"What sort of deal?"
"A horsetrade. You think the Company is corrupt and your father is not a casualty, right?"
"Correct, Tom."
"And I think the Company is not corrupt and your father has radiation poisoning. One of us has to be wrong, right?"
"Correct, Tom."
"Let's find out. There are ways of testing for radiation-sickness. I'll go into the clinic in the morning and get the answer."
She also lifted up on one elbow, peering at me, her long hair braided down her back. "Will you?"
"Sure. And we'll make bets on it, Rena. If you are wrong—if your father has radiation poisoning—I want you to tell me everything there is to tell about the riot today and the people behind it. If I'm wrong—" I swallowed—"if I'm wrong, I'll get your father out of there for you. Somehow. I promise it, Rena."
There was absolute silence for a long time. Then she swung out of the bed and hurried over to me, her hands on mine. She looked at me and again I saw tears. "Will you do that, Tom?" she asked, hardly audible.
"Why, sure," I said awkwardly. "But you have to promise—"
"I promise!"
She was staring at me, at arm's length. And then something happened. She wasn't staring and she wasn't at arm's length.
Kissing her was like tasting candied violets; and the Moon made her lovelier than anything human; and the bellboy had not been so presumptuous, after all, when he left us the champagne.
VIII
Dr. Lawton was "away from his desk" the next morning. That was all to the good. I was not a hardened enough conspirator to seek out chances to make mistakes, and although I had a perfectly good excuse for wanting to go down into the vaults again, I wasn't anxious to have to use it.
The expediter-officer in charge, though, didn't even ask for reasons. He furnished me with what I wanted—a map of the vaults and a radiation-counter—and turned me loose.
Looking at the map, I was astonished at the size of this subterranean pyramid. Lawton had said we had eighty-odd thousand sleepers filed away and that had surprised me, but by the chart I held in my hand, there was space for perhaps ten times that many. It was beyond belief that so much space was really needed, I thought—unless there was some truth to Rena's belief that the Company used the clinics for prisons....
I applied myself to the map.
And, naturally, I read it wrong. It was very simple; I merely went to the wrong level, that was all.
It looked wrong as soon as I stepped out of the elevator. An elderly, officious civilian with a British accent barred my way. "You aren't one of us, are you?"
I said, "I doubt it."
"Then would you mind?" he asked politely, and indicated a spot on the side of the hall. Perhaps I was suggestible, but I obeyed his request without question. It was just as well, because a sort of procession rounded a bend and came down the corridor. There was a wheeled stretcher, with three elderly civilians puttering around it, and a bored medic following with a jar of something held aloft, feeding through a thin plastic tube into the arm of the man on the stretcher, as well as half a dozen others of more nondescript types.
The man who had stopped me nearly ran to meet the stretcher. He stared into the waxy face and whispered, "It's he! Oh, absolutely, it is he!"
I looked and the face was oddly familiar. It reminded me of my childhood; it had a link with school days and the excitement of turning twelve. By the way the four old men were carrying on, however, it meant more than that to them. It meant, if not the Second Coming, at least something close to it.
By then I had figured out that this was that rare event in the day of a clinic—a revival. I had never seen one. I suppose I could have got out of the way and gone about my conspiratorial business, and it is no credit to me as a conspirator that I did not. But I was fascinated.
Too fascinated to wonder why revivals were so rare....
The medic looked at his watch and, with careless efficiency, plucked the tube out of the waxy man's arm.
"Two minutes," he said to one of the civilians. "Then he'll be as good as he ever was. You've got his clothes and release papers?"
"Oh, definitely," said the civilian, beaming.
"Okay. And you understand that the Company takes no responsibility beyond the policy covering? After all, he was one of the first men suspended. We think we can give him another year or so—which is a year more than he would have had, at that—but he's not what you'd call a Grade A risk."
"Certainly," agreed the civilian. "Can we talk to him now?"
"As soon as he opens his eyes."
The civilian bent over the man, who no longer looked waxy. His face was now a mottled gray and his eyelids were flickering. He had begun to breathe heavily and irregularly, and he was mumbling something I couldn't understand. The civilian whispered in his ear and the revived man opened his eyes and looked at him.
It was like seeing the dead come to life. It was exactly that, in fact; twenty minutes before, no chemical test, no stethoscope or probing thumb in the eye socket could have detected the faint living glow in the almost-dead cells. And yet—now he looked, he breathed, he spoke.
"I made it," were his first understandable words.
"Indeed you did!" crowed the civilian in charge, while all of the others murmured happily to each other. "Sir, it is my pleasure to welcome you back to us. You are in Anzio, Italy. And I am Thomas Welbourne, at your service."
The faint eyes sparkled. Dead, near-dead or merely decrepit, this was a man who wanted to enjoy life. Minutes out of the tomb, he said: "No! Not young Tommy Welbourne!"
"His grandson, sir," said the civilian.
I had it just then—that face had watched me through a whole year of school. It had been in a frame at the front of the room, with half a dozen other faces. It had a name under it, which, try as I might, I couldn't recall; but the face was there all the same. It was an easy one to keep in mind—strong though sunken, ancient but very much alive.
He was saying, in a voice as confident as any youth's, "Ah, Tommy, I've lived to see it! Tell me, have you been to Mars? What is on the other side of the Moon? And the Russians—what are the Russians up to these days?"
The civilian coughed and tried to interrupt, but the figure on the stretcher went on heedlessly: "All those years gone—what wonders must we have. A tunnel under the Atlantic, I'll wager! And ships that fly a hundred times the speed of sound. Tell me, Tommy Welbourne! Don't keep an old man waiting!"
The civilian said reluctantly, but patiently, "Perhaps it will take a little explaining, sir. You see, there have been changes—"
"I know it, boy! That's what I'm asking you!"
"Well, not that sort of changes, sir. We've learned new virtues since your time—patience and stability, things of that sort. You see—"
The interesting part was over and the glances of the others in the party reminded me that I didn't belong here. I stole off, but not before the man on the stretcher noticed me and made a sort of clumsy two-fingered salute of hail and farewell as I left. It was exactly like the gesture in his picture on that schoolroom wall, up next to the presidents and the greatest of kings.
I found a staircase and climbed to another level of the boxlike clinic.
The local peasants called the vaults "coolers" or "ice cubes." I suppose the reason had something to do with the fact that they were cool and rectangular, on the whole—perhaps because, like icebergs, the great bulk of the vaults was below the surface. But whatever you called them, they were huge. And the clinic at Anzio was only one out of hundreds scattered all over the world.
It was all a matter of viewpoint. To me, the clinics were emblems of the Company's concern for the world. In any imaginable disaster—even if some fantastic plague struck the entire race at once—the affected population could be neatly and effectively preserved until medicine could catch up with their cures.
To Rena, they were prisons big enough to hold the human race.
It was time to find out which of us was right. I hurried through the corridors, between the tiers of sleepers, almost touching them on both sides. I saw the faint purplish gleam where Rena had spilled the fluid, and knelt beside the cocoon that held her father.
The UV sterilizers overhead made everything look ghastly violet, but in any light, the waxy face under the plastic would have looked dead as death itself. I couldn't blame Rena for weeping.
I took out the little radiation counter and looked at it awkwardly. There was nothing complicated about the device—fortunately, because I had had little experience with them. It was a cylinder with a flaring snout at one end, a calibrated gauge at the side, marked in micro-roentgens. The little needle flickered in the green area of the dial. I held it to myself and the reading didn't change. I pointed it up and pointed it down; it didn't change.
I held it to the radiation-seared body of Benedetto dell'Angela.
And it didn't change.
Radiation-seared? Not unless the instrument lied! If dell'Angela had ever in his life been within the disaster radius of an atomic explosion, it had been so long before that every trace of radioactive byproduct was gone!
Rena was right!
I worked like a machine, hardly thinking. I stood up and hurriedly touched the ion-tasting snout of the counter to the body on the shelf above Benedetto, the one above that, a dozen chosen at random up and down the aisle.
Two of them sent the needle surging clear off the scale; three were as untainted by radioactivity as Benedetto himself. A few others gave readings from "mild" to "lethal"—but all in the danger area.
Most were as untainted by radiation as Benedetto himself.
It was possible, I told myself frantically, that there were mysteries here I did not understand. Perhaps after a few months or a year, the radiation level would drop, so that the victim was still in deadly danger while the emitted radiation of his body was too slight to affect the counter. I didn't see how, but it was worth a thought. Anything was worth a thought that promised another explanation to this than the one Rena had given!
There had been, I remembered, a score or more of new suspendees in the main receiving vault at the juncture of the corridors. I hurried back to it. Here were fresh cases, bound to show on the gauge.
I leaned over the nearest one, first checking to make sure its identification tag was the cross-hatched red one that marked "radiation." I brought the counter close to the shriveled face—
But I didn't read the dial, not at first. I didn't have to. For I recognized that face. I had seen it, contorted in terror, mumbling frantic pleas for mercy, weeping and howling, on the old Class E uninsurable the expediters had found hiding in the vaults.
Hehad no radiation poisoning ... unless a bomb had exploded in these very vaults in the past twelve hours.
It wasn't pleasant to stand there and stare around the vaults that were designed for the single purpose of saving human life—and to wonder how many of the eighty thousand souls it held were also prisoners.
And it wasn't even tolerable to think the thought that followed. If the Company was corrupt, and I had worked to do the Company's business, how much of this guilt was mine?
The Company, I had said and thought and tried to force others to agree, was the hope of humanity—the force that had permanently ended war (almost), driven out disease (nearly), destroyed the threat to any human of hunger or homelessness (in spite of the starving old man who slept in the shadow of the crypt, and others like him).
But I had to face the facts that controverted the Big Lie. If war was ended, what about Naples and Sicily, and Prague and Vienna, and all the squabbles in the Far East?If there was no danger from disease, why had Marianna died?
Rena had said that if there was no danger of disaster, no one would have paid their premiums. Obviously the Company could not have wanted that, but why had I never seen it before? Sample wars, sample deaths—the Company needed them. And no one, least of all me, fretted about how the samples felt about it.
Well, that was behind me. I'd made a bet with Rena, and I'd lost, and I had to pay off.
I opened the cased hypodermic kit Rena had given me and examined it uncomfortably. I had never used the old-fashioned sort of needle hypodermic; I knew a little something about the high-pressure spray type that forced its contents into the skin without leaving a mark, but I was very far from sure that I could manage this one without doing something wrong. Besides, there wasn't much of the fluid left, only the few drops left in the bottom of the bottle after Rena had loaded the needle that had been smashed.
I hurried back along the corridor toward Benedetto dell'Angela. I neared again the red-labeled door marked Bay 100, glanced at it in passing—and stopped.
This was the door that only a handful of people could open. It was labeled in five languages: "Entrance Strictly Prohibited. Experimental Section."
Why was it standing ajar?
And I heard a faint whisper of a moan: "Aiutemi, aiutemi."
Someone inside was calling for help!
If I had been a hardened conspirator, I would never have stopped to investigate. But, of course, I wasn't. I pushed the door aside, against resistance, and peered in.
And that was my third major shock in the past quarter of an hour, because, writhing feebly just inside the door, staring up at me with an expression of pain and anger, was Luigi Zorchi.
He propped himself up on his hands, the rags of his plastic cocoon dangling from his shoulders.
"Oho," he said faintly. "The apprentice assassin again."
I found water for him at a bubble-fountain by the ramp; he drank at least a quart before I made him stop. Then he lay back, panting, staring at me. Except for the shreds of plastic and the bandages around the stumps of his legs, he was nude, like all the other suspendees inside their sacks. The luxuriant hair had already begun to grow back.
He licked his lips. More vigorous now, he snarled: "The plan fails, does it not? You think you have Zorchi out of the way, but he will not stay there."
I said, "Zorchi, I'm sorry about all this I—I know more now than I did yesterday."
He gaped. "Yesterday? Onlyyesterday?" He shook his head. "I would have thought a month, at the least. I have been crawling, assassin. Crawling for days, I thought." He tried to shrug—not easy, because he was leaning on his elbows. "Very well, Weels. You may take me back to finish the job now. Sticking me with a needle and putting me on ice will not work. Perhaps you should kill me outright."
"Listen, Zorchi, IsaidI was sorry. Let's let it go at that for a moment. I—I admit you shouldn't be here. The question is, how do you come to be awake?"
"How not? I am Zorchi, Weels. Cut me and I heal; poison me and I cure myself." He spat furiously. "Starve me, however, and I no doubt will die, and it is true that you have come very near to starving me down here." He glowered at the shelves of cocooned bodies in the locked bay. "A pity, with all this pork and beef on the rack, waiting for me, but I find I am not a monster, Weels. It is a weakness; I do not suppose it would stop any Company man for a moment."
"Look, Zorchi," I begged, "take my word for it—I want to help you. You might as well believe me, you know. You can't be any worse off than you are."
He stared at me sullenly for a moment. Then, "True enough," he admitted. "What then, Weels?"
I said hesitantly, "Well, I'd like to get you out of here...."
"Oh, yes. I would like that, too. How shall we do it?"
I rubbed the back of my neck thoughtfully, staring at him. I had had a sort of half-baked, partly worked out plan for rescuing Benedetto. Wake him up with the needle; find a medical orderly's whites somewhere; dress him; and walk him out.
It wasn't the best of all possible plans, but I had rank enough, particularly with Defoe off in Rome, to take a few liberties or stop questions if it became necessary. And besides, I hadn't really thought I'd have to do it. I had fully expected—as recently as half an hour ago!—that I would find Benedetto raddled with gamma rays, a certainty for death if revived before the half-life period of the radioelements in his body had brought the level down to safety.
That plan might work for Benedetto. But Zorchi, to mention only one possible obstacle, couldn't walk. And Benedetto, once I took off his beard with the razor Rena had insisted I bring for that purpose, would not be likely to be recognized by anyone.
Zorchi, on the other hand, was very nearly unforgettable.
I said honestly, "I don't know."
He nodded. "Nor do I, Weels. Take me then to your Defoe." His face wrinkled in an expression of fury and fear. "Die I can, if I must, but I do not wish to starve. It is good to be able to grow a leg, but do you understand that the leg must come from somewhere? I cannot make it out of air, Weels—I must eat. When I am in my home at Naples, I eat five, six, eight times a day; it is the way my body must have it. So if Defoe wishes to kill me, we will let him, but I must leave herenow."
I shook my head. "Please understand me, Zorchi—I can't even do that for you. I can't have anybody asking me what I was doing down in this level." I hesitated only briefly; then, realizing that I was already in so deeply that secrecy no longer mattered, I told him about Benedetto dell'Angela, and the riot that failed, and my promise.
His reaction was incredulity. "You did not know, Weels? The arms and legs of the Company do not know what thoughts pass through its brain? Truly, the Company is a wonderful thing! Even the peasants know this much—the Company will do anything it must."
"I admit I never guessed. Now what?"
"That is up to you, Weels. If you try to take the two of us out, it endangers you. It is for you to decide."
So, of course, I could decide only one way.
I hid the hypodermic behind one of the bodies in Bay 100; it was no longer useful to me. I persuaded Zorchi to lie quietly in one of the tiers near Benedetto, slammed the heavy door to Bay 100, and heard the locks snap. That was the crossing of the Rubicon. You could open that door easily enough from inside—that was to protect any personnel who might be caught in there. But only Defoe and a couple of others could open it from without, and the hypodermic was now as far out of reach as the Moon.
I opened Benedetto dell'Angela's face mask and shaved him, then sealed it again. I found another suspendee of about the same build, made sure the man was not radioactive, and transferred them. I switched tags: Benedetto dell'Angela was now Elio Barletteria. Then I walked unsteadily to the ramp, picked up the intercom and ordered the medical officer in charge to come down.
It was not Dr. Lawton who came, fortunately, but one of his helpers who had seen me before. I pointed to the pseudo-Barletteria. "I want this man revived."
He sputtered, "You—you can't just take a suspendee out of his trance, Mr. Wills. It's a violation of medical ethics! These men aresick. They—"
"They'll be sicker still if we don't get some information from this one," I said grimly. "Are you going to obey Mr. Defoe's orders or not?"
He sputtered some more, but he gave in. His orderlies took Benedetto to the receiving station at the foot of the vault; one of them stood by while the doctor worriedly went through his routine. I sat and smoked, watching the procedure.
It was simple enough. One injection, a little chafing of the hands and feet by the bored orderly while the doctor glowered and I stonily refused to answer his questions, and a lot of waiting. And then the "casualty" stirred and moaned.
All the stand-by apparatus was there—the oxygen tent and the pulmotor and the heart stimulator and so on. But none of it was needed.
I said: "Fine, Doctor. Now send the orderly to have an ambulance standing by at the main entrance, and make out an exit pass for this casualty."
"No!" the doctor shouted. "This is against every rule, Mr. Wills. I insist on calling Dr. Lawton—"
"By all means," I said. "But there isn't much time. Make out the pass and get the ambulance, and we'll clear it with Dr. Lawton on the way out." He was all ready to say no again when I added: "This is by direct order of Mr. Defoe. Are you questioning his orders?"
He wasn't—not as long as I was going to clear it with Dr. Lawton. He did as I asked. One of the advantages of the Company's rigid regulations was that it was hard to enforce strict security on its personnel. If you didn't tell the staff that they were working for something needing covering up, you couldn't expect them to be constantly on guard.
When the orderly was gone and the doctor had scrawled out the pass, I said cordially, "Thank you, Doctor. Now would you like to know what all the fuss was about?"
"I certainly would," he snapped. "If you think—"
"I'm sorry," I apologized. "Come over here and take a look at this man."
I juggled the radiation counter in my hand as he stalked over. "Take a look at his eyes," I invited.
"Are you trying to tell me that this is a dangerously radioactive case? I warn you, Mr. Wills—"
"No, no," I said. "See for yourself. Look at the right eye, just beside the nose."
He bent over the awakening body, searchingly.
I clonked him with the radiation counter on the back of the head. They must have retired that particular counter from service after that; it wasn't likely to be very accurate any more.
The orderly found me bending over the doctor's body and calling for help. He bent, too, and he got the same treatment. Benedetto by then was awake; he listened to me and didn't ask questions. The blessings of dealing with conspirators—it was not necessary to explain things more than once.
And so, with a correctly uniformed orderly, who happened to be Benedetto dell'Angela, pushing the stretcher, and with myself displaying a properly made out pass to the expediter at the door, we rolled the sham-unconscious body of Luigi Zorchi out to a waiting ambulance.
I felt my pulse hammering as we passed the expediter at the door. I had thrown my coat over the place where legs should have been on "Barletteria," and Benedetto's old plastic cocoon, into which we had squeezed Zorchi, concealed most of him.
I needn't have worried. The expediter not only wasn't suspicious, he wasn't even interested.
Benedetto and I lifted Zorchi into the ambulance. Benedetto climbed in after him and closed the doors, and I went to the front. "You're dismissed," I told the driver. "I'll drive."
As soon as we were out of sight of the clinic, I found a phone, got Rena at the hotel, told her to meet me under the marquee. In five minutes, she was beside me and we were heading for the roads to the north.
"You win," I told her. "Your father's in back—along with somebody else. Now what? Do we just try to get lost in the hills somewhere?"
"No, Tom," she said breathlessly. "I—I have made arrangements." She giggled. "I walked around the square and around, until someone came up to me. You do not know how many gentlemen came before that! But then one of my—friends showed up, to see if I was all right, and I arranged it. We go up the Rome highway two miles and there will be a truck."
"Fine," I said, stepping on the gas. "Now do you want to climb back and tell your father—"
I stopped in the middle of the word. Rena peered at me. "Tom," she asked anxiously, "is something wrong?"
I swallowed, staring after a disappearing limousine in the rear-view mirror. "I—hope not," I said. "But your friends had better be there, because we don't have much time. I saw Defoe in the back of that limousine."
IX
Rena craned her neck around the door and peered into the nave of the church. "He's kissing the Book," she reported. "It will be perhaps twenty minutes yet."
Her father said mildly, "I am in no hurry. It is good to rest here. Though truthfully, Mr. Wills, I thought I had been rested sufficiently by your Company."
I think we were all grateful for the rest. It had been a hectic drive up from Anzio. Even though Rena's "friends" were thoughtful people, they had not anticipated that we would have a legless man with us.
They had passports for Rena and myself and Benedetto; for Zorchi they had none. It had been necessary for him to hide under a dirty tarpaulin in the trunk of the ancient charcoal-burning car, while Rena charmed the Swiss Guards at the border. And it was risky. But the Guards charmed easily, and we got through.
Zorchi did not much appreciate it. He swore a ragged blue streak when we stopped in the shade of an olive grove and lugged him to the front seat again, and he didn't stop swearing until we hit the Appian Way. When the old gas-generator limped up a hill, he swore at its slowness; when it whizzed along the downgrades and level stretches, he swore at the way he was being bounced around.
I didn't regret rescuing Zorchi from the clinic—it was a matter of simple justice since I had helped trick him into it. But I did wish that it had been some more companionable personality that I had been obligated to.
Benedetto, on the other hand, shook my hand and said: "For God, I thank you," and I felt well repaid. But he was in the back seat being brought up to date by his daughter; I had the honor of Zorchi's company next to me....
There was a long Latin period from the church, a response from the altar boy, and then the finalIte, missa est. We heard the worshippers moving out of the church.
The priest came through the room we were waiting in, his robes swirling. He didn't look around, or give any sign that he knew we were there, though he almost stepped on Zorchi, sitting propped against a wall.
A moment later, another man in vaguely clerical robes entered and nodded to us. "Now we go below," he ordered.
Benedetto and I flanked Zorchi and carried him, an arm around each of our necks. We followed the sexton, or whatever he was, back into the church, before the altar—Benedetto automatically genuflected with the others, nearly making me spill Zorchi onto the floor—to a tapestry-hung door. He pushed aside the tapestry, and a cool, musty draft came up from darkness.
The sexton lit a taper with a pocket cigarette lighter and led us down winding, rickety steps. There was no one left in the church to notice us; if anyone had walked in, we were tourists, doing as countless millions of tourists had done before us over the centuries.
We were visiting the Catacombs.
Around us were the bones of the Christians of a very different Rome. Rena had told me about them: How they rambled under the modern city, the only entrances where churches had been built over them. How they had been nearly untouched for two thousand years. I even felt a little as though I really were a tourist as we descended, she had made me that curious to see them.
But I was disappointed. We lugged the muttering Zorchi through the narrow, musty corridors, with the bones of martyrs at our elbows, in the flickering light of the taper, and I had the curious feeling that I had been there before.
As, in a way, I had: I had been in the vaults of the Company's clinic at Anzio, in some ways very closely resembling these Catacombs—
Even to the bones of the martyrs.
I was almost expecting to see plastic sacks.
We picked our way through the warrens for several minutes, turning this way and that. I was lost in the first minute. Then the sexton stopped before a flat stone that had a crude, faded sketch of a fish on it; he leaned on it, and the stone discovered itself to be a door. We followed him through it into a metal-walled, high-ceilinged tunnel, utterly unlike the meandering Catacombs. I began to hear sounds; we went through another door, and light struck at our eyes.
I blinked and focused on a long room, half a dozen yards wide, almost as tall, at least fifty yards long. It appeared to be a section of an enormous tunnel; it appeared to be, and it was. Benedetto and I set Zorchi—still cursing—down on the floor and stared around.
There were people in the tunnel, dozens of them. There were desks and tables and file cabinets; it looked almost like any branch of the Company, with whirring mimeographs and clattering typewriters.
The sexton pinched out the taper and dropped it on the floor, as people came toward us.
"So now you are in our headquarters in Rome," said the man dressed as a sexton. "It is good to see you again, Benedetto."
"And it is much better to see you, Slovetski," the old man answered warmly.
This man Slovetski—I do not think I can say what he looked like.
He was, I found, the very leader of the "friends," the monarch of this underground headquarters. But he was a far cry from the image I had formed of a bearded agitator. There was a hint of something bright and fearful in his eyes, but his voice was warm and deep, his manner was reassuring, his face was friendly. Still—there was that cat-spark in his eyes.
Slovetski, that first day, gave me an hour of his time. He answered some of my questions—not all. The ones he smiled at, and shook his head, were about numbers and people. The ones he answered were about principles and things.
He would tell me, for instance, what he thought of the Company—endlessly. But he wouldn't say how many persons in the world were his followers. He wouldn't name any of the persons who were all around us. But he gladly told me about the place itself.
"History, Mr. Wills," he said politely. "History tells a man everything he needs to know. You look in the books, and you will learn of Mussolini, when this peninsula was all one state; he lived in Rome, and he started a subway. The archives even have maps. It is almost all abandoned now. Most of it was never finished. But the shafts are here, and the wiring that lights us still comes from the electric mains."
"And the only entrance is through the Catacombs?"
The spark gleamed bright in his eye for a second. Then he shrugged. "Why shouldn't I tell you? No. There are several others, but they are not all convenient." He chuckled. "For instance, one goes through a station on the part of the subway that is still in operation. But it would not have done for you, you see; Rena could not have used it. It goes through the gentlemen's washroom."
We chuckled, Slovetski and I. I liked him. He looked like what he once had been: a history teacher in a Company school, somewhere in Europe. We talked about History, and Civilization, and Mankind, and all the other capitalized subjects. He was very didactic and positive in what he said, just like a history teacher. But he was understanding. He made allowances for my background; he did not call me a fool. He was a patient monk instructing a novice in the mysteries of the order, and I was at ease with him.
But there was still that spark in his eye.
Rena disappeared almost as soon as we were safely in the tunnels. Benedetto was around, but he was as busy as Slovetski, and just as mysterious about what occupied him. So I had for company Zorchi.
We had lunch. "Food!" he said, and the word was an epithet. "They offer this to me for food! For pigs, Weels. Not for Zorchi!" He pushed the plate away from him and stared morosely at the table.
We were given a room to share, and one of Slovetski's men fixed up a rope-and-pulley affair so Zorchi could climb into his bed unaided. He was used to the help of a valet; the first time he tried it, he slipped and fell on the stumps of his legs. It must have hurt.
He shrieked, "Assassins! All of them! They put me in a kennel with the apprentice assassin, and the other assassins make a guillotine for me to kill myself on!"
We had a long talk with Slovetski, on the ideals and principles of his movement. Zorchi stared mutinously at the wall. I found the whole thing very interesting—shocking, but interesting. But Zorchi was immune to shock—"Perhaps it is news to you, Weels, that the Company is a big beast?"—and he was interested in nothing in all the world but Zorchi.
By the end of the second day I stopped talking to him entirely. It wasn't kind. He disliked me, but he hated everyone else in the tunnel, so he had no one to talk to. But it was either that or hit him in the face, and—although many of my mores had changed overnight—I still did not think I could strike a man without legs.
And besides, the less I saw of Zorchi, the more time I had to think about Rena.
She returned on the third day, without a word of explanation to me of where she had been or what she had done. She greeted me and disappeared again, this time only for hours. Then she came back and said, "Now I am through, for a time. How have you liked our little hideaway?"
I said, "It gets lonesome."
"Lonesome?" Her brown eyes were wide and perfectly serious. "I had thought it would be otherwise, Tom. So many of us in this little space, how could you be lonesome?"
I took her hand. "I'm not lonesome now," I told her. We found a place to sit in a corner of the communal dining hall. Around us the life of the underground movement buzzed and swirled. It was much like a branch of the Company, as I have said; the work of this secret section seemed to be mostly a record-keeping depot for the activities that took place on the surface. But no one paid much attention to Rena and me.
What did we talk about? What couples have always talked about: Each other, and everything, and nothing. The only thing we didnottalk about was my basic beliefs in regard to the Company. For I was too troubled in my mind to talk about them, and Rena sensitive enough not to bring them up.
For I had, with all honor, sworn an oath of allegiance to the Company; and I had not kept it.
I could not, even then, see any possibility of a world where the Company did not exist. For what the Company said of itself was true: Before the Company existed, men lived like beasts. There was always the instant danger of war and disease. No plan could be made, no hope could be held, that could not be wiped out by blind accident.
And yet, were men better off today? I could not doubt the truths I had been told. The Company permitted wars—I had seen it. The Company permitted disease—my own wife had died.
Somewhere there was an answer, but I couldn't find it. It was not, I was sure, in Slovetski's burning hatred of everything the Company stood for. But it could not be, either, in the unquestioning belief that I had once given.
But my views, it turned out, hardly mattered any more; the die was cast. Benedetto appeared in the entrance to the dining hall, peering about. He saw us and came over, his face grave.
"I am sorry, Mr. Wills," he said. "I have been listening to Radio Napoli. It has just come over the air: A description of you, and an order for your arrest. The charge is—murder!"
I gaped at him, hardly believing. "Murder! But that's not true; I certainly never—"
Benedetto laid a hand on my shoulder. "Of course not, Mr. Wills. It is a fiction of the Company's, beyond doubt. But it is a fiction that may cause your death if you are discovered, do not doubt that."
I swallowed. "Who—whom did I murder?"
Benedetto shrugged. "I do not know who he is. The name they gave was Elio Barletteria."
That was the suspendee whose place Zorchi had usurped. I sat back, bewildered. It was true, at least, that I had had some connection with the man. But—kill him? Was it possible, I asked myself, that the mere act of taking him out of his plastic sack endangered his life? I doubted it, but still—
I asked Benedetto. He frowned. "It is—possible," he admitted at last. "We do not know much about the suspendees, Mr. Wills. The Company has seen to that. It is my opinion—only an opinion, I am afraid—that if this man Barletteria is dead, it had nothing to do with anything you did. Still—" he shrugged—"what difference does it make? If the Company calls you a murderer, you must be one, for the Company is always right. Is that not so?"
We left it at that, but I was far from easy in my mind. The dining hall filled, and we ate our evening meal, but I hardly noticed what I ate and I took no part in the conversation. Rena and her father considerately left me alone; Zorchi was, it seemed, sulking in our room, for he did not appear. But I was not concerned with him, for I had troubles of my own. I should have been....
After dinner was over, I excused myself and went to the tiny cubicle that had been assigned to Zorchi and myself. He wasn't there. Then I began to think: Would Zorchi miss a meal?
The answer was unquestionably no. With his metabolism, he needed many times the food of an ordinary person; his performance at table, in fact, was spectacular.
Something was wrong. I was shaken out of my self-absorption; I hurried to find Benedetto dell'Angela, and told him that Zorchi was gone.
It didn't take long for us to find the answer. The underground hideout was not large; it had only so many exits. It was only a matter of moments before one of the men Benedetto had ordered to search returned with an alarmed expression.
The exit that led through the subway station was ajar. Somehow Zorchi had hitched himself, on his stumps, down the long corridor and out the exit. It had to be while we were eating; he could never have made it except when everyone was in one room.
How he had done it did not matter. The fact remained that Zorchi was gone and, with him, the secrecy of our hiding place.
X
We had to move. There was no way out of it.
"Zorchi hates the Company," I protested. "I don't think he'll go to them and—"
"No, Wills." Slovetski patiently shook his head. "We can't take a chance. If we had been able to recapture him, then we could stay here. But he got clean away." There was admiration in his eyes. "What a conspirator he would have made! Such strength and determination! Think of it, Wills, a legless man in the city of Rome. He cannot avoid attracting attention. He can barely move by himself. And yet, our men track him into the subway station, to a telephone ... and that is all. Someone picks him up. Who? A friend, one supposes—certainly not the Company, or they would have been here before this. But to act so quickly, Wills!"
Benedetto dell'Angela coughed. "Perhaps more to the point, Slovetski, is how quickly we ourselves shall now act."
Slovetski grinned. "All is ready," he promised. "See, evacuation already has begun!"
Groups of men were quickly placing file folders into cartons and carrying them off. They were not going far, I found later, only to a deserted section of the ancient Roman Catacombs, from which they could be retrieved and transported, little by little, at a later date.
By sundown, Rena and I were standing outside the little church which contained the entrance to the Catacombs. The two of us went together; only two. It would look quite normal, it was agreed, for a young man and a girl to travel together, particularly after my complexion had been suitably stained and my Company clothes discarded and replaced with a set of Rome's best ready-to-wears.
It did not occur to me at the time, but Rena must have known that her own safety was made precarious by being with me. Rena alone had nothing to fear, even if she had been caught and questioned by an agent of the Company. They would suspect her, because of her father, but suspicion would do her no harm. But Rena in the company of a wanted "murderer"—and one traveling in disguise—was far less safe....
We found an ancient piston-driven cab and threaded through almost all of Rome. We spun around the ancient stone hulk of the Colosseum, passed the balcony where a sign stated the dictator, Mussolini, used to harangue the crowds, and climbed a winding, expensive-looking street to the Borghese Gardens.
Rena consulted her watch. "We're early," she said. We hadgelatiin an open-air pavilion, listening to the wheezing of a sweating band; then, in the twilight, we wandered hand in hand under trees for half an hour.
Then Rena said, "Now it is time." We walked to the far end of the Gardens where a small copter-field served the Class-A residential area of Rome. A dozen copters were lined up at the end of the take-off hardstand. Rena led me to the nearest of them.
I looked at it casually, and stopped dead.