The Penultimate Truth

Beside him his wife Rita saw the gesture, the summons; woodenfaced, she stared straight ahead, then, as if she had seen nothing. And, as he found his target, Dale Nunes saw, too, and frowned.

However, Nicholas obediently accompanied Carol up the aisle and out of Wheeling Hall, into the deserted corridor and seclusion.

"What in god's name," he said to her as he and she stood together, "do you want?" The way Nunes had looked at them as they departed... he would be hearing in due time from the commissioner.

"I want you to certify the death papers," Carol said, walking toward the elevator. "For poor old Maury--"

"But why now?" There was more; he knew it.

She said nothing; both of them were silent on the trip down to the clinic, to the freeze locker in which the rigid body lay--he glanced under the wrapper briefly, then emerged from the locker to sign the forms which Carol had laid out, five copies in all, neatly typed and ready to be sent up by vidline to the bureaucrats on the surface.

Then, from the buttoned front of her white smock, Carol brought forth a tiny electronic instrument which he recognized as a you-don'tknow-I-have-it aud-recorder. She extracted the spool of tape, unlocked the steel drawer of a cabinet of what appeared to be medical supplies-- and exposed to his sight, briefly, other spools of tape and other electronic instruments, none of them related as far as he could see to her medical work.

"What's going on?" he said, this time more controlledly. Obviously she wanted him to witness this, the aud-recorder, the reservoir of tape which she kept locked away from anyone else's sight. He knew her as well, as intimately, as did anyone in the Tom Mix, and yet this was news to him.

Carol said, "I made an aud tape of Yancy's speech. The part I was there for, anyhow."

"Those other spools of aud tape in that cabinet?"

"All of Yancy. Former speeches. Dating back over the past year."

"Is that legal to do?"

Carol said, as she gathered the five copies of Maury Souza's death-forms together and inserted them into the slot of the Xeroxtransmitter which would put them on the wire to the Estes Park archives, "As a matter of fact it _is_ legal. I looked it up."

Relieved, he said, "Sometimes I think you're nuts." Her mind was always off in some odd direction, flashing and echoing in its fullness, and baffling him eternally; he could never keep up with her, and so his awe of her continually grew. "Explain," he said.

"Have you noticed," Carol said, "that Yancy, in his speeches in late February, when he used the phrase _coup de grace_, he pronounced it _gras_. And in March he pronounced it--" From the steel-doored cabinet she brought forth a chart with entries, which she now consulted. "March twelfth. Pronounced _coo de grah_. Then, in April, on the fifteenth, it was _gras_ again." She glanced up alertly, eyed Nicholas.

He shrugged wearily, irritably. "Let me get to bed; let's talk about this some other--"

"Then," Carol said, inflexibly, "on May third in a speech, he once more used the term. That memorable speech in which he informed us that our destruct of Leningrad completely--" She glanced up from her chart. "It could well be the _coo de grah_. No _s_. Back to his earlier pronunciation." She restored the chart to the cabinet, then, and relocked the cabinet. He noted that it took not only a metal insert key but the pressure of her fingerprints; even with a duplicate key--or her key-- the cabinet would remain closed. It would open only for her.

"So?"

Carol said, "I don't know. But it means something. Who fights the surface war?"

"Leadies."

"And where are the humans?"

"What is this, Commissioner Nunes all over again, interrogating people at bedtime when they ought to be--"

"They're in ant tanks," Carol said. "Below surface. Like us. Now, when you apply for an artiforg you are told they're available only to military hospitals, presumably on the surface."

"I don't know," he said, "or care, where the military hospitals are. All I know is that they have the priority and we don't."

Carol said, "If leadies are fighting the war, what are in the military hospitals? Leadies? No. Because they send damaged leadies down to shops, our shop for instance. And a leady is a metal construct and it has no pancreas. There are a _few_ humans on the surface, of course; the Estes Park Government. And in Pac-Peop, the Soviet. Are the pancreases for them?"

He was silent; she had him completely.

"Something," she said, "is wrong. There can't be military hospitals because there aren't civilians or soldiers who've been maimed in the fighting and who need artiforgs. Yet--they won't release the artiforgs to us. To me, for instance, for Souza; even though they know we can't survive without Souza. Think about it, Nick."

"Hmm," he said.

Carol said quietly. "You're going to have to come up with something better than 'Hmm,' Nick. And soon."

4

The next morning as soon as she awoke, Rita said, "I saw you go off with that woman, last night, that Carol Tigh. Why?"

Nicholas, grubby and confused, not yet shaved, without having had the chance to splash cold water on his face or brush his teeth, murmured, "It had to do with signing the death certificate forms of Souza. Strictly business."

He padded off to the bathroom, which he and Rita shared with the cubby to their right--and found the door locked.

"Okay, Stu," he said. "Finish shaving and unlock the door."

The door opened; there was his younger brother, sure enough, at the mirror, shaving away for all he was worth, guiltily. "Don't mind me," Stu said. "Go ahead and--"

His brother's wife, Edie, said shrilly from their cubby, "We got into the bathroom first this morning, Nick; your wife had it for a whole hour last night, showering. So would you please wait."

Giving up he shut the bathroom door, padded to their kitchen-- which they did _not_ share with anyone, either to right or left--and started the coffee heating on the stove. Last night's to be reheated; he did not have the energy to brew a fresh pot, and anyhow their allocation of synthetic beans was low. They would be entirely out before month's end anyhow, would be begging, borrowing or bartering with fellow tankers, offering their supply of sugar--neither he nor Rita used much sugar--in exchange for the odd little brown ersatz beans.

And of coffee beans, he thought, I could use an endless amount. If there was such a thing. But, like everything else, the (as marked on invoices) syn-cof-bnz were severely rationed. And after all these years he accepted it--intellectually. But his body craved more.

He could still remember how real coffee, in the pretank days, had tasted. Nineteen, he remembered; I was in my first year of college, just started drinking coffee instead of malted milks, kid stuff. I had just begun to put on maturity... and then this.

But, as Talbot Yancy, beaming or frowning, whatever was appropriate, would say, 'At least we weren't incinerated, as we had anticipated. Because we did have that whole year to get under, and we must never forget.' So Nicholas was not forgetting; as he stood reheating last night's synthetic coffee he thought of himself incinerated fifteen years ago, or the cholinesterase of his body destroyed by the hideous U.S. nerve gas weapon, the worst so far conjured up by insane idiots in high places in what had been Washington, D.C., themselves blessed with the antidote, atropine, and hence safe... safe from the nerve gas made at the Newport Chemical Plant in Western Indiana as contracted for by the still-notorious FMC Corporation, but not safe from the missiles of the USSR. And he appreciated this and was glad, appreciated the fact that he was here and alive to drink this syn-cof brew, bitter as it was.