Chapter 14

The hotel was not safe, of course, but what place was when the world was at an end? Rena and I, between us, got her father, Benedetto, upstairs into her room without attracting too much attention. We put him on the bed and peeled back his jacket.

The bullet had gone into his shoulder, a few inches above the heart. The bone was splintered, but the bleeding was not too much. Rena did what she could and, for the first time in what seemed like years, we had a moment’s breathing space.

I said, “I’ll phone for a doctor.”

Benedetto said faintly, “No, Thomas! The Company!”

I protested, “What’s the difference? We’re all dead, now. You’ve seen--” I hesitated and changed it. “Slovetski has seen to that. There was cobalt in that bomb.”

He peered curiously at me. “Slovetski? Did you suppose it was Slovetski who planned it so?” He shook his head--and winced at the pain. He whispered, “Thomas, you do not understand. It was my project, not Slovetski’s. That one, he proposed to destroy the Company’s Home Office; it was his thought that killing them would bring an end to evil. I persuaded him there was no need to kill--only to gamble.”

I stared at him. “You’re delirious!”

“Oh, no.” He shook his head and succeeded in a tiny smile. “Do you not see it, Thomas? The great explosion goes off, the world is showered with particles of death. And then--what then?”

“We die!”

“Die? No! Have you forgotten the vaults of the clinics?”

It staggered me. I’d been reciting all the pat phrases from early schooling about the bomb! If it had gone off in the Short War, of course, it would have ended the human race! But I’d been a fool.

The vaults had been built to handle the extreme emergencies that couldn’t be foreseen--even one that knocked out nearly the whole race. They hadn’t expected that a cobalt-cased bomb would ever be used. Only the conspirators would have tried, and how could they get fissionables? But they were ready for even that. I’d been expecting universal doom.

“The clinics,” Benedetto repeated as I stared at him.

It was the answer. Even radio-poisons of cobalt do not live forever. Five years, and nearly half of them would be gone; eleven years, and more than three-quarters would be dissipated. In fifty years, the residual activity would be down to a fraction of one per cent--and the human race could come back to the surface.

“But why?” I demanded. “Suppose the Company can handle the population of the whole world? Granted, they’ve space enough and one year is the same as fifty when you’re on ice. But what’s the use?”

He smiled faintly. “Bankruptcy, Thomas,” he whispered. “So you see, we do not wish to fall into the Company’s hands right now. For there is a chance that we will live ... and perhaps the very faintest of chances that we will win!”

It wasn’t even a faint chance--I kept telling myself that.

But, if anything could hurt the Company, the area in which it was vulnerable was money. Benedetto had been intelligent in that. Bombing the Home Office would have been an inconvenience, no more. But to disrupt the world’s work with a fifty-year hiatus, while the air purged itself of the radioactive cobalt from the bomb, would mean fifty years while the Company lay dormant; fifty years while the policies ran their course and became due.

For that was the wonder of Benedetto’s scheme: The Company insured against everything. If a man were to be exposed to radiation and needed to be put away, he automatically went on “disability” benefits, while his policy paid its own premiums!

Multiply this single man by nearly four billion. The sum came out to a bankrupt Company.

It seemed a thin thread with which to strangle a monster. And yet, I thought of the picture of Millen Carmody in my Adjuster’s Manual. There was the embodiment of honor. Where a Defoe might cut through the legalities and flout the letter of the agreements, Carmody would be bound by his given word. The question, then, was whether Defoe would dare to act against Carmody.

Everything else made sense. Even exploding the bomb high over the Atlantic: It would be days before the first fall-out came wind-borne to the land, and in those days there would be time for the beginnings of the mass migration to the vaults.

Wait and see, I told myself. Wait and see. It was flimsy, but it was hope, and I had thought all hope was dead.

We could not stay in the hotel, and there was only one place for us to go. Slovetski captured, the Company after our scalps, the whole world about to be plunged into confusion--we had to get out of sight.

It took time. Zorchi’s hospital gave me a clue; I tracked it down and located the secretary.

The secretary spat at me over the phone and hung up, but the second time I called him he grudgingly consented to give me another number to call. The new number was Zorchi’s lawyer. The lawyer was opaque and uncommunicative, but proposed that I call him back in a quarter of an hour. In a quarter of an hour, I was on the phone. He said guardedly: “What was left in Bay 100?”

“A hypodermic and a bottle of fluid,” I said promptly.

“That checks,” he confirmed, and gave me a number.

And on the other end of that number I reached Zorchi.

“The junior assassin,” he sneered. “And calling for help? How is that possible, Weels? Did my avocatto lie?”

I said stiffly, “If you don’t want to help me, say so.”

“Oh--” he shrugged. “I have not said that. What do you want?”

“Food, a doctor, and a place for three of us to hide for a while.”

He pursed his lips. “To hide, is it?” He frowned. “That is very grave, Weels. Why should I hide you from what is undoubtedly your just punishment?”

“Because,” I said steadily, “I have a telephone number. Which can be traced. Defoe doesn’t know you’ve escaped, but that can be fixed!”

He laughed angrily. “Oh-ho. The assassin turns to blackmail, is that it?”

I said furiously, “Damn you, Zorchi, you know I won’t turn you in. I only point out that I can--and that I will not. Now, will you help us or not?”

He said mildly, “Oh, of course. I only wished you to say ‘please’--but it is not a trick you Company men are good at. Signore, believe me, I perish with loneliness for you and your two friends, whoever they may be. Listen to me, now.” He gave me an address and directions for finding it. And he hung up.

Zorchi’s house was far outside the city, along the road to New Caserta. It lay at the bend of the main highway, and I suppose I could have passed it a hundred thousand times without looking inside, it was so clearly the white-stuccoed, large but crumbling home of a mildly prosperous peasant. It was large enough to have a central court partly concealed from the road.

The secretary, spectacles and all, met us at the door--and that was a shock. “You must have roller skates,” I told him.

He shrugged. “My employer is too forgiving,” he said, with ice on his voice. “I had hoped to reach him before he made an error. As you see, I was too late.”

We lifted Benedetto off the seat; he was just barely conscious by now, and his face was ivory under the Mediterranean tan. I shook the secretary off and held Benedetto carefully in my arms as Rena held the door before me.

The secretary said, “A moment. I presume the car is stolen. You must dispose of it at once.”

I snarled over my shoulder, “It isn’t stolen, but the people that own it will be looking for it all right. You get rid of it.”

He spluttered and squirmed, but I saw him climbing into the seat as I went inside. Zorchi was there waiting, in a fancy motorized wheelchair. He had legs! Apparently they were not fully developed as yet, but in the short few days since I had rescued him something had grown that looked like nearly normal limbs. He had also grown, in that short time, a heavy beard.

The sneer, however, was the same.

I made the error of saying, “Signore Zorchi, will you call a doctor for this man?”

The thick lips writhed under the beard. “Signore it is now, is it? No longer the freak Zorchi, the case Zorchi, the half-man? God works many miracles, Weels. See the greatest of them all--it has transmuted the dog into a signore!”

I grated, “For God’s sake, Zorchi, call a doctor!”

He said coldly, “You mentioned this over the phone, did you not? If you would merely walk on instead of bickering, you would find the doctor already here.”

Plasma and antibiotics: They flowed into Benedetto from half a dozen plastic tubes like oil into the hold of a tanker. And I could see, in the moments when I watched, the color come back into his face, and the sunken eyes seem to come back to life.

The doctor gave him a sedative that made him sleep, and explained to us that Benedetto was an old man for such goings-on. But if he could be kept still for three or four weeks, the doctor said, counting the lire Zorchi’s secretary paid him, there was no great danger.

If he could be kept still for three or four weeks. In scarcely ten days, the atmosphere of the planet would be death to breathe! Many things might happen to Benedetto in that time, but remaining still was not one of them.

Zorchi retired to his own quarters, once the doctor was gone, and Rena and I left Benedetto to sleep.

We found a television set and turned it on, listening for word of the cobalt-bomb. We got recorded canzoni sung by a reedy tenor. We dialed, and found the Neapolitan equivalent of a soap opera, complete with the wise, fat old mother and the sobbing new daughter-in-law. It was like that on all the stations, while Rena and I stared at each other in disbelief.

Finally, at the regular hourly newscast, we got a flicker: “An unidentified explosion,” the announcer was saying, “far out at sea, caused alarm to many persons last night. Although the origins are not known, it is thought that there is no danger. However, there has been temporary disturbance to all long-lines communications, and air travel is grounded while the explosion is being investigated.”

We switched to the radio: it was true. Only the UHF television bands were on the air.

I said, “I can’t figure that. If there’s enough disturbance to ruin long-distance transmission, it ought to show up on the television.”

Rena said doubtfully, “I do not remember for sure, Tom, but is there not something about television which limits its distance?”

“Well--I suppose so, yes. It’s a line of sight transmission, on these frequencies at any rate. I don’t suppose it has to be, except that all the television bands fall in VHF or UHF channels.”

“Yes. And then, is it not possible that only the distance transmission is interrupted? On purpose, I mean?”

I slammed my hand on the arm of the chair. “On purpose! The Company--they are trying to keep this thing localized. But the idiots, don’t they know that’s impossible? Does Defoe think he can let the world burn up without doing anything to stop it--just by keeping the people from knowing what happened?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, Tom.”

I didn’t know either, but I suspected--and so did she. It was out of the question that the Company, with its infinite resources, its nerve-fibers running into every part of the world, should not know just what that bomb was, and what it would do. And what few days the world had--before the fall-out became dangerous--were none too many.

Already the word should have been spread, and the first groups alerted for movement into the vaults, to wait out the day when the air would be pure again. If it was being delayed, there could be no good reason for it.

The only reason was Defoe. But what, I asked myself miserably, was Millen Carmody doing all this while? Was he going to sit back and placidly permit Defoe to pervert every ideal of the Company?