Baffled, Eric said, “If I knew something about that drug—”
“I assumed you would. I’m disappointed; that was my reason for bringing you here. Anyhow—there’s one other possibility … logically. Suggested by this assassinated corpse here.” Festenburg hesitated. “I hate to mention it because it’s so bizarre that it makes my other conjectures look tainted by association.”
“Go ahead,” Eric said tightly.
“There is no Gino Molinari.”
Eric grunted. Good grief, he thought.
“All of them are robants. The healthy one who’s on the video tape, the tired, sick one you’ve met, this dead one here in the casket—that somebody, possibly GRS Enterprises, engineered this to keep the ’Starmen from taking over our planet. So far they’ve made use of the ill one.” Festenburg gestured. “And now they’ve hauled out the healthy one, made the first tape of him. And there may be more. Logically why not? I’ve even tried to imagine what other alternatives might be like. You tell me. In addition to the three we know, what’s left?”
Eric said, “Obviously it leaves the possibility of building one with powers above the norm. Beyond the merely healthy.” He thought, then, of Molinari’s recovery from one terminal illness after another. “But maybe we have that already. Have you read the medical file?”
“Yes.” Festenburg nodded. “And there’s one very interesting quality about it. None of the tests were conducted by any persons now on his medical staff. Teagarden didn’t authorize any of them; the tests predate him, and as far as I know, Teagarden, like yourself, has never managed to subject Gino to even a cursory physical exam. Nor do I think he ever will. Nor do I think you ever will, doctor. Even if you’re kept around here for years.”
“Your mind,” Eric said, “is certainly hyperactive.”
“Am I a glandular case?”
“That has no bearing on the matter. But you certainly have spun a lot of ad hoc ideas out of your own head.”
“Based on facts,” Festenburg pointed out. “I want to know what Gino is up to. I think he’s one hell of a smart man. I think he can outthink the ’Starmen any day of the week, and if he had the economic resources and the population behind him that they have, he’d be in the driver’s seat, no contest. As it is, he’s in charge of one dinky planet and they have a system-wide empire of twelve planets and eight moons. It’s frankly a wonder he’s been able to accomplish all he has. You know, doctor, you’re here to find out what’s making Gino sick. I say that’s not the issue. It’s obvious what’s making him sick: the whole darn situation. The real question is: What’s keeping him alive? That’s the real mystery. The miracle.”
“I guess you’re right.” Grudgingly, he had to admit that despite his repellent qualities Festenburg was intelligent and original; he had managed to see the problem properly. No wonder Molinari had hired him.
“You’ve met the schoolgirl shrew?”
“Mary Reineke?” Eric nodded.
“Christ, here’s this tragic, complicated mess, this sick man barely making it through the day with the weight of the world, of Terra itself, on his back, knowing he’s losing the war, knowing the reegs are going to get us if by some miracle Lilistar doesn’t—and in addition he’s got Mary on his back. And the final blistering irony is that Mary, by being a shrew and simple-minded, selfish, demanding, and anything else you want to articulate as a basic character defect—she does have him on his feet; you’ve seen her get him out of bed and back into uniform, functioning again. Do you know anything about Zen, doctor? This is a Zen paradox, because from a logical standpoint Mary ought to have been the final straw that utterly destroyed Gino. It makes you rethink the entire role of adversity in human life. To tell you the truth, I detest her. She detests me, too, naturally. Our only working connection is through Gino; we both want him to make it.”
“Has she been shown the video tape of the healthy Molinari?”
Festenburg glanced up swiftly. “A wise thought. Has Mary seen the tape? Yes, maybe or no—check one. Not to my knowledge. But if you suppose my alternate-present theory, and that it’s not a robant on that tape, if it’s a human being, that magnetic, fire-eating, striving demigod, and if Mary catches sight of it—you can assume the following: the other Molinaris will disappear. Because what you saw on that tape is exactly what Mary Reineke wants—insists—that Gino be.”
It was an extraordinary thought. Eric wondered if Gino was aware of this aspect of the situation; if so, it might explain why he had waited so long to employ this tactic.
“I wonder,” he said to Festenburg, “how the sick Gino, whom we know, could be a robant, in view of Mary Reineke’s existence.”
“How so? Why not?”
“To put it in delicate terms … wouldn’t Mary be somewhat peeved by being the mistress of a product of GRS Enterprises?”
“I’m getting tired, doctor,” Festenburg said. “Let’s write finis to this discussion—you go and fix up your swinkly new conapt which they’ve donated to you for your loyal services here at Cheyenne.” He moved toward the door; the two top-position Secret Service men stepped aside.
Eric said, “I’ll give you one opinion of my own. Having met Gino Molinari I refuse to believe GRS could construct something so human and—”
“But you haven’t met the one they filmed,” Festenburg said quietly. “It’s interesting, doctor. By drawing on himself from the alternates contained in the mishmash of time Gino may have collected an ensemble capable of facing the ally. Three or four Gino Molinaris, forming a committee, would be rather formidable … don’t you agree? Think of the combined ingenuity; think of the harebrained, clever, wild schemes they could hatch up working collectively.” As he opened the door he added, “You’ve met the sick one and glimpsed the well one—weren’t you impressed?”
“Yes,” Eric admitted.
“Would you now vote with those who want to see him sacked? And yet when you try to pin down what he’s actually done that’s so impressive—it isn’t there. If we were winning the war, or forcing back Lilistar’s investment of our planet … but we’re not. So what is it specifically, doctor, that Gino’s done that so impresses you? Tell me.” He waited.
“I—guess I can’t say specifically. But—”
A White House employee, a uniformed robant, appeared and confronted Eric Sweetscent. “Secretary Molinari has been looking for you, doctor. He’s waiting to see you in his office; I’ll lead the way.”
“Oops,” Festenburg said, chagrined and all at once quite nervous. “Evidently I kept you too long.”
Without a further exchange Eric followed the robant up the corridor to the elevator. This was probably important; he had that intuition.
In his office Molinari sat in a wheelchair, a blanket over his lap, his face gray and sunken. “Where were you?” he said, as Eric came into sight. “Well, it doesn’t matter; listen, doctor—the ’Starmen have called a conference and I want you to be with me while I attend. I want you to be on hand constantly, just in case. I’m not feeling well and I wish this damn get-together could be avoided or at least postponed for a few weeks. But they insist.” He began to wheel himself from the office. “Come on. It’s going to start anytime.”
“I met Don Festenburg.”
“Brilliant rat, isn’t he? I put complete faith in our eventual success in him. What did he show you?”
It seemed unreasonable to tell Molinari that he had been viewing his corpse, especially in view of the fact that the man had just now said he did not feel well. So Eric merely said, “He took me around the building.”
“Festenburg has the run of the place—because of the trust I put in him.” At a bend in the corridor a gang of stenographers, translators, State Department officials, and armed guards met Molinari; his wheelchair disappeared into the corporate body and did not reappear. Eric, however, could still hear him talking away, explaining what lay ahead. “Freneksy is here. So this is going to be rough. I have an idea what they want, but we’ll have to
wait and see. Better not to anticipate; that way you do their work for them, you sort of turn on yourself and do yourself in.”
Freneksy, Eric thought with a sensation of dread. Lilistar’s Prime Minister, here personally on Terra.
No wonder Molinari felt sick.
9
The members of Terra’s delegation to the hastily called conference occupied seats on one side of the long oak table, and now, on the far side, the personages from Lilistar began to emerge from side corridors and find chairs. As a whole they did not look sinister; they looked, in fact, overworked and harried, caught up, as was Terra, by the strain of conducting the war. Obviously they had no time to spare. They were clearly mortal.
“Translation,” a ’Starman said in English, “will be done by human agency not by machine, as any machine might make a permanent record, which is contrary to our desires here.”
Molinari grunted, nodded.
Now Freneksy appeared; the ’Star delegation and several members of the Terran rose in a show of respect; the ’Starmen clapped their hands as the bald, lean, oddly round-skulled man took a chair at the center of the delegation and began without preliminaries to open a briefcase of documents.
But his eyes. Eric noticed that, as Freneksy glanced briefly up at Molinari and smiled in greeting, Freneksy had what Eric thought of—and recognized in his practice as—paranoid eyes. Once he had learned to spot this, future identification generally came easy. This was not the glittering, restless stare of ordinary suspicion; this was a motionless gaze, a gathering of the totality of faculties within to comprise a single undisturbed psychomotor concentration. Freneksy did not decide to do this; in fact he was helpless, compelled to confront his compatriots and adversaries alike in this fashion, with this unending ensnaring fixity. It was an attentiveness which made empathic understanding impossible; the eyes did not reflect any inner reality; they gave back to the viewer exactly what he himself was. The eyes stopped communication dead; they were a barrier that could not be penetrated this side of the tomb.
Freneksy was not a bureaucrat and he did not—could not even if he tried—subordinate himself to his office. Freneksy remained a man—in the bad sense; he retained, in the midst of the busy activity of official conduct, the essence of the purely personal, as if to him everything was deliberate and intentional—a contest between people, not one between abstract or ideal issues.
What Minister Freneksy does, Eric realized, is to deprive all the others of the sanctity of their office. Of the security-producing reality of their titled position. Facing Freneksy, they became as they were born; isolated and individual, unsupported by the institutions which they were supposed to represent.
Take Molinari. Customarily, the Mole was the UN Secretary; he as an individual had—and properly so—dissolved into his function. But facing Minister Freneksy, the naked, hapless, lonely man reemerged—and was required to stand up to the Minister in this unhappy infinitude. The normal relativeness of existence, lived with others in a fluctuating state of more or less adequate security, had vanished.
Poor Gino Molinari, Eric thought. Because facing Freneksy the Mole might as well not have become UN Secretary. And meanwhile Minister Freneksy became even more cold, more lifeless; he did not burn with the desire to destroy or dominate: he merely took away what his antagonist possessed—and left him nothing and nowhere, literally.
It was perfectly clear to Eric, at this point, why Molinari’s procession of lethal illnesses had not proved fatal. The illnesses were not merely a symptom of the stress under which he lay; they were simultaneously a solution to that stress.
He could not as yet make out quite precisely how the illnesses behaved in order to function as a response to Freneksy. But he had the deep and acute intution that he would very soon; the confrontation between Freneksy and Molinari lay only moments away, and everything which the Mole had would have to be trotted out, if the Mole wished to survive.
Beside Eric a minor State Department official muttered, “Oppressive in here, isn’t it? Wish they’d open a window or turn on the vent system.”
Eric thought, No mechanical vent system will clear this air. Because the oppression emanates from those seated across from us and it will not depart until they depart—and perhaps not even then.
Leaning toward Eric, Molinari said, “Sit here beside me.” He drew the chair back. “Listen, doctor, do you have your bag of instruments with you?”
“It’s in my conapt.”
Molinari at once dispatched a robant runner. “I want you to have the bag at all times.” He cleared his throat, then turned toward those seated on the far side of the table. “Minister Freneksy, I have a, uh, statement. I’d like to read it; the statement summarizes Earth’s present position as regards—”
“Secretary,” Freneksy said suddenly in English, “before you read any statement I would like to describe the status of the war effort on Front A.” Freneksy rose; an aide at once unrolled a map projection which took effect on the far wall. The room sank into shadow.
Grunting, Molinari placed his written statement back inside the jacket of his uniform; he would not get his opportunity to read it. In an obvious manner he had been preempted. And, for a political strategist, this was a grave defeat. The initiative, if it had ever been his, was gone now.
“Our combined armies,” Freneksy stated, “are shortening their lines for strategic purposes. The reegs are expending inordinate amounts of men and material in this area.” He indicated a sector on the map; it lay halfway between two planets of the Alpha System. “They will not be able to continue this long; I predict a bankruptcy of their strength no later than a month—Terran count—from now. The reegs do not understand yet that this is to be a long war. Victory, for them, must come soon or not at all. We, however—” Freneksy indicated the entire map with a sweep of the pointer. “We are maturely aware of the overall strategic meaning of this struggle, and how long it must remain with us in terms of time as well as space. Also, the reegs are spread too thinly. If a major battle were to break out here—” Freneksy indicated the spot—“they could not support their forces already committed. Further, we will have twenty more first-line divisions in action by the end of the Terran year; this is a promise, Secretary. We have yet to call up several classes here on Terra, whereas the reegs have scraped the barrel.” He paused.
Molinari murmured, “Is your bag here yet, doctor?”
“Not yet,” Eric said, looking for the robant runner; it had not returned.
Leaning close to Eric, the Mole whispered, “Listen. You know what I’ve been experiencing lately? Head noises. Rushing sounds—you know, in my ears. Swoop, zwoop. Does that sound like anything?”
Minister Freneksy had continued. “We have new weapons, also emanating from Planet Four of the Empire; you will be astonished, Secretary, when you see video clips of them in tactical operation. They are devastating in their accuracy. I will not attempt to describe them in detail now; I prefer to wait until the tapes are available. I personally supervised their engineering and construction.”
His head almost touching Eric’s, Molinari whispered, “And when I turn my head from side to side I get a distinct cracking sound from the base of my neck. Can you hear it?” He turned his head from side to side, nodding in a slow, stiff manner. “What is that? It resounds unpleasantly as hell in my ears.”
Eric said nothing; he was watching Freneksy, barely paying attention to the whispering from the man beside him.
“Secretary,” Freneksy said, pausing, “consider this aspect of our joint effort; the reegs’ space-drive output has been severely restricted due to the success by our W-bombs. Those which have come off their assembly lines recently—we are informed by MCI—are unreliable, and a number of highly destructive contaminations have occurred in deep space aboard their line ships.”
The robant runner entered the room now, with Eric’s instrument case.
Ignoring this, Freneksy continued, his voice harsh and insistent. “I also
point out, Secretary, that on Front Blue the Terran brigades have not performed well, no doubt due to a lack of proper equipment. Victory is of course inevitable for us—eventually. But right now we must see to it that our troops who hold the line against the reegs are not put in the position of facing the enemy deprived of adequate material. It is criminal to allow men to fight under those circumstances; don’t you agree, Secretary?” Without pausing, Freneksy continued, “Therefore you can see the urgency of increasing Terra’s output of strategic war goods and weapons of all sort.”
Molinari saw Eric’s instrument case and nodded with relief. “You have it,” he said. “Good. Keep it ready, just in case. You know what I think these head noises are from? Hypertension.”
Cautiously, Eric said, “Could be.”
Now Minister Freneksy had ceased; his expressionless face seemed to become more severe, more withdrawn into the vacuum of his own intensity, the nonBeing which seemed to be his major quality. Irritated by Molinari’s lack of attention, Freneksy was drawing from this well of his own antiexistence, Eric decided. Casting his principle over the conference room and the people in it, as if forcing everyone away from each other step by step.
“Secretary,” Freneksy said, “this now is most crucial. My generals in the field tell me that the new reeg offensive weapon, their—”
“Wait,” Molinari croaked. “I wish to confer with my colleague, here beside me.” Bending so close to Eric that his soft, perspiration-dampened cheek pressed against his neck, Molinari whispered to him, “And you know what else? I seem to be having trouble with my eyes. As if I’m going completely blind. Here’s what I want you to do, doctor; give me a pressure reading right now. Just to be sure it’s not dangerously high. I feel it is, frankly.”