She turned to look at the back wall against which Wally, Maea, and Dr. Carwell were standing.
“Dr. Carwell,” she said, “will you tell the Council what you know and what you did?”
Morgan Carwell rolled forward, seeming clumsy as a bear.
“I’m a physician at an RIV Clinic,” he said earnestly to the faces around the large table. “I have to admit I was a MOGOW, too, for a while. But I became convinced there was more harm than good to be accomplished in that direction. There was another physician at the Clinic who, like me, belonged to that subversive organization. For MOGOW purposes he experimented on his own to improve the RIV formula. Then he tried out the result on a young man, a MOGOW from another branch of the organization, who came to the Clinic deliberately to act as a guinea pig for him. The result was that the young man suffered an extreme negative reaction to the drug.”
He turned to Wally, still standing against the wall, arms folded, gazing at the floor as if lost in thought.
“It was that young man there,” he said. There was a murmur from the room.
“What—” began Drega.
The gavel banged down.
“Order. Let him finish. Go on, doctor,” said Sorenson.
“So I reported the whole matter to my Medical superiors and promised to do whatever I could to stop such deadly experimentation in the future. Later on, when Etter Ho asked me to be his personal physician, I checked with my Medical superiors and they asked me to accept the post and keep them informed of what went on with this new R-Master, since there was some suspicion he had been connected, or would be, like his brother, with the MOGOWs.”
Carwell stopped and wiped his forehead, which was gleaming with sweat.
“I did,” he said. “I found out much more than the auditors did. The man sitting is actually Etter Ho. The one standing is Wallace Ho, a revived cryogenic, who actually has no mind or personality. He’s been response-trained to play Etter’s role, while Etter, with the MOGOWs, tried to discover some fanciful hidden research concerning a developed and improved form of RIV. They believed they’d found it; I understand they were going to try to duplicate this supposed improved form of the drug with the facilities of a laboratory set up underneath the home of Lee Malone, another R-Master—”
“What? When?” snapped Wilson. “Patrick, order Field Examiners to Lee Malone’s immediately—”
“It’s not necessary,” interrupted Sorenson. “Our own people have already raided the place. We got much of the lab equipment, but Lee Malone has gone missing, along with your Rico Erm.”
“Erm?” Wilson stared.
“Exactly,” said Sorenson icily. “One of the most trusted secretaries, according to Auditor vetting, I think? He’s disappeared all right. But he was working with Ho and the MOGOWs all the time. I should, by the way, reassure the Council. There is no need for worry about any of this. We of Medical have allowed it to run on this long only in order to demonstrate how badly Accounting and its parasecurity arm, the Auditor Corps, have been serving us all. The time has long been overdue for each Section to maintain its own security force. Never mind that now, however. The point is that Medical—not Accounting—had this little MOGOW conspiracy under control from the very beginning. Let me tell you—”
“This is outrageous!” Wilson lifted his voice. “Medical is violating all the rules of order of this—”
“Quiet,” said the fat man. “I want to hear this.” There was a chorus of agreement from the other figures around the table. “Go on, Saya.”
“Gladly. As I was saying, we’ve had the conspiracy under control from the inside all the time the Auditors were watching it and worrying about it from the outside. The injection of Wallace Ho with an experimental version of RIV raised the possibility that more efforts like this might well be made by irresponsible private groups in the future. If so, how should they be controlled? We at Medical evolved a plan for control and proceeded to test it, in this case. Wallace Ho had inadvertently been made a near-idiot—or would have been, if he had not committed suicide before the process had taken its full effect. To smoke out the conspirators who had been involved in producing the drug used on him, we offered them a bait. When Wallace’s brother Etter decided to take the RIV treatment, we saw that he was not given RIV-II—”
“Not the RIV-VII!” cried Nicolina Drega. “You didn’t break the Council commitment against using the final form of the drug!”
“No, no, of course not,” said Sorenson. “We merely used a slightly more advanced form, the RIV-IV. It was sufficient to ensure Etter Ho an R-Master development, but still left him in need of palliative medication.”
“Which he refused to take!” snapped Wilson.
“Well, yes, that’s true,” said Sorenson, glancing at Ett in his chair. “He did refuse all medication. But that was a minor matter. As we suspected, the MOGOWs and even some others like your Rico Erm, who were at heart subversives, took the bait and gathered around him in hopes of making some profound alteration in our system. As a result, we uncovered a number of most dangerous people; not only that, we will continue to uncover more as Lee Malone and Rico Erm, in their flight, lead us to others as they turn to them for shelter and help.”
Sorenson turned and looked directly at Ett, once more. “Etter Ho,” she said, “was an inexperienced, ignorant young man, even though he became an R-Master. He was out of his league all along, and never knew it. But now it’s all over.”
Ett sat unmoving in his chair during Sorenson’s indictment, his eyes focused on the shield that was embossed on the panelled wall behind her. She continued to look at him after she stopped talking, until the rising hubbub in the room attracted her attention. Wilson was arguing heatedly with several other Section Chiefs, pausing only to exchange quieter words with Patrick St. Onge, who had moved over to stand behind him.
Finally Ett turned his head, to see Wally standing unchanged in his place and Maea, still near him, still standing by the wall. Her eyes were on Ett, and her face seemed to be pleading or apologizing; but she uttered no word. Carwell had moved well away from her, and was now against the wall at the other end of the chamber, unattended and looking tired and downcast. He didn’t look up as Ett glanced his way.
Ett turned back in his chair, but his eyes were now directed at the floor. The marbled pattern of its carpet swam before his eyes, blurring out of and back into focus. Within him the old feelings were back again. He could feel his eyes squinting as the skin around them tightened, and his pulse began to race, his breathing to quicken. He sat up straighter in his chair as Sorenson rapped for order once more.
It took some time, but eventually the room quieted, and all attention turned back to the Chair.
“It seems,” she said, “that our first concern must be to find out how badly the zero-zero files have indeed been compromised. I suggest—yes, Dr. Carwell?” The big brown man had moved forward, waving a hand to attract her attention and shaking off the arm of a Field Examiner who looked rather unsure of himself. Carwell was sweating profusely, and his voice was hoarse.
“Did I hear correctly?” he said. “There was an improved version of RIV that you all decided to hide?”
“Doctor, you’re out of order now. Please leave the—” She was interrupted as Carwell turned to Ett.
“You were right after all,” he said. His voice was deep and raspy, and the coverall he wore showed wet stains at armpits and wrists, as well as down the back. “I didn’t have the guts to admit it.”
The next instant he was in the grasp of two Field Examiners and was being hauled out of the room. He made no protest of any sort.
Ett watched him until he was out of sight, and then turned his eyes to Maea, still standing by the wall and still watching him. Their looks crossed, met. He smiled slightly at her for a moment, and then turned back to face the Council.
“That’s insane!” Wilson was raging. “What Carwell reported means that Erm and Malone are on the loose with the RIV-VII information. While w
e sit here, they’re probably turning out doses of the drug by the hundreds, if not thousands!”
“Which need not worry us,” said Sorenson. “An R-Master, whether produced with RIV-II or RIV-VII, is still nothing more than a highly effective problem-solving human entity. He or she is effective only in proportion to the power he or she already possesses. It goes without saying that the MOGOWs are, almost without exception, outside the working system of the Earth Council; it’s with the EC—with us—that the real power lies. The R-Masters produced by Malone and Erm may be somewhat troublesome to us for a short while, but there’s little major change they can accomplish before they betray themselves into our hands. Bear in mind that the EC is a system of world management employing millions of people. What can a few thousand, working from the outside, do against anything so massive?”
“By God!” said Wilson. “You take it calmly enough!”
Sorenson shrugged.
“I leave it to the other Section Chiefs of this Council to decide—by vote—if I’m not right,” she said. “Shall we vote on it?”
“By all means,” said the fat man, glancing at his chronometer. “I have a dinner engagement…”
There was a murmur of approval around the table.
“You’re a bunch of idiots!” exploded Wilson. “Idiots, playing with matches in a fireworks factory!”
“Be quiet and vote,” Sorenson told him. “No one here is about to be worried by your dire predictions.”
“How about mine?” said Ett.
His voice brought heads from around the Council table to look at him.
“Keep him quiet, you Field Examiners,” commanded Saya Sorenson, brusquely.
“Stop and think,” said Ett. “Not everyone wants to be an R-Master—”
The rest of his words were lost as one of the Field Examiners reached from behind him and encircled his neck with a hard forearm, choking Ett off.
“Let him talk,” said Wilson malevolently.
“Yes,” said Drega. “That was rather an interesting start he made there. Let him talk.”
“Let go!” snapped Wilson directly to the Field Examiner. “That’s an order—from me!”
The Field Examiner let go. Ett massaged his throat for a moment and got his voice back into working order.
“I was going to point out something,” he said. “Not everyone wants to be an R-Master, even if the chance is given to them. Some people don’t want to spend their lives being high-powered puzzle-solvers. Others have personal reasons—” he looked around the table—“like all of you here have.”
“Shut him up!” snapped Sorenson.
“I figured out quite a while ago why none of you took advantage of the RIV-VII,” Ett continued. No one moved in the room now. “It was part of the business of not rocking the boat, of not risking anyone getting an edge over everyone else. I’ll bet you all take monthly or even daily examinations to prove to each other there’s no RIV serum in you. Aren’t I right?”
None of them answered.
“Of course I’m right,” said Ett swiftly. “And that’s why you’ve continued to treat people with the RIV-II at the Clinics, instead of using the problem-free RIV-VII—you want those who do become R-Masters, who might be able to make problems for you, to stay under your control.”
He moved in his chair as he spoke, looking about the circle to see each of them in turn. “That’s the one thing you overlooked in letting Malone and Rico Erm get away with the means to make the RIV-VII. The one group of people who’d really threaten the EC system if they were R-Masters are you people here.”
“There’s no danger of that,” said Sorenson acidly. “Do you think we’re going to invite Malone in to treat us all?”
“Not Malone,” said Ett. “Someone else… Wally! Now!”
At the end of the line of people against the wall of the room, Wally moved, in the last of his trained movements. His face had no expression, but his hands went to his neck and grabbed, pulling away as if in a ripping movement. The skin there opened, ripped away as if it were cloth, fitted with a pocket. Inside was a small, flat plastic capsule. Before any of the Field Examiners could reach him, Wally took it in his fingers and tossed it onto the floor in the center of the horseshoe table; and as it hit two laser beams crossed in front of him, then found his chest.
The capsule exploded.
Suddenly, the room was obscured by an eye-stinging mist. Sitting in his place in front of the table, Ett felt as if the whole place moved about him. He started to hold on, but his fingers slipped from the sides of his chair, numb and useless. His mind was spinning, and he felt himself beginning to fall from his seat. Then the mist began to thin and his strength to return. He caught himself, still upright in the chair. But now the clearing lights of the room hurt his eyes. The sound of voices roared and thundered in his ears, so exaggeratedly loud that he could not make sense of what was being said.
Now it was clear enough to see that Wally had fallen. He lay face down and still. Near him Maea was sitting with her back to the wall. She looked different. Her face had changed. No, thought Ett, not her face, just her expression—the way she was looking at things. Had he looked like that, he wondered, in that first moment at the clinic when the advanced form of RIV had taken effect? Or was RIV-VII more potent that way?
But he had no time to puzzle over such things. Around the room they were all changing—Maea, St. Onge, Wilson, Sorenson, Drega, all of them—even the Field Examiners. Ett’s strength was still diminished, but he forced himself up onto his feet. He stood, walking into the opening of the horseshoe shaped table, to look down at Wilson, still in his chair but totally helpless. Ett could feel himself, still weak, but there was strength enough in him to kill anyone here if he needed to. He was the only one so far able to rise.
But then he turned back from the table, walked slowly towards Maea, instead. Whatever the effect of a double exposure to the RIV drugs might be was yet to be learned. But at the moment he was strong enough—and sensible enough—to reach the young woman and kneel beside her.
He stroked Maea’s hair and she looked up at him, eyes wide and hands caressing the carpet she leaned above. He let himself down slowly, to sit beside her on the floor, and leaned his head back against the wall. His eyes wandered from light to light, and across the spaces between the fixtures in the ceiling. About the room there were noises of abstracted, almost rhythmic movement. But it seemed remarkably peaceful. He closed his eyes, realizing that they had begun to unfocus once more.
“Not in my time, O Lord, but in thine,” said the voice of great-grandfather Bruder, somewhere nearby, and the phrase had a sound like trumpets. It began to reverberate about the room, echoing in his head, becoming a roar.
The light was becoming too much for him. It hurt his eyes—but no, his eyelids were already closed, so… There opened before him a world—no, a universe—made available by the RIV-VII, a universe in shape and distance, depth and content, such as no one had ever imagined before. He had won.
Chapter Twenty
The Pixie swayed slightly, riding the tropical Pacific swells so lightly that it seemed it was the stars that were dancing circles in the dark sky. The ship was almost becalmed, and the ocean was unruffled, strangely smooth except for the rise and fall of the glassy surface. Dark threads that were sea snakes writhed in the moonlight down the glinting surface of the water.
Al was down in the cabin with a light on over his bunk, reading—the reflection of that light could be seen on the water to starboard. Undisturbed by it, up in the cockpit of the sloop Ett and Maea had the vessel, the sea, and the stars to themselves.
“… and there’s the Southern Cross,” Ett was saying.
“How strange,” Maea said. “I’ve seen it before, but right now it’s like looking at it for the first time.”
“And there’s Alpha Centauri,” Ett said. He was half sitting, half lying, on the cushions of the stern seat with Maea on his right side and the rim of the wheel under his left han
d. He could have roped the wheel but he liked the feel of it, alive under his fingers, as the boat eased into every little breath of air.
“Where?” asked Maea.
“See, one of the pointers, there, for the Crux—the Southern Cross. See it now?”
“Yes,” said Maea. “Do you think we’ll ever go there?”
“Why not?” said Ett, and stared up into the night. “Now that we’re starting to get the world moving again.”
She shivered slightly.
“Are you cold?” he asked.
“No, no,” she said. But even as she said it, she shivered once more. “Just a psychological chill, I guess.”
“Someone step on your grave?” he said, smiling at her, but watching her closely.
“No,” she said, looking down at the decking beyond her feet. “Yours.”
He raised an eyebrow and tilted his head to the side. “You’re still thinking about that day in the Council chamber,” he said.
“Before that,” she said. “In Hong Kong, in that hotel lobby. I’d never seen you like that before—I’d never seen anyone look like that.”
She lifted her head and turned it to stare straight into his eyes.
“I’d never have believed such fury—” her voice was almost empty of emotion—“in anyone,” Her words lingered on the soft, night sea air about them. After a moment he answered.
“It’s genetic, I think,” he said. He heard his own voice, also empty. “I told you about my greatgrandfather Bruder—he was intolerance and fury incarnate in the flesh.”
“But you don’t have to do what he did,” she said. He shook his head at her.
“No,” he said. The word came out hard and unyielding. “I can promise you that.”
He felt her hand slip into his; and it felt oddly comforting, reassuring.
“Wally used to talk about him, too,” she said. “How could he be so important to you both?”
“I don’t know if ‘important’ is quite the right word,” Ett said. “He was more than that… it was as if he could only worship God by taking over God’s role in our universe. Dealing with him was like dealing with an elemental force, one that was always there, eclipsing everything else.”