Preferred Risk

by Lester Del Rey

  Well, I did what I could; but Benedetto was an iron-necked old man. I forbade him to leave and he laughed at me. I begged him to stay and he thanked me—and refused. Finally I abandoned him to Rena and Zorchi.

  Zorchi gave up almost at once. “A majestic man!” he said admiringly, as he rolled into the room where I was waiting, on his little power cart. “One cannot reason with him.”

  And Rena, in time, gave up, too. But not easily. She was weeping when she rejoined me.

  * * * *

  She had been unable even to get him to let her join him, or to consider taking someone else with him; he said it was his job alone. She didn’t even know where he was going. He had said it was not permissible, in so critical a situation, for him to tell where Slovetski was.

  Zorchi coughed. “As to that,” he said, “I have already taken the liberty of instructing one of my associates to be ready. If the Signore has gone to meet Slovetski, my man is following him…”

  So we waited, while the television announcers grew more and more grim-lipped and imperative.

  I listened with only half my mind. Part of my thoughts were with Benedetto, who should have been in a hospital instead of wandering around on some dangerous mission. And partly I was still filled with the spectacle that was unfolding before us.

  It was not merely a matter of preserving human lives. It was almost as important to provide the newly awakened men and women, fifty years from now, with food to eat and the homes and tools and other things that would be needed.

  Factories and transportation gear—according to the telecasts—were being shut down and sealed to stand up under the time that would pass—“weeks,” according to the telecast, but who needed to seal a tool in oil for a few weeks? Instructions were coming hourly over the air on what should be protected in each home, and how it was to be done. Probably even fifty years would not seriously damage most of the world’s equipment—if the plans we heard on the air could be efficiently carried out.

  But the farms were another matter. The preserving of seeds was routine, but I couldn’t help wondering what these flat Italian fields would look like in fifty untended years. Would the radiocobalt sterilize even the weeds? I didn’t think so, but I didn’t know. If not, would the Italian peninsula once again find itself covered with the dense forests that Caesar had marched through, where Spartacus and his runaway slaves had lurked and struck out against the Senators?

  And how many millions would die while the forests were being cleared off the face of the Earth again to make way for grain? Synthetic foods and food from the sea might solve that—the Company could find a way. But what about the mines—three, four and five thousand feet down—when the pumps were shut off and the underground water seeped in? What about the rails that the trains rode on? You could cosmoline the engines, perhaps, but how could you protect a million miles of track from the rains of fifty years?

  So I sat there, watching the television and waiting. Rena was too nervous to stay in one place. Zorchi had mysterious occupations of his own. I sat and stared at the cathode screen.

  Until the door opened behind me, and I turned to look.

  Rena was standing there. Her face was an ivory mask. She clutched the door as her father had a few hours before; I think she looked weaker and sicker than he.

  I said, for the first time, “Darling!” She stood silent, staring at me. I asked apprehensively, “What is it?”

  The pale lips opened, but it was a moment before she could frame the words. Then her voice was hard to hear. “My father,” she said. “He reached the place where he was meeting Slovetski, but the expediters were there before him. They shot him down in the street. And they are on their way here.”

  CHAPTER XVII

  It was quick and brutal. Somehow Benedetto had been betrayed; the expediters had known where he had come from. And that was the end of that.

  They came swarming down on us in waves, at least a hundred of them, to capture a man, a girl and a cripple—Zorchi’s servants had deserted us, melting into the hemp fields like roaches into a garbage dump. Zorchi had a little gun, a Beretta; he fired it once and wounded a man.

  The rest was short and unpleasant.

  They bound us and gagged us and flew us, trussed like game for the spit, to the clinic. I caught a glimpse of milling mobs outside the long, low walls as we came down. Then all I could see was the roof of the copter garage.

  We were brought to a tiny room where Defoe sat at a desk. The Underwriter was smiling. “Hello, Thomas,” he said, his eyes studying the bruise on my cheek. He turned toward Rena consideringly. “So this is your choice, eh, Thomas?” He studied Rena coolly. “Hardly my type. Still, by sticking with me, you could have had a harem.”

  Bound as I was, I started forward. Something hit me in the back at my first step, driving a hot rush of agony up from my kidneys. Defoe watched me catch my breath without a change of expression.

  “My men are quite alert, Thomas. Please do not try that again. Once is amusing, but twice would annoy me.” He sighed. “I seem to have been wrong about you, Thomas. Perhaps because I needed someone’s help, I overestimated you. I thought long ago that beneath your conditioning you had brains. Manning is a machine, good for taking orders. Dr. Lawton is loyal, but not intelligent. And between loyalty and intelligence, I’ll take brains. Loyalty I can provide for myself.” He nodded gravely at the armed expediters.

  Zorchi spat. “Kill us, butcher,” he ordered. “It is enough I die without listening to your foolish babbling.”

  Defoe considered him. “You interest me, Signore. A surprise, finding you revived and with Wills. Before we’re finished, you must tell me about that.”

  I saw Zorchi bristle and open his mouth, but a cold, suddenly calculating idea made me interrupt. “To get dell’Angela out as an attendant, I needed a patient for him to wheel. Zorchi had money, and I expected gratitude when I revived him later. It wasn’t hard getting Lawton’s assistant to stack his cocoon near Benedetto’s.”

  “Lawton!” Defoe grimaced, but seemed to accept the story. He smiled at me suddenly. “I had hopes for you, then. That escape was well done—simple, direct. A little crude, but a good beginning. You could have been my number one assistant, Thomas. I thought of that when I heard of the things you were saying after Marianna died—I thought you might be awaking.”

  I licked my lips. “And when you picked me up after Marianna’s death, and bailed me out of jail, you made sure the expediter corps had information that I was possibly not reliable. You made sure the information reached the underground, so they would approach me and I could spy for you. You wanted a patsy!”

  The smile was gleaming this time. “Naturally, until you could prove yourself. And of course, I had you jailed for the things you said because I wanted it that way. A pity all my efforts were wasted on you, Thomas. I’m afraid you’re not equipped to be a spy.”

  It took everything I had, but this time I managed to smile back. “On which side, Defoe? How many spies know you’ve got Millen Carmody down in Bay—”

  That hit him. But I didn’t have time to enjoy it. He made a sudden gesture, and the expediters moved. This time, when they dragged me down, it was very bad.

  * * * *

  When I came to, I was in another room. Zorchi and Rena were with me, but not Defoe. It was a preparation chamber, racked with instruments, furnished with surgical benches.

  A telescreen was flickering and blaring unheeded at one end of the room. I caught a glimpse of scenes of men, women and children standing in line, going in orderly queues through the medical inspections, filing into the clinic and its local branch stations for the sleep drug. The scenes were all in Naples; but they must have been, with local variations, on every telescreen on the globe.

  Dr. Lawton appeared. He commanded coldly: “Take your clothes off.”

  I think that was the most humiliating moment of all.

  It was, of course, only a medical formality. I knew that the suspendees had to be nude i
n their racks. But the very impersonality of the proceeding made it ugly. Reluctantly I began to undress, as did Rena, silent and withdrawn, and Zorchi, sputtering anger and threats. My whole body was a mass of redness; in a few hours the red would turn to purple and black, where the hoses of the expediters had caressed me.

  Or did a suspendee bruise? Probably not. But it was small satisfaction.

  Lawton was looking smug; no doubt he had insisted on the privilege of putting us under himself after I’d blamed him for Zorchi’s escape. I couldn’t blame him; I would have returned the favor with great joy.

  Well, I had wanted to reach Millen Carmody, and Defoe was granting my wish. We might even lie on adjacent racks in Bay 100. After what I’d told Defoe, we should rate such reserved space!

  Lawton approached with the hypospray, and a pair of expediters grabbed my arms. He said: “I want to leave one thought with you, Wills. Maybe it will give you some comfort.” His smirk told me that it certainly would not. “Only Defoe and I can open Bay 100,” he reminded me. “I don’t think either of us will; and I expect you will stay there a long, long time.”

  He experimentally squirted a faint mist from the tip of the hypospray and nodded satisfaction. He went on: “The suspension is effective for a long time—several hundred years, perhaps. But not forever. In time the enzymes of the body begin to digest the body itself.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “I don’t know if the sleeping brain knows it is pain or not. If it does, you’ll know what it feels like to dissolve in your own gutwash…”

  He smiled. “Good night,” he crooned, and bent over my arm.

  The spray from the end of the hypo felt chilly, but not at all painful. It was as though I had been touched with ice; the cold clung, and spread.

  I was vaguely conscious of being dumped on one of the surgical tables, even more vaguely aware of seeing Rena slumping across another.

  The light in the room yellowed, flickered and went out.

  I thought I heard Rena’s voice…

  Then I heard nothing. And I saw nothing. And I felt nothing, except the penetrating cold, and then even the cold was gone.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  My nerves throbbed with the prickling of an infinity of needles. I was cold—colder than I had ever been. And over everything else came the insistent, blurred voice of Luigi Zorchi.

  “Weels! Weels!”

  At first it was an annoyance. Then, abruptly, full consciousness came rushing back, bringing some measure of triumph with it. It had worked! My needling of Defoe and my concealing of Zorchi’s ability to revive himself had succeeded in getting us all put into Bay 100, where the precious hypodermic and fluid were hidden. After being pushed from pillar to post and back, even that much success was enough to shock me into awareness.

  My heart was thumping like a rusty cargo steamer in a high sea. My lungs ached for air and burned when they got it. But I managed to open my eyes to see Zorchi bending over me. Beyond him, I saw the blue-lighted sterilizing lamps, the door that opened from inside, and the racked suspendees of Bay 100.

  “It is time! But now finally you awake, you move!” Zorchi grumbled. “The body of Zorchi does not surrender to poisons; it throws them off. But then because of these small weak legs, I must wait for you! Come, Weels, no more dallying! We have still work to do to escape this abomination!”

  I sat up clumsily, but the drugs seemed to have been neutralized. I was on the bottom tier, and I managed to locate the floor with my legs and stand up. “Thanks, Zorchi,” I told him, trying to avoid looking at his ugly, naked body and the things that were almost his legs.

  “Thanks are due,” he admitted. “I am a modest man who expects no praise, but I have done much. I cannot deny it. It took greatness to crawl through this bay to find you. On my hands and these baby knees, Weels, I crawled. Almost, I am overcome with wonder at so heroic— But I digress. Weels, waste no more time in talking. We must revive the others who are above my reach. Then let us, for God, go and find food.”

  Somehow, though I was still weak, I managed to follow Zorchi and drag down the sacks containing Rena and Carmody. And while waiting for them to revive, I began to realize how little chance we would have to escape this time, naked and uncertain of what state affairs were in. I also realized what might happen if Lawton or Defoe decided to check up on Bay 100 now!

  For the few minutes while Rena revived and recognized me, and while I explained how I’d figured it out, it was worth any risk. Then finally, Carmody stirred and sat up. Maybe we looked enough like devils in a blue hell to justify his first expression.

  He wasn’t much like my mental image of the great Millen Carmody. His face was like his picture, but it was an older face and haggard under the ugly light. Age was heavy on him, and he couldn’t have been a noble figure at any time. Now he was a pot-bellied little man with scrawny legs and a faint tremble to his hands.

  But there was no fat in his mind as he tried to absorb our explanations while he answered our questions in turn. He’d come to Naples, bringing his personal physician, Dr. Lawton. His last memory was of Lawton giving him a shot to relieve his indigestion.

  It must have been rough to wake up here after that and find what a mess had been made of the world. But he took it, and his questions became sharper as he groped for the truth. Finally he sat back, nodding sickly. “Defoe!” he said bitterly. “Well, what do we do now, Mr. Wills?”

  It shook me. I’d unconsciously expected him to take over at once. But the eyes of Rena and Zorchi also turned to me. Well, there wasn’t much choice. We couldn’t stay here and risk discovery. Nor could we hide anywhere in the clinic; when Defoe found us gone, no place would be safe.

  “We pray,” I decided. “And if prayers help, maybe we’ll find some way out.”

  “I can help,” Carmody offered. He grimaced. “I know this place and the combination to the private doors. Would it help if we reached the garage?”

  I didn’t know, but the garage was half a mile beyond the main entrance. If we could steal a car, we might make it. We had to try.

  There were sounds of activity when we opened the door, but the section we were in seemed to be filled, and the storing of suspendees had moved elsewhere.

  We shut and relocked the door and followed Carmody through the seemingly endless corridors, with Zorchi hobbling along, leaning on Rena and me and sweating in agony. We offered to carry him, but he would have none of that. We moved further and further back, while the sight of Carmody’s round, bare bottom ahead ripped my feeling of awe for him into smaller and smaller shreds.

  He stopped at a door I had almost missed and his fingers tapped out something on what looked like an ornamental pattern. The door opened to reveal stairs that led down two flights, winding around a small elevator shaft. At the bottom was a long corridor that must be the one leading underground to the garage. Opposite the elevator was another door, and Carmody worked its combination to reveal a storeroom, loaded with supplies the expediters might need.

  He ripped a suit of the heavy gray coveralls off the wall and began donning them. “Radiation suits,” he explained. They were ugly things, but better than nothing. Anyone seeing us in them might think we were on official business. Zorchi shook off our help and somehow got into a pair. Then he grunted and began pulling hard-pellet rifles and bandoliers of ammunition off the wall.

  * * * *

  “Now, Weels, we are prepared. Let them come against us. Zorchi is ready!”

  “Ready to kill yourself!” I said roughly. “Those things take practice!”

  “And again I am the freak—the case who can do nothing that humans can do, eh, Weels?” He swore thickly, and there was something in his voice that abruptly roughened it. “Never Zorchi the man! There are Sicilians who would tell you different, could they open dead mouths to speak of their downed planes!”

  “He was the best jet pilot Naples had,” Rena said quietly.

  It was my turn to curse. He was right; I hadn’t thought of him as a man, o
r considered that he could do anything but regrow damaged tissues. “I’m sorry, Luigi!”

  “No matter.” He sighed, and then shrugged. “Come, take arms and ammunition and let us be out of this place. Even the nose of Zorchi can stand only so much of the smell of assassins!”

  We moved down the passage, staggering along for what seemed to be hours, expecting every second to run into some official or expediter force. But apparently the passage wasn’t being used much during the emergency. We finally reached stairs at the other end and headed up, afraid to attract attention by taking the waiting elevator.

  At the top, Carmody frowned as he studied the side passages and doors. “Here, I guess,” he decided. “This may still be a less used part of the garage.” He reached for the door.

  I stopped him. “Wait a minute. Is there any way back in, once we leave?”

  “The combination will work—the master combination used by the Company heads. Otherwise, these doors are practically bomb-proof!” He pressed the combination and opened the door a crack.

  Outside, I could see what seemed to be a small section of the Company car pool. There were sounds of trucks, but none were moving nearby. I saw a few men working on trucks a distance from us. Maybe luck was on our side.

  I pointed to the nearest expediter patrol wagon—a small truck, really, enclosed except for the driver’s seat. “That one, if there’s fuel. We’ll have to act as if we had a right to it, and hope for the best. Zorchi, can you manage it that far?”

  “I shall walk like a born assassin,” he assured me, but sweat began popping onto his forehead at what he was offering. Yet there was no sign of the agony he must have felt as he followed and managed to climb into the back with Rena and Carmody.

  The fuel gauge was at the half mark and, as yet, there was no cry of alarm. I gunned the motor into life, watching the nearest workmen. They looked up casually, and then went back to their business. Ahead, I could see a clear lane toward the exit, with a few other trucks moving in and out. I headed for it, my hair prickling at the back of my neck.