Assignment in Eternity

  “Well?”

  “Don’t you see, you fool—he gave the order at once to destroy the other copies.”

  Briggs whistled. “Jumped the gun, didn’t he?”

  “That’s not the way he’ll figure it—mind you, the President was pressuring him. He’ll say that I jumped the gun.”

  “And so you did.”

  “No, you jumped the gun. You told me the films were in that box.”

  “Hardly. I said I had sent them there.”

  “No, you didn’t”

  “Get out the tape and play it back.”

  “There is no tape—by the President’s own order no records are kept on this operation.”

  “So? Then why are you recording now?”

  “Because,” Bonn answered sharply, “someone is going to pay for this and it is not going to be me.”

  “Meaning,” Briggs said slowly, “that it is going to be me.”

  “I didn’t say that. It might be the Secretary.”

  “If his head rolls, so will yours. No, both of you are figuring on using me. Before you plan on that, hadn’t you better hear my report? It might affect your plans. I’ve got news for you, boss.”

  Bonn drummed the desk. “Go ahead. It had better be good.”

  In a passionless monotone Briggs recited all events as recorded by sharp memory from receipt of the films on the Moon to the present moment. Bonn listened impatiently.

  Finished, Briggs waited. Bonn got up and strode around the room. Finally he stopped and said, “Briggs, I never heard such a fantastic pack of lies in my life. A fat man who plays cards! A wallet that wasn’t your wallet—your clothes stolen! And Mrs. Keithley—Mrs. Keithley! Don’t you know that she is one of the strongest supporters of the Administration?”

  Briggs said nothing. Bonn went on, “Now I’ll tell you what actually did happen. Up to the time you grounded at Pied-a-Terre your report is correct, but—”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because you were covered, naturally. You don’t think I would trust this to one man, do you?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I could have hollered for help and saved all this.”

  Bonn brushed it aside. “You engaged a runner, dismissed him, went in that drugstore, came out and went to the post office. There was no fight in the concourse for the simple reason that no one was following you. At the post office you mailed three tubes, one of which may or may not have contained the films. You went from there to the New Age Hotel, left it twenty minutes later and caught the transrocket for Cape Town. You—”

  “Just a moment,” objected Briggs. “How could I have done that and still be here now?”

  “Eh?” For a moment Bonn seemed stumped. “That’s just a detail; you were positively identified. For that matter, it would have been a far, far better thing for you if you had stayed on that rocket. In fact—” the bureau chief got a far-away look in his eyes, “—you’ll be better off for the time being if we assume officially that you did stay on that rocket. You are in a bad spot, Briggs, a very bad spot. You did not muff this assignment—you sold out!”

  Briggs looked at him levelly. “You are preferring charges?”

  “Not just now. That is why it is best to assume that you stayed on that rocket—until matters settle down, clarify.”

  Briggs did not need a graph to show him what solution would come out when “matters clarified.” He took from a pocket a memo pad, scribbled on it briefly, and handed it to Bonn.

  It read: “I resign my appointment effective immediately.” He had added signature, thumbprint, date, and hour.

  “So long, boss,” he added. He turned slightly, as if to go.

  Bonn yelled, “Stop! Briggs, you are under arrest.” He reached toward his desk.

  Briggs cuffed him in the windpipe, added one to the pit of Bonn’s stomach. He slowed down then and carefully made sure that Bonn would remain out for a satisfactory period. Examination of Bonn’s desk produced a knockout kit; he added a two-hour hypodermic, placing it inconspicuously beside a mole near the man’s backbone. He wiped the needle, restored everything to its proper place, removed the current record from the desk and wiped the tape of all mention of himself, including door check. He left the desk set to “covert” and “do not disturb” and left by another of the concealed routes to the Bureau.

  He went to the rocket port, bought a ticket, unreserved, for the first ship to Chicago. There was twenty minutes to wait; he made a couple of minor purchases from clerks rather than from machines, letting his face be seen. When the Chicago ship was called he crowded forward with the rest.

  At the inner gate, just short of the weighing-in platform, he became part of the crowd present to see passengers off, rather than a passenger himself. He waved at someone in the line leaving the weighing station beyond the gate, smiled, called out a good-bye, and let the crowd carry him back from the gate as it closed. He peeled off from the crowd at the men’s washroom. When he came out there were several hasty but effective changes in his appearance.

  More important, his manner was different.

  A short, illicit transaction in a saloon near a hiring hall provided the work card he needed; fifty-five minutes later he was headed across country as Jack Gillespie, loader and helper-driver on a diesel freighter.

  Could his addressing of the pneumo tube have been bad enough to cause the automatic postal machines to reject it? He let the picture of the label, as it had been when he had completed it, build in his mind until it was as sharp as the countryside flowing past him. No, his lettering of the symbols had been perfect and correct; the machines would accept it

  Could the machine have kicked out the tube for another cause, say a turned-up edge of the gummed label? Yes, but the written label was sufficient to enable a postal clerk to get it back in the groove. One such delay did not exceed ten minutes, even during the rush hour. Even with five such delays the tube would have reached Chicago more than one hour before he reported to Bonn by phone.

  Suppose the gummed label had peeled off entirely; in such case the tube would have gone to the same destination as the two cover-up tubes.

  In which case Mrs. Keithley would have gotten it, since she had been able to intercept or receive the other two.

  Therefore the tube had reached the Chicago post office box.

  Therefore Kettle Belly had read the message in the stacked cards, had given instructions to someone in Chicago, had done so while at the helicopter’s radio. After an event, “possible” and “true” are equivalent ideas, whereas “probable” becomes a measure of one’s ignorance. To call a conclusion “improbable” after the event was self-confusing amphigory.

  Therefore Kettle Belly Baldwin had the films—a conclusion he had reached in Bonn’s office.

  Two hundred miles from New Washington he worked up an argument with the top driver and got himself fired. From a local booth in the town where he dropped he scrambled through to Baldwin’s business office. “Tell him I’m a man who owes him money.”

  Shortly the big man’s face built up on the screen. “Hi, kid! How’s tricks?”

  “I’m fired.”

  “I thought you would be.”

  “Worse than that—I’m wanted.”

  “Naturally.”

  “I’d like to talk with you.”

  “Swell. Where are you?”

  Gilead told him.

  “You’re clean?”

  “For a few hours, at least.”

  “Go to the local airport. Steve will pick you up.”

  Steve did so, nodded a greeting, jumped his craft into the air, set his pilot, and went back to his reading. When the ship settled down on course, Gilead noted it and asked, “Where are we going?”

  “The boss’s ranch. Didn’t he tell you?”

  “No.” Gilead knew it was possible that he was being taken for a one-way ride. True, Baldwin had enabled him to escape an otherwise pragmatically certain death—it was certain that Mrs. Keithley had not intended to
let him stay alive longer that suited her uses, else she would not have had the girl killed in his presence. Until he had arrived at Bonn’s office, he had assumed that Baldwin had saved him because he knew something that Baldwin most urgently wanted to know—whereas now it looked as if Baldwin had saved him for altruistic reasons.

  Gilead conceded the existence in this world of altruistic reasons, but was inclined not to treat them as “least hypothesis” until all other possible hypotheses had been eliminated; Baldwin might have had his own reasons for wishing him to live long enough to report to New Washington and nevertheless be pleased to wipe him out now that he was a wanted man whose demise would cause no comment.

  Baldwin might even be a partner in these dark matters of Mrs. Keithley. In some ways that was the simplest explanation though it left other factors unexplained. In any case Baldwin was a key actor—and he had the films. The risk was necessary.

  Gilead did not worry about it. The factors known to him were chalked up on the blackboard of his mind, there to remain until enough variables become constants to permit a solution by logic. The ride was very pleasant.

  Steve put him down on the lawn of a large rambling ranch house, introduced him to a motherly old party named Mrs. Garver, and took off. “Make yourself at home, Joe,” she told him. “Your room is the last one in the east wing—shower across from it. Supper in ten minutes.”

  He thanked her and took the suggestion, getting back to the living room with a minute or two to spare. Several others, a dozen or more of both sexes, were there. The place seemed to be a sort of a dude ranch—not entirely dude, as he had seen Herefords on the spread as Steve and he were landing.

  The other guests seemed to take his arrival as a matter of course. No one asked why he was there. One of the women introduced herself as Thalia Wagner and then took him around the group. Ma Garver came in swinging a dinner bell as this was going on and they all filed into a long, low dining room. Gilead could not remember when he had had so good a meal in such amusing company.

  After eleven hours of sleep, his first real rest in several days, he came fully, suddenly awake at a group of sounds his subconscious could not immediately classify and refused to discount. He opened his eyes, swept the room with them, and was at once out of bed, crouching on the side away from the door.

  There were hurrying footsteps moving past his bedroom door. There were two voices, one male, one female, outside the door; the female was Thalia Wagner, the man he could not place.

  Male: “tsʉmaeq?”

  Female: “nø!”

  Male: “zulntsɨ.”

  Female: “ɨpbit’ New Jersey.”

  These are not precisely the sounds that Gilead heard, first because of the limitations of phonetic symbols, and second because his ears were not used to the sounds. Hearing is a function of the brain, not of the ear; his brain, sophisticated as it was, nevertheless insisted on forcing the sounds that reached his ears into familiar pockets rather than stop to create new ones.

  Thalia Wagner identified, he relaxed and stood up. Thalia was part of the unknown situation he accepted in coming here; a stranger known to her he must accept also. The new unknowns, including the odd language, he filed under “pending” and put aside.

  The clothes he had had were gone, but his money—Baldwin’s money, rather—was where his clothes had been and with it his work card as Jack Gillespie and his few personal articles. By them someone had laid out a fresh pair of walking shorts and new sneakers, in his size.

  He noted, with almost shocking surprise, that someone had been able to serve him thus without waking him.

  He put on his shorts and shoes and went out. Thalia and her companion had left while he dressed. No one was about and he found the dining room empty, but three places were set, including his own of supper, and hot dishes and facilities were on the sideboard. He selected baked ham and hot rolls, fried four eggs, poured coffee. Twenty minutes later, warmly replenished and still alone, he stepped out on the veranda.

  It was a beautiful day. He was drinking it in and eyeing with friendly interest a desert lark when a young woman came around the side of the house. She was dressed much as he was, allowing for difference in sex, and she was comely, though not annoyingly so. “Good morning,” he said.

  She stopped, put her hands on her hips, and looked him up and down. “Well!” she said. “Why doesn’t somebody tell me these things?”

  Then she added, “Are you married?”

  “No.”

  “I’m shopping around. Object: matrimony. Let’s get acquainted.”

  “I’m a hard man to marry. I’ve been avoiding it for years.”

  “They’re all hard to marry,” she said bitterly. “There’s a new colt down at the corral. Come on.”

  They went. The colt’s name was War Conqueror of Baldwin; hers was Gail. After proper protocol with mare and son they left. “Unless you have pressing engagements,” said Gail, “now is a salubrious time to go swimming.”

  “If salubrious means what I think it does, yes.”

  The spot was shaded by cottonwoods, the bottom was sandy; for a while he felt like a boy again, with all such matters as lies and nova effects and death and violence away in some improbable, remote dimension. After a long while he pulled himself up on the bank and said, “Gail, what does ‘tsʉmaeq’ mean?”

  “Come again?” she answered. “I had water in my ear.”

  He repeated all of the conversation he had heard. She looked incredulous, then laughed. “You didn’t hear that, Joe, you just didn’t.” She added, “You got the ‘New Jersey’ part right.”

  “But I did.”

  “Say it again.”

  He did so, more carefully, and giving a fair imitation of the speakers’ accents.

  Gail chortled. “I got the gist of it that time. That Thalia; someday some strong man is going to wring her neck.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  Gail gave him a long, sidewise look. “If you ever find out, I really will marry you, in spite of your protests.”

  Someone was whistling from the hill top. “Joe! Joe Greene—the boss wants you.”

  “Gotta go,” he said to Gail. “G’bye.”

  “See you later,” she corrected him.

  Baldwin was waiting in a study as comfortable as himself. “Hi, Joe,” he greeted him. “Grab a seatful of chair. They been treating you right?”

  “Yes, indeed. Do you always set as good a table as I’ve enjoyed so far?”

  Baldwin patted his middle. “How do you think I came by my nickname?”

  “Kettle Belly, I’d like a lot of explanations.”

  “Joe, I’m right sorry you lost your job. If I’d had my druthers, it wouldn’t have been the way it was.”

  “Are you working with Mrs. Keithley?”

  “No. I’m against her.”

  “I’d like to believe that, but I’ve no reason to—yet. What were you doing where I found you?”

  “They had grabbed me—Mrs. Keithley and her boys.”

  “They just happened to grab you—and just happened to stuff you in the same cell with me—and you just happened to know about the films I was supposed to be guarding—and you just happened to have a double deck of cards in your pocket? Now, really!”

  “If I hadn’t had the cards, we would have found some other way to talk,” Kettle Belly said mildly. “Wouldn’t we, now?”

  “Yes. Granted.”

  “I didn’t mean to suggest that the set up was an accident. We had you covered from Moon Base; when you were grabbed—or rather as soon as you let them suck you into the New Age, I saw to it that they grabbed me too; I figured I might have a chance to lend you a hand, once I was inside.” He added, “I kinda let them think that I was an FBS man, too.”

  “I see. Then it was just luck that they locked us up together.”

  “Not luck,” Kettle Belly objected. “Luck is a bonus that follows careful planning—it’s never free. There was a computable probabilit
y that they would put us together in hopes of finding out what they wanted to know. We hit the jackpot because we paid for the chance. If we hadn’t, I would have had to crush out of that cell and look for you—but I had to be inside to do it.”

  “Who is Mrs. Keithley?”

  “Other than what she is publicly, I take it. She is the queen bee—or the black widow—of a gang. ‘Gang’ is a poor word—power group, maybe. One of several such groups, more or less tied together where their interests don’t cross. Between them they divvy up the country for whatever they want like two cats splitting a gopher.”

  Gilead nodded; he knew what Baldwin meant, though he had not known that the enormously respected Mrs. Keithley was in such matters—not until his nose had been rubbed in the fact. “And what are you, Kettle Belly?”

  “Now, Joe—I like you and I’m truly sorry you’re in a jam. You led wrong a couple of times and I was obliged to trump, as the stakes were high. See here, I feel that I owe you something; what do you say to this: we’ll fix you up with a brand-new personality, vacuum tight—even new fingerprints if you want them. Pick any spot on the globe you like and any occupation; we’ll supply all the money you need to start over—or money enough to retire and play with the cuties the rest of your life. What do you say?”

  “No.” There was no hesitation.

  “You’ve no close relatives, no intimate friends. Think about it. I can’t put you back in your job; this is the best I can do.”

  “I’ve thought about it. The devil with the job, I want to finish my case! You’re the key to it.”

  “Reconsider, Joe. This is your chance to get out of affairs of state and lead a normal, happy life.”

  “‘Happy,’ he says!”

  “Well, safe, anyhow. If you insist on going further your life expectancy becomes extremely problematical.”

  “I don’t recall ever having tried to play safe.”

  “You’re the doctor. Joe. In that case—” A speaker on Baldwin’s desk uttered: “œnIe r nøg rylp.”

  Baldwin answered, “nu,” and sauntered quickly to the fireplace. An early-morning fire still smouldered in it. He grasped the mantel piece, pulled it toward him. The entire masonry assembly, hearth, mantel, and grate, came toward him, leaving an arch in the wall. “Duck down stairs, Joe,” he said. “It’s a raid.”