The Penultimate Truth

In the wide white bed lay something flat, something so squashed that it could only gaze up, as if it were a reflection, something dimly seen in a pool that absorbed light rather than reflected it. The pool in which the old man lay was a consumer of energy of all kinds, Nicholas realized as he walked to the bed. This is only a husk left here; it has been drained as if a spider got to it; a world-spider or for us, rather, a subworld, underspider. But still a drinker of human existence. Even below this far.

From his supine immobility the old man moved his lips. "Hi."

"Hi, you old knurlheaded frab," Nicholas said, and drew a chair up beside the bed. "How do you feel?"

After a time, as if it had taken that long for Nicholas' words to reach him--that great journey across space--the old mechanic said, "Not so good, Nick."

You don't know, Nicholas thought, what you've got. Unless Carol has told you since I last discussed you with her. He eyed the old mechanic, wondering if there was an instinct. Pancreatitis was fatal in almost one hundred percent of its cases, he knew; Carol had told him. But of course no one had or would tell Souza, because the miracle might happen.

"You'll pick up," Nicholas said clumsily.

"Listen, Nick. How many leadies we made this month?"

He considered whether to lie or tell the truth. Souza had been here in this bed eight days; surely he had lost contact, could not check and trip him up. So he lied. "Fifteen."

"Then--" A labored pause; Souza stared upward, never turned his eyes toward Nicholas, as if he were looking away in shame. "We could still make our quota."

"What do I care," Nicholas said, "if we make our quota?" He had known Souza, been shut up with him here at the Tom Mix, for the total war-period: fifteen years. "I care whether--" God, a misspoken word; impossible to amend, too.

"'Whether I get out of here,'" Souza whispered.

"Naturally I mean _when_." He felt furious with himself. And, now, he saw Carol at the door, looking professional in her white smock, her low-heeled shoes, carrying her clipboard on which, no doubt, she had Souza's chart. Without a word Nicholas rose, walked away from the bed and past Carol and out into the corridor.

She followed. They stood together in the empty corridor and then Carol said, "He'll live one more week and then he'll die. Whether your tongue wags and says 'whether' or if you--"

"I told him our shops had turned out fifteen leadies so far this month; make sure nobody else tells him different."

"I hear," she said, "it's more like five."

"Seven." He told her not because she was their doctor and someone they depended on, but because of The Relationship. Always he told Carol everything; that was one of the emotional hooks that gaffed him, held him to her: she, and this was so rare, could see through any sham, even the little daily i

"Then we can't meet the quota," she said. Matter-of-factly.

He nodded. "Partly it's because they've asked for three type VIIs and that's hard; that strains our shops. If it had all been the III or IV types--" But it hadn't; it never was, nor would be. Ever.

So long as the surface lasted.

"You know," Carol said presently, "that on the surface artificial pancreases--artiforgs--are available. You've considered this possibility, of course, in your official capacity."

Nicholas said, "It's illegal. Military hospitals only. Priority. Rating 2-A. We don't qualify."

"There is said to be--"

"And get caught." It would no doubt be a quick kangaroo-court military tribunal session and then execution, if one were caught trading on the blackmarket. In fact if one were caught up there at all.

"Are you afeared to go up?" Carol asked, with her brisk, brilliant hard scrutiny.

"Yep." He nodded: it was so. Two weeks: death by destruction of the red bloodcell-making capacity of the bone marrow. One week: the Bag Plague or the Stink of Shrink or Raw-Claw-Paw and he already felt germphobic; already, a few moments ago, he had quaked with the trauma of it--as did virtually every tanker, although in actual fact not one case of any of the poxes had broken out at the Tom Mix.

"You can," Carol said, "call a meeting of those--you know-- those you can trust. And ask for a volunteer."

"Goddam it, I'll go if anyone does." But he didn't want to send anyone because he knew what was up there. No one would return because a homotropic weapon, if not the tribunal, would flush him out of hiding and it would follow him until he died. And that in a matter of minutes, perhaps.

And homotropic weapons were vile things; they did it in a vile way.

Carol said, "I know how badly you want to save old Souza."

"I love him," he said. "Above and beyond the shops, the quota, all of that. Did he ever, in all the time we've been locked up down below here, refuse anyone anything? Any time of the night, a leaking water pipe, break in power, clogged protine chute--he always came and hammered and patched and stitched and rewrapped it back into operation." And, since Souza was, officially, Chief Mechanic, he could have dispatched any one of fifty assistants and snoozed on. From the old man Nicholas had learned; you did the job yourself--you did not drop it in the lap of a subordinate.

As, he thought, the warwork's devolved down here to us. Building the metal fighters in eight basic types, and so on, with the Estes Park Government, the functionaries of WesDem and of Brose personally, breathing at us at close, close range.

And, as if the words magically impelled the unseen presence, a gray, faint shape moved urgently down the hall toward him and Carol. Commissioner Dale Nunes, all right; eager, busy, pressed on by his business.

"Nick!" Panting, Nunes read straight from a slip of paper. "A big speech in ten minutes; get on the all-cubby circuit and get everyone into Wheeling Hall; we'll watch in unison because there'll be questions. This is serious." His fast bird eyes flew in their spasm of alarm. "Honest to god, Nick, the way I got it over the coax it's all of Detroit; they penetrated the final ring."

"Jesus," Nicholas said. And moved, reflexively, toward a nearby aud-tap of the circuit which ran, speakerwise, throughout each floor and chamber of the Tom Mix. "But it's bedtime," he said to Commissioner Nunes. "A lot of them are undressing or in bed; couldn't they watch on their own individual cub-sets?"

"The questions," Nunes said, agitatedly. "They're going to up the quotas because of this Detroit fiasco--that's what I'm afraid of. And I want to be sure everyone knows why, if that's the case." He did not look happy.

Nicholas said, "But Dale; you know our situation. We can't even--"

"Just get them into Wheeling Hall. Okay? We can talk later."

Lifting the microphone Nicholas said, addressing every cubby in the tank, "People, this is President St. James and I'm sorry but we've all got to be at Wheeling Hall in ten minutes. Come as you are; don't worry about that--a bathrobe is fine. It's grave news."

Nunes murmured, "Yancy'll speak. For sure; they told me."

"The Protector," Nicholas said into the mike, and heard his voice boom from each end of the deserted clinic corridor, as it was everywhere else in the great subsurface ant tank of fifteen hundred human souls, "is going to address us, I understand. And he'll accept questions."

He rang off, feeling defeated. It was not a reasonable time to give them bad news. And with Souza and the quota and the audit to come--

"I can't leave my patient," Carol said.

Upset, Nunes said, "But I was told to assemble everyone, Doctor."

"Then," Carol said, with that superlative intelligence that made Nicholas both fear and adore her, "Mr. Souza must get up and come, too. If the edict is to be fully obeyed."