He shook his head slightly, a faint sickly smile frozen on his lips. Then he gripped the chair, the tubes in his plastic arms flickered, he bolted to his feet. “Oh,” he said, face very serious now. “I do remember something. Mr. Ubu—he said in his tribe it was common for people to have some kind of sickness in the head. He explained that they had a certain kind of operation for this sickness, Mandunga it was called, a lot of people were operated on.”
“The gossipy old bastard,” Martine muttered. “I told him, I warned him to keep his trap shut.”
“He said many people were trained to perform this operation,” Theo went on mechanically, toneless as an electrovox. “He said for many years it had been done very scientifically, with asepsis and power-driven trepans and everything. He said that was because for many years a remarkable scientist had been living with them and teaching them how to do it scientifically. He said—this man, he’d had to leave not long before—he was a skilled scientist, he knew an awful lot about the brain. . . .”
Theo ran his plastic fingers through his close-cropped blond hair, blinked, swallowed hard. “Oh, no,” he said. “Oh no. . . . But still. Ubu said. He said this man was white. You’re white. You—you’re a brain surgeon, a highly skilled brain surgeon. Oh, dear God.”
Theo was beginning to cry again, a teardrop welled up in one large innocent hazel eye and flowed down his cheek. “Eighteen years?” he said shakily. “It’s crazy, it doesn’t make sense.”
“How many times do I have to tell you?” Martine said. In exasperation he thumped the desk top with his fist. “I was a deserter. I was hiding. Not saving humanity, not dreaming up harebrained messianic stunts. Hiding! Hiding! Deserters hide, I was hiding!” He glared at Theo—the man was beseeching him with his eyes to ease his torment somehow.
“One thing,” Theo whispered.
“Shoot.”
“The notebook. You did write it. You did leave it.”
“All right. I’ll have to take the responsibility for writing it—and for leaving it around where somebody else could read it. But, you see, you never took the responsibility for reading it.”
“Helder was wrong?”
“It’s high time you found this out: the Helders are always wrong. They’re always annotating the facts of history and personality out of existence, whenever those facts mess up their neat ideological packages. And shoving their footnotes, dressed up as facts, down the gullible throats of suckers like you.”
Theo sat down again, transparent elbows on transparent knees, and regarded his dangling transparent hands. “Helder was very convincing,” he said.
“Because you wanted to be convinced—you couldn’t bring yourself to look the stark facts in the eye, you begged Helder to dress them up with his footnotes. One fact in particular you could never assess coolly—the fact of Helder himself. You think you know Helder?”
Martine explained what had happened to Rosemary. “I know the whole story, you see. That, dear Brother Theo, was the story I reminded him of in my letter this morning. You see, you really didn’t have to go to the trouble of checking the tattoo on my arm. The son-of-a-bitch knew from my letter that it was really me. . . .”
Theo was silent, turning his hands forward and back, examining them as though they were prize specimens of Aglais j-album. Finally he said, without looking up, “Then you didn’t mean all that about Immob either.”
“I was warning against Immob—warning myself. I meant only one thing. I meant what I said about masochism—the one subject in my notes that Helder chose to overlook. I meant only that the human race was so goddamned masochistic it might very well, given an exalted programmatic cover by some bumblehead messiah like Helder, an excuse for self-maiming dressed up as a shining ideology, come to some ultimate sacrificial monstrosity like Immob—tear itself limb from limb, literally, and call the result salvation—create for itself the last word in limbos and consider that it had been jet-propelled straight through the pearly gates. . . . Only it was just an ironic figure of speech, you see, an elaborate pun. I didn’t mean it literally. I thought I was just joking. . . .”
Theo held his fingers before his face and bent the knuckles, absorbedly watching the gleaming tubes. “The Theo part, that was a joke. You were joking about calling me Theo.”
“The glossy theological sheen, and under it a savage plunging of the scalpel into oneself—that’s the anatomy of all great political crusades, all messianic perfectionist and Salvationist mass movements, from Cro-Magnon man to Cyber-Cyto man! Naturally, such movements must be led by men who are pacifists on the surface and raping babies at heart—only a leader with such raging ambivalence in himself can exert such a charismatic spell over the rest of humanity, the rank-and-file ambivaleers, the ambivaliants, as to mobilize them for anything and everything. . . .”
Theo raised his fingers still higher, studying their outlines against the background of the lumi-ceiling like a bacteriologist eyeing a rack of test tubes. “For nothing,” he said. “The whole thing was a mistake.”
There was no hysteria in his face now, the eyes were quite dry, steady. Something that ran deeper than tears, excluded tears, had taken hold of him now—he was lost in a dead emotional space in which the unspeakable facts gleamed, sputtered, beat like ramrods against the eyballs. It was a fact-ridden, fact-drenched becalmment in which he floated now, corpse riding on a Sargasso Sea of facts, enormities brushing against him like putrescent orange peels and stinking dead cats. He looked exactly as he had looked eighteen years ago on the operating table, eyes open and glassy and staring. But this time he saw.
But now that Theo was far beyond the paltry histrionics of grief, Martine himself felt moved to weep. It was absurd—what was there to weep for in this wretch? But there it was, Martine felt a prickling in his eyes as he watched Theo turn his gleaming plastic hands back and forth against the light, over and back; he began to blink rapidly.
“I’m no better than you,” he said. “Worse, maybe. I didn’t even believe. . . . All this talk, what good does it do? Are you going to take me to Helder?”
“You knew about Coney Island. He said if you knew, if the tattoo was there, I was to take you to him.”
“Poor little Theo.” Martine had intended to make it sound mocking, but there was instead a real sadness in his voice. “Poor little self-made ambulatory basket case. For centuries now you’ve been devotedly tailing your glorious martyrs—never suspecting that if you ever caught up with them they’d turn out to have feet of clay, and tattoos on their arms informing you that twice-two equals five. . . . Come on, let’s get going. I’ve got a couple of footnotes I want to add to Helder’s footnotes.”
Martine rolled down his shirtsleeve and slipped into his jacket. He went to the door and opened it, waited for Theo to pass through. He followed.
“Don’t feel too sorry for yourself,” he said as the car swung into the highway. “Helder taught you the neat mathematical approach to things, the twice-two pitch, use it now. How many people did you eliminate in the war, twenty million, thirty million? How many did you disfigure or clip, hundreds and hundreds of thousands?” His voice grew harsh as he spoke, it satisfied him that his toughness was returning; sentimentality had no place in his plans at the moment. “The mathematics is all in your favor, you see—two legs ripped from you and two arms willingly given, twice-two equals four exactly. It’s not a very stiff price to pay, you got off pretty damned easy.”
To himself he added, “How many people did I eliminate in the cave? How stiff a price will I have to pay for that?”
Theo drove for a long time without saying anything; he left the highway and picked a devious route over bumpy back roads, concentrating on the wheel. Finally, as the buildings of Los Alamos loomed up in the distance, wavering a little in the rolling heat currents of the desert, he said very softly, “Why did you come back?”
Martine made a face, as though he had tasted something unpleasant. “Oh,” he said. “To take responsibility for my notebook,
I guess. To find out why I wrote it. To write an ending for it, maybe.”
His thumb played with the safety catch of the automatic in his pocket. He studied Theo’s large, frank, innocent, too steady hazel eye, eagle-scout eye, peace-on-earth eye. If he killed Helder, obviously he also had to kill Theo—matter of consistency, you can’t kill just one Siamese twin. He did not know whether he could do it.
Ahead there was a long low concrete structure, one story high, with garage-like driveways between its thick columns; across the roof was a sign reading, DROP NUMBER SEVEN: LOS ALAMOS INDUSTRIAL SLOT. Theo took the cutoff leading to this building and drove through one of the entrances, stopping before a pair of wide doors and flicking his headlights on and off several times.
“We’ll go the rest of the way underground,” he said without expression. “Safer. Might run into some of Vishinu’s men going through the streets.”
In response to the signal from his headlights the doors slid open. Theo drove into the elevator, flashed his lights twice more, the doors closed and the elevator began to drop.
chapter twenty-two
FOR A MINUTE, close to a minute, they streaked downward. Then a slackening of speed, the elevator braked to a smooth halt, doors ground open again and Theo drove out into a narrow low-ceilinged corridor chipped through solid rock and whitewashed to a gleam. The car nosed into another such slot, then a third. More twistings and weavings, it was a trellis of underground speedways, a two-laned honeycomb, hospital-clean and morgue-still—then without warning they zoomed clear of imminent walls, shot from cramping confinement into the open as in some explosive chthonian birth.
Martine looked about him in dumb astonishment. They were now traveling at a hundred miles an hour along the rim of a chasm as wide across as the Grand Canyon or the Grand Coulee and seemingly without beginning or end.
The road they were speeding over was actually a sort of platform stretched in space only thirty feet or so from the roof of this enormous pit, a catwalk arrangement supported by cantilevers which jutted out from the sheer perpendicular wall on the left: a spacious highway, wide enough for six traffic lanes and edged with a raised ramp for pedestrians. And below, to the right, fizzing and yammering all through the incredible man-made gash, was a whole subterranean supercity—a composite of many Pittsburghs and Detroits buried under the desert sands. At some points the earth had been hollowed out to greater depths than at others: the topmost levels seemed to be hardly more than two or three hundred feet below the overhanging road, the bottommost levels a thousand feet down or even more. And the entire floor of the hollow, at all levels, was strewn with machines and manufacturing equipment, the litter of a miraculous century which wrote its fables in steel and underscored them in molybdenum: the squat metallic humps of atomic breeder reactors, big around as a city block, and hovering over them, traveling on suspended tracks, the delicate spidery filigreed arms of cranes with magnetized fingers at their restless lips; flame-geysering blast furnaces and sparkshowering open hearths and incandescent kilns, close by them many thin-lipped mouths from whose spinning cylindrical dentures spewed flat sheets of steel and aluminum, and, just beyond, to mold these metals, row upon row of planers and shapers and drillers and bevelers and stampers and buffers and riveters and welders; all the sleek devices invented by men to supplement their own puny fingers and teeth, and to muscle these super-biters and super-hammerers, to supply the super-biceps, atomic power plants everywhere. It was Willow Run and Oak Ridge and Hanford rolled up in one. And besides the magnetized fingers and the giant hooks, belt lines ran everywhere, conveyor bands and escalators: mechanized carrier pigeons and St. Bernard dogs which loped dutifully about feeding the raw materials of metal and plastic into the processors and the finished parts into sub-assembly lines and the sub-assemblies into final assembly, then herded the finished products to the paint-sprayers and plastic-coaters and after that to the packaging and loading platforms.
Straining to fix his eye on discrete objects as the fantastic blur sped by, Martine could make out here and there squadrons of manufactured items riding out on the conveyors to the shipping departments: refrigerators, bicycles, upholstered armchairs, prefabricated cottages, electric toasters, automobiles, passenger planes, tractors, television sets, typewriters, adding machines, books, bathtubs, flags. And artificial limbs: at one point Martine was sure he spotted a line of gleaming plastic legs traveling along.
Visually the scene was like carnival fireworks, some amuck Mardi Gras, the whole pit danced with sparks and flares and gleams and licking flames, interspersed with puffs of steam and spurts of dust and spray—and the sound was an infernal hubbub of clangings and crunchings, whines and burrs, cracklings and hissings. But, curiously, there was an impersonal cast to the whole picture, the machines gave the impression of being on their own, impervious, self-contained. Here and there Martine could make out the dwarfed, irrelevant figure of a man—most of the workers seemed to be Negroes, he couldn’t be sure because of the distance and the speed at which the car was traveling—dressed in overalls, they all seemed to be puttering impotently, applying oil cans, sweeping up refuse, wiping away smudges of oil, wheeling carts of waste, while the machines, smug, indifferent, aloof, growled and thumped.
Martine pointed down at another belt line loaded with artificial limbs. “More legs,” he said. “To genuflect before the machines that make legs.”
His eyes hurt, it was too much. He looked away. For the first time he noticed that on their left, at eye level, carved into the face of the great cavern close to the ceiling, were many deep cubicles, separated from the elevated speedway by walls of glass and filled, lined on all sides, with more equipment: panel upon panel of levers and dials and switches and calibrated indicators and fluttering needles, batteries of electronic controls. It was easy to see what these instruments were for—up above the control boards loomed racks of flickering electronic tubes and a fantastic hodgepodge of multicolored wires running in a diabolic tangle from wall to wall, like neurone foliations seen through an electron microscope. Here was the reason why the few workmen below looked like such surplus commodities; these were the robot engineers which ran the sunken factories, caches of brains to ride herd on the brawn below. It was uncanny: as though the calculating machines up in their supervisory crannies were actually looking down upon their metallic slaves in the pit, literally overseeing them, eyes tyrannizing hands and feet, barking silent orders and blowing unheard whistles. Even before the war Martine had visited whole factories that were robotized from end to end all along the flow-chart, from the feed-in of ores and crude rubbers to the trundling out of neatly packaged jeeps and anti-aircraft guns; but he had never seen anything on this scale, whole cities run together and put under the surveillance of the machina ratiocinatrix. The most disconcerting thing about it was that he had a feeling he was being watched—as all the cogs in all the machines were watched. The atmosphere was one of peeping Toms everywhere, snoops and hawkshaws swarming over the white aseptic-looking walls.
“I don’t mean to be nosy,” Martine said, “but when a guy wants a raise around here, or would like to ask for the day off, who does he see—the third knob on the right?”
The strained joke didn’t relieve his nervousness, Theo seemed not to notice it. They drove in silence for a time, then Theo slowed down and took a left turn into a narrow tunnel. More zagging through the maze; then a pause before another elevator and a greased ascent, Martine relieved now to be back in cramped quarters after the agoraphobic wildness of the last few minutes.
When they emerged from the elevator this time there were lavish sweeps of window all about them and a downpour of sunlight—they were, Martine could see as soon as his eyes adjusted themselves to the glare, somewhere in the upper reaches of a skyscraper, some thirty-five or forty stories up, and the ramp they were traveling on mounted further still, curling wormlike around on the outside of the building and then shooting indoors again with each full circle, completing one loop per floor.
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On the topmost floor, which was domed with solid glass, Theo drove off the ramp into a parking space and came to a halt. He climbed out—there was an absent look about him, he seemed to be moving as though drugged—and Martine followed him.
“This is it,” Theo said. “I’d better call before we go in.”
He walked over to a switchboard set in the wall, pressed one of the plastic knobs several times. A light flashed on the board.
“We’re here,” he said tensely after a moment, speaking into the board. “I’ve got him with me.”
A silence; then a clipped “O.K.” Theo signaled to Martine to follow him.
Through corridors again, spacious ones this time, with bouncy soft-plasticized floors and much window and walls of soothing pastel shades, azure and magenta. They passed many doors on which there were neat little signs: BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS, BUREAU OF THE CENSUS, BUREAU OF NEURO-LOCO EDUCATION, BUREAU OF PRICE CONTROL—through the glass Martine could see that the offices within were inhabited not by people but by machines, more robot brains: panels of controls and circuits of tubes and transistors everywhere. Vishinu could mow down all the bureaucrats in the Strip and business would go on much as usual for a long time—these were the real bureaucrats, no migraine, the human ones were by far the most expendable. Shades of Wiener.
He stopped before the door marked BUREAU OF PRICE CONTROL and peered in. Directly before him was a huge panel running from floor to ceiling, labeled “Official Wholesale Price of Eggs Per Gross”; in the slot for the date were the figures “10/20/90” and in the slot which indicated the price per gross the figures changed, as Martine watched, from “$8.273” to “$8.274.”
“Very neat,” he said. “Just too, too twice-two.”
Theo stood by his side without saying anything, waiting for him.
“What price glory?” Martine said. “You got a calculator for that? I don’t know what that’s got to do with the price of eggs.”
They went on into another wing, passed through a door marked OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT. An anteroom, several outer offices—then another door on which Theo knocked.
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