The Penultimate Truth

His intuition told him that there would be more. Once this sort of thinking, this method of problem solving, began it tended to develop its own momentum. Lantano--or Talbot Yancy as he would soon be calling himself, and not, evidently, for the first time--had worked centuries to achieve this. Obviously after Brose might come Runcible or Adams and, as he had thought from the start of this, himself. Whoever, as Lantano had put it, was "necessary."

A favorite word, Foote reflected, of those driven by a yearning for power. The only necessity was an internal one, that of fulfilling their drives. Brose had it; Lantano had it; countless little Yance-men and would-be Yance-men had it; hundreds if not thousands of pol-coms down in the ant tanks below, Foote realized, are ruling as true tyrants, through their link with the surface, through their possession of the _gnosis_, the secret knowledge of the actual state of affairs that obtain here.

But with this particular man the drive spans centuries.

Who, then, Foote asked himself as he followed Lantano toward a parked and waiting express flapple, is the greater menace? Six-hundredyear-old Lantano/Yancy/Ru

But is this all? Foote asked himself as, reflexively, he entered the flapple, seated himself beside Lantano, who at once started up the engine; the flapple rose into the gloom, leaving the hot-spot of Cheye

"The assembly," Lantano said, "which constitutes the weapon, is in the back seat. Carefully packaged in its original autofac carton."

Foote said, "Then you knew what I would choose."

"Time travel," Lantano said, "is valuable." That was the extent of his laconic reply; they flew on in silence.

There is a third choice, Foote said to himself. A third person, of enormous power, who is not a unit moved about by Lantano and not by Stanton Brose either. In his Capetown resort villa, su

"I'll go through with it, as I said," Foote said aloud. "The setting up of the weapon assembly in Adams' office in New York." _And then_, he decided, _I'm heading for Capetown. For Louis Runcible_.

_l'm physically sick_, he realized, _made so by the aura of "necessity" that surrounds this man beside me-an order of political and moral reality which I'm too simple to fathom; after all, I've lived only forty-two years. Not six hundred._

_And as soon as I've arrived safely in Capetown_, Foote said to himself, _I will get my ear up against news transmitters of every kind, waiting without break, without interruption, to hear, out of New York, that Stanton Brose, fat and putty-like and senile-cu

_After that perhaps I--and, hopefully, Louis Runcible, if we can make a deal--will have some idea of what to do. Will see our "necessity."_

Because at the moment, lord knew, he did not.

Aloud he said, "You personally are ready, the moment Brose is dead, to claim, before the Recon Dis-In Council, to constitute the sole legitimate governing body? The planetwide Protector, outranking General Holt here in Wes-Dem and Marshal--"

"Doesn't every one of the several hundreds of millions of tankers know that? Hasn't the Protector's supreme authority been established for years back?"

"And the leadies," Foote said. "They'll obey you? Not Holt or Harenzany? If it comes to that?"

"What you are overlooking is this: my legal access to the simulacrum, that _thing_ at the oak desk; I program it--I feed reading matter to it by way of Megavac 6-V. So I've in a sense begun to make the transition already; I will simply blend with it, not by an abrupt abolition of it, but by--" Lantano gestured spasmodically. "The word is--_fusion_."

Foote said, "You won't enjoy it, being bolted to that desk."

"I think that part can happily be eliminated. Yancy may in fact begin visiting representative ant tanks. As Churchill did the bombedout areas of England in World War Two. Gottlieb Fischer did not have to counterfeit _those_ sequences."

"Did you, in your centuries of past life, limit your public appearance to one faked scene in Gottlieb Fischer's documentary? One impersonation of an American general of World War Two? Or--" And his extrasensory insight was keen, now; it had sniffed something into the light. "Did you at one or more times already hold power-- power to some extent... not like this, not that of the planetwide supreme Protector--"

"I have to some extent been active. On a number of occasions. There is an evolutionary, historic continuity of my role."

"Any name I would recognize?"

The man beside him said, "Yes. Several." He did not amplify, and it was obvious that he was not going to; he remained silent as the express flapple flew above the unlit surface of Earth, toward New York City.

"Not too long ago," Foote said cautiously, not really expecting to obtain an answer to this direct query, "some of my better interrogators, working with tankers who had bored through to the surface, extracted the--to me--fascinating fact that a weak TV signal, not the normal one from Estes Park, carried by the coax, had elliptically alluded, shall we say, to certain irregularities in previous official, supposedly authentic--"

"There I erred," Lantano said.

"Then it was you." So now he knew the origin of that. Once more a hunch of his had proved correct.

"Yes, it was my mistake," Lantano said. "And I almost cost Runcible his free existence, which for him would have meant his physical life. It was obvious I had to stop--once I discovered that Brose blamed the splice and the transmission on Runcible. All I was really doing was to set up Runcible for extinction by Brose's agents. And I didn't want that. I removed the lash-up cut into one of the peripheral shielded coax cables--but I was too late. Brose had already in that weird, worn-out, crafty, infantile brain hatched up the special project. The gear teeth had begun to turn, and it was my--mine, all my--fault; I was obsessed by what I had initiated. And at that point--"

"You managed," Foote said tartly, "to impede it rather well."

"I had to; the responsibility was so clearly mine. I had transformed a latent suspicion on Brose's part into a crisis. Of course, it goes without saying, I couldn't come forth. So I started with Hig. That seemed the only way to approach it at that late date; the only way to handle it so that it came to a stop, a real stop-not just a temporary one."

"And without, as you say, exposing yourself."

Lantano said, "It was a difficult situation and dangerous, not only to Runcible--" He glanced at Foote. "But to me. And I did not intend to have that."