The Penultimate Truth (17 page)

     Perhaps, Hig thought, as a result of this one job, this major special Agency project, I'll be a Yance-man. And then I can start paying those private cops of Webster Foote to keep readings going for me in the hot-spots that remain; I can start the long vigil like David Lantano did up until just recently. If he could do it, so can I, because who ever heard of him before?

     "How's it look, Mr. Hig?" a human workman yelled at him, as all the 'dozers dug, dropped their dirt into the converters, dug again.

     "Okay," Hig yelled back.

     He walked closer to examine the exposed hard brown dirt; the 'dozers were to go down fifty feet, create a flat depression five square miles wide. In no sense was this an unusual excavation task, in terms of what Runcible's rigs could accomplish; the problem here at the start was merely to produce level ground, rather than excavate as such. Surveying teams, high-type leadies, could be observed here and there, utilizing their tripod-mounted theodolites to determine the true horizontal plane. The digging, then, would not take much time; this was not like the days before the war when the ant tanks had been buried--this was nothing in comparison.

     Hence the buried artifacts had to appear soon. Or they would not be found at all. In less than two days in fact the digging would be done.

     _I hope_, Hig thought, _there's been no foul-up, that the damn things aren't too deep. Because if they are, then so ends the special project; it's over as soon as the first load of concrete is poured, the first vertical steel shafts go in; in fact when the first plastic forms are laid to contain the concrete_. And already the forms were arriving by air-lift. From the site of the last construction job.

     To himself he said, _So I better be ready. Any minute. To halt the 'dozers, stop the scooping and digging and whirring and wheezing; bring it all to a grinding halt. and then--_

     _Be gin to yell my head off._

     He tensed himself. Because, within the brown hard surface, below the level of dead tree roots, he already saw something glint, something smeared and dark, that would have passed unnoticed except for his vigil. The leadies wouldn't notice; the rigs wouldn't notice; even the other human engineers wouldn't notice--they all had their jobs.

     As he had his. He peered. Was it just a rock, or was it the first of the--

     It was. A rusted dark weapon; hard to believe, but the same that he had seen last night, shiny and new, just out of Yance-man Lindblom's expert hands. What a change six centuries had brought: Hig felt a terrible forbidding distrust of his senses--it _couldn't_ be what Lindblom had made, what he and Adams and Brose and Lindblom had stood together viewing on the table. It was barely recognizable . . . he walked toward it, squinting in the sun. Rock or artifact? Hig waved to the 'dozer nearby, which automatically backed, leaving the area vacant for a moment. Descending into the depression, Hig walked to the spot, stopped by the embedded, dark, formless object.

     He knelt, "Hey," he yelled, looking around, trying to find another human--not just rigs and leadies. There was Dick Patterson, another human, an engineer employed by Runcible, like himself. "Hey Patterson!" Hig began to yell. And then he discovered that, goddam it, the thing was not an artifact; he had made his move too soon. Oh christ! He had flubbed it!

     Approaching, Patterson said, "Whazit?"

     "Nothing." Furious, Hig strode back, out of the depression; he signaled the 'dozer to start up again and it did; it groaned back into operation and the black object--nothing but a rock--disappeared under the tread of the rig.

     Ten minutes later the 'dozer exposed something that shone white and metallic in the early-morning sun, and this time there was no doubt; at the ten foot level the first artifact had come to light.

     "Hey, Patterson!" Hig yelled. But Patterson, this time, was not within sound of his voice. Reaching, Hig picked up a nearby walkie-talkie, started to broadcast a general call. Then he changed his mind. I better not cry wolf again, he realized. So he waved the 'dozer back--it seemed reluctantly, grumpily, to retreat under protest--and this time, when he strode over to the object he saw with furious excitement that yes; this was it--a gun of a peculiar sort, deeply stuck, thoroughly lodged in the soil. The mouth of the 'dozer's scoop had actually shaved off the top layer of rust, of soft corrosion, exposing still hard metal beneath.

     Goodbye, Mr. Runcible, Hig said to himself in exultation. Now I will be a Yance-man--he felt intuitively positive of it--and you are going to learn what prison is like, you who've been building prisons for others. Again waving to the 'dozer, this time to shut down entirely, he strode with vigor toward the walkie-talkie; it was his intention now to broadcast the code which would halt all operations-- and would bring every engineer on the site and half the leadies on the run, demanding to know what was up.

     Secretly, he switched on his shirt-button camera and, at the same time, started the aud recorder. Runcible was not here, but Brose had at the last moment decided he wanted the entire sequence recorded, from the moment Hig first called attention to the find.

     He bent, picked up the walkie-talkie.

     A laser beam cut him, severed the right lobe of his brain and the skull and passed on through his scalp and he dropped to the ground, the walkie-talkie falling and shattering. There he lay. There he died.

     The autonomic 'dozer, which he had halted, waited patiently for a signal to resume work. At last, from another human engineer on the far side, the signal came; the 'dozer, with a grateful roar, started up.

     Under its treads the shining, small metal object embedded in the earth at the ten foot level, exposed briefly to the sun after six hundred years, disappeared.

     And in the next scoop it disappeared along with the dirt, into the converter.

     Without hesitation the converter transformed it, with all its intricate wiring and miniaturized components, along with rocks and dirt, into pure energy.

     And, noisily, the digging continued.

17

     In his London office Webster Foote studied with a jeweler's loupe-- old-fashioned gadgets fascinated him--the gradually unreeling photographic record which eye-spy satellite 65, owned by Webster Foote, Limited of London, had taken during its pass 456,765, Nor-Hem-W.

     "Here," his photo expert, Jeremy Cencio, said, pointing. "All right, my boy." Reaching, Webster Foote stopped the unreeling of the continuous positive; he swung a 1200x microscope into position at the locus, manually adjusted first a coarse and then the fine focus-he had a slight astigmatism in his right eye, so he utilized the left--and saw, on the film, what Cencio wanted him to see.

     Cencio said, "This is roughly the region where Colorado and Nebraska and Wyoming come together. South of what once was Cheyenne, before the war, a major city of the United States."

     "Oh indeed."

     "Shall I animate this segment?"

     Webster Foote said, "Yes. Please. And project it waliwise." A moment later, as the room lights darkened, a square appeared on the wall, projection of the segment of film. Cencio started the animating equipment, which altered the film from a still into a sequence of several minutes.

     Enlarged by way of 1200x microscope, which intervened between the film and the animating construct, a scene, looked down at from above, of course, could be made out. A man and two leadies.

     As he watched, Webster Foote saw one of the leadies prepare to kill the man; he saw the unmistakable move of its right manual extremity toward what he, as a professional, knew it carried at that spot of its mechanical anatomy. The man was about to be extinguished.

     And then, like a puff, a sneeze of dust, one leady whisked out, and its companion whirled frantically in what technically was called a circus-motion pattern, all circuits at peak-velocity as it strove to locate the source of the destruct beam--and then it, too, condensed into disconnected motes that floated and drifted.

     "That's all," Cencio said, and turned on the room light.

     "That would be the demesne area of--" Foot consulted one of the police corporation's reference works. "A Mr. David Lantano. No, not a demesne; still in preparation. Not a full year, yet; so legally it remains technically a hot-spot. But under Lantano's jurisdiction."

     "Presumably those are--were--Lantano's leadies."

     "Yes." Foote nodded absently. "I tell you, my boy. Go over all the adjoining segments with the 400x lens until you find the source of the destruct beam that took out those two leadies. See who--"

     The vidcom in his office pinged; it was his secretary, Miss Grey, and the signal, three winks of light along with the ping, meant that the call was urgent.

     "Excuse me," Foote said, and turned to the full size vidset on which the call would be, by Miss Grey, relayed for his attention.

     The face of Louis Runcible appeared, heavy, rather ruddy and fleshy, the old-fashioned rimless glasses . . . the dome of his head a little more bald since Foote had last seen him; a little less of the fine white hair combed across, ear to ear. "Your field rep," Runcible said, "told me to call you the instant anything unusual occurred in my business operations."

     "Yes!" Foote leaned eagerly toward the screen, grabbed at the key of the aud-vid recorder to be sure this call was permanently registering. "Go ahead, Louis. What turned up?"

     "Somebody murdered one of my engineers. Lasered him in the back of the head, while he was at the new site in Southern Utah. So your extrasensory perception was right; they're out to get me." Runcible, on the vidscreen, looked more indignant than frightened, but that, for him, would be natural.

     "You can continue your ground-breaking without this man?" Foote asked.

     "Oh sure. We're digging away. We didn't even find him until evidently an hour or so after it happened; no one noticed, with all the work in progress. Hig was his name. Bob Hig. Not one of my best, but not too bad, either."

     "Keep digging, then," Foote said. "We'll of course send a field rep to the spot to examine the body of Hig; he should be there within half an hour, released by one of our substations. And meanwhile keep in touch. This may be their first move in a sequence." He did not need to specify who "they" were; both he and Runcible understood perfectly.

     The call terminated, Foote returned to the examination of the continuous film-strip made by the satellite.

     "Any luck on pinpointing the origin of that destruct beam?" he asked Cencio. He wondered if there were any connection between the murder of Runcible's engineer and the taking out of these two leadies. It always appealed to him, tying separate events together; he enjoyed a pattern which wove all strands into harmony. But as the connection between these two despiteous events, however, even his extrasensory vision did not provide him with any knowledge. Perhaps in time . . .

     "No luck," Cencio said. "So far."

     "Are they trying to scare Runcible into stopping work in Utah?" Foote asked rhetorically, aloud. "Because that's hardly the way; Louis can lose engineer after engineer and survive. My god, with the weapons they have at the Agency, especially the advanced prototypes that Brose has access to--they could wipe out the entire site, all the men, leadies and machinery that loiter around there. And not just an engineer . . . not a top one at that." It made no sense.

     "No hunch?" Cencio asked him. "No Psionic foresight?"

     "Yes," Webster Foote said; he had an odd inkling. It grew in his mind until it amounted to a true precog revelation. "Two leadies dissolved," he said. "Then one of Runcible's construction crew in Utah lasered in the back of the head, the moment they start breaking ground . . . I foresee--" He broke off. Another death, he said to himself. And soon. He examined his round, ancient pocket watch. "It was the _back_ of the head. Assassination. Look for someone in the Yance-man class."

     "A Yance-man--murdered?" Cencio stared at him.

     "Very soon now," Foote said. "If not already."

     "And we'll be called."

     "Oh yes," Foote said. "And this time not by Runcible but by Brose. Because--" And his extrasensory talent told him this; plainly. "It'll be someone Brose is depending on; this will upset Brose extravagantly--we'll get quite an agitated call."

     "Let's wait and see," Cencio said, skeptically, "if you're right."

     "I know I'm right as to what's going to happen," Foote said. "The question is--_when?_" Because his talent was very bad on timing, and he recognized this; he could be days, even a week off. But not much more than that. "Suppose," Foote said thoughtfully, "the murder of this person was not directed at Runcible. It just doesn't hurt Louis enough; he can't be the target." Suppose, he thought, _although Hig was an employee of Runcible's, this is directed at Stanton Brose_.

     Was that so bad?

     "Do you like Brose?" he asked his photo expert assistant in charge of all visual satellite-tracking data.

     "I never thought about it one way or another," Cencio said.

     Foote said, "I have. I don't like Brose. I wouldn't lift my left little finger to help him. If! could avoid it." But how could he avoid it? Brose, acting through General Holt and Marshal Harenzany, had an army of veteran leadies at his disposal, plus the advanced weapons archives at the Agency. Brose could get at him, at Webster Foote, Limited of London, any time he wanted.