Remember always that the Company serves humanity, not the reverse. The Company's work is the world's work. The Company can end, forever, the menace of war and devastation; but it must not substitute a tyranny of its own. Corruption breeds tyrants. Corruption has no place in the Company.
Remember always that the Company serves humanity, not the reverse. The Company's work is the world's work. The Company can end, forever, the menace of war and devastation; but it must not substitute a tyranny of its own. Corruption breeds tyrants. Corruption has no place in the Company.
They were glorious words. I read them over again, and stared at the portrait of Underwriter Carmody that was the frontispiece of the handbook. It was a face to inspire trust—wise and human, grave, but with warmth in the wide-spaced eyes.
Millen Carmody was not a man you could doubt. As long as men like him ran the Company—and he was the boss of them all,theChief Underwriter, the highest position the Company had to offer—there could be no question of favoritism or corruption.
After eating, I shaved, cleaned up a little and went back to the clinic.
There was trouble in the air, no question of it. More expediters were in view, scattered around the entrance, a dozen, cautious yards away from the nearest knots of civilians. Cars with no official company markings, but with armor-glass so thick that it seemed yellow, were parked at the corners. And people were everywhere.
People who were quiet. Too quiet. There were some women—but not enough to make the proportion right. And there were no children.
I could almost feel the thrust of their eyes as I entered the clinic.
Inside, the aura of strain was even denser. If anything, the place looked more normal than it had earlier; there were more people. The huge waiting room was packed and a dozen sweating clerks were interviewing long lines of persons. But here, as outside, the feeling was wrong; the crowds weren't noisy enough; they lacked the nervous boisterousness they should have had.
Dr. Lawton looked worried. He greeted me and showed me to a small room near the elevators. There was a cocoon of milky plastic on a wheeled table; I looked closer, and inside the cocoon, recognizable through the clear plastic over the face, was the waxlike body of Luigi Zorchi. The eyes were closed and he was completely still. I would have thought him dead if I had not known he was under the influence of the drugs used in the suspension of life in the vaults.
I said: "Am I supposed to identify him or something?"
"We know who he is," Lawton snorted. "Sign the commitment, that's all."
I signed the form he handed me, attesting that Luigi Zorchi, serial number such-and-such, had requested and was being granted immobilization and suspension in lieu of cash medical benefits. They rolled the stretcher-cart away, with its thick foam-plastic sack containing the inanimate Zorchi.
"Anything else?" I asked.
Lawton shook his head moodily. "Nothing you can help with. I told Defoe this was going to happen!"
"What?"
He glared at me. "Man, didn't you just come in through the main entrance? Didn't you see that mob?"
"Well, I wouldn't call it a mob," I began.
"You wouldn'tnow," he broke in. "But you will soon enough. They're working themselves up. Or maybe they're waiting for something. But it means trouble, I promise, and I warned Defoe about it. And he just stared at me as if I was some kind of degenerate."
I said sharply, "What are you afraid of? Right outside, you've got enough expediters to fight a war."
"Afraid? Me?" He looked insulted. "Do you think I'm worried about my own skin, Wills? No, sir. But do you realize that we have suspendees here who need protection? Eighty thousand of them. A mob like that—"
"Eightythousand?" I stared at him. The war had lasted only a few weeks!
"Eighty thousand. A little more, if anything. And every one of them is a ward of the Company as long as he's suspended. Just think of the damage suits, Wills."
I said, still marveling at the enormous number of casualties out of that little war, "Surely the suspendees are safe here, aren't they?"
"Not against mobs. The vaults can handle anything that might happen in the way of disaster. I don't think an H-bomb right smack on top of them would disturb more than the top two or three decks at most. But you never know what mobs will do. If they once get in here—And Defoe wouldn't listen to me!"
As I went back into the hall, passing the main entrance, the explosion burst.
I stared out over the heads of the dreadfully silent throng in the entrance hall, looking toward the glass doors, as was everyone else inside. Beyond the doors, an arc of expediters was retreating toward us; they paused, fired a round of gas-shells over the heads of the mob outside, and retreated again.
Then the mob was on them, in a burst of screaming fury. Hidden gas guns appeared, and clubs, and curious things that looked like slingshots. The crowd broke for the entrance. The line of expediters wavered but held. There was a tangle of hand-to-hand fights, each one a vicious struggle. But the expediters were professionals; outnumbered forty to one, they savagely chopped down their attackers with their hands, their feet and the stocks of their guns. The crowd hesitated. No shot had yet been fired, except toward the sky.
The air whined and shook. From low on the horizon, a needle-nosed jet thundered in. A plane! Aircraft never flew in the restricted area over the Company's major installations. Aircraft didn't barrel in at treetop height, fast and low, without a hint of the recognition numbers every aircraft had to carry.
From its belly sluiced a silvery milt of explosives as it came in over the heads of the mob, peeled off and up and away, then circled out toward the sea for another approach. A hail of tiny blasts rattled in the clear space between the line of expediters and the entrance. The big doors shook and cracked.
The expediters stared white-faced at the ship. And the crowd began firing. An illegal hard-pellet gun peppered the glass of the doors with pock-marks. The guarding line of expediters was simply overrun.
Inside the waiting room, where I stood frozen, hell broke out. The detachment of expediters, supervising the hundreds inside leaped for the doors to fight back the surging mob. But the mob inside the doors, the long orderly lines before the interviewing clerks, now split into a hundred screaming, milling centers of panic. Some rushed toward the doors; some broke for the halls of the vaults themselves. I couldn't see what was going on outside any more. I was swamped in a rush of women panicked out of their senses.
Panic was like a plague. I saw doctors and orderlies struggling against the tide, a few scattered expediters battling to turn back the terrified rush. But I was swept along ahead of them all, barely able to keep my feet. An expediter fell a yard from me. I caught up his gun and began striking out. For this was what Lawton had feared—the mob loose in the vaults!
I raced down a side corridor, around a corner, to the banked elevators that led to the deeps of the clinic. There was fighting there, but the elevator doors were closed. Someone had had the wit to lock them against the mob. But there were stairs; I saw an emergency door only a few yards away. I hesitated only long enough to convince myself, through the fear, that my duty was to the Company and to the protection of its helpless wards below. I bolted through the door and slammed it behind me, spun the levers over and locked it. In a moment, I was running down a long ramp toward the cool immensities of the vaults.
If Lawton had not mentioned the possible consequences of violence to the suspendees, I suppose I would have worried only about my own skin. But here I was. I stared around, trying to get my bearings. I was in a sort of plexus of hallways, an open area with doors on all sides leading off to the vaults. I was alone; the noise from above and outside was cut off completely.
No, I was not alone! I heard running footsteps, light and quick, from another ramp. I turned in time to see a figure speed down it, pause only a second at its base, and disappear into one of the vaults. It was a woman, but not a woman in nurse's uniform. Her back had been to me, yet I could see that one hand held a gas gun, the other something glittering and small.
I followed, not quite believing what I had seen. For I had caught only a glimpse of her face, far off and from a bad angle—but I was as sure as ever I could be that it was Rena dell'Angela!
She didn't look back. She was hurrying against time, hurrying toward a destination that obsessed her thoughts. I followed quietly enough, but I think I might have thundered like an elephant herd and still been unheard.
We passed a strange double-walled door with a warning of some sort lettered on it in red; then she swung into a side corridor where the passage was just wide enough for one. On either side were empty tiers of shelves waiting for suspendees. I speeded up to reach the corner before she could disappear.
But she wasn't hurrying now. She had come to a bay of shelves where a hundred or so bodies lay wrapped in their plastic sacks, each to his own shelf. Dropping to her knees, she began checking the tags on the cocoons at the lowest level.
She whispered something sharp and imploring. Then, straightening abruptly, she dropped the gas gun and took up the glittering thing in her other hand. Now I could see that it was a hypodermic kit in a crystal case. From it she took a little flask of purplish liquid and, fingers shaking, shoved the needle of the hypodermic into the plastic stopper of the vial.
Moving closer, I said: "It won't work, Rena."
She jumped and swung to face me, holding the hypodermic like a stiletto. Seeing my face, she gasped and wavered.
I stepped by her and looked down at the tag on the cocooned figure.Benedetto dell'Angela, Napoli, it said, and then the long string of serial numbers that identified him.
It was what I had guessed.
"It won't work," I repeated. "Be smart about this, Rena. You can't revive him without killing him."
Rena half-closed her eyes. She whispered, "Would death be worse than this?"
I hadn't expected this sort of superstitious nonsense from her. I started to answer, but she had me off guard. In a flash, she raked the glittering needle toward my face and, as I stumbled back involuntarily, her other hand lunged for the gas gun I had thrust into my belt.
Only luck saved me. Not being in a holster, the gun's front sight caught and I had the moment I needed to cuff her away. She gasped and spun up against the tiers of shelves. The filled hypodermic shattered against the floor, spilling the contents into a purple, gleaming pool of fluorescence.
Rena took a deep breath and stood erect. There were tears in her eyes again.
She said in a detached voice: "Well done, Mr. Wills."
"Are you crazy?" I crackled. "This is your father. Do you want to kill him? It takes a doctor to revive him. You're an educated woman, Rena, not a witch-ridden peasant! You know better than this!"
She laughed—a cold laugh. "Educated! A peasant woman would have kicked you to death and succeeded. I'm educated, all right! Two hundred men, a plane, twenty women risking themselves up there to get me through the door. All our plans—and I can't remember a way to kill you in time. I'm too educated to hate you, Claims Adjuster Wills!" She choked on the words. Then she shook her head dully. "Go ahead, turn me in and get it over with."
I took a deep breath. Turn her in? I hadn't thought that far ahead. True, that was the obvious thing to do; she had confessed that the whole riot outside was a diversion to get her down in the vaults, and anyone who could summon up that sort of organized anti-Company violence was someone who automatically became my natural enemy.
But perhaps I was too educated and too soft as well. There had been tears on her face, over her father's body. I could not remember having heard that conspirators cried.
And I sympathized a little. I had known what it was like to weep over the body of someone I loved. Despite our difficulties, despite everything, I would have done anything in the world to bring Marianna back to life. I couldn't. Rena—she believed—could revive her father.
I didn't want to turn her in.
Ishouldn'tturn her in. It was my dutynotto turn her in, for hadn't Defoe himself ordered me to investigate the dissident movement of which she was clearly a part? Wouldn't it be easier for me to win her confidence, and trick her into revealing its secrets, than to have her arrested?
The answer, in all truth, wasNo. She was not a trickable girl, I was sure. But it was, at least, a rationale, and I clung to it.
I coughed and said: "Rena, will you make a bargain?"
She stared drearily. "Bargain?"
"I have a room at the Umberto. If I get you out of here, will you go to my room and wait for me there?"
Her eyes narrowed sharply for a second. She parted her lips to say something, but only nodded.
"Your word, Rena? I don't want to turn you in."
She looked helplessly at the purple spilled pool on the floor, and wistfully at the sack that held her father. Then she said, "My word on it. But you're a fool, Tom!"
"I know it!" I admitted.
I hurried her back up the ramp, back toward the violence upstairs. If it was over, I would have to talk her out of the clinic, somehow cover up the fact that she had been in the vaults. If it was still going on, though—
It was.
We blended ourselves with the shouting, rioting knots. I dragged her into the main waiting room, saw her thrust through the doors. Things were quieting even then. And I saw two women hastening toward her through the fight, and I do not think it was a coincidence that the steam went out of the rioters almost at once.
I stayed at the clinic until everything was peaceful again, though it was hours.
I wasn't fooling myself. I didn't have a shred of real reason for not having her arrested. If she had information to give, I was not the type to trick it out of her—even if she really was waiting at the Umberto, which was, in itself, not likely. If I had turned her in, Defoe would have had the information out of her in moments; but not I.
She was an enemy of the Company.
And I was unable to betray her.
VII
Dr. Lawton, who seemed to be Chief Medical Officer for Anzio Clinic, said grimly: "This wasn't an accident. It was planned. The question is, why?"
The expediters had finished driving the rioters out of the clinic itself, and gas guns were rapidly dispersing the few left outside the entrance. At least thirty unconscious forms were scattered around—and one or two that were worse than unconscious.
I said, "Maybe they were hoping to loot the clinic." It wasn't a very good lie. But then, I hadn't had much practice in telling lies to an officer of the Company.
Lawton pursed his lips and ignored the suggestion. "Tell me something, Wills. What were you doing down below?"
I said quickly, "Below? You mean a half an hour ago?"
"That's what I mean." He was gentle, but—well, not exactly suspicious. Curious.
I improvised: "I—I thought I saw someone running down there. One of the rioters. So I chased after her—afterhim," I corrected, swallowing the word just barely in time.
He nodded. "Find anything?"
It was a tough question. Had I been seen going in or coming out? If it was coming out—Rena had been with me.
I took what we called a "calculated risk"—that is, I got a firm grip on my courage and told a big fat and possibly detectable lie. I said, "Nobody that I could find. But I still think I heard something. The trouble is, I don't know the vaults very well. I was afraid I'd get lost."
Apparently it was on the way in that I had been spotted, for Lawton said thoughtfully, "Let's take a look."
We took a couple of battered expediters with us—I didn't regard them as exactly necessary, but I couldn't see how I could tell Lawton that. The elevators were working again, so we came out in a slightly different part of the vaults than I had seen before; it was not entirely acting on my part when I peered around.
Lawton accepted my statement that I wasn't quite sure where I had heard the noises, without argument. He accepted it all too easily; he sent the expediters scouring the corridors at random.
And, of course, one of them found the pool of spilled fluorescence from the hypodermic needle I had knocked out of Rena's hand.
We stood there peering at the smear of purplish color, the shattered hypodermic, Rena's gas gun.
Lawton mused, "Looks like someone's trying to wake up some of our sleepers. That's our standard antilytic, if I'm not mistaken." He scanned the shelves. "Nobody missing around here. Take a look in the next few sections of the tiers."
The expediters saluted and left.
"They won't find anyone missing," Lawton predicted. "Andthatmeans we have to take a physical inventory of the whole damn clinic. Over eighty thousand suspendees to check." He made a disgusted noise.
I said, "Maybe they were scared off before they finished."
"Maybe. Maybe not. We'll have to check, that's all."
"Are you sure that stuff is to revive the suspendees?" I persisted. "Couldn't it just have been someone wandering down here by mistake during the commotion and—"
"And carrying a hypodermic needle by mistake, and armed with a gas gun by mistake. Sure, Wills."
The expediters returned and Lawton looked at them sourly.
They shook their heads. He shrugged. "Tell you what, Wills," he said. "Let's go back to the office and—"
He stopped, peering down the corridor. The last of our expediters was coming toward us—not alone.
"Well, what do you know!" said Lawton. "Wills, it looks like he's got your fugitive!"
The expediter was dragging a small writhing figure behind him; we could hear whines and pleading. For a heart-stopping second, I thought it was Rena, against all logic.
But it wasn't. It was a quavery ancient, a bleary-eyed wreck of a man, long past retirement age, shabbily dressed and obviously the sort who cut his pension policies to the barest minimum—and then whined when his old age was poverty-stricken.
Lawton asked me: "This the man?"
"I—I couldn't recognize him," I said.
Lawton turned to the weeping old man. "Who were you after?" he demanded. All he got was sobbing pleas to let him go; all he was likely to get was more of the same. The man was in pure panic.
We got him up to one of the receiving offices on the upper level, half carried by the expediters. Lawton questioned him mercilessly for half an hour before giving up. The man was by then incapable of speech.
He had said, as nearly as we could figure it out, only that he was sorry he had gone into the forbidden place, he didn't mean to go into the forbidden place, he had been sleeping in the shadow of the forbidden place when fighting began and he fled inside.
It was perfectly apparent to me that he was telling the truth—and, more, that any diversionary riot designed to gethiminside with a hypodermic and gas gun would have been planned by maniacs, for I doubted he could have found the trigger of the gun. But Lawton seemed to think he was lying.
It was growing late. Lawton offered to drive me to my hotel, leaving the man in the custody of the expediters. On the way, out of curiosity, I asked: "Suppose he had succeeded? Can you revive a suspendee as easily as that, just by sticking a needle in his arm?"
Lawton grunted. "Pretty near, that and artificial respiration. One case in a hundred might need something else—heart massage or an incubator, for instance. But most of the time an antilytic shot is enough."
Then Rena had not been as mad as I thought.
I said: "And do you think that old man could have accomplished anything?"
Lawton looked at me curiously. "Maybe."
"Who do you suppose he was after?"
Lawton said off-handedly. "He was right near Bay 100, wasn't he?"
"Bay 100?" Something struck a chord; I remembered following Rena down the corridor, passing a door that was odd in some way. Was the number 100 on that door? "Is that the one that's locked off, with the sign on it that says anybody who goes in is asking for trouble?"
"That's the one. Though," he added, "nobody is going to get in. That door is triple-plate armor; the lock opens only to the personal fingerprint pattern of Defoe and two or three others."
"What's inside it that's so important?"
He said coldly, "How would I know? I can't open the door." And that was the end of the conversation. I knewhewas lying.
I had changed my bet with myself on the way. I won it. Rena was in the room waiting for me. She was sound asleep, stretched out on the bed. She looked as sober-faced and intent in her sleep as a little girl—a look I had noticed in Marianna's sleeping face once.
It was astonishing how little I thought about Marianna any more.
I considered very carefully before I rang for a bellboy, but it seemed wisest to let her sleep and take my chances with the house detective, if any. There was none, it turned out. In fact, the bellboy hardly noticed her—whether out of indifference or because he was well aware that I had signed for the room with an official travel-credit card of the Company, it didn't much matter. He succeeded in conveying, without saying a word, that the Blue Sky was the limit.
I ordered dinner, waving away the menu and telling him to let the chef decide. The chef decided well. Among other things, there was a bottle of champagne in a bucket of ice.
Rena woke up slowly at first, and then popped to a sitting position, eyes wide. I said quickly, "Everything's all right. No one saw you at the clinic."
She blinked once. In a soft voice, she said, "Thank you." She sighed a very small sigh and slipped off the bed.
I realized as Rena was washing up, comparisons were always odious, but—Well, if a strange man had found Marianna with her dress hitched halfway up her thigh, asleep on his bed, he'd have been in for something. What the "something" would be might depend on circumstances; it might be a raging order to knock before he came in, it might only be a storm of blushes and a couple of hours of meticulously prissy behavior. But she wouldn't just let it slide. And Rena, by simply disregarding it, was as modest as any girl could be.
After all, I told myself, warming to the subject, it wasn't as if I were some excitable adolescent. I could see a lovely girl's legs without getting all stirred up. For that matter, I hardly even noticed them, come to think of it. And if Ididnotice them, it was certainly nothing of any importance; I had dismissed it casually, practically forgotten it, in fact.
She came back and said cheerfully, "I'm hungry!" And so, I realized, was I.
We started to eat without much discussion, except for the necessary talk of the table. I felt very much at ease sitting across from her, in spite of the fact that she had placed herself in opposition to the Company. I felt relaxed and comfortable; nothing bothered me. Certainly, I went on in my mind, I was as free and easy with her as with any man; it didn't matter that she was an attractive girl at all. I wasn't thinking of her in that way, only as someone who needed some help.
I came to. She was looking at me with friendly curiosity. She said, "Is that an American idiom, Tom, when you said, 'Please pass the legs'?"
We didn't open the champagne: it didn't seem quite appropriate. We had not discussed anything of importance while we were eating, except that I had told her about the old man; she evidently knew nothing about him. She was concerned, but I assured her he was safe with the Company—what did she think they were, barbarians? She didn't answer.
But after dinner, with our coffee, I said: "Now let's get down to business. What were you doing in the clinic?"
"I was trying to rescue my father," she said.
"Rescue, Rena? Rescue from what?"
"Tom, please. You believe in the Company, do you not?"
"Of course!"
"And I do not. We shall never agree. I am grateful to you for not turning me in, and I think perhaps I know what it cost you to do it. But that is all, Tom."
"But the Company—"
"When you speak of the Company, what is it you see? Something shining and wonderful? It is not that way with me; what I see is—rows of my friends, frozen in the vaults or the expediters and that poor old man you caught."
There was no reasoning with her. She had fixed in her mind that all the suspendees were the victims of some sinister brutality. Of course, it wasn't like that at all.
Suspension wasn't death; everyone knew that. In fact, it was the antithesis of death. Itsavedlives by taking the maimed and sick and putting them mercifully to sleep, until they could be repaired.
True, their bodies grew cold, the lungs stopped pumping, the heart stopped throbbing; true, no doctor could tell, on sight, whether a suspendee was "alive" or "dead." The life processes were not entirely halted, but they were slowed enormously—enough so that chemical diffusion in the jellylike blood carried all the oxygen the body needed. But there was a difference: The dead were dead, whereas the suspendees could be brought back to life at any moment the Company chose.
But I couldn't make her see that. I couldn't even console her by reminding her that the old man was a mere Class E. For so was she.
I urged reasonably: "Rena, you think something is going on under the surface. Tell me about it. Why do you think your father was put in suspension?"
"To keep him out of the way. Because the Company is afraid of him."
I played a trump card: "Suppose I told you therealreason he's in the vaults."
She was hit by that, I could tell. She was staring at me with wonder in her eyes.
"You don't have to speculate about it, Rena. I looked up his record, you see."
"You—you—"
I nodded. "It's right there in black and white. They're trying to save his life. He has radiation poisoning. He was a war casualty. It's standard medical practice in cases like his to put them in suspension for a while, until the level of radioactivity dies down and they can safely be revived. Now what do you say?"
She merely stared at me.
I pressed on persuasively: "Rena, I don't mean to call your beliefs superstitions or anything like that. Please understand me. You have your own cultural heritage and—well, I know that it looks as though he is some kind of 'undead,' or however you put it, in your folk stories. I know there are legends of vampires and zombies and so on, but—"
She was actually laughing. "You're thinking of Central Europe, Tom, not Naples. And anyway—" she was laughing only with her eyes now—"I do not believe that the legends say that vampires are produced by intravenous injections of chlorpromazine and pethidine in a lytic solution—which is, I believe, the current technique at the clinics."
I flared peevishly: "Damn it, don't you want him saved?"
The laughter was gone. She gently touched my hand. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to be a shrew and that remark wasn't kind. Must we discuss it?"
"Yes!"
"Very well." She faced me, chin out and fierce. "My father does not have radiation poisoning, Tom."
"He does."
"He does not! He is a prisoner, not a patient. He loved Naples. That's why he was put to sleep—for fifty years, or a hundred, until everything he knew and loved grows away from him and nobody cares what he has to say any more. They won't kill him—they don't have to! They just want him out of the way, because he sees the Company for what it is."
"And what is that?"
"Tyranny, Tom," she said quietly.
I burst out, "Rena, that's silly! The Company is the hope of the world. If you talk like that, you'll be in trouble. That's dangerous thinking, young lady. It attacks the foundations of our whole society!"
"Good! I was hoping it would!"
We were shouting at each other like children. I took time to remember one of the priceless rules out of the Adjusters' Handbook:Never lose your temper; think before you speak. We glared at each other in furious silence for a moment before I forced myself to simmer down.
Only then did I remember that I needed to know something she might be able to tell me. Organization, Defoe had said—an organization that opposed the Company, that was behind Hammond's death and the riot at the clinic and more, much more.
"Rena, why did your friends kill Hammond?"
Her poise was shaken. "Who?" she asked.
"Hammond. In Caserta. By a gang of anti-Company hoodlums."
Her eyes flashed, but she only said: "I know nothing of any killings."
"Yet you admit you belong to a subversive group?"
"I admit nothing," she said shortly.
"But you do. I know you do. You said as much to me, when you were prevented from reviving your father."
She shrugged.
I went on: "Why did you call me at the office, Rena? Was it to get me to help you work against the Company?"
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she said: "It was. And would you like to know why I picked you?"
"Well, I suppose—"
"Don't suppose, Tom." Her nostrils were white. She said coldly: "You seemed like a very good bet, as far as we could tell. I will tell you something you don't know. There is a memorandum regarding you in the office of the Chief of Expediters in Naples. I do not choose to tell you how I know of it, but even your Mr. Gogarty doesn't know it exists. It is private and secret, and it says of you, 'Loyalty doubtful. Believed in contact with underground movement. Keep under close but secret surveillance'."
That one rocked me, I admit. "But that's all wrong!" I finally burst out. "I admit I went through a bad time after Marianna died, but—"
She was smiling, though still angry. "Are you apologizing tome?"
"No, but—" I stopped. That was a matter to be taken up with Defoe, I told myself, and I was beginning to feel a little angry, too.
"All right," I said. "There's been a mistake; I'll see that it's straightened out. But even if it was true, did you think I was the kind of man to join a bunch of murderers?"
"We are not murderers!"
"Hammond's body says different."
"We had nothing to do with that, Tom!"
"Your friend Slovetski did." It was a shot in the dark. It missed by a mile.
She said loftily: "If he is such a killer, how did you escape? When I had my interview with you, and it became apparent that the expediters were less than accurate, the information came a little late. You could easily have given us trouble—Slovetski was in the next room. Why didn't he shoot you dead?"
"Maybe he didn't want to be bothered with my body."
"And maybe you are all wrong about us!"
"No! If you're against the Company, Ican'tbe wrong. The Company is the greatest blessing the world has ever known—it's made the world a paradise!"
"It has?" She made a snorting sound. "How?"
"By bringing countless blessings to all of us.Countless!"
She was shaking with the effort of controlling her temper. "Name one!"
I swore in exasperation. "All right," I said. "It ended war."
She nodded—not a nod of agreement, but because she had expected that answer. "Right out of the textbooks and propaganda pieces, Tom. Tell me, why is my father in the vaults?"
"Because he has radiation poisoning!"
"And how did he get this radiation poisoning?"
"How?" I blinked at her. "You know how, Rena. In the war between Naples and—the war—"
Rena said remorselessly, "That's right, Tom, the war. The war that couldn't have existed, because the Company ended war—everybody knows that. Ah, Tom! For God, tell me, why is the world blind? Everyone believes, no one questions. The Company ended war—it says so itself. And the blind world never sees the little wars that rage, all the time, one upon the heels of another. The Company has ended disease. But how many deaths are there? The Company has abolished poverty. But am I living in riches, Tom? Was the old man who ran into the vaults?"
I stammered, "But—but, Rena, the statistical charts show very clearly—"
"No, Tom," she said, gentle again. "The statistical charts showlesswar, not no war. They showlessdisease."
She rubbed her eyes wearily—and even then I thought: Marianna wouldn't have dared; it would have smeared her mascara.
"The trouble with you, Tom, is that you're an American. You don't know how it is in the world, only in America. You don't know what it was like after the Short War, when America won and the flying squads of Senators came over and the governments that were left agreed to defederate. You're used to a big and united country, not little city-states. You don't have thousands of years of intrigue and tyranny and plot behind you, so you close your eyes and plunge ahead, and if the charts show things are getting alittlebetter, you think they are perfect."
She shook her head. "But not us, Tom. We can't afford that. We walk with eyes that dart about, seeking danger. Sometimes we see ghosts, but sometimes we see real menace. You look at the charts and you see that there are fewer wars than before. We—we look at the charts and we see our fathers and brothers dead in a little war that hardly makes a ripple on the graph. You don't even see them, Tom. You don't even see the disease cases that don't get cured—because the techniques are 'still experimental,' they say. You don't—Tom! What is it?"
I suppose I showed the pain of remembrance. I said with an effort, "Sorry, Rena. You made me think of something. Please go on."
"That's all of it, Tom. You in America can't be blamed. The big lie—the lie so preposterous that it cannot be questioned, the thing that proves itself because it is so unbelievable that no one would say it if it weren't true—is not an American invention. It is European, Tom. You aren't inoculated against it. We are."
I took a deep breath. "What about your father, Rena? Do you really think the Company is out to get him?"
She looked at me searchingly, then looked hopelessly away. "Not as you mean it, Tom," she said at last. "No, I am no paranoid. I think he is—inconvenient. I think the Company finds him less trouble in the deep-freeze than he would be walking around."
"But don't you agree that he needs treatment?"
"For what? For the radiation poisoning that he got from the atomic explosion he was nowhere near, Tom? Remember, he is my father! I was with him in the war—and he never stirred a kilometer from our home. You've been there, the big house where my aunt Luisa now lives. Did you see bomb craters there?"
"That's a lie!" I had to confess it to myself: Rena was beginning to mean something to me. But there were emotional buttons that even she couldn't push. If she had been a man, any man, I would have had my fist in her face before she had said that much; treason against the Company was more than I could take. "You can't convince me that the Company deliberately falsifies records. Don't forget, Rena, I'm an executive of the Company! Nothing like that could go on!"
Her eyes flared, but her lips were rebelliously silent.
I said furiously: "I'll hear no more of that. Theoretical discussions are all right; I'm as broad-minded as the next man. But when you accuse the Company of outright fraud, you—well, you're mistaken."
We glowered at each other for a long moment. My eyes fell first.
I said sourly, "I'm sorry if I called you a liar. I—I didn't mean to be offensive."
"Nor I, Tom," she hesitated. "Will you remember that I asked you not to make me discuss it?"
She stood up. "Thank you very much for a dinner. And for listening. And most of all, for giving me another chance to rescue my father."
I looked at my watch automatically—and incredulously. "It's late, Rena. Have you a place to stay?"
She shrugged. "N—yes, of course, Tom. Don't worry about me; I'll be all right."
"Are you sure?"
"Very sure."
Her manner was completely confident—so much so that I knew it for an act.
I said: "Please, Rena, you've been through a tough time and I don't want you wandering around. You can't get back to Naples tonight."
"I know."
"Well?"
"Well what, Tom?" she said. "I won't lie to you—I haven't a place to go to here. I would have had, this afternoon, if I had succeeded. But by now, everything has changed. They—that is, my friends will assume that I have been captured by the Company. They won't be where I could find them, Tom. Say they are silly if you wish. But they will fear that the Company might—request me to give their names."
I said crisply, "Stay here, Rena. No—listen to me. You stay here. I'll get another room."
"Thank you, Tom, but you can't. There isn't a room in Anzio; there are families of suspendees sleeping in the grass tonight."
"I can sleep in the grass if I have to."
She shook her head. "Thank you," she repeated.
I stood between her and the door. "Then we'll both stay here. I'll sleep on the couch. You can have the bed." I hesitated, then added, "You can trust me, Rena."
She looked at me gravely for a moment. Then she smiled. "I'm sure I can, Tom. I appreciate your offer. I accept."
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 key-hole, 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.
It 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. Ithadto 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 shewaswrong. 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?"