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 doesn’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 goo
d 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.
“Blue Bolt policies give you complete protection against all hazards from this explosion. I repeat, Blue Bolt policies give you complete protection against all hazards from this explosion. Check your policies and be sure of your status. There is absolutely no risk for any person carrying the basic Blue Bolt minimum coverage or better.”
I clicked off the set. “I wonder what the people in Shanghai are hearing tonight,” I said.
Zorchi had only listened without comment, when I told him about the bomb that afternoon; he listened without comment now.
Rena said: “Tom, I’ve been wondering. You know, I—I don’t have any insurance. Neither has my father, since we were canceled. And we’re not the only ones without it, either.”
I patted her hand. “We’ll straighten this out,” I promised. “You’ll get your coverage back.”
She gave me a skeptical look, but shook her head. “I don’t mean just about father and me. What about all of the uninsurables, all over the world? The bomb goes off, and everybody with a policy files down into the vaults, but what about the others?”
I explained, “There are provisions for them. Some of them can be cared for under the dependency clauses in the policies of their next of kin. Others have various charitable arrangements—some localities, for instance, carry blanket floater policies for their paupers and prisoners and so on. And—well, I don’t suppose it would ever come to that, but if someone turned up who had no coverage at all, he could be cared for out of the loss-pool that the Company carries for such contingencies. It wouldn’t be luxurious, but he’d live. You see,” I went on, warming to my subject, “the Company is set up so the actual premiums paid are meaningless. The whole objective of the Company is service; the premiums are only a way to that goal. The Company has no interest other than the good of the world, and—”
I stopped, feeling like a fool. Zorchi was laughing raucously.
I said resentfully, “I guess I asked for that, Zorchi. Well, perhaps what I said sounds funny. But, before God, Zorchi, that’s the way the Company is set up. Here—” I picked the Handbook from the end table beside me and tossed it to him—“read what Millen Carmody says. I won’t try to convince you. Just read it.”
He caught it expertly and dropped it on the floor before him. “So much for your Chief Assassin,” he remarked pleasantly. “The words are no doubt honied, Weels, but I am not at this moment interested to read them.”
I shrugged. It was peculiar how even a reasonable man—I have always thought of myself as a reasonable man—could make a fool of himself. It was no sin that habit had betrayed me into exalting the Company; but it was, at the least, quite silly of me to take offense when my audience disagreed with me.
I said, in what must have been a surly tone, “I don’t suppose you are—why should you? You hate the Company from the word go.”
He shook his head mildly. “I? No, Weels. Believe me, I am the Company’s most devoted friend. Without it, how would I feed my five-times-a-day appetite?”
I sneered at him. “If you’re a friend to the Company, then my best buddy is a tapeworm.”
“Meaning that Zorchi is a parasite?” His eyes were furious. “Weels, you impose on me too far! Be careful! Is it the act of a tapeworm that I bleed and die, over and over? Is it something I chose, did I pray to the saints, before my mother spawned me, that I should be born a monster? No, Weels! We are alike, you gentlemen of the Company and I—we live on blood money, it is true. But the blood I live on, man—it is my own!”
I said mollifyin
gly, “Zorchi, I’ve had a hard day. I didn’t mean to be nasty. I apologize.”
“Hah!”
“No, really.”
He shrugged, abruptly quiet. “It is of no importance,” he said. “If I wished to bear you a grudge, Weels, I would have more than that to give me cause.” He sighed. “It all looked quite simple twenty-four hours ago, Weels. True, I had worked my little profession in this area as far as it might go—with your help, of course. But the world was before me—I had arranged to fly next week to the Parisian Anarch, to change my name and, perhaps within a month, with a new policy, suffer a severe accident that would provide me with francs for my hobbies. Why is it that you bring bad news always?”
I said, “Wasn’t I of some little assistance to you at one time?”
“In helping me from the deepfreeze? Oh, yes, perhaps. But didn’t you help me into it in the first place, as well? And surely you have already had sufficient credit for aiding my escape—I observe the young lady looking at you with the eyes of one who sees a hero.”
I said in irritation, “You’re infuriating, Zorchi. I suppose you know that. I never claimed any credit for helping you out of the clinic. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I ever mentioned it. Everyone assumed that I had just happened to bring you along—no one questioned it.”
He flared, “You let them assume, Weels? You let them assume that Zorchi was as helpless a side of pork as those other dead ones—you let them guess that you stuck me with a needle, so that it would seem how brave you were? Is it not true that I had revived by myself, Weels?”
I felt myself growing angry. “Of course! But I just didn’t see any reason to—”
“To divide the credit, is that it, Weels? No, say no more; I have closed the subject. However, I point out that there is a difference between the rescue of a helpless hulk and the mere casual assistance one may be invited to give to a Zorchi.”
I let it go at that. There was no point in arguing with that man, ever.
The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack Page 95