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The Recon Dis-In Council of leadies in Mexico City/Amecameca. It had assisted in the job of forcing peace on the planet. And as a governing body, a final arbiter, it had not gone away. Man has built a weapon that could think for itself, and after it had thought a while, two years in which vile destruction had occurred, with the leadies locked hip and thigh each with the other, two huge artificial armies from two land masses... advanced varieties of leadies, who had been constructed with an eye toward utilizing their analytical brains for pla
Aloud, Adams said, "But they didn't see the advantage."
"Pardon?" Lindblom murmured, still shaky, still unwilling to engage in any more talk; he looked tired.
"What the Recon Dis-In Council didn't see," Adams said, "and can't see now, because there's no libido-component to their perceptmentation systems, is that the maxim, Why execute someone-"
"Aw, shut up," Lindblom said, and, turning, stalked out of Joseph Adams' office. Leaving him standing there alone, speech in hand, idea in mind; doubly frustrated.
But he could hardly blame Lindblom for being upset. Because all the Yance-men had this streak. They were selfish; they had made the world into their deer park at the expense of the millions of tankers below; it was wrong and they knew it and they felt guilt--not quite enough guilt to cause them to knock off Brose and let the tankers up, but enough guilt to make their late evenings a thrashing agony of loneliness, emptiness, and their nights impossible. And they knew that if anyone could be said to be amending the crime committed, the theft of an entire planet from its rightful owners, it was Louis Runcible. _They_ gained by keeping the tankers down, and he gained by luring them up; the Yance-man elite confronted Runcible as an antagonist, but one whom they knew, deep down inside, was morally in the right. It was not a sanguine feeling, at least not to Joe Adams as he stood alone in his office, gripping his superb speech which was to be 'vacked, run through the sim, taped, then castrated from Brose's office. This speech: it did not tell the truth, but it was not a pastiche of cliches, lies, bromides, euphemisms--
And, more sinister ingredients, which Adams had noticed in speeches dreamed up by his fellow Yance-men; after all, he was only one speech writer from among a pack.
Carrying his highly prized new speech--so regarded by him, anyhow, in the absence of a contrary consensual validation--he left his office and, by express elevator, dropped to the floor where Megavac 6-V chugged away; floors, rather, in that the total works of the organism had undergone accretive changes over the years, refinements that had added to it whole new parts occupying entire new layers. Megavac 6-V was huge, but in contrast, the sim itself remained the same as always.
Two uniformed toughs, Brose's hand-picked but oddly effete, physiognomically dainty roughnecks, eyed him as he emerged from the elevator. They knew him; they understood that his presence on Megavac 6-V's programming floor was mandatory in view of his job.
He approached the keyboard of Megavac 6-V, saw that it was in use; another Yance-man, unfamiliar to him, was whacking away at the keys like a virtuoso pianist at the end of a Franz Liszt opus, with double octaves and all, everything but hammering with the fist.
Above the Yance-man his written copy was suspended, and Adams gave in to the impulse; he moved close to inspect it.
At once the Yance-man ceased typing.
"Sorry," Adams said.
"Let's see your authorization." The Yance-man, quite dark, youthful and small, with almost Mexican-like hair, held out his hand peremptorily.
Sighing, Adams got out of his briefcase the memo from Geneva, from Brose's bureau, entitling him to 'vac this particular speech; the document had a stamped code number, entered on the memo as well--the dark, small Yance-man compared the document with the memo, seemed satisfied, returned both to Adams.
"I'll be through in forty minutes." The youth resumed typing.
"So bounce off and leave me alone." His tone was neutral but forbidding.
Adams said, "I rather like your style." He had quickly, briefly, sca
Again the Yance-man ceased typing. "You're Adams." Once more he extended his hand, this time for shaking purposes; they shook, then, and the strained atmosphere reduced to a tolerable level. But there was always the I'm-bigger-than-you competitiveness in the air when two Yance-men met, either away from the Agency at their demesnes or here right on the job. It always made the day just that much tougher to get through, and yet Adams thrived on it--if not, he realized, he would long since have gone under. "You've done some good pieces; I've watched the final tapes." Studying him with his sharp, bright, black, deeply-set Mexican-type eyes, the young Yance-man said, "But a lot of your work has been axed at Geneva, or so I hear."
"Well," Adams said stoically, "it's either axed or it's coaxed in this business; there's no such thing as half-transmitting."
"You want to bet?" The youth's tone was brittle, penetrating; it disconcerted Adams.
Guardedly, because after all both of them in essence were competing for the same prize, Adams said, "I suppose a jejune, watereddown speech could be considered--"
"Let me show you something." The dark young Yance-man rose, yanked shut the master circuit breaker so that the 'vac began processing what he had fed it up to now.
Together, Adams and the dark young Yance-man walked over to view the sim.
There it sat. Solely, at its large oak desk, with the American flag behind it. In Moscow another and identical sim sat, with a duplicate of Megavac 6-V, the flag of the USSR behind it; otherwise everything, the clothes, the gray hair, the competent, fatherly, mature but soldierly features, the strong chin--it was the same sim all over again, both having been built simultaneously in Germany, wired by the finest Yance-man technicians alive. And here maintenance men perpetually skulked, watching with trained, narrow eyes for any sign of failure, even a fraction-of-a-second hesitation. Anything which might mitigate the quality striven for, that of free and easy authenticity; this simulacrum, out of all which they, the Yance-men, were involved in, required the greatest semblance of the actuality which it mimicked.
A breakdown here, Adams realized soberly, however minute, would be catastrophic. Like the time its left hand, in reaching out--
A huge red warning light on the wall lit, a buzzer buzzed; a dozen main-men for the simulacrum materialized to scrutinize.
Catastrophic--as the time the reaching left hand went into a spasm of pseudo-Parkinsonism, a neutral-motor tremor... indicating, had the tapes been put on the cable, the insidious start of senility; yes, that would have been the tankers' interpretation, most probably. He's getting old, they would have muttered to each other as they sat in their communal halls, overseen by their pol-coms. Look; he's shaky. The strain. Remember Roosevelt; the strain of the war got him, finally; it'll get the Protector, and then what'll we do?