The Penultimate Truth

I wish there was one missile left, he said to himself. In orbit. And we could touch one of those quaint old-time buttons the brass once had at their disposal, and that missile would go _pfoooooom!_ At Geneva. And Stanton Brose.

By god, Adams thought, maybe I will program the 'vac one day not with a speech, even a good speech like the one here beside me that I got off last night finally, but the very simple, calm statement of what gives. I'll get through the 'vac to the sim itself, then onto aud and vid tape, because since that's autonomic there's no editing, unless of course Eisenbludt happens to stroll in... and even he, technically, can't touch the speech part of the reading matter.

And then the sky will fail in.

But that ought to be interesting to watch, Adams mused. If you could get far enough off to watch.

"Listen," he would program to Megavac 6-V. And all those fu

And what would be achieved? Since, after all, Geneva would pounce on it... and we are not amused, Joseph Adams articulated within his own mind, the voice which he, like every other Yance-man, had long ago introjected. The super ego, as the prewar intellectuals had called it, or, before that the ayenbite of inwyt, or some such rustic Medieval old phrase.

Conscience.

Stanton Brose, holed up in his castlelike _Festung_ in Geneva like some pointed-hat alchemist, like a corrupted, decayed but, as they say, shining and stinking, glowing pale white fish of the sea, a dead mackerel with clouded-over glaucomalike eyes... or did Brose look like this?

Only twice in his life had he, Joseph Adams, actually seen Brose in the flesh. Brose was old. What was it, eighty-two? And not lean. Not a stick, ribboned with the streamers of smoked, dried flesh; Brose at eighty-two weighed a ton, waddled and rolled, pitched, with his mouth drizzling and his nose as well... and yet the heart still beat, because of course it was an artiforg heart, and an artiforg spleen and an artiforg and so on.

But yet the authentic Brose remained. Because the brain was not artiforg; there was no such thing; to manufacture an artiforg brain--to have done so, when that firm, Arti-Gan Corporation of Phoenix, existed, back before the war--would have been to go into what Adams liked to think of as the "genuine simulated silver" business... his term for what he considered with its multiform spawned offspring: the universe of authentic fakes.

And that universe, he reflected, which you would think you could enter the IN door of, pass through and then exit by the OUT door of in say roughly two minutes... that universe, like Eisenbludt's propheaps in the Moscow film studios, was endless, was room beyond room; the OUT door of one room was only the IN door for the next.

And now, if Verne Lindblom were correct, if the man from the private intelligence corporation, Webster Foote, Limited of London, were correct some new IN door had swung open, given momentum by the hand that reached in all its trembling senility from Geneva... in Adams' mind the metaphor, growing, became visual and frightening; he actually experienced the doorway ahead, felt the darkness breathed by it--room lacking light, into which he would soon tread, faced by god knew what task that was not a nightmare, not, like the black, listless fogs from within and without, formless, but--

Too distinct. Spelled out, in graphically unambiguous words, in a memo originating from that damn monster pit, Geneva. General Holt, even Marshal Harenzany who after all was a Red Army officer and not in any sense a Bunthorne sniffing at a sunflower, even Harenzany sometimes _listened_. But the waddling, drizzling, eye-rolling old hulk chuck-full of artiforgs--Brose had greedily ingested artiforg after artiforg of the world's small and dwindling supply--was earless.

Literally. Years ago the organs of that sense had withered away. And Brose had declined artiforg replacements; he _liked_ not to hear.

When Brose reviewed each and every TV tape of Yancy's speeches, he did not listen; horribly, or so it seemed to Adams, the fat, semidead organism received the aud-portion by direct wire: through electrodes grafted, skillfully implanted years ago, in the proper section of his elderly brain... in the one original organ, which _was_ Brose, the rest now being, tin-woodmanwise, a mere procession of Arti-Gan Corporation's plastic, complex, never-failing (they had, before the war, proudly carried lifetime guarantees, and in the artiforg business the meaning of the word "lifetime," that is, whether it applied to the life of the object or of the owner was delightfully clear) replacements which lesser men, the Yance-men as a whole had a kind of nominal, formal claim on--in that, while still warehoused in the subsurface storage vaults under Estes Park, the artiforg supplies belonged to the Yancemen as a class and not merely to Brose.

But it didn't quite work out that way. Because when a kidney failed, as had occurred to Shelby Lane, whose demesne up in Oregon Adams had frequently visited--there was no artiforg kidney for Mr. Lane, although in the warehouse three were known to exist. It seemed, and for some reason as he lay in his bed in the master bedroom of his demesne, surrounded by his entourage of worrying leadies, Lane had not seemed convinced by the argument, Brose had put on these three artiforg kidneys what legally was called an _attachment_. He had attached the goddam organs, tied them up, stopped their use, by a complex quasi-legal "prior" claim... Lane, pathetically, had taken it to the Recon Dis-In Council which sat perpetually in session at Mexico City, passing judgment on the land-boundary quarrels between demesne owners, a council on which one leady of each type sat; Lane had not exactly lost, but he had quite certainly not won, in that he was dead. He had died while waiting for the issue of attachment to be settled. And--Brose lived on, with the knowledge that he could suffer three more total kidney-failures and survive. And anyone who chose to go before the Recon Dis-In Council would undoubtedly be dead, like Lane, and the litigation would, with the plaintiff, expire.

_The fat old louse_, Adams thought, and he saw ahead New York City, the spires, the postwar high-rise buildings, the ramps and tu

And, a moment later, he hovered fruit-fly-like himself, over the especially tall cardinal building 580 Fifth Avenue and the Agency.

The entire city was the Agency, of course; the buildings on each side were as much a part of the machinery as this one omphalos. But here his particular office lay; here he entrenched himself against the competing members of his own class. It was a top job that he held... and in his briefcase, which he now picked up expectantly, lay as he well knew top-drawer material.

Maybe Lindblom was right. Maybe the Russians were about to bomb Carthage.

He reached the down ramp of the roof field, touched the hi-speed button, and dropped like a plumb line for his floor and office.

When he entered his office, briefcase in hand, he utterly without a shade or glimpse of warning faced a mound of rubber, winking and blinking, flapping seal-like its pseudopodia and peeping at him while with its slitlike mouth it gaped and gri