Hamilton, Donald - Matt Helm 14 (11 page)

           
Lorna, still without looking around,
said, "Miss Borden, what is the one thing we have plenty of in this world?
What is the single material that is not in short supply these days?"

           
"I don't know what you
mean!"

           
The older woman said quietly,
"We're running out of clean air and water, are we not? And not only clean
water. I read in the same newspaper that in the capital city of New Mexico,
practically right next door, they are not watering their lawns or washing their
ears this summer because they have hardly any water, clean or dirty. We are
running out of important metals and minerals. Some areas of the world cannot
produce enough food to support their populations adequately. Fuels of all kinds
are becoming scarce. In fact we are running out of just about everything, Miss
Borden, with one spectacular exception. What is the one resource that's
practically unlimited'?" The girl licked her lips and didn't answer. Lorna
said, "The one thing we have plenty of, my dear, is people."

           
Martha licked her lips once more.
"Assuming that what you say is true, Mrs. Holt or whatever I'm supposed to
call you, what's your point?"

           
Lorna sipped her drink, still
studying the tanned, aquiline face in the mirror. Her voice remained very soft.
"We are going to have to take a long hard look at the so-called sacredness
of human life in the very near future, if the race is to survive. We are going
to have to apply a little logic to the problem, instead of continuing to wallow
in the sentimental humanitarianism currently fashionable. And the simple fact
is, Miss Borden, that on strictly logical grounds we should consider war a
tremendous, if rather inefficient, blessing. We should look at the yearly
traffic toll as a great, beneficial contribution to population control. We
should applaud every suicide as a public benefactor voluntarily yielding up his
place on this crowded planet and making it available to somebody else."

           
I didn't like it. When they start
thinking deep thoughts, and particularly when they start talking about them,
they're apt to get kind of unreliable in action.

           
I said, "Hooray for cancer and
emphysema. Bring on your drugs and cigarettes. Cut it out, Lorna. You can solve
the problems of humanity some other night. Right now let's tackle something
important, like who's going to sleep where."

           
She paid me no attention, and
neither did Martha. The younger girl said, "You must be crazy, Mrs. Holt!
That's a terrible way to think!"

           
Lorna shrugged. "I'm not crazy,
just realistic. The basic trouble with your generation, Miss Borden, is that
you will not face the facts. Subconsciously you realize that you're mostly
superfluous-that the world would be much better off if only a fraction of you
had been born-but you can't bring yourself to admit it and face the logical
consequences: that your lousy little lives are not particularly valuable, let
alone sacred. There are too many of you. Anything that plentiful can't be worth
much, can it?"

           
I said, "Damn it, Lorna, shut
up! it's too late at night-"

           
"No," said the woman at
the dresser, gulping down the last of her drink and reaching for the bottle
again, "no, it's not too late at night, and no, I will not shut up! I am
fed up to here with children who consider themselves something special simply
because they happened to be born. And I am particularly tired of the hypocritical
attitude towards death they all display. They live on death. Every antibiotic
they take-and they gobble penicillin like candy-kills millions of living
organisms. The slaughterhouses of the nation run knee-deep in blood to supply
them with hamburgers and hotdogs. Even if they're vegetarians, they're eating
bread and cereal and salads from fields protected by lethal farm chemicals that
murdered countless innocent insects that had a perfect right to exist-and after
all, a stalk of wheat or a head of lettuce is a living thing, too, something
they carefully ignore. This girl is right now sitting in a motel room which was
undoubtedly constructed on the graves of hundreds of small living creatures,
slaughtered and dispossessed by the cruel bulldozers

           
"You're here, too!" the
girl protested.

           
"My dear, I'm not carrying on a
crusade against death. You are. It's the great fashionable cause of modern
times. The Victorians thought sex was horrible, but they accepted death. You
accept sex, but you think death is perfectly dreadful. That makes both of you
hypocrites. No life is any more sacred than any other. Why should you be more
important than a streptococcus or a mosquito, just because you happen to be a
little more highly developed from one point of view-your own? Either all life
is sacred, which is ridiculous, since most life forms, men included, have to
live by preying on other life forms; or no life is sacred, not mine, not
Helm's, not yours.

           
“Of course, his and mine are a
little more sacred than yours-"

           
"Why?" Martha demanded.
"Because you're older? That's just silly!"

           
Lorna started to drink from her
replenished glass, but frowned and set it aside carefully. She gripped the edge
of the dresser, staring at her image in the mirror. She spoke, still without turning
her head.

           
"Not because we're older,"
she said slowly and deliberately, "but because we make our lives more
valuable by making it damned tough for anyone who tries to take them away from
us. But they could have your life just by reaching out for it, couldn't they,
Miss Borden? You wouldn't defend it. You've backed yourself into a
philosophical corner from which you can't strike back; and even if you could
bring yourself to do it, you wouldn't know how. Which, my dear, makes your life
about as valuable as that of a sick mouse, worth only the slight effort
required, by anyone who doesn't mind messing up his boot heel, to stamp down
hard. And in the truly overcrowded world that's coming, those who aren't
prepared to fight will get stamped on, girl, and that goes for nations as well
as individuals. We haven't turned any peaceful corners and I can see none
ahead. I see just a very tough battle for room enough to live in halfway decent
fashion. . .

           
Her voice stopped abruptly. Her
fingers released the edge of the dresser; and she slid to the floor in a dead
faint.

           
Kneeling beside the woman on the
floor, I was aware of Martha Borden rising from the bed and coming to stand
over us.

           
"Is she . . . is she drunk? She
certainly talked as if she were drunk."

           
I said, "Help me get her on the
bed. Now, unlace those clodhopper boots and get them off her, will you?" I
arranged the pillows under Lorna's head and went into the bathroom for a towel,
which I moistened under the tap and brought back to wipe off her face, oddly
pale now under the recent sunburn. I said, "Call it what you want. She's
just spent two days on the desert living on a couple of candy bars and half a
gallon of water. Maybe the alcohol hit her, maybe just reaction. . . . Hi, there,"
I said to Lorna as she opened her eyes. "Come back and join the
party."

           
She made a wry face, lying there.
"What happened?"

           
"You gave us a lecture on the
desperate state of this overcrowded world, and passed out."

           
"Oh, God," she said.
"I ought to know better than to drink on an empty stomach. It always makes
me gloomy as hell. Call me Cassandra for short."

           
She started to sit up. I pushed her
back down. "Stay put. Martha, pop out to the candy machine by the office
and get a fistful of
Hersheys
or something to fill
the aching void until the restaurant opens. Here's some change."

           
When the girl had left, Lorna
sighed, and patted her hair back from her face with both hands.

           
"Sorry, Helm."

           
"Think nothing of it."

           
"I don't particularly want
candy. I'd rather wait for bacon and eggs, if you don't mind. That one little
hamburger just reminded me of how many meals I'd missed, I guess."

           
"You don't have to eat the
stuff. I just wanted her out of the way for a moment. Remember, Mae said double
negative. Even her daddy realizes the kid presents some- thing of a problem.

           
You did frisk her, didn't you?"

           
Lorna was watching me carefully.
"Yes. She's clean."

           
"Where's your gun?"

           
"Right here."

           
"Keep it handy. I want you
feeble and helpless, understand, but armed and ready. Okay?"

           
She frowned quickly. "Are you
giving me orders?" In the armed forces, they've got discipline. It must be
nice. All we've got is temperament. I said, "I sure as hell am, Mrs. Holt.

           
Mac sent the girl to me, not to you.
Take it up with him when you see him next. In the meantime, keep that gun
handy, please."

           
She hesitated; then she smiled
faintly. "Very well. As long as you say please. I hope you know what
you're doing."

           
"That makes two of us.
Shhh
, here she comes now."

           
In the early morning stillness, the
approaching footsteps sounded very loud outside. Martha entered with
half-a-dozen candy bars, which she dropped on the bed. Then she turned to me.

           
"Who's Cassandra?" she
asked.

           
"What?"

           
"Mrs. Holt said to call her Cassandra
for short. What did she mean?"

           
The woman on the bed laughed
quickly. "Cassandra was a Greek girl who could foretell the future, Miss
Borden. The only trouble was,
nobody'd
believe
her."

           
Martha looked back to me. "And
what's
Ragnarok
or however you pronounced it? Back
when you were giving her the password, you asked, 'Will
Ragnarok
do?'"

           
I said, "
Ragnarok
is the Scandinavian equivalent of
Gotterdämmerung
,
which is the German equivalent of Armageddon. The end of the world in
Technicolor."

           
"Thanks, I just like to get
these things straight. I hope you're feeling better, Mrs. Holt."

           
"I . . . I feel fine as long as
I don't try to stand up," Lorna said bravely. "I'll be all right in a
minute."

           
I said, "Well, you just lie
there while Martha gives us the word from Washington." The girl glanced at
me quickly. I went on. "M the words from Washington, doll. Names,
addresses, and telephone numbers. The whole list you're carrying. All ten
names. Well, nine, since we've already made contact with number one." When
Martha hesitated, I asked, "What's the trouble now?"

           
She glanced towards the bed, and
back to me. "I was supposed to tell it only to you, Matt."

           
I shrugged. "The minute you
tell me, I'll tell her, so what's the difference?"

           
"Do you trust her that
much?" The younger woman's voice was sharp.

           
"I have to trust her that
much," I said. "In this business there are two kinds of damn fools.
There are the damn fools who trust everybody, and then there are the damn fools
who trust nobody. I try not to be either kind."

           
"All right," Martha said
reluctantly. "All right, but it's your responsibility."

           
She had a good memory. She stood
there with her eyes partly closed and rattled off, without any hesitation, the
code names of nine agents, their current cover names, where they were to be
found, and how they could be reached by telephone. Some of the names were
familiar to me: men and women with whom I'd worked in the past. Others I'd
never heard of. Well, they'd probably never heard of me, so we were even. I
made the girl go over the list once more; then I repeated it back to make
certain I had everything straight. I knew Lorna was assimilating the material
right along with me.

           
"That's it?" I asked when
we were finished. "That's everything you were supposed to tell me?"

           
Martha's eyes wavered slightly.
"Yes, that's it. Daddy said you'd know what to do without having it
spelled out for you."

           
I regarded her for a moment, rather
grimly, trying to figure the whole thing out: why Mac had used his daughter on
this critical mission-even with a built-in warning code-instead of sending a
trained agent, and what additional information he'd given her that she was now
holding back for some screwball reason of her own. Looking at her I realized,
with some surprise, that properly cleaned up she could be beautiful. Even in
her dirty pseudo-pirate outfit she was an attractive kid, not that it mattered.
What was important was that she was an infuriating nut, if not worse.

           
"There's another list, there's
got to be," I said slowly. Her face told me I'd guessed right, so I went
on: "It's got ten names on it, too, or maybe eleven. Give."

           
"I. . . I can't!" She
frowned suspiciously. "How did you know there was another list?"

           
"I told you. There had to be.
Mac said I'd know what to do. Sure, I know. But I don't know who to do it to.
Tell me."

           
"I can't!" she protested.
"If I do-"

           
"What?"

           
"If I do, I'll be responsible
for what happens to them."

           
"That's right," I said.
"And if you don't, you'll be responsible for what happens to us, your dad
included. Not to mention a couple of hundred million fellow citizens who may be
adversely affected by your decision." I grimaced, and went on
flamboyantly, "The fate of your country is in your hands, Borden. George
Washington and Abraham Lincoln are counting on you."

           
She said angrily, "Stop it!
You're not funny!" She was probably right, at that. After a moment, she
went on:

           
"You can't really believe that
just you and she and Daddy and a few others are going to. . .to change anything?
And even if you can make a difference by using violence, how do you know you're
right?"

           
I said, "Go to hell, doll. How
do you know we're wrong? Can you take the responsibility of assuming that your
father is just a bloodthirsty nincompoop who doesn't know what the hell he's
doing?"

           
She stared at me for a long moment.
Her gray eyes were wide and shiny; I thought she was going to burst into tears.
Abruptly, she drew a long, shaky breath and said, "Bainbridge, Joseph W.,
office 2243 Federal Annex A, home 77 Archuleta Circle, Phoenix, Arizona; Dunn,
Homer P., office.

           
There were ten names again, in
alphabetical order. Again I went over them with her until I had them and got a
nod from Lorna saying she had them, too.

           
"Fine," I said to Martha.
"And now, the date. There's got to be a date."

           
She drew a long breath, shaky with
anger this time. "Damn you, if you can read minds, why do you bother to
ask questions?" When I didn't say anything, she said, "June 17."

           
"Just June 17. No hour or
minute?"

           
"No. The date was all he gave
me."

           
I regarded her bleakly. "Why
are you so reluctant to cooperate, Borden? You took the job, didn't you?
Why-"

           
"Yes, and I wish to heaven I
hadn't!" she gasped. "After watching you kill three men just like
snapping your fingers. . .Anyway, I don't trust you and I don't trust your Mrs.
Holt with her dreadful ideas, and I'm sure if Daddy really knew what kind of
people he'd hired . . .Now that you have all the information, what are you
going to do with it?"

           
I said irritably, "Oh, stop
trying to kid your lousy little conscience. You knew what we were going to do
with it before you gave it to me, so don't ask stupid questions you don't want
to hear the answers of." I turned to Lorna. "He's got them pretty
well divided," I said, "east and west of the
Mississippi
, five and five. You take the Western
division of both lists. Get in touch with the other four agents out here. He's
got each of them located pretty close to a target address, you'll notice. I
guess the one in
Phoenix
was meant for you. Of course, if one of your people gets into trouble,
or you can't make contact with him, you'll have to arrange for his touch to be
made by somebody else, or make it yourself. Oh, and tell your people it had
better look as accidental as they can make it look."

           
"Yes," she said, "but
you've forgotten something, haven't you, Helm?"

           
I looked down at her. She waited,
smiling faintly. I grinned and said, "Goddamn a world full of
temperamental females. Please?"

           
"That's better."

           
I looked at Martha. "Okay, is
that it? Is there anything else you were supposed to tell me?"

           
"No," she said, "no,
that's all. Just the two lists of names, and the date, and that you'd know what
to do."

           
I studied her grimly. She never gave
up. She was still holding out something. After a moment I realized what it had
to be.

           
"You're forgetting one item,
aren't you, Borden?" I said wearily. "One more thing he told you. An
address, a place on the water, but where?" She faced me and didn't speak,
but the resentful gray eyes told me I was right. I said, "Eleven hot-shot
agents, the best he's got, specially selected, carefully hidden out of harm's
way. Eleven agents but only ten targets. That's one left over: me. Me, and a
boat he was very eager for me to have. Tell me where I'm supposed to go
boating, Borden, and when."

           
She started to blurt out something
frustrated and furious but held it back. "He. . . he wants you to report
to him the night before."

           
"The night of June 16th.
Where?"

           
She glanced towards Lorna, and back
to me. "That I'm not going to tell you in front of her! If you want to
risk having her know Daddy's hiding place, you'll have to tell her
yourself."