And if Man outlawed death, he thought, if the doorway of death were closed against the final revelation and the resurrection, then surely Man must find such a concept or wander forever amid the galaxies a lost and crying thing.
With an effort, Vickers brought his thoughts back to the present.
"Hezekiah," he asked, "you are sure?"
"Of what, sir?"
"About the Prestons. You are sure there are no Prestons?"
"I am sure," said Hezekiah, "There was a Kathleen Preston," Vickers said. "I am _sure_ there was…"
But how could he be so sure?
He remembered her.
Flanders said there was such a person.
But his memory could be conditioned and so could Flanders' memory.
Kathleen Preston could be no more than an emotional factor introduced into his brain to keep him tied to this house, a keyed-in response that would not let him forget, no matter where he went or what he might become, this house and the ties it held for him.
"Hezekiah," Vickers asked, "who is Horton Flanders?"
"Horton Flanders," said the robot, "is an android, just the same as you."
CHAPTER FORTY
So he was supposed to stop Crawford.
He was supposed to hunch him.
But first he had to figure out the angles. He had to take the factors and balance one against another and see where the weak spots were and the strong points, too. There was the might of industry, not one industry alone, but the might of all the industry in the entire world. There was the fact that Crawford and industry had declared open war upon the mutants. And there was the matter of the secret weapon.
"Desperation and a secret weapon," Crawford had said, sitting in the hotel room. But the secret weapon, he had added, wasn't good enough.
First of all, Vickers had to know what the weapon was. Until he knew that, there would be no point in making any plans.
He lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and sorted out the facts and laid them in orderly rows and had a Iook at them. Then he juggled them a bit, changing their position in regard to one another and he balanced the strength of normal human against the strength of mutant and there were many places where they canceled one another and there were other instances where one stood forth, unassailable and uncancelable.
He got exactly nowhere.
"And of course I won't," he said. "This is the old awkward normal human way of doing. This is reasoning.
Hunch was the thing.
And how to do the hunching?
He swept the factors clean away, swept them from his mind, and lay upon the bed, staring at the darkness where the ceiling was and did not try to think.
He could feel the factors bumping in his brain, bouncing together, then fleeing from each other, but he kept himself from recognizing them.
An idea came: War.
He thought about it and it grew and gripped him.
War, but a different kind of war than the world had ever known. What was that phrase from the old history of World War II? A phoney war. And yet, not a phoney war.
It was a disturbing thing to think about something that you couldn't place — to have a hunch — that was it, a hunch grawing at you and not know what it was.
He tried to think about it and it retreated from him. He stopped thinking and it came back again.
Another idea came: Poverty.
And poverty was somehow tied up with war and he sensed the two of them, the two ideas, circling likecoyotes around the campfire that was himself, snarling and growling at each other in the darkness beyond the flame of his understanding.
He tried to banish them utterly into the darkness and they would not go.
After a time he grew accustomed to them and it seemed that the campfire flickered lower and the coyote-ideas did not run so fast nor snap so viciously.
There was another factor, too, said his sleeping mind. The mutants were short on manpower. That's why they had the robots and the androids.
There would be ways you could get around a manpower shortage. You could take one life and split it into many lives. You could take one mutant life and you could spread it thin, stretch it out and make it last longer and go further. In the economy of manpower, you could do many things if you just knew how.
The coyotes were circling more slowly now and the fire was growing dimmer and I'll stop you, Crawford, I'll get the answer and I'll stop you cold and I love you, Ann, and -
Then, not knowing, he had slept, he woke and sat bolt upright in the bed.
He knew!
He shivered in the slight chill of summer dawn and swung his legs from beneath the covers and felt the bite of the cold floor against his bare feet.
Vickers ran to the door and jerked it open and came out on the landing, with the stairway winding down into the hall below him.
"Flanders!" he shouted. "Flanders."
Hezekiah appeared from somewhere and began to climb the stairs, calling: "What is the matter, sir? Is there something that you want?"
"I want Horton Flanders!"
Another door opened and Horton Flanders stood there, bony ankles showing beneath the hem of nightshirt, sparse hair standing almost erect.
"What's going on?" he mumbled, tongue still thick with sleep. "What's all the racket?"
Vickers strode across the hall and grabbed him by the shoulders and demanded: "How many of us are there? How many ways was Jay Vickers' life divided?"
"If you'll stop shaking me —»
"I will when you tell me the truth."
"Oh, gladly," Flanders said. "There are three of us. There's you and I and…"
"_You?_"
"Certainly. Does it surprise you?"
"But you're so much older than I."
"We can do a great deal with synthetic flesh," said Flanders. "I don't see why you should be surprised at all."
And he wasn't, Vickers suddenly realized. It was as if he had always been aware of it.
"But the third one?" Vickers asked. "You said there are why they had the three. Who's the other one?"
"I can't tell you yet," Flanders said. "I won't tell you who it is. I've told you too much already."
Vickers reached out and grasped the front of Flanders' nightshirt and twisted the fabric until it tightened on his throat.
"There's no use in violence," Flanders said. "No possible use in violence. It was only because we reached a crisis sooner than expected that I've told you what I have. You weren't ready for even that much. You weren't fit to know. We were taking quite a chance of pushing you too fast. I couldn't possibly tell you more."
"Not fit to know!" Vickers repeated savagely.
"Not ready. You should have had more time. And to tell you what you ask, to tell you now, just isn't possible. It would — create complications for you. Impair your efficiency and your value."
"But I know _that_ answer already," Vickers told him angrily. "Ready or not, I know the answer to Crawford and his friends, and that's more than the rest of you have done, with all the time you've spent on it. I have the answer now, everything you'd hoped for; I know the secret weapon and I know how to counteract it. You said I should stop Crawford and I can."
"You're sure of that?"
"Completely sure," Vickers said. "But this other person, this third person…"
There was a suspicion creeping into his mind, a frightful suspicion.
"I have to know," he said.
"I just can't tell you; I can't possibly tell you," Flanders repeated.
Vickers' grip on the nightshirt had loosened; now he let his hand drop. The nagging thing tearing at his mind was a torture, a terrible, rising torture. Slowly he turned away.
"Yes, I'm sure," Vickers said again. "I'm sure I know _all_ the answers. I know, but what the hell's the use."
He went into his room and shut the door.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
THERE had been a moment when he had seen his course straight and clear before him — the realization th
at Kathleen Preston might have been no more than a conditioned personage, that for years the implanted memory of the walk in the enchanted valley had blinded him to the love he bore Ann Carter and the love that he now was sure she felt for him, glossed over with their silly quibbling and their bitter quarreling.
Then had come the realization, too, that his parents slept away the years in suspended animation, waiting for the coming of that world of peace and understanding to which they had given so much.
And he had not been able to turn his back upon them.
Perhaps, he told himself, it was as well, for now there was this other factor — making more than one life out of a single life.
It was a sensible way to do things, and perhaps a valid method, for the mutants needed manpower and when you needed manpower you did the best you could with what you had at hand. You placed in the hands of robots the work that could be left to robots and you took the life of living men and women and out of each of those lives you made several lives, housing the divisional lives in the bodies of your androids.
He was not a person in his own right, but a part of another person, a third of that original Jay Vickers whose body lay waiting for the day when his life would be given back to him again.
And Ann Carter was not a person in her own right, either, but the part of another person. Perhaps a part — and for the first time he forced himself to allow his suspicion to become a clear and terrible thought — perhaps a part of Jay Vickers, sharing with him and with Flanders the life that had been held originally by one.
Three androids now shared the single life: he and Flanders and someone else. And the question beat at him, whispering in his brain: who could that other be?
The three of them were bound by a common cord that almost made them one, and in time the three of them must let their lives flow back into the body of the original Jay Vickers. And when that happened, he wondered, which of them would continue as Jay Vickers? Or would none of them — would it be an equivalent of death for all three and a continuation of the consciousness that Jay Vickers himself had known? Or would the three of them be mingled, so that the resurrected Jay Vickers would be a strange three-way personality combining what was now himself and Flanders and the unknown other?
And the love he bore Ann Carter? In the face of the possibility that Ann might be that unknown other, what about the tenderness he suddenly had felt for her after the moonlight-androses years — what of that love now?
There could be no such love, he knew. If Ann were the third, there could be no love between them. You could not love yourself as you would another person. You could not love a facet of yourself or let a facet of yourself love you. You could not love a person who was closer than a sister or a mother…
Twice he had known love of a woman and twice it had been taken from him and now he was trapped with no other choice but to do the job that had been assigned to him.
He had told Crawford that when he knew what was going on, he'd come back and talk to him and between the two of them they'd see if there was a compromise.
But there was no compromise now, he knew.
Not if his hunch was right.
And Flanders had said that hunch was a better way of reasoning, a more mature, more adult way of arriving at the answer to a problem that was up to you to solve. A method, Flanders had told him, that did away with the winding path of reason that the human race had used through all its formative years.
For the secret weapon was the old, old weapon of deliberate war, waged with mathematical cynicism and calculated precision.
And how many wars, he wondered, could the human race survive? And the answer seemed to be: _Just one more real war_.
The mutants were the survival factor in the race of Man; and now there was nothing left to him, neither Kathleen nor Ann, nor even, perhaps, the hope of personal humanity — he must work as best he could to carry forward the best hope of the human race.
Someone tapped at the door.
"Yes," said Vickers. "Come on in."
"Breakfast will be ready, sir," said Hezekiah, "by the time that you get dressed."
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
FLANDERS was waiting in the dining room when Vickers came down the stairs.
"The others left," said Flanders. "They had work to do. And you and I have plotting."
Vickers did not answer. He pulled out a chair and sat down across from Flanders. The sunlight from the windows came down across Flanders' shoulders and his head stood out against the window glass in bold relief, with the whiteness of his hair like a fuzzy halo. His clothes, Vickers saw, still were slightly shabby and his necktie has seen better days, but he still was neat and his face shone with the scrubbing he had given it.
"I see that Hezekiah found some clothes for you," said Flanders. "I don't know what we'd do without Hezekiah. He takes care of us."
"Money, too," said Vickers. "A pack of it was lying on the dresser with the shirt and tie. I didn't take the time to count it, but there'd seem to be several thousand dollars."
"Of course. Hezekiah thinks of everything."
"But I don't want several thousand dollars."
"Go ahead," said Flanders. "We've got bales of it."
"Bales of it!"
"Certainly. We keep making it."
"You mean you counterfeit it?"
"Oh, bless me, no," said Flanders. "Although it's something we have often thought of. Another string to our bow, you might say."
"You mean flood the normal world with counterfeit money?"
"It wouldn't be counterfeit. We could duplicate the money exactly. Turn loose a hundred billion dollars of new money in the world and there'd be hell to pay."
"I can see the point," said Vickers. "I'm amazed you didn't do it."
Flanders looked sharply at him. "I have a feeling that you disapprove of us."
"In some ways I do," said Vickers.
Hezekiah brought in a tray with tall glasses of cold orange juice, plates of scrambled eggs and bacon, buttered toast, a jar of jam and a pot of coffee.
"Good morning, sir," he said to Vickers.
"Good morning, Hezekiah."
"Have you noticed," asked the robot, "how fine the morning is?"
"I have noticed that," said Vickers.
"The weather here is most unusually fine," said Hezekiah. "Much finer, I am told, than on the Earth ahead."
He served the food and left, out through the swinging door the kitchen, where they could hear him moving about at his morning chores.
"We have been humane," said Flanders, "as humane as possible. But we had a job to do and once in a while someone got his toes stepped on. It may be that we will have to get a little rougher now, for we are being pushed. If Crawford and his gang had just taken it a little easier, it would have worked out all right and we wouldn't have had to hurt them or anyone. Ten years more and it would have been easier. Twenty years more and it would have been a cinch. But now it's neither sure nor easy. Now it has to amount almost to revolution. Had we been given twenty years, it would have been evolution.
"Given time and we would have taken over not only world industry and world finance, but world government as well, but they didn't give us the time. The crisis came too soon."
"What we need now," said Vickers, "is a countercrisis."
Flanders seemed not to have heard him. "We set up dummy companies," he continued. "We should have set up more, but we lacked the manpower to operate even the ones we did set up. Given the manpower, we would have set up a vast number of our companies, would have gone more extensively into the manufacture of certain basic gadgets. But we needed the little manpower we had at so many other places — at certain crisis points or to hunt down other mutants to enlist into our group."
"There must be many mutants," Vickers said.
"There are a number of them," agreed Flanders, "but a large percentage of them are so entangled in the world and the affairs of the normal world that you can't dislodge them. Take a mutant man marri
ed to a normal woman. You simply can't, in the name of humanity, break up a happy marriage. Say some of their children are mutants — what can you do about them? You can't do a thing about it. You simply watch and wait. When they grow up and go out on their own, you can approach them, but not before that time.
"Take a banker or an industrialist upon whose shoulders rest an economic empire. Tell him he's a mutant and he'll laugh at you. He's made his place in life; he's satisfied; whatever idealism or liberalism he may have had at one time has disappeared beneath the exterior of rugged individualism. His loyalties are set to the pattern of the life he's made and there's nothing we can offer that will interest him."
"You might try immortality," suggested Vickers.
"We haven't got immortality."
"You should have attacked on the governmental level."
Flanders shook his head. "We couldn't. We did a little of it, but not much. With a thousand major posts in the governments of the world, we would have turned the trick quickly and easily. But we didn't have the thousand mutants to train for government and diplomatic jobs.
"By various methods, we did head off crisis after crisis. The carbohydrates relieved a situation which would have led to war. Helping the West get the hydrogen bomb years ahead of time held off the East just when they were set to strike. But we weren't strong enough and we didn't have the time to carry out any well defined, long-range program, so we had to improvise. We introduced gadgets as the only quick way we knew to weaken the socio-economic system of the Earth and, of course, that meant that sooner or later we would force Earth's industry to band against us."
"What else would you expect?" asked Vickers. "You interfere…"
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