The Penultimate Truth

Adams said, "Can I go along?"

"To--" Nicholas looked startled, but principally preoccupied; it was the artiforg that concerned him--the object and the task of getting it back intact with him to his tank. "You want to go below with me, you mean? Why?"

"I want to hide," Adams said, simply.

After a pause Nicholas said, "You mean Lantano."

"I mean," Adams said, "everyone. They got my one and only living friend; they'll get me. But if I'm down below, and they won't know which tank, maybe, unles your pol-com happens to report--"

"My pol-com," Nicholas said tonelessly, "came from the surface, from Estes Park, after the end of the war. He knew. So there isn't going to be any pol-com at the Tom Mix. Anyhow, not that one."

Another death, Adams realized. And also "necessary." Like each of the others; like mine will be, eventually. And yet--this rule, this necessity, has always existed, and for everything that has ever lived. What we've got here is only a special case, only a hastening of the natural, organic process.

"Sure," Nicholas said. "You're welcome. I know from what you said at Lantano's demesne you're as unhappy as hell up here."

"'Hell,' " Adams echoed. Yes, it was, literally, the burning place of the dead; the place of fires, the flicker of red, the charred background, the pits, summed up and summoned up by the war of thirteen years ago-he had been living it, first in the scorching blaze of the war itself, then in its other, later form, the cool, approaching mist, and then once more in its more awful searing aspect; igniting him, cramming him with this time a new, entirely new, agony: from the moment he had learned of Verne Lindblom's death.

"You'll have to get used to the overcrowding down there," Nicholas said as the two of them made their way toward the parked flapple, Adams' leadies trailing behind. "And you can't bring them--" He gestured at the retinue of leadies. "--with you; you'll have to come alone. There's no room; in fact in our cubby we share the bathroom--"

"Good enough," Adams said. He would agree to anything, give up his last leady, be stripped of that, too, and gladly. And--he would be more than willing to share the bathroom with those inhabiting the adjoining room. He would not endure it; he would thrive. Because it would make up for the loneliness of his years as dominus of his vast, silent, forest-surrounded demesne, with its ocean fog; the gruesome, empty Pacific fog.

The tankers would not understand that. Maybe they would even marvel at his ability to adjust to such crowded conditions--after having been a functionary, as he would tell them, _have_ to tell them, of the Estes Park Wes-Dem Government. Like the pol-coms he had descended into their tank to share their deprivations with them... or so they would think.

Ironic.

28

They were, presently, airborne. The flapple, in the night's darkness, headed northwest, toward the Cheye

To reopen the vertical tu

Now the entrance once again gaped. The professional work of the no longer extant leadies had been undone. But it had taken hours.

Setting it on auto, Joseph Adams dispatched the flapple; it rose, disappeared into the gray, early morning light. Left here it would have acted as a clear giveaway. And the problem still remained of resealing the tu

For this purpose he and Adams had composed a plug. A section of hard dirt, weed-covered, sheared to fit the tu

And then, with great care, they detached all metal pieces from the plug, the stakes and the chains... detectors, used later on, would have registered the presence of the metal; that would have been the tropism that would have distinguished their trail of escape, for the hounds who would one day be coming.

Five minutes later Nicholas, with his boots, kicked loose the seal at the base of the tu

Squeezed into the small storeroom of floor one the entire leadership of the committee, Hailer and Flanders and Jorgenson, all of them waited with their strange little hand-made laser pistols which they had turned out in the ant tank's shops.

"We've been listening to you for an hour," Jorgenson said. "Banging and rattling around up there, reopening the tu

"He got it," Hailer said.

Nicholas said, "I got it." He handed the cylinder to Jorgenson, turned then to help Adams out of the tu

"Nunes," Jorgenson said, "is dead. An industrial accident. In the bottom-floor shops; he was--you know. Exhorting us to greater productivity. And he got too near a power cable. And for some reason--I forget now--but anyhow the cable wasn't properly shielded."

Hailer said, "And some oaf pushed Nunes backward so that he fell onto the cable. And it wiped him out." He added, "We already buried him. It was either that or have him report to up above on your absence."

"And in your name," Jorgenson said, "like you were still here, we sent an official report to the surface, to Estes Park. Asking for another pol-com to replace Commissioner Nunes, and of course expressing our regrets."

There was silence.

Nicholas said, "I'll take the artiforg to Carol." And then he said to them all, "I didn't bring this back so we could make our quota. I brought it for Souza' s sake as such. For his life. But the quota is over."

"How come?" Jorgenson said, perceptively. "What is it, up there?" He saw Adams, then, realized all at once that Nicholas had not returned alone. "Who's this? You better explain."

Nicholas said, "I will when the mood strikes me."

"He's still President of the tank," Flanders reminded Jorgenson. "He can wait as long as he wants; chrissakes, he brought the pancreas; I mean, does he have to deliver a speech in addition?"

"I was just curious," Jorgenson, backing down, said lamely.

"Where's Carol?" Nicholas said, as with Joseph Adams, he passed through the gang of committee members toward the door of the storeroom. He reached the door, took hold of the knob--