Now Wait for Last Year Page 10

  'I'm not confused,' Eric said, after a pause.

  'Then you know your duty. You're the artiforg man, aren't you? The top org-trans surgeon ... I read about you in Time, I think. Don't you think Time is a highly informative magazine in all fields? I read it from cover to cover every week, especially the medical and scientific sections.'

  Eric said, 'Do – you go to school?'

  'I graduated. High school, not college; I've got no interest in what they call "higher learning."'

  'What did you want to be?'

  'What do you mean?' She eyed him suspiciously.

  'I mean what career did you intend to enter?'

  'I don't need a career.'

  'But you didn't know that; you had no way of telling you'd wind up—' He gestured. 'Be here at the White House.'

  'Sure I did. I always knew, all my life. Since I was three.'

  'How?'

  'I was – I am – one of those precogs. I could tell the future.' Her tone was calm.

  'Can you still do it?'

  'Sure.'

  'Then you don't need to ask me why I'm here; you can look ahead and see what I do.'

  'What you do,' Mary said, 'isn't that important; it doesn't register.' She smiled then, showing beautiful, regular, white teeth.

  'I can't believe that,' he said, nettled.

  'Then be your own precog; don't ask me what I know if you're not interested in the results. Or not able to accept them. This is a cutthroat environment, here at the White House; a hundred people are clamoring to get Gino's attention all the time, twenty-four hours a day. You have to fight your way through the throngs. That's why Gino gets sick – or rather pretends to be sick.'

  '"Pretends,"' Eric said.

  'He's an hysteric; you know, where they think they have illnesses but really don't. It's his way of keeping people off his back; he's just too sick to deal with them.' She laughed merrily. 'You know that – you've examined him. He doesn't actually have anything.'

  'Have you read the file?'

  'Sure.'

  'Then you know that Gino Molinari has had cancer at three separate occasions.'

  'So what?' She gestured. 'Hysterical cancer.'

  'In the medical profession no such—'

  'Which are you going to believe, your textbooks or what you see with your own eyes?' She studied him intently. 'If you expect to survive here you better become a realist; you better learn to detect facts when you meet up with them. You think Teagarden is glad you're here? You're a menace to his status; he's already begun trying to find ways to discredit you – or haven't you noticed?'

  'No,' he said. 'I haven't noticed.'

  'Then you haven't got a chance. Teagarden will have you out of here so fast—' She broke off. Ahead lay the sick man's door and the two rows of Secret Service men. 'You know why Gino has those pains actually? So he can be pampered. So people will wait on him as if he's a baby; he wants to be a baby again so he won't have grownup responsibilities. See?'

  'Theories like that,' Eric said, 'sound so perfect, they're so glib, so easy to say—'

  'But true,' Mary said. 'In this case.' She pushed past the Secret Service men, opened the door, and entered. Going up to Gino's bed, she gazed down at him and said, 'Get on your feet, you big lazy bastard.'

  Opening his eyes, Gino stirred leadenly. 'Oh. It's you. Sorry, but I—'

  'Sorry nothing,' Mary said in a sharp voice. 'You're not sick. Get up! I'm ashamed of you; everybody's ashamed of you. You're just scared and acting like a baby – how do you expect me to respect you when you act like this?'

  After a time Gino said, 'Maybe I don't expect you to.' He seemed depressed more than anything else by the girl's tirade. Now he made out Eric. 'You hear her, doctor?' he said gloomily. 'Nobody can stop her; she comes in here when I'm dying and talks to me like that – maybe that's the reason I'm dying.' He rubbed his stomach gingerly. 'I don't feel them right now. I think that shot you gave me did it; what was in that?'

  Not the shot, Eric thought, but the surgery downstairs on McNeil. Your complaint is gone because an assistant cook on the White House staff now has an artiforg heart. I was right.

  'If you're okay—' Mary began.

  'Okay,' Molinari sighed. 'I'll get up; just leave me alone, will you, for chrissake?' He stirred about, struggling to get from the bed. 'Okay — I'll get up; will that satisfy you?' His voice rose to a shout of anger.

  Turning to Eric, Mary Reineke said, 'You see? I can get him out of bed; I can put him back on his feet like a man.'

  'Congratulations,' Gino murmured sourly as he shakily rose to a standing position. 'I don't need a medical staff; all I need is you. But I noticed it was Dr Sweetscent here who got rid of my pains, not you. What did you ever do but bawl me out? If I'm back up it's because of him.' He passed by her, to the closet for his robe.

  'He resents me,' Mary said to Eric. 'But underneath he knows I'm right.' She seemed perfectly placid and sure of herself; she stood with her arms folded, watching the Secretary as he tied the sash of his blue robe and got on his deerskin slippers.

  'Big-time,' Molinari muttered to Eric, jerking his head at Mary. 'She runs things – according to her.'

  'Do you have to do what she says?' Eric inquired.

  Molinari laughed. 'Sure. Don't I?'

  'What happens if you don't? Does she make the heavens fall?'

  'Yes, she pulls down everything.' Molinari nodded. 'It's a psionic talent she has ... it's called being a woman. Like your wife Kathy. I'm glad to have her around; I like her. I don't care if she bawls me out – after all, I did get out of bed and it didn't hurt me; she was right.'

  'I always know when you're malingering,' Mary said.

  'Come with me, doctor,' Molinari said to Eric. There's something they've set up for me to watch; I want you to see it too.'

  Trailed by Secret Service men, they crossed the corridor and entered a guarded, locked room which Eric realized was a projection chamber; the far wall consisted of a permanent vidscreen installation on a grand scale.

  'Me making a speech,' Molinari explained to Eric as they seated themselves. He signaled and a video tape began to roll, projected on the large screen. 'It'll be delivered tomorrow night, over all the TV networks. I want your opinion on it in advance, in case there's anything I should change.' He glanced slyly at Eric, as if there was more he was not saying.

  Why would he want my opinion? Eric wondered as he watched the image of the UN Secretary fill the screen. The Mole in full military regalia as C-in-C of Terra's armed forces: medals and arm bands and ribbons and, above all, the stiff marshal's hat with its visor partly shielding the round, heavy-jowled face so that only the lower part, the grimy chin, was visible with its disconcertingly harsh scowl.

  And the jowls, unaccountably, were not flabby; they had become, for no reason which Eric could conjure up, firm and determined. It was a rocklike, severe face which showed on the screen, stern and strengthened by inner authority that Eric had not seen before in the Mole ... or had he?

  Yes, he thought. But it had been years ago, when the Mole had first taken office, when he had been younger and there had not been the crushing responsibility. And now, on the screen, the Mole spoke. And his voice – it was the old original voice from past times; it was exactly as it had been, a decade ago, before this terrible, losing war.

  Chuckling, Molinari said from the deep, foam-rubber chair in which he lounged beside Eric, 'I look pretty good, don't I?'

  'You do.' The speech rolled on, sonorous, even containing, now and then, a trace of the awesome, the majestic. And it was precisely this which Molinari had lost: he had become pitiable. On the screen the mature, dignified man in military garb expressed himself clearly in a voice that snapped out its sentences without hesitancy; the UN Secretary, in the video tape, demanded and informed, did not beg, did not turn to the electorate of Terra for help ... he told them what to do in this period of crisis. And that was as it should be. But how had it been done? How did the pleading, hy
pochondriacal invalid, suffering from his eternal half-killing complaints, rise up and do this? Eric was mystified.

  Beside him Molinari said, 'It's a fake. That's not me.' He grinned with delight as Eric stared first at him and then at the screen.

  Then who is it?'

  'It's nobody. It's a robant. General Robant Servant Enterprises made it up for me – this speech is its first appearance. Pretty good, like my old self, makes me feel young again just to watch it.' And, Eric saw, the UN Secretary did seem more his old self; he had genuinely perked up as he sat watching the simulacrum on the screen. The Mole, above and beyond everyone else, was taken in by the ersatz spectacle; he was its first convert. 'Want to see the thing? It's top secret, of course – only three or four people know about it, besides Dawson Cutter of GRS Enterprises, of course. But they'll keep it confidential; they're used to handling classified material in the process of war-contract letting.' He thumped Eric on the back. 'You're getting let in on one of the secrets of state — how does that feel? This is the way the modern state is run; there're things the electorate doesn't know, shouldn't know for their own good. All governments have functioned this way, not just mine. You imagine it's just mine? If you do you've got a lot to learn. I'm using a robant to make my speeches for me because at this point I don't—' He gestured 'present quite the proper visual image, despite the make-up technicians who work me over. It's just an impossible job.' Now he had become dour, no longer joking. 'So I gave up. I'm being realistic.' He settled back in his chair, moodily.

  'Who wrote the speech?'

  'I did. I can still put together a political manifesto, depicting the situation, telling them how we stand and where we're going and what we've got to do. My mind is still there.' The Mole tapped his big bulging forehead. 'However, I naturally had help.'

  '"Help,"' Eric echoed.

  'A man I want you to meet – a brilliant new young lawyer who acts as confidential adviser to me, without pay. Don Festenburg, a whiz; you'll be as impressed as I was. He has a knack for remolding, condensing, extracting the substance and presenting it in a few distilled sentences... I always had a tendency to run on at excessive length; everybody knows that. But not any more, not with Festenburg around. He programmed this simulacrum – he's really saved my life.'

  On the screen his synthetic image was saying com-mandingly, '—and gathering up the collective eclat of our several national societies, we as Terrans present a formidable association, more than just a planet but admittedly less, at the moment, than an interplanetary empire on the order of Lilistar . .. although perhaps—.'

  'I – would prefer not to have a look at the simulacrum,' Eric decided.

  Molinari shrugged. 'It's an opportunity, but if you're not interested or if it distresses you—' He eyed Eric. 'You'd rather retain your idealistic image of me; rather imagine that the thing talking up there on the screen is real.' He laughed. 'I thought a doctor, like a lawyer and a priest, could withstand the shock of seeing life as it is; I thought truth was your daily bread.' He leaned toward Eric earnestly; under him his chair squeaked in protest, giving under his excessive weight. 'I'm too old. I can't talk brilliantly any more. God knows I'd like to. But this is a solution; would it be better just to give up?'

  'No,' Eric admitted. That wouldn't solve their problems.

  'So I use a robant substitute, speaking lines that Don Festenburg programmed. The point is: we'll go on. And that's what matters. So learn to live with it, doctor; grow up.' His face was cold now, unyielding. '

  'Okay,' Eric said after a moment.

  Molinari tapped him on the shoulder and said in a low voice. The 'Starmen don't know about this simulacrum and Don Festenburg's work; I don't want them to find out, doctor, because I'd like to impress them, too. You understand? In fact I'm sending a print of this video tape to Lilistar; it's already on the way. You want to know the truth, doctor? Frankly, I'm more interested in impressing them than I am our own population. How does that strike you? Tell me honestly.'

  'It strikes me,' Eric said, 'as an acute commentary on our plight.'

  The Mole regarded him somberly. 'Perhaps so. But what you don't realize is that this is nothing; if you had any idea of—'

  'Don't tell me any more. Not right now.'

  On the screen the imitation of Gino Molinari boomed and expostulated, gesticulated to the unseen TV audience.

  'Sure, sure,' Molinari agreed, mollified. 'Sorry to have bothered you with my troubles in the first place.' Downcast, his face more lined and weary than before, he turned his attention back to the screen, to the healthy, vigorous, completely synthetic image of his earlier self.

  * * *

  In the kitchen of her conapt Kathy Sweetscent lifted a small paring knife with difficulty, attempted to cut a purple onion but found to her incredulity that she had somehow slashed her finger; she stood mutely holding the knife, watching the crimson drops slide from her finger to merge with the water sprinkled across her wrist. She could no longer handle even the most commonplace object. The damn drug! she thought with embittered fury. Every minute it's making me more powerless. Now everything defeats me. So how the hell am I going to fix dinner?

  Standing behind her, Jonas Ackerman said with concern, 'Something has to be done for you, Kathy.' He watched her as she went to the bathroom for a Band-Aid. 'Now you're spilling the Band-Aids everywhere; you can't even handle that.' He complained, 'If you'd tell me what it is, what—'

  'Put the Band-Aid on for me, will you?' She stood silently as Jonas wrapped her cut finger. 'It is JJ-180,' she blurted suddenly, without premeditation. 'I'm on it, Jonas. The 'Star-men did it. Please help me, get me off it. Okay?'

  Shaken, Jonas said, 'I – don't know exactly what I can do, because it's such a new drug. Of course we'll get in touch with our subsidiary right away. And the whole company will back you up, including Virgil.'

  'Go talk to Virgil right now.'

  'Now? Your time sense, Kathy; you feel this urgency because of the drug. I can see him tomorrow.'

  'Damn it, I'm not going to die because of this drug. So you better see him tonight, Jonas; do you understand?'

  After a pause Jonas said, 'I'll call him.'

  'The vidlines are tapped. By the 'Starmen.'

  'That's a paranoid idea. From the drug.'

  'I'm afraid of them,' she said trembling. They can do anything. You go and see Virgil face to face, Jonas; calling isn't enough. Or don't you care what happens to me?'

  'Of course I care! Okay, I'll go and see the old man. But will you be all right alone?'

  'Yes,' Kathy said. 'I'll just sit in the living room and do nothing. I'll just wait for you to come back with some kind of help. What could happen to me if I don't try to do anything, if I just sit there?'

  'You might get yourself into a state of morbid agitation. You might be swamped by panic . .. start to run. If it's true you're on JJ-180—'

  'It's true!' she said loudly. 'Do you think I'm kidding?'

  'Okay,' Jonas said, giving in. He led her to the couch in the living room, sat her down. 'God, I hope you'll be all right – I hope I'm not making a mistake.' He was sweating and pale, his face wizened with worry. 'See you in about half an hour, Kathy. Christ, if something goes wrong, Eric'11 never forgive me and I won't blame him.' The apartment door shut after him. He did not even say good-by.

  She was alone.

  At once she went to the vidphone and dialed. 'A cab.' She gave her address and hung up.

  A moment later, her coat over her shoulders, she hurried from the building and out onto the nocturnal sidewalk.

  When the autonomic cab had picked her up she instructed it by means of the card which Corning had given her.

  If I can get more of the drug, she thought, my mind will clear and I can reason out what I have to do; as I am now I can't think. Anything I decide now, in this state, would be spurious. I owe it to myself to restore the normal functioning – or rather the desired functioning – of my faculties; without that I can't plan or s
urvive and I'm doomed. I know, she thought fiercely, that the only way out for me would be suicide; it's just a matter of a few hours at the most. And Jonas couldn't help me in that short a time.

  The only way I could have gotten rid of him, she realized, is the way I chose; by telling him of my addiction. Otherwise he would have hung around me forever and I never would have had a chance to get to Corning for more. I gained the opportunity I need, but now the Ackermans understand what's wrong with me and they'll try even harder to keep me from going to Cheyenne and joining Eric. Maybe I should go there tonight, not even return to my apartment. Just take off as soon as I have the capsules. Leave everything I own behind, abandoned.

  How demented can you get? she asked herself. And it required only one exposure to JJ-180 to do this; what'll I be like when I've taken it repeatedly ... or even just twice.

  The future, to her, was mercifully obscure. She frankly did not know.

  'Your destination, miss.' The cab settled onto the rooftop landing field of a building. That will be one dollar and twenty cents US plus a twenty-five-cent tip.'

  'Screw you and the tip,' Kathy said, opening her purse; her hands shook and she could barely get out the money.

  'Yes, miss,' the autonomic cab said obediently.

  She paid and then stepped out. A dull guide-light showed her descent. What a rundown building for 'Starmen to inhabit, she thought. It surely isn't good enough for them; they must be pretending to be Terrans. The only consolation was a bitter one: the 'Starmen, like Terra, were losing the war, would ultimately be defeated. Relishing that thought, she increased her pace, felt more confidence; she did not simply hate the 'Starmen: she could, for a moment, despise them.

  In this fortified frame of mind she reached the conapt held by the 'Starmen, rang the bell, and waited.

  It was Corning himself who answered; she saw, behind him, other 'Starmen, evidently in conference. In camera, she said to herself; I'm disturbing them. Too bad; he said to come.

  'Mrs Sweetscent.' Corning turned to the people behind him. 'Isn't that a superb name? Come in Kathy.' He held the door wide.