risk mattered when the world was at an end?
Rena was waiting at the hotel. She answered at once. I did not think the call had been intercepted—or that it would mean anything to anyone if it had. I went back to the boat to wait with Benedetto for Rena to arrive, in a rented car. We didn’t dare chance a cab.
Benedetto was sitting up, propped rigidly against the mast, staring off across the water. Perhaps I startled him as I came to the boat; he turned awkwardly and cried out weakly.
Then he saw that it was I. He said something I could not understand and pointed out toward the west, where the Sun had gone down long before.
But there was still light there—though certainly not sunset.
Far off over the horizon was a faint glow! I couldn’t understand at first, since I was sure the bomb had been zeroed-in on the Home Offices in New York; but something must have happened. From that glow, still showing in the darkness so many hours after the explosion as the dust particles gleamed bluely, it must have gone off over the Atlantic.
There was no doubt in my mind any longer. The most deadly weapon the world had ever known had gone off!
CHAPTER XV
The hotel was not safe, of course, but what place was when the world was at an end? Rena and I, between us, got her father, Benedetto, upstairs into her room without attracting too much attention. We put him on the bed and peeled back his jacket.
The bullet had gone into his shoulder, a few inches above the heart. The bone was splintered, but the bleeding was not too much. Rena did what she could and, for the first time in what seemed like years, we had a moment’s breathing space.
I said, “I’ll phone for a doctor.”
Benedetto said faintly, “No, Thomas! The Company!”
I protested, “What’s the difference? We’re all dead, now. You’ve seen—” I hesitated and changed it. “Slovetski has seen to that. There was cobalt in that bomb.”
He peered curiously at me. “Slovetski? Did you suppose it was Slovetski who planned it so?” He shook his head—and winced at the pain. He whispered, “Thomas, you do not understand. It was my project, not Slovetski’s. That one, he proposed to destroy the Company’s Home Office; it was his thought that killing them would bring an end to evil. I persuaded him there was no need to kill—only to gamble.”
I stared at him. “You’re delirious!”
“Oh, no.” He shook his head and succeeded in a tiny smile. “Do you not see it, Thomas? The great explosion goes off, the world is showered with particles of death. And then—what then?”
“We die!”
“Die? No! Have you forgotten the vaults of the clinics?”
It staggered me. I’d been reciting all the pat phrases from early schooling about the bomb! If it had gone off in the Short War, of course, it would have ended the human race! But I’d been a fool.
The vaults had been built to handle the extreme emergencies that couldn’t be foreseen—even one that knocked out nearly the whole race. They hadn’t expected that a cobalt-cased bomb would ever be used. Only the conspirators would have tried, and how could they get fissionables? But they were ready for even that. I’d been expecting universal doom.
“The clinics,” Benedetto repeated as I stared at him.
It was the answer. Even radio-poisons of cobalt do not live forever. Five years, and nearly half of them would be gone; eleven years, and more than three-quarters would be dissipated. In fifty years, the residual activity would be down to a fraction of one per cent—and the human race could come back to the surface.
“But why?” I demanded. “Suppose the Company can handle the population of the whole world? Granted, they’ve space enough and one year is the same as fifty when you’re on ice. But what’s the use?”
He smiled faintly. “Bankruptcy, Thomas,” he whispered. “So you see, we do not wish to fall into the Company’s hands right now. For there is a chance that we will live…and perhaps the very faintest of chances that we will win!”
* * * *
It wasn’t even a faint chance—I kept telling myself that.
But, if anything could hurt the Company, the area in which it was vulnerable was money. Benedetto had been intelligent in that. Bombing the Home Office would have been an inconvenience, no more. But to disrupt the world’s work with a fifty-year hiatus, while the air purged itself of the radioactive cobalt from the bomb, would mean fifty years while the Company lay dormant; fifty years while the policies ran their course and became due.
For that was the wonder of Benedetto’s scheme: The Company insured against everything. If a man were to be exposed to radiation and needed to be put away, he automatically went on “disability” benefits, while his policy paid its own premiums!
Multiply this single man by nearly four billion. The sum came out to a bankrupt Company.
It seemed a thin thread with which to strangle a monster. And yet, I thought of the picture of Millen Carmody in my Adjuster’s Manual. There was the embodiment of honor. Where a Defoe might cut through the legalities and flout the letter of the agreements, Carmody would be bound by his given word. The question, then, was whether Defoe would dare to act against Carmody.
Everything else made sense. Even exploding the bomb high over the Atlantic: It would be days before the first fall-out came wind-borne to the land, and in those days there would be time for the beginnings of the mass migration to the vaults.
Wait and see, I told myself. Wait and see. It was flimsy, but it was hope, and I had thought all hope was dead.
We could not stay in the hotel, and there was only one place for us to go. Slovetski captured, the Company after our scalps, the whole world about to be plunged into confusion—we had to get out of sight.
* * * *
It took time. Zorchi’s hospital gave me a clue; I tracked it down and located the secretary.
The secretary spat at me over the phone and hung up, but the second time I called him he grudgingly consented to give me another number to call. The new number was Zorchi’s lawyer. The lawyer was opaque and uncommunicative, but proposed that I call him back in a quarter of an hour. In a quarter of an hour, I was on the phone. He said guardedly: “What was left in Bay 100?”
“A hypodermic and a bottle of fluid,” I said promptly.
“That checks,” he confirmed, and gave me a number.
And on the other end of that number I reached Zorchi.
“The junior assassin,” he sneered. “And calling for help? How is that possible, Weels? Did my avocatto lie?”
I said stiffly, “If you don’t want to help me, say so.”
“Oh—” he shrugged. “I have not said that. What do you want?”
“Food, a doctor, and a place for three of us to hide for a while.”
He pursed his lips. “To hide, is it?” He frowned. “That is very grave, Weels. Why should I hide you from what is undoubtedly your just punishment?”
“Because,” I said steadily, “I have a telephone number. Which can be traced. Defoe d
oesn’t know you’ve escaped, but that can be fixed!”
He laughed angrily. “Oh-ho. The assassin turns to blackmail, is that it?”
I said furiously, “Damn you, Zorchi, you know I won’t turn you in. I only point out that I can—and that I will not. Now, will you help us or not?”
He said mildly, “Oh, of course. I only wished you to say ‘please’—but it is not a trick you Company men are good at. Signore, believe me, I perish with loneliness for you and your two friends, whoever they may be. Listen to me, now.” He gave me an address and directions for finding it. And he hung up.
Zorchi’s house was far outside the city, along the road to New Caserta. It lay at the bend of the main highway, and I suppose I could have passed it a hundred thousand times without looking inside, it was so clearly the white-stuccoed, large but crumbling home of a mildly prosperous peasant. It was large enough to have a central court partly concealed from the road.
The secretary, spectacles and all, met us at the door—and that was a shock. “You must have roller skates,” I told him.
He shrugged. “My employer is too forgiving,” he said, with ice on his voice. “I had hoped to reach him before he made an error. As you see, I was too late.”
We lifted Benedetto off the seat; he was just barely conscious by now, and his face was ivory under the Mediterranean tan. I shook the secretary off and held Benedetto carefully in my arms as Rena held the door before me.
The secretary said, “A moment. I presume the car is stolen. You must dispose of it at once.”
I snarled over my shoulder, “It isn’t stolen, but the people that own it will be looking for it all right. You get rid of it.”
He spluttered and squirmed, but I saw him climbing into the seat as I went inside. Zorchi was there waiting, in a fancy motorized wheelchair. He had legs! Apparently they were not fully developed as yet, but in the short few days since I had rescued him something had grown that looked like nearly normal limbs. He had also grown, in that short time, a heavy beard.
The sneer, however, was the same.
I made the error of saying, “Signore Zorchi, will you call a doctor for this man?”
The thick lips writhed under the beard. “Signore it is now, is it? No longer the freak Zorchi, the case Zorchi, the half-man? God works many miracles, Weels. See the greatest of them all—it has transmuted the dog into a signore!”
I grated, “For God’s sake, Zorchi, call a doctor!”
He said coldly, “You mentioned this over the phone, did you not? If you would merely walk on instead of bickering, you would find the doctor already here.”
* * * *
Plasma and antibiotics: They flowed into Benedetto from half a dozen plastic tubes like oil into the hold of a tanker. And I could see, in the moments when I watched, the color come back into his face, and the sunken eyes seem to come back to life.
The doctor gave him a sedative that made him sleep, and explained to us that Benedetto was an old man for such goings-on. But if he could be kept still for three or four weeks, the doctor said, counting the lire Zorchi’s secretary paid him, there was no great danger.
If he could be kept still for three or four weeks. In scarcely ten days, the atmosphere of the planet would be death to breathe! Many things might happen to Benedetto in that time, but remaining still was not one of them.
Zorchi retired to his own quarters once the doctor was gone, and Rena and I left Benedetto to sleep.
We found a television set and turned it on, listening for word of the cobalt-bomb. We got recorded canzoni sung by a reedy tenor. We dialed, and found the Neapolitan equivalent of a soap opera, complete with the wise, fat old mother and the sobbing new daughter-in-law. It was like that on all the stations, while Rena and I stared at each other in disbelief.
Finally, at the regular hourly newscast, we got a flicker: “An unidentified explosion,” the announcer was saying, “far out at sea, caused alarm to many persons last night. Although the origins are not known, it is thought that there is no danger. However, there has been temporary disturbance to all long-lines communications, and air travel is grounded while the explosion is being investigated.”
We switched to the radio: it was true. Only the UHF television bands were on the air.
I said, “I can’t figure that. If there’s enough disturbance to ruin long-distance transmission, it ought to show up on the television.”
Rena said doubtfully, “I do not remember for sure, Tom, but is there not something about television which limits its distance?”
“Well—I suppose so, yes. It’s a line of sight transmission, on these frequencies at any rate. I don’t suppose it has to be, except that all the television bands fall in VHF or UHF channels.”
“Yes. And then, is it not possible that only the distance transmission is interrupted? On purpose, I mean?”
I slammed my hand on the arm of the chair. “On purpose! The Company—they are trying to keep this thing localized. But the idiots, don’t they know that’s impossible? Does Defoe think he can let the world burn up without doing anything to stop it—just by keeping the people from knowing what happened?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, Tom.”
I didn’t know either, but I suspected—and so did she. It was out of the question that the Company, with its infinite resources, its nerve-fibers running into every part of the world, should not know just what that bomb was, and what it would do. And what few days the world had—before the fallout became dangerous—were none too many.
Already the word should have been spread, and the first groups alerted for movement into the vaults, to wait out the day when the air would be pure again. If it was being delayed, there could be no good reason for it.
The only reason was Defoe. But what, I asked myself miserably, was Millen Carmody doing all this while? Was he going to sit back and placidly permit Defoe to pervert every ideal of the Company?
I could not believe it. It was not possible that the man who had written the inspiring words in the Handbook could be guilty of genocide.
Rena excused herself to look in on her father. Almost ashamed of myself, I took the battered book from my pocket and opened it to check on Millen Carmody’s own preface.
It was hard to reconcile the immensely reassuring words with what I had seen. And, as I read them, I no longer felt safe and comforted.
* * * *
There seemed to be no immediate danger, and Rena needed to get out of that house. There was nothing for Benedetto to do but wait, and Zorchi’s servants could help him when it was necessary.
I took her by the arm and we strolled out into the garden, breathing deeply. That was a mistake. I had forgotten, in the inconspicuous air conditioning of Zorchi’s home, that we were in the center of the hemp fields that had nearly cost me my dinner, so long ago, with Hammond. I wondered if I ever would know just why Hammond was killed. Playing both ends against the middle, it seemed—he had undoubtedly been in with Slovetski’s group. Rena had admitted as much, and I was privately certain that he had been killed by them.
But of more importance was the stench in our nostrils. “Perhaps,” said Rena, “across the road, in the walnut grove, it will not be as bad.”
I hesitated, but it felt safe in the warm Italian night, and so we tried it. The sharp scent of the walnut trees helped a little; what helped even more was that the turbinates of the nostril can stand just so much, and when their tolerance is exceeded they surrender. So that it wasn’t too long before, though the stench was as strong as ever, we hardly noticed it.
We sat against the thick trunk of a tree, and Rena’s head fitted naturally against my shoulder. She was silent for a time, and so was I—it seemed good to have silence, after violent struggle and death.
Then she said: “Strange man.”
“Me?”
“No. Oh, yes, Tom, if it comes to that, you, too. But I was thinking just now of Zorchi. Is it true, what you told me of his growing legs and arms so freely?”
“I thought everyone in Naples knew that. I thought he was a national hero.”
“Of course, but I have never really known that the stories were true. How does it happen, Tom?”
I shrugged. “Heaven knows, I don’t. I doubt if even Zorchi knows. His parents might have been involved in some sort of atomic business and got radiated, and so they produced a mutation. It’s perfectly possible, you know.”
“I have heard so, Tom.”
“Or else it just happened. Something in his diet, in the way his glands responded to a sickness, some sort of medicine. No one knows.”
“Cannot scientists hope to tell?”
“Well—” it was beginning to sound like the seeds of one of our old arguments—“well, I suppose so. Pure research isn’t much encouraged these days.”
“But it should be, you think?”
“Of course it should. The only hope of the world—” I trailed off. Through the trees was a bright, distant glare, and I had just remembered what it was.
“Is what, Tom?”
“There isn’t any,” I said, but only to myself. She didn’t press me; she merely burrowed into my arm.
Perhaps the wind shifted, and the smell of the hemp fields grew stronger; perhaps it was only the foul thought that the glaring sky had triggered that contaminated my mood. But where I had been happy and relaxed—the C-bomb completely out of my mind for the moment—now I was too fully aware of what was ahead for all of us.
“Let’s go back, Rena,” I said. She didn’t ask why. Perhaps she, too, was feeling the weight of our death sentence.
* * * *
We caught the evening newscast; its story varied little from the early ones.
Benedetto still slept, but Zorchi joined us as we watched it.
The announcer, face stamped with the careful blend of gravity and confidence that marks telecasters all over the world, was saying: “Late word on the bomb exploded over the North Atlantic indicates that there is some danger that radioactive ash may be carried to this area. The danger zones are now being mapped and surveyed, and residents of all such sections will be evacuated or placed in deep sleep until the danger is over.
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