* * * *
I am built too long for a hotel-room couch, particularly a room in a Mediterranean coastal fleabag. I lay staring into the white Italian night; the Moon brightened the clouds outside the window, and the room was clearly enough illuminated to show me the bed and the slight, motionless form in it. Rena was not a restless sleeper, I thought. Nor did she snore.
Rena was a most self-possessed girl, in fact. She had overruled me when I tried to keep the bellboy from clearing away the dinner service. “Do you think no other Company man ever had a girl in his room?” she innocently asked. She borrowed a pair of the new pajamas Defoe’s thoughtful expediters had bought and put in the bureau. But I hadn’t expected that, while the bellboy was clearing away, she would be softly singing to herself in the bath.
He had seemed not even to hear.
He had also leaped to conclusions—not that it was much of a leap, I suppose. But he had conspicuously not removed the bottle of champagne and its silver bucket of melting ice.
It felt good, being in the same room with Rena.
I shifted again, hunching up my torso to give my legs a chance to stretch out. I looked anxiously to see if the movement had disturbed her.
There is a story about an animal experimenter who left a chimpanzee in an empty room. He closed the door on the ape and bent to look through the keyhole, to see what the animal would do. But all he saw was an eye—because the chimp was just as curious about the experimenter.
In the half-light, I saw a sparkle of moonlight in Rena’s eye; she was watching me. She half-giggled, a smothered sound.
“You ought to be asleep,” I accused.
“And you, Tom.”
I obediently closed my eyes, but I didn’t stop seeing her.
If only she weren’t a fanatic.
And if she had to be a fanatic, why did she have to be the one kind that was my natural enemy, a member of the group of irresponsible troublemakers that Defoe had ordered me to “handle”?
What, I wondered, did he mean by “handle”? Did it include chlorpromazine in a lytic solution and a plastic cocoon?
I put that thought out of my mind; there was no chance whatever that her crazy belief, that the Company was using suspension as a retaliatory measure, was correct. But thinking of Defoe made me think of my work. After all, I told myself, Rena was more than a person. She was a key that could unlock the whole riddle. She had the answers—if there was a movement of any size, she would know its structure.
I thought for a moment and withdrew the “if.” She had admitted the riot of that afternoon was planned. It had to be a tightly organized group.
And she had to have the key.
* * * *
At last, I had been getting slightly drowsy, but suddenly I was wide awake.
There were two possibilities. I faced the first of them shakily—she might be right. Everything within me revolted against the notion, but I accepted it as a theoretical possibility. If so, I would, of course, have to revise some basic notions.
On the other hand, she might be wrong. I was certain she was wrong. But I was equally certain she was no raddled malcontent and if she was wrong, and I could prove it to her, she herself might make some revisions.
Propped on one elbow, I peered at her. “Rena?” I whispered questioningly.
She stirred. “Yes, Tom?”
“If you’re not asleep, can we take a couple more minutes to talk?”
“Of course.” I sat up and reached for the light switch, but she said, “Must we have the lights? The Moon is very bright.”
“Sure.” I sat on the edge of the couch and reached for a cigarette. “Can I offer you a deal, Rena?”
“What sort of deal?”
“A horse trade. You think the Company is corrupt and your father is not a casualty, right?”
“Correct, Tom.”
“And I think the Company is not corrupt and your father has radiation poisoning. One of us has to be wrong, right?”
“Correct, Tom.”
“Let’s find out. There are ways of testing for radiation sickness. I’ll go into the clinic in the morning and get the answer.”
She also lifted up on one elbow, peering at me, her long hair braided down her back. “Will you?”
“Sure. And we’ll make bets on it, Rena. If you are wrong—if your father has radiation poisoning—I want you to tell me everything there is to tell about the riot today and the people behind it. If I’m wrong—” I swallowed—“if I’m wrong, I’ll get your father out of there for you. Somehow. I promise it, Rena.”
There was absolute silence for a long time. Then she swung out of the bed and hurried over to me, her hands on mine. She looked at me and again I saw tears. “Will you do that, Tom?” she asked, hardly audible.
“Why, sure,” I said awkwardly. “But you have to promise—”
“I promise!”
She was staring at me, at arm’s length. And then something happened. She wasn’t staring and she wasn’t at arm’s length.
Kissing her was like tasting candied violets; and the Moon made her lovelier than anything human; and the bellboy had not been so presumptuous, after all, when he left us the champagne.
CHAPTER IX
Dr. Lawton was “away from his desk” the next morning. That was all to the good. I was not a hardened enough conspirator to seek out chances to make mistakes, and although I had a perfectly good excuse for wanting to go down into the vaults again, I wasn’t anxious to have to use it. The expediter-officer in charge, though, didn’t even ask for reasons. He furnished me with what I wanted—a map of the vaults and a radiation-counter—and turned me loose.
Looking at the map, I was astonished at the size of this subterranean pyramid. Lawton had said we had eighty-odd thousand sleepers filed away and that had surprised me, but by the chart I held in my hand, there was space for perhaps ten times that many. It was beyond belief that so much space was really needed, I thought—unless there was some truth to Rena’s belief that the Company used the clinics for prisons…
I applied myself to the map. And, naturally, I read it wrong. It was very simple; I merely went to the wrong level, that was all.
It looked wrong as soon as I stepped out of the elevator. An elderly, officious civilian with a British accent barred my way. “You aren’t one of us, are you?”
I said, “I doubt it.”
“Then would you mind?” he asked politely, and indicated a spot on the side of the hall. Perhaps I was suggestible, but I obeyed his request without question. It was just as well, because a sort of procession rounded a bend and came down the corridor. There was a wheeled stretcher, with three elderly civilians puttering around it, and a bored medic following with a jar of something held aloft, feeding through a thin plastic tube into the arm of the man on the stretcher, as well as half a dozen others of more nondescript types.
The man who had stopped me nearly ran to meet the stretcher. He stared into the waxy face and whispered, “It’s he! Oh, absolutely, it is he!”
I looked and the face was oddly familiar. It reminded me of my childhood; it had a link with school days and the excitement of turning twelve. By the way the four old men were carrying on, however, it meant more than that to them. It meant, if not the Second Coming, at least something close to it.
By then I had figured out that this was that rare event in the day of a clinic—a revival. I had never seen one. I suppose I could have got out of the way and gone about my conspiratorial business, and it is no credit to me as a conspirator that I did not. But I was fascinated.
Too fascinated to wonder why revivals were so rare…
* * * *
The medic looked at his watch and, with careless efficiency, plucked the tube out of the waxy man’s arm.
“Two minutes,” he said to one of the civilians. “Then he’ll be as good as he ever was. You’ve got his clothes and release papers?”
“Oh, definitely,” said the civilian, beaming.
�
�Okay. And you understand that the Company takes no responsibility beyond the policy covering? After all, he was one of the first men suspended. We think we can give him another year or so—which is a year more than he would have had, at that—but he’s not what you’d call a Grade A risk.”
“Certainly,” agreed the civilian. “Can we talk to him now?”
“As soon as he opens his eyes.”
The civilian bent over the man, who no longer looked waxy. His face was now a mottled gray and his eyelids were flickering. He had begun to breathe heavily and irregularly, and he was mumbling something I couldn’t understand. The civilian whispered in his ear and the revived man opened his eyes and looked at him.
It was like seeing the dead come to life. It was exactly that, in fact; twenty minutes before, no chemical test, no stethoscope or probing thumb in the eye socket could have detected the faint living glow in the almost-dead cells. And yet—now he looked, he breathed, he spoke.
“I made it,” were his first understandable words.
“Indeed you did!” crowed the civilian in charge, while all of the others murmured happily to each other. “Sir, it is my pleasure to welcome you back to us. You are in Anzio, Italy. And I am Thomas Welbourne, at your service.”
The faint eyes sparkled. Dead, near-dead or merely decrepit, this was a man who wanted to enjoy life. Minutes out of the tomb, he said: “No! Not young Tommy Welbourne!”
“His grandson, sir,” said the civilian.
I had it just then—that face had watched me through a whole year of school. It had been in a frame at the front of the room, with half a dozen other faces. It had a name under it, which, try as I might, I couldn’t recall; but the face was there all the same. It was an easy one to keep in mind—strong though sunken, ancient but very much alive.
He was saying, in a voice as confident as any youth’s, “Ah, Tommy, I’ve lived to see it! Tell me, have you been to Mars? What is on the other side of the Moon? And the Russians—what are the Russians up to these days?”
The civilian coughed and tried to interrupt, but the figure on the stretcher went on heedlessly: “All those years gone—what wonders must we have. A tunnel under the Atlantic, I’ll wager! And ships that fly a hundred times the speed of sound. Tell me, Tommy Welbourne! Don’t keep an old man waiting!”
The civilian said reluctantly, but patiently, “Perhaps it will take a little explaining, sir. You see, there have been changes—”
“I know it, boy! That’s what I’m asking you!”
“Well, not that sort of changes, sir. We’ve learned new virtues since your time—patience and stability, things of that sort. You see—”
The interesting part was over and the glances of the others in the party reminded me that I didn’t belong here. I stole off, but not before the man on the stretcher noticed me and made a sort of clumsy two-fingered salute of hail and farewell as I left. It was exactly like the gesture in his picture on that schoolroom wall, up next to the presidents and the greatest of kings.
I found a staircase and climbed to another level of the boxlike clinic.
The local peasants called the vaults “coolers” or “ice cubes.” I suppose the reason had something to do with the fact that they were cool and rectangular, on the whole—perhaps because, like icebergs, the great bulk of the vaults was below the surface. But whatever you called them, they were huge. And the clinic at Anzio was only one out of hundreds scattered all over the world.
It was all a matter of viewpoint. To me, the clinics were emblems of the Company’s concern for the world. In any imaginable disaster—even if some fantastic plague struck the entire race at once—the affected population could be neatly and effectively preserved until medicine could catch up with their cures.
To Rena, they were prisons big enough to hold the human race.
It was time to find out which of us was right. I hurried through the corridors, between the tiers of sleepers, almost touching them on both sides. I saw the faint purplish gleam where Rena had spilled the fluid, and knelt beside the cocoon that held her father.
The UV sterilizers overhead made everything look ghastly violet, but in any light, the waxy face under the plastic would have looked dead as death itself. I couldn’t blame Rena for weeping.
I took out the little radiation counter and looked at it awkwardly. There was nothing complicated about the device—fortunately, because I had had little experience with them. It was a cylinder with a flaring snout at one end, a calibrated gauge at the side, marked in micro-roentgens. The little needle flickered in the green area of the dial. I held it to myself and the reading didn’t change. I pointed it up and pointed it down; it didn’t change.
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.”
The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack Page 90