The Penultimate Truth

It got through; Nunes, for all his bureaucratic rigidity, his almost neurotic determination to fulfill to the letter each order coaxed down to them--via him--nodded. "Okay, you stay here." To Nicholas he said, "Let's go." He started off, burdened by their mass consciences; his main task was to supervise their loyalty: Nunes was the tank's pol-com, its political commissioner.

Five minutes later Nicholas St. James sat stiffly, formally, in his President's chair, slightly elevated, in row one of Wheeling Hall; behind him they had all assembled, shifted and rustled, murmured and stirred, everyone, including himself, gazing at the floor-to-ceiling vidscreen. This was their window--their sole window--on the above world, and they took rather seriously what was received on its giant surface.

He wondered if Rita had heard the a

"Any improvement? Nunes whispered to Nicholas. "In old Souza?"

"In pancreatitis--are you kidding?" The Commissioner was an idiot.

"I've passed on fifteen memos," Nunes said, "to them up top."

"And not one of the fifteen," Nicholas said, "was a formal request for an artiforg pancreas that Carol could surgically graft in."

"I just begged for a suspension on the audit." Pleadingly, Nunes said, "Nick, politics is the art of the possible; we might get a suspension, but we won't get on artiforg pancreas; they're just not available. Instead we've got to write off Souza and escalate one of the lesser mechanics like Winton or Bobbs or--"

All at once the great communal screen turned from lusterless gray to beaming white. And the speaker system said, "Good evening."

In Wheeling Hall the audience of fifteen hundred mumbled, "Good evening." It was a legal formality, in that no aud-receptor carried anything up; the lines carried data only one way: down. From above to below.

"News bulletin," the a

The aud-track grew; the drums drifted foward and the camera, no doubt from an eye-spy Wes-Dem satellite, pa

Thank god for all of them, Commies and U.S. citizens alike, that the war had broken out on a colony world, in a hassle as to which bloc, Wes-Dem or Pac-Peop, held the bigger-dog's share. Because in that first year of war on Mars the populations of Earth had been hurried underground. And, he thought, we're still here and it isn't good but it beats _that_; he watched the screen fixedly, saw a flock of leadies melt--hence the name--and, to his horror, still try to run while melting. He looked away.

"Awful," Commissioner Nunes, beside him, muttered, gray-faced. All at once in the empty seat to Nicholas' right Rita appeared, in bathrobe and slippers; with her came Nicholas' kid brother, Stu. Both, staring at the screen, said nothing to him, as if he weren't there. In fact each person in Wheeling Hall was isolated, now, by the catastrophe on the giant TV screen, and the a

"This--was--Detroit. May 19th. Year of God 2025. Amen."

It only took a few seconds, once the defensive shield around a city had been broken, to get in and do this.

For fifteen years Detroit had existed intact. Well, Marshal Harenzany, meeting in the thoroughly protected Kremlin with the Supreme Soviet, could pay a painter to paint, as symbol of a direct hit, a tiny spire on the door of their chamber. Chalk up one more U.S. city for their side.

And, in Nicholas' mind, through the horror of seeing this decapitation of one of the few-remaining heads of Western Civilization--which he really did believe in and love--there came the niggling, selfish, personal thought once more. _It means a higher quota_. More must be achieved underground as less, every day, remained above.

Nunes murmured, "Yancy will explain, now. How it happened to happen. So get ready." And Nunes of course was right, because the Protector never gave up; he had that grand turtlelike unwillingness, which Nicholas admired in the man, to admit that this blow was mortal. And yet--

They did get to us, Nicholas realized... . and even you, Talbot Yancy, our spir-pol-mil leader, brave enough to live in your surface fortress in the Rockies: even you, good friend, can't undo what's just been done.

"My fellow Americans," Yancy' s voice came, and it was not even weary. Nicholas blinked, startled by the vigor. Yancy seemed almost unaffected, to have remained true to the _stoa_, to his West Point heritage; he viewed it all, accepted and understood, but no emotion unhinged his calm reason.

"You have seen," Yancy continued in his low, late middle-age voice, that of a seasoned old warrior, ramrod in body, clear in mind; good for a few more years... not like the husk, the dying thing in the clinic bed over which Carol watched. "--a terrible thing. Nothing is left of Detroit and as you know a good deal of war material has emerged by her fair autofacs, all these years, and now that is lost. But we have sacrificed no human life, the one commodity which we ca

"Good point," Nunes muttered, jotting notes.

Beside Nicholas, all at once, Carol Tigh appeared, in her white smock, low shoes; he rose, instinctively, stood to face her.

"He passed away," Carol said. "Souza. Just now. I at once froze him; I was right there at the bed, so there was no time loss. Braintissue won't have suffered. He just--went." She tried to smile, and then tears filled her eyes. It shocked him; he had never seen Carol cry, and something in him was horrified, as if it was wicked, this that he saw.

"We shall endure this," the aud-track of the coax transmission from the Estes Park fortress continued, and now, on the screen, Yancy's face appeared and the war, the rolling clouds of matter in suspension or turned to hot gas, faded. And it was a stiff, firm man at a large oak desk in some hidden spot where Soviet, even the awful deadly new Sino-twenty red-dot missiles, had never found him.

Nicholas got Carol seated, got her attention turned to the screen.

"With each passing day," Yancy said, and he spoke with pride, a good and reasonable pride, "we grow stronger. Not weaker. _You_ are stronger." And by god he looked, then, directly at Nicholas and Carol and Dale Nunes and Stu and Rita and all the rest of them at the Tom Mix, at every one of them except Souza, who was dead; and when you are dead, Nicholas realized, no one, not even the Protector, can tell you that you are growing stronger. And when you died just now, we also died. Unless that pancreas, at whatever cost, from whatever ugly blackmarket source which robs a military hospital, can be obtained.

Sooner or later, Nicholas realized, despite the law against it, I will have to go up to the surface.