The Penultimate Truth

He said, "Colleen, one day I looked out the window and I saw a squirrel."

Staring at him she said, "No."

"The tail; you can't mistake the tail. It's as round and fat and gray as a bottle brush. And they hop like this." He made a wicket-motion with his hand, showing her, trying to recapture it, for himself, too. "I squalled; I got four of my leadies out there with--" He shrugged. "Anyhow they finally came back and said, 'There's no such thing out there, dominus,' or some darn remark." He was silent a moment. It had, of course, been a hypnagogic hallucination, based on too many drinks and too little sleep. He knew it. The leadies knew it. And now Colleen knew it. "But just suppose," he said, then.

"Write, in your own words, how you felt. By hand on paper--not dictated into a recorder. What finding a thriving, living squirrel would have meant to you." She gestured scathingly at his fifteen thousand dollar rhetorizor. "Not what it thinks. And--"

"And Brose himself," he said, "would strike it. Maybe I could get it through the 'vac, to the sim and then on tape; I think it'd go that far. But never past Geneva. Because I wouldn't be saying, in effect, 'Come on, fellas; carry on.' I'd be saying--" He considered feeling peaceful for a moment now. "I'll try," he decided, and rose to his feet, pushing his old-California wicker chair back. "Okay, I'll even do it in longhand; I'll find a--what do you call them?"

"Ballpoint pen. Think of your cousin who was killed in the war: Ken. Then remember you're both men. Then you have it: pen."

He nodded. "And program the 'vac direct from that. You might be right; it'd be depressing but at least it wouldn't make me sick stomachwise; I wouldn't get those pyloric spasms." He began searching around the library for--what had she called it?

Still on rerun, the rhetorizor squeaked to itself, "... and that little fellow; inside that head was packed a powerful lot of savvy. Maybe even more than you or I can ever guess. And I think we can learn from him." It droned on. Inside it thousands of microcomponents spun the problem from a dozen drums of info-data; it could go on forever, but Joe Adams was busy; now he had found a pen and all he needed was blank white paper. Hell, he surely had _that_; he beckoned to the leady waiting to escort Colleen to her flapple.

"Get the staff," he instructed it, "to search up paper for me to write on. Go through every room of the villa, including all the bedrooms, even those not currently in use. I distinctly remember seeing a folio or packet of it, however it used to come. It was dug up."

By direct radio contact the leady passed on his command and he felt the building stir, through the villa's fifty-odd rooms, his staff moving into activity from the spot where each had halted after its last task. He, the dominus, sensed, with the soles of his feet, the burgeoning life of this his building and some of the inside fog went away, even though they were only what the Czechs had called _robots_, their crazy word for _workers_.

But, outside, the fog scratched at the window.

And when Colleen left, he knew, it would pluck and scrape, try to get in, more determinedly.

He wished it were Monday and he were at the Agency, in New York at his office, with other Yance-men around him. And the life there would not be the movement of dead--or rather, to be fair, unliving--things. But the reality itself.

"I can tell you," he said suddenly. "I love my work. In fact I've got to have it; there's nothing else. Not this--" He gestured at the room in which they stood, then at the murky, clouded-over window.

"Like a drug," Colleen said, perceptively.

"Okay." He nodded. "To use the archaic expression, 'I'll purchase that.'"

"Some linguist," she said gently. "It's _buy_. Maybe you ought to use that machine after all."

"No," he said, at once. "You were right; I'm going all the way back to trying it direct, on my own." Any moment now one of his staff of leadies would come clanking in with blank white paper; he was sure he possessed it, somewhere. And if he didn't he could swap some item with a neighbor, make a trip, surrounded and protected, of course, by his entourage of leadies, to the demesne and villa to the south, that of Ferris Granville. Ferris would have paper; he had told them on the open-cha

Whatever in, on or over Earth memoirs were.

2

Time for bed. The clock said so, but--suppose the power had been off again, as it had for almost a whole day last week; the clock might be hours wrong. It might in fact, Nicholas St. James thought morbidly, really be time to get up. And the metabolism of his body, even after all these years underground, told him nothing.

In the shared bathroom of their cubby, 67-B of the Tom Mix, water ran; his wife was taking a shower. So Nicholas searched about her vanity table until he found her wristwatch, read it; both timepieces agreed, therefore that was that. And yet he felt wide-awake. The Maury Souza affair, he realized; it preyed vulturely on him, made a trough of his brain. This is how it must feel, he thought, to contract the Bag Plague, where those virtues get in and cause your head to expand until it pops like a blown-up paper bag. Maybe I'm sick, he thought. Actually. Even more so than Souza. And Maury Souza, the chief mechanic of their ant tank, now in his seventies, was dying.

"I'm out," Rita called from the bathroom. However, the shower still ran; she was not out. "I mean, you can come in and brush your teeth or put them in a glass or whatever it is you do."

What I do, he thought, is get the Bag Plague... probably that last damaged leady they sent down hadn't been 'cided properly. Or I've picked up the Stink of Shrink, and from that he physically cringed; imagine, he thought, having your head diminish in size, features included, to the circumference of a marble. "Okay," he said, reflexively, and began to unlace his work boots. He felt the need to be clean; he would shower, too, despite the severe water ration currently in force at the Tom Mix, and by his own edict. When you do not feel clean, he realized, you are doomed. Considering exactly what we could be made unclean by, the microscopic _things_ downfalling to us that some careless ambulatory metal hunk of handmade parts had failed to 'cide out of existence before yanking the drop switch, shooting three hundred pounds of contaminated matter to us, something both hot and dirty at the same time... hot with radioactivity and dirty with germs. Great combination, he thought.

And, in the back part of his mind, again he recalled: _Souza is dying_. What else matters? Because--how long can we last without that one grumpy old man?

Approximately two weeks. Because their quota came up for auditing in two weeks. And this time, if he knew his luck and his tank's, it would be one of the Minister of the Interior Stanton Brose's agents, not General Holt's. They rotated. It prevented, the image of Yancy on the big screen had once said, corruption.

Picking up the audphone he dialed the tank's clinic.

"How is he?"

On the other end Dr. Carol Tigh, their G.P. in charge of their small clinic, said, "No change. He's conscious. Come on down; he tells me he'd like to talk to you."

"Okay." Nicholas rang off, shouted--through the noise of ru

Three floors down, at the clinic, he passed through empty waiting rooms--the clinic was closed, except for its bed patients--and then passed the nurses' station; the nurse stood up respectfully to greet him because after all Nicholas was their elected president, and then he found himself at the closed door of Maury Souza's room with its _Quiet--Do Not Disturb!_ sign on the door. He entered.