Brother to Dragons
Page 25
“Sure. You think you can make me in worse shape than I am?” Job sighed. “Don’t threaten a drowning man with water torture, Mr. Dell. Can’t you see I’m dying? That I’m dead already? I wanted to explain last night, but you were so eager to go over to Bracewell Mansion, you didn’t want to listen. I blundered around the central Xanadu dump, the hottest part. I rode a Tandyman to leave Xanadu! You hear me? If you want to live, you don’t go near a Tandyman without a protective suit. I knew that. I didn’t want to die. But I didn’t have a suit, and I was carrying something so important that I had to get away. Last night I ate thousands of rads. Thousands and thousands.”
“Fuck you and your thousand rads! It’s a pity you didn’t fry on the spot.” Wilfred Dell was shaking all over. With rage or fear, Job could not tell.
“But if you shook Dell’s hand…” Something was finally getting through to Reginald Brook. He was holding his hand in front of his face and staring at it in a puzzled way. “And he shook hands with me when I left last night, and then I shook hands with Walsh and Nelson…”
“Welcome to the club.” Job laughed again, a dry rattle that tortured his throat. “How many of us are there this morning, Mr. Brook? How many will there be by tonight? Don’t you want a symbiote to stop you aging and make you live to a healthy old age? Most people would love it. I thought for an hour or two that it might even help me. But it can’t work miracles.”
“An antidote! Something to reverse the action. There has to be one.” Dell snatched the bottle from Job’s hand and dashed out of the room.
“Don’t bet on it,” Job croaked after him. “Hanna Kronberg doesn’t think it can be removed from the human system. And she’s an awfully smart woman.”
He stood up and walked slowly across to Reginald Brook. Frozen in his chair, the other man raised his hands in front of his face. “Get away from me!”
“I just wanted to take a good look at one of the real owners of the world.” Job stared at Brook for a few seconds, then walked back to slump in his own seat. He was feeling dizzy, and the light in the room had become a patchwork of light and dark spots.
“You never visited the Nebraska Tandy, Mr. Brook.” Job closed his tired eyes. “You never will. But I did. And you know something? Life goes on there. You take the worst poisons and the worst radioactives and the worst pollutants in the whole country, and you pour them all into one little area, twenty miles across. And you know what happens? The earth fights back. Life fights back. People fight back. They have children, and they worry about their future. They seem as happy there as they do here.
“I sat in the Tandyman last night, after I escaped from Xanadu, and I thought about you and the Royal Hundred. I knew that if I gave that vial to Wilfred Dell, he would take it, and study it. But what would you do next? I knew the answer. You’d restrict its use. You and a few friends would get the benefits, along with the Royal Hundreds, whoever they are, of other countries. You’d like the fit life and the healthy old age—but you wouldn’t want it for everyone, because the big side effect is reduced fertility. Hanna Kronberg talks about a future world population that will stabilize at one and a half billion, instead of increasing past twelve. That’s good for most people. They’ll be better off, because they won’t need a whole bunch of kids to look after them in their old age—they’ll able to manage for themselves. And Earth will be better off, too. It needs a breathing space. It fights back, better than we deserve, but it can use a rest from too many people.”
Job opened his eyes. Reginald Brook was staring at him open-mouthed, with the terrified and hopeless expression of a rabbit facing a snake. Job rested his aching head on the soft seat back.
“Did I say everyone will be better off? I don’t mean quite everyone, do I?” His voice was an unintelligible mumble. “I mean, everyone but you, and a handful of others like you. What you fear, you see, more than anything, is change. But when the world population shrinks, change is one thing that’s absolutely guaranteed. ‘It’s nice to have plenty of young and poor,’ Wilfred Dell told me, ‘to look after the old and wealthy.’ He meant you—the Royal Hundred. You need the status quo. But what will your kind do when the supply of young and poor dries up? Will you cook your own meals, and clean your own house, and mend your own clothes?”
There was silence. Job opened his eyes. Reginald Brook had left. Job was alone.
“It’s the hardest problem of all, isn’t it?” Job went on muttering, his head lolling forward onto his chest. “Who should run the world? There’s no easy answer, no magic solution. There never is, to a really hard question. Who should run the world? Hanna Kronberg and her friends would like to run it, and they can make gadgets that help; but they don’t understand people, so they don’t know how the gears work in the real world. Wilfred Dell is different. He knows how it operates—the trouble is, he wants to operate it himself. And that’s enough to rule him out.”
Job sat up and stared around. It was clear daylight, but the room seemed to be filling with a pink fog, blurring the outlines of everything. When he tried to speak, his throat produced no sound.
So who will run the world? The question rolled on, inside his head. There’s only one answer. No one knows if there’s a ‘right’ way for the world to work, so no one can be allowed to run the whole thing. But everyone plays a part. Hanna Kronberg does her bit, trying to make things change for what she thinks is better. Maybe she’s right. Reginald Brook and Wilfred Dell fight every change, doing their best to keep things just the way they are, and maybe they are not always wrong. Even Skip Tolson has a purpose, hanging on when there’s no hope and no reason, surviving when he ought to die, clinging to life, never giving up. He does his bit.
And I did mine.
It was the answer that faith provided, and it was the right answer. Job was sure of it. Because although Reginald Brook had left the room, Father Bonifant had taken his place in the chair opposite. And Mister Bones was smiling.
Wilfred Dell returned in fifteen minutes, gray-faced and furious. He had three armed guards with him. But he was too late. Job had already slipped away.