***
He woke abruptly.
For a moment he did not know where he was. Then memory came back and it seemed to him that he had closed his eyes just a moment ago. But the room was now full of morning light, and Rico was standing over him.
“Wha—?” Ett said.
“I’m sorry to wake you,” said Rico. “But Dr. Garranto is leaving, and he wants to speak to you before he goes.”
“Speak to me.” Ett propped himself up on one elbow, running a hand over his numb and bristled face. “How long have I been sleeping?”
“Fourteen hours.”
“Fourteen!” Ett’s mind was jolted into full awareness. “Wally—how’s Wally?”
A little change passed across the polite features of Rico.
“Dr. Garranto wants to give you a full report.”
“Oh.” Ett swung his legs over the edge of the bed and sat up. “Where is he?”
“Just outside the door. If you don’t mind, he’d like to come right in. He’s eager to leave.”
“Fine,” said Ett. “Let him in, then.”
He rubbed the last of the sleepiness out of his eyes as Rico went to the door of the bedroom and opened it to let Garranto in and himself out. As the door closed, the narrow-bodied doctor strode briskly over to where Ett waited, pulled up a chair, and sat down so that they faced each other.
“How’s Wally?” asked Ett.
Garranto did not answer directly at once. Exhaustion had grayed his skin and deepened the lines on his face. For a second he merely stared directly into Ett’s eyes.
“Mr. Ho,” he said, “I want you to understand something. I’m a highly trained physician in a medical area where there are never enough highly trained men and women. I don’t have enough time to handle all the patients I’d like to handle, let alone involve myself in anything outside my work with patients.”
Ett nodded. Garranto’s formal and oblique answer to his question had started a small, uneasy feeling inside him, but he repressed it. He felt he had no option but to let the man finish whatever it was he had begun to say in so portentious a manner.
“Fair enough,” said Ett, seeing that some sort of reply was indicated. “What about it?”
“We had a very successful revivification in the case of your brother,” said the physician. “He responded excellently. Physically, he could hardly be in better shape. Mentally, I’m sorry to say, the case was otherwise.”
The uneasy feeling blossomed inside Ett.
“How bad…” he began, but the words stuck in his throat.
“I’m afraid”—the voice of Garranto tolled in his ears—“that mentally there was no effective recovery at all. In short, I’m sorry to tell you that your brother is in almost a state of coma—one from which we can’t hope to rouse him.”
Darkness roared in the back of Ett’s mind. He felt the room tilting about him and then felt himself steadied by the strong, bony hand of the surgeon.
“Hold on, there!” Garranto was saying. “Hold on. How do you feel?”
“It didn’t work,” muttered Ett. He was conscious of himself in the room, with Garranto facing him; but with another part of his mind he was falling, endlessly falling, down into nothingness. Opening out forever before him was the eternity in which Wally would never recover; for the first time he faced the fact that he had never really accepted that possibility. From the start he had ignored all warnings. Inwardly, he had been sure that Wally would be brought back, not merely to warmth and life but to his old abilities and powers.
“No,” he said, pushing Garranto’s supporting hand from him, “I’m all right. I’d been hoping—but I should have known better, of course.”
“No,” said Garranto strangely. “No, you shouldn’t have known better.”
Ett stared at him.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, damn it, that the odds were there, the odds against your brother being returned to mental normality!” snapped Garranto. “Your own physician must have warned you—Carwell—and I warned you; but in my own mind, Mr. Ho, I actually gave your brother a better than even chance. He was young. The death had been sudden and entirely physical in induction. He had been cryoed immediately. The odds should have been good enough to return him to some form of normal activity both mental and physical.”
Ett laughed without humor.
“Why tell me this now?” he said.
“Because.” Garranto’s tone of voice put a period after the word. Reaching into the side pocket of his jacket, he came out with a small, transparent bottle with a heavy stopper. Within were a few cubic centimeters of what looked like a pale amber liquid.
“I told you I was a busy man,” he said. “I’ve got no time to answer lawyers’ questions and sit in courts of justice, no matter how good the cause. When your brother failed to respond mentally to the normal procedure, I did a spinal tap and found traces of a substance which I have never encountered before in the spinal fluid of anyone—following an RIV injection or otherwise—even in the case of someone who, like your brother, had had a bad reaction to the drug. I don’t know what this substance is, and I don’t want to know. But it appears, among other things, to inhibit the production and liberation of acetylcholine at the postganglionic parasympathetic terminals of the nervous system.”
Garranto got to his feet, walked across to a window, and punched the stud that set it sliding open. He opened the container in his hand and poured its contents out into the open air.
Unable to move, Ett watched.
“As I said,” the physician went on, coming back across the room to stand before him, “I’ve got my work to do; I’ll deny ever having this conversation with you, if it comes to that. But if I was a betting man, I’d bet your brother had something administered to him other than the normal RIV-II—and that other, whatever it was, was responsible for his mental decay and the fact that now he’ll never recover from his present state.”
Garranto looked grimly at Ett.
“Forgive me,” he said, “but nothing I or anyone else can do can help your brother now. Good-bye.”
He turned and went out.
Ett sat still.
There was no darkness roaring at the back of his mind now. There was only a spreading numbness of realization, behind the leaping conclusions of his own RIV-stimulated mind, flogged into extreme activity by the brutal surge of adrenaline called forth by the information that Wally had been deliberately destroyed.
Of course. His mind leaped, as if in magic seven-league boots, taking great and certain strides from evidence to conclusion and on to further conclusions. Wally was known to be a MOGOW. What special knowledge he might have had, or whether he had been only an experimental subject as far as the EC bureaucracy was concerned, did not matter now. What mattered now was only the fact of what they had done to him—and what Ett would guide him, or the shell of him, to do in return.
No longer was it a matter of setting up a situation in which he and Wally would be left alone by bureaucracy and MOGOW alike. Now it was a matter of Wally’s living-dead hand which would bring retribution upon the EC—the Council and its agents—itself.
The fatal crack had been made in the shell that Ett had tended so laboriously for so long, around his violent inner self; and now the Heinrich Bruder-like being he knew himself to be was free. A great hatred was filling that being, and it was a good feeling, for it made him feel strong and tall and overpowering.
He had felt that other self in him before, but never like this. Even when he had given way to his fury, so briefly, in the office of Shu-shu, a part of him had watched and, while enjoying the warmth of the great internal fires, known how those fires threatened to consume him whole. But now the fires about his soul were not at all warm; they were cold, so cold, and they took him completely. As they would consume the world about him completely, too.
Chapter Fourteen
Three days later Rico was waiting for Ett in the workroom that had been set up for the priv
ate use of Ett and himself. A large architectural image was three-dimensionally depicted on the viewscreen of a tilted grav-table surface against one wall.
“Mr. Ho—” began Rico as soon as Ett appeared.
“Damn it!” exploded Ett. “Why can’t you call me by my first name like everyone else?”
Rico stared at him for perhaps a second.
“I can, of course,” he said. “But to be truthful, I feel more comfortable speaking to you formally. You’d rather I called you Ett?”
“No, no,” said Ett wearily. “Forgive me. Call me anything you want. Is this the plan of the area under the Museum of Natural History that has the files we’re after?”
As he changed the subject, Ett was mentally kicking himself. The strains of his physical discomforts and his recent mental upheaval had given him a hair-trigger temper, and in these last couple of days he had been venting his wrath on those about him more and more often. His resolve to once more regain control of that inner nature of him remained undimmed, but he knew he had already compromised with it, and that that weakened his will. But he could see no way around the fact that he had to, and would, send the world and its society down in ruins—and as he worked to do that, he was aware of the fierce joy in destruction that burned behind the wall in back of his eyes.
His plans would come to nothing, though, he told himself, if he allowed this thing in him to drive off those he needed in the work. Control was once more essential; but this time it would have to be the control of an iron, forceful will, and not that of a mild, bland nothing of a personality.
“Essentially,” said Rico, at the table. He picked up a long thin light-pencil and began indicating areas as he mentioned them. “This is the elevator shaft down to it, this is the entrance, and the files are here. Actually, what you’re looking at is a composite rendering, built up from a number of sources of information. To begin with, what Shu-shu told us was no more than a possibility. I’ve checked it, however, from a number of angles, at several removes—for example, from old records of New York subway tunnels, comparison figures over the years of the number of people going in and out of the museum each day, records of repairs within the museum itself and of the mechanical equipment involved, and so forth—all things which can be safely examined from public sources without alerting EC’s Central Computer that anyone is interested in what’s underneath the museum.”
“Then this is only what you believe it looks like—if it’s there?” asked Ett.
“It’s a little more than that,” said Rico. “Enough things check so that we can be pretty sure it’s there, all right. Call its existence certain. Otherwise the amount of coincidence involved in the dovetailing of these pieces of information is beyond belief. It’s there, and it’s quite a simple layout—which helps protect it. It’s simply a secret additional sub floor beneath the museum, with files of records on old-fashioned emem—multiplex microfiche. It has one drop tube elevator with its upper entrance hidden within an electronically guarded vault entered from the office of one of the museum officials. That official is the only man who knows about the subfloor and the files. All requests for information go directly to him. He goes down, copies the necessary records, and brings the information up again.”
“I see,” said Ett.
“I should add,” said Rico, “that the rock around the sub-basement—and it’s sunk in the rock that underlies all Manhattan—is loaded with sensors.”
“All right,” said Ett. “How do we get to the files?”
“We were expecting the answer to that question from you, Mr. Ho.”
“From me?”
“Yes, sir,” said Rico. “You’re the Master. You have the problem-solving ability. Frankly, I don’t see any way into that sub-basement without our being identified and traced back here, eventually—even if we should manage to get away with the information we want. But if there is a way, someone like you would be the one to find it.”
“I see,” said Ett.
“Yes, Mr. Ho. Shall I leave you to think about it?”
“All right. I can try, at least.”
Rico went out. Ett was left gazing at the rendering of the sub-basement. He touched the controls of the screen and brought up an image of the museum itself, above the sub-basement. To the right of that image, he punched for a simultaneous display of data on the museum employee who alone had access to the file room; following this, he asked for information on the connection between this man and the EC itself, and on the route by which information was channeled through the single individual both to and from the files.
The information was detailed and complete. Rico had done a good job of setting it up. Ett pulled over a grav-float seat and sat down, gazing at the screen and thinking.
When Rico had first left him, he had not felt confident. Wally’s revival had emptied him emotionally. And since then, when not in the grip of his own personal devil, his optimism and enthusiasm were drained away; he skirted the edges, he knew, of a pit of depression in which the various discomforts of his body and mind would become overpowering.
Now, however, as he read the display and studied the rendering of the sub-basement file room, interest began to kindle in him. Little by little, his depression and the small complaints of his body were pushed into the background of his consciousness. His thoughts expanded to encompass all the information available on the problem and consider it.
The process was self-feeding. As his interest rose, he found himself responding physically, as he had responded during the gambling session at the Sunset Mountain. Self-adrenalized, he began to lift on as strong an emotional push upward as the downward pushes that had sickened him after seeing the fencers and the dolphins. His discomforts began to be crowded off into nonexistence; his body felt light and powerful with energy. His thoughts increased their speed, multiplied, and swelled from something like a slow trickle down a gentle slope, to a cataract pouring down some steep mountainside.
Now he was up on his feet and pacing the room, moving fast and jerkily as excess energy pulled him this way and that. His mind burned in a fire that warmed but did not consume. He rode the furious current of his thoughts as if his attention was a canoe charging among the foam and boulders of a mountain stream, negotiating a course of rapids without a bump. By twos, threes, and dozens, solutions and answers to things he had wondered about all his life came pouring into him—no, they came pouring from him, welling up to the surface of his mind and presenting themselves before his watching eyes like a series of birthday presents…
Lost among these was the problem that had started it all, the question of how to get into the sub-basement under the museum.
He did not wonder about that now. The problem was still there, he would get to it eventually, and when he did no serious effort would be required to solve it. More important now was the sheer intoxication of cerebration. He thought now, with the sheer joy in pure thinking that could perhaps be likened to that joy a painter feels as color and image leap into life from his brush and onto the canvas, or that the composer feels as notes in an order never before conceived of sing back to him from the piano on which he is developing them.
He was laughing now, he could hear the clear tones of the voice that was his, like bells; and he strode up and down the room, eyes darting from interesting object to fascinating glint of light. His hands rushed about with him, touching and feeling, exploring new things for him to think about and realize within himself. There was no room in all this for that inner fury he’d lived with, and in fear of, for so long; and he didn’t notice that it was gone, at least for the moment.
In one great rush he felt that he was reviewing all of Earth and its history up to the present moment. He ran his mind along the times of recorded mankind, as he might have slowly stroked the sleek side of some great cat, feeling the warmth and texture of each hair as his fingers passed. He spread the present before him like a map, then added to it that third dimension built of the characters of those presently alive—the commu
nity social pressure, reaching out to create the momentum of an economic and political juggernaut that was now running wild, out of control, headed down the steepening slope of the future to inevitable destruction and ruin against the blank wall of a blind alley.
There was no way to stop that juggernaut. But it could be diverted. Just a few successive small barriers in its path, at the right points, would jolt the whole massive vehicle aside onto a different vector, one leading it down a different street, where there was no blind wall waiting—
“Ett?”
He broke suddenly from the world of his thoughts to find Maea just inside the door of the room, staring at him.
“Ett?” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt. But you acted as if you couldn’t even see me, or anything else.”
“It’s all right,” he said automatically.
The torrent of his thoughts had not yet been checked. They were with him still, but they were being diverted around this interruption like the water of the rapids around a boulder in the riverbed.
“What do you want?” he asked her.
“I wanted to tell you about Wally,” she answered. “The sensors they’ve got on him right now show signs he’s returning to some sort of consciousness. But, Ett, he can’t come back, can he?”
“No,” said Ett. And now he was fully back, but he didn’t resent her intrusion. “They’re right. He can’t possibly recover.” He looked at her now with different eyes. She, too, had once loved Wally, he remembered, at least in some way; and with that memory he was almost ready to forgive her for whatever influence she had had in Wally’s taking the RIV in the first place. Unlike Cele, she was a soft, warm person, human and alive; she had not been the one who had pushed Wally at all. He realized that now.
“Answer some questions for me,” he said, in a gentler tone of voice.
“Of course,” she said, coming farther into the room. “What about?”
“For one—Lee Malone. He’s your grandfather, isn’t he?”
She stared at him now.
The Last Master Page 17
