The Penultimate Truth

_God help me_, Foote thought, _to get away from this man. And out over the Atlantic in a flapple, alone, in contact with Runcible by vidphone, telling him I'm on my way._

_Suppose Runcible didn't listen_.

That anxiety-inducing thought, with every one of its ramifications, remained central in Foote's mind, all the way across the United States to the Agency buildings and the office of Joseph Adams in New York City.

The office was dark. Adams had not yet arrived.

"Naturally it'll take him a little while," Lantano said, "to get the Alpha-wave pattern." Nervously, looking--for him unusually--taut, he examined his wristwatch, checked the dial which gave New York time. "Maybe, we should get the Alpha-wave pattern from Megavac 6-V instead. You begin setting up the assembly." The two of them stood briefly in the hallway outside Adams' office at 580 Fifth Avenue. "Go on in while I get the pattern." Lantano started off, rapidly.

Foote said, "There's no way I can get in. Adams and Brose have, as far as I know, the only keys."

Staring at him, Lantano said, "Can't you--"

"My corporation," Foote said, "possesses tools to obviate any lock in the world, no matter how intricate or obstinate. But--" He had none with him; they were all in London or scattered at field stations around the world.

"Then we might as well just stand here and wait," Lantano said, not pleased at all, but accommodating himself to the fact; they had to have Adams, not only for the Alpha-pattern of Stanton Brose by which to render the weapon tropic but simply and literally to gain access to the premises, the office, which evidently fat, huge, aging Brose would enter bright and early in the morning, ahead of its owner. One of the few places outside of Geneva where he apparently felt safe. And Geneva itself was impossible; if they had to alter their plans and make a try at Brose there they were already finished.

They waited.

"Suppose," Foote said presently, "Adams changes his mind. And does not come."

Lantano glared at him. "He'll come." The black deep-set eyes were envenomed even at mention of the possibility.

"I'm waiting exactly fifeen more minutes," Foote said, with quiet dignity, unafraid of the furious dark eyes, "and then I'm getting out of here."

The two of them continued to wait, minute after minute.

And, as each minute ticked past, Foote thought, he's not coming; he's backed out. And if he's backed out we must assume he's contacted Geneva: we can't afford to make any other assumption than that we're waiting here for Brose's killers. Waiting in this hall for our deaths.

"The future," he said to Lantano, "it's a series of alternatives, is it? Some more probable than others?"

Lantano grunted.

"Do you foresee, as one alternative future, Adams informing Brose and saving himself at our expense?"

Lantano said, tightly, "Yes. But it's unlikely. About one chance in forty."

"I have my extrasensory hunch faculty," Foote said. And, he thought, it tells me that those are not the odds; the odds are far, far greater that we are trapped like pink-eared baby mice, floating, drowning, in a dish of honey. Served up for extermination. For greedy, lipsmacking consumption.

It was a very arduous, and, psychosomatically, very unfortunate wait.

And, despite what Lantano' s watch said, very long.

Foote wondered if he could endure it.

Could--or, in the face of Brose's ability to move his agents about rapidly from this place to that, would.

27

After he had stopped by Verne Lindblom's demesne and had picked up the Alpha-wave pattern of Stanton Brose' s brain once more from the type VI senior leady, Joseph Adams with his retinue of personal leadies and his bodyguard from the Foote organization flew aimlessly, not toward New York; not in any particular direction.

He got away with that for just a few minutes. And then one of the four Footemen leaned toward him from the seat behind and said distinctly and grimly, "Go the Agency in New York. Without delay. Or I'll kill you with my laser beam." He thereupon placed the cold, round muzzle of his laser pistol to the back of Joseph Adams' head.

"Some bodyguard," Adams said, bitterly.

"You have an appointment with Mr. Foote and Mr. Lantano at your office," the Footeman commando said. "Please keep it."

On Joseph Adams' person, in the form of a dead man's throttle strapped to his left wrist, he possessed--had rigged this up as a result of Verne Lindblom's death--an emergency signaling device that co

An interesting question.

And on it nothing more or less than his life depended.

But why _not_ fly on to the Agency? What held him back?

I'm afraid of Lantano, he realized. Lantano knew too much, had too many pieces of detailed knowledge about Verne Lindblom's death at his disposal. But I'm afraid, he realized, of Stanton Brose, too; I'm afraid of both of them, but of the two Brose is the known fear and Lantano the unknown. So for me, Lantano creates an even greater sense of that grisly all-encompassing devouring i

And Brose, he realized, will get worse. As that brain rots more and more, as those miscroscopic strictures of minute blood vessels continue to occur. As bit after bit of brain tissue, clogged, deprived of oxygen and nutrition, perishes. And leaves the remnants just that more revolting, that much less to be depended on, ethically and pragmatically.

The next twenty years, under the decaying rule of Stanton Brose, would be even more profoundly ghastly as the decay of the central, guiding organ penetrated deeper, ceaselessly deeper, and lured the world along with it. And he--all the Yance-men--all of them would be jerked and dangled by the conclusive twitches on the deranged master string; as Brose's brain degenerated, as extensions of Brose, would all of them degenerate in resonance. God, what a prospect...

The force which Lantano had unique control over--time--was the force which was corrupting the organic tissue of Stanton Brose. Hence-- With one stroke, the release of one high velocity homeostatic Alpha-wave-tropic cyanide dart, that corrupting force would he abolish from their lives. And wasn't that the whole rational reason for this flight to New York, to his office, where Lantano and Foote waited?

But Joseph Adams' body, unconvinced, threw its metabolic secretions of fear through and through his sympathetic nervous system. Struggling for relief--in other words, he realized, for escape. _I want to get away_.

And Foote, too, he realized acutely, if that look on his face meant anything, felt something of this. Only not as strongly as I'm feeling it now, because if he did he would not be in New York; he'd be out here long ago. Webster Foote would know how. And, he realized, I don't; I'm not equipped, as he is, for this.

"Okay," Adams said to the Footeman commando behind him who held the laser pistol to Adams' head. "I was disoriented for a minute; now I'm all right." He turned the flapple then toward New York.

Behind him the Footeman commando withdrew the laser pistol, restored it to its shoulder holster as the flapple streaked northeast.

At his left wrist Joseph Adams released the dead man's throttle signaling device. The microwave impulse, to his leadies, automatically and instantly became perceptible, although his own sense receptors picked up nothing. Nor did those of the four Footemen.