Isaac Asimov (4 page)

“Could be,” said Grant. “I’m an easy man to see. Just look for the nearest rotten job, and I’ll be right there on top of it.”

“I’m glad you took
this
rotten one.”

Grant reddened. “This rotten one had an important point to it, professor. Glad to be of help. I mean that.”

“I know. Good-bye! Good-bye!” Benes waved, stepped back toward the limousine.

Grant turned to the colonel, “Will I be breaking security if I knock off now, chief?”

“Go ahead … And by the way, Grant …”

“Yes, sir?”

“Good work!”

“The expression, sir, is: ‘Jolly good show.’ I don’t answer to anything else.” He touched a sardonic forefinger to his temple and walked off.

Exit Grant, he thought; then: Enter Good Old Charlie?

The colonel turned to Owens. “Get in with Benes and talk to him. I’ll be in the car ahead. And then when we get to Headquarters, I want you to be ready with a firm identification, if you have one; or a firm denial, if you have one. I don’t want anything else.”

“He remembered that drinking episode,” said Owens.

“Exactly,” said the colonel, discontentedly, “he remembered it a little too quickly and a little too well.
Talk
to him.”

They were all in, and the cavalcade moved off, picking up speed. From a distance, Grant watched, waved blindly at no one in particular, then moved off again.

He had free time coming and he knew exactly how he planned spending it, after one night’s sleep. He smiled in cheerful anticipation.

The cavalcade picked its route carefully. The pattern of bustle and calm in the city varied from section to section and from hour to hour, and that which pertained to this section and this hour was known.

The cars rumbled down empty streets through rundown neighborhoods of darkened warehouses. The motorcycles jounced on before and the colonel in the first limousine tried once again to estimate how the Others would react to the successful coup.

Sabotage at Headquarters was always a possibility. He couldn’t imagine what precautions remained to be taken but it was an axiom in his business that no precautions were ever sufficient.

A light?

For just a moment, it had seemed to him that a light had flashed and dimmed in one of the hulks they were approaching. His hand flew to the car telephone to alert the motorcycle escort.

He spoke quickly and fiercely. From behind, a motorcycle raced forward.

Even as it did so, an automobile engine, ahead and to one side, roared into loud life (muffled and nearly drowned by the multiple clatter of the oncoming cavalcade) and the automobile itself came hurtling out of an alley.

Its headlights were off and in the shock of its sudden
approach, nothing registered with anyone. No one, afterward, could recall a clear picture of events.

The car-projectile, aimed squarely at the middle limousine containing Benes, met the motorcycle coming forward. In the crash that ensued, the motorcycle was demolished, its rider hurled many feet to one side and left broken and dead. The car-projectile itself was deflected so that it merely struck the rear of the limousine.

There were multiple collisions. The limousine, spinning out of control, smashed into a telephone pole and jolted to a stop. The kamikaze car, also out of control, hit a brick wall and burst into flame.

The colonel’s limousine ground to a halt. The motorcycles screeched, veering and turning.

Gonder was out of his limousine, racing for the wrecked car, wrenching at the door.

Owens, shaken, a reddened scrape on one cheekbone said, “What happened?”

“Never mind that. How is Benes?”

“He’s hurt.”

“Is he alive?”

“Yes. Help me.”

Together, they half lifted, half pulled Benes from the car. Benes’ eyes were open but glazed, and he made only incoherent little sounds.

“How are you, professor?”

Owens said in a quick, low voice. “His head cracked hard against the door handle. Concussion, probably. But he
is
Benes. That’s certain.”

Gonder shouted, “We know that
now
, you …” He swallowed the last word with difficulty.

The door to the first limousine was opened. Together they lifted Benes in as a rifle shot cracked from somewhere above. Gonder threw himself into the car on top of Benes.

“Let’s get the show out of here,” he yelled.

The car and half the motorcycle escort moved on. The remainder stayed behind. Policemen ran for the building from which the rifle shot had sounded. The dying light of the burning kamikaze car cast a hellish glow on the scene.

There was the rustle in the distance of the beginnings of a gathering crowd.

Gonder cradled Benes’ head on his lap. The scientist was
completely unconscious now, his breathing slow, his pulse feeble.

Gonder stared earnestly at the man who might well be dead before the vehicle came to its final halt and muttered despairingly to himself, “We were almost there! —Almost there!”

Grant was only dopily aware of the hammering at his door. He stumbled upright and emerged from his bedroom, walking flat-footedly across the cold floor, and yawning prodigiously.

“Coming …” He felt drugged and he
wanted
to feel drugged. In the way of business, he was trained to come alive at any extraneous noise. Instant alertness. Take a mass of sleep, add a pinch of thump and there would be an instant and vast flowering of
qui vive
.

But now he happened to be on his own time and to heck with it.

“What do you want?”

“From the colonel, sir,” came from the other side of the door. “Open at once.”

Against his will, Grant jolted into wakefulness. He stepped to one side of the door and flattened against the wall. He then opened the door as far as the chain would allow and said, “Shove your ID card here.”

A card was thrust at him and he took it into his bedroom. He groped for his wallet and pinched out his Identifier. He inserted the card and read the result on the translucent screen.

He brought it back and unhinged the chain; ready, despite himself, for the appearance of a gun or for some sign of hostility.

But the young man who entered looked completely harmless. “You’ll have to come with me, sir, to Headquarters.”

“What time is it?”

“About 6:45 sir.”

“A.M.?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why do they need me this time of day?”

“I can’t say, sir. I’m following orders. I must ask you to come with me. Sorry.” He tried a wry joke. “I didn’t want to get up myself, but here I am.”

“Do I have time to shave and shower?”

“Well …”

“All right, then, do I have time to dress?”

“Yes, sir. —But quickly!”

Grant scraped at the stubble along the angle of his jaw with his thumb and was glad he had showered the night before. “Give me five minutes for clothes and necessities.”

He called out from the bathroom, “What’s it all about?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“What Headquarters are we going to?”

“I don’t think …”

“Never mind.” The sound of rushing water made further speech impossible for a moment.

Grant emerged, feeling somberly semi-civilized. “But we’re going to Headquarters. You said that, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right, son,” said Grant, pleasantly, “but if I think you’re about to cross me, I’ll cut you in two.”

“Yes, sir.”

Grant frowned when the car stopped. The dawn was gray and dank. There was a hint of forthcoming rain, the area was a rundown mélange of warehouses and a quarter mile back they had passed a roped-off area.

“What happened here?” Grant had asked and his companion was the usual mine of non-information.

Now they stopped and Grant gently placed his hand on the butt of his holstered revolver.

“You’d better tell me what happens next.”

“We’re here. This is a secret government installation. It doesn’t look it, but it is.”

The young man got out and so did the driver. “Please stay in the car, Mr. Grant.”

The two stepped away for a hundred feet, while Grant looked warily about. There was a sudden jerk of movement and for a split second he was thrown off balance. Recovering, he began to fling the car door open, then hesitated in astonishment as smooth walls grew upward all about him.

It took him a moment to realize that he was sinking along with the car; that the car had been sitting on the top of an elevator shaft. By the time he had drunk that in, it was too late to try to leave the car.

Overhead, a lid moved into place and for a while, Grant
was in complete darkness. He flicked on the car’s headlights but they splashed uselessly back from the round curve of the rising wall.

There was nothing to do but wait for an interminable three minutes and then the car stopped.

Two large doors opened, and Grant’s tensed muscles were ready for action. He called them off at once. A two-man scooter bearing one M.P.—one obvious M.P. in a completely legitimate military uniform—was waiting for him. On his helmet were the letters CMDF. On the scooter were the same letters.

Automatically, Grant put words to the initials. “Centralized Mountain Defense Forces,” he muttered, “Coastal Marine Department Fisheries.”

“What?” he said aloud. He had not heard the M.P.’s remark.

“If you’ll get in, sir,” repeated the M.P. with stiff propriety, indicating the empty seat.

“Sure. Quite a place you have here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How big is it?”

They were passing through a cavernous empty area, with trucks and motor-carts lined against the wall, each with its CMDF insigne.

“Pretty big,” said the M.P.

“That’s what I like about everybody here,” said Grant. “Full of priceless nuggets of data.”

The scooter moved smoothly up a ramp to a higher level and a well-populated one. Uniformed individuals, both male and female, moved about busily, and there was an indefinable but undeniable air of agitation about the place.

Grant caught himself following the hurrying footsteps of a girl in what looked like a nurse’s uniform (CMDF neatly printed over the curve of one breast) and remembered the plans he had begun to make the evening before.

If this was another assignment …

The scooter made a sharp turn and stopped before a desk.

The M.P. scrambled out. “Charles Grant, sir.”

The officer behind the desk was unmoved at the information. “Name?” he said.

“Charles Grant,” said Grant, “like the nice man said.”

“I.D. card, please.”

Grant handed it over. It carried an embossed number only, to which the officer gave one curt glance. He inserted it into the Identifier on his desk, while Grant watched without much interest. It was precisely like his own wallet Identifier, overgrown and acromegalous. The gray, featureless screen lit up with his own portrait, full-face and profile, looking—as it always did in Grant’s own eyes—darkly and menacingly gangsterish.

Where was the open, frank look? Where the charming smile? Where the dimples in his cheeks that drove the girls mad, mad? Only those dark, lowering eyebrows remained to give him that angry look. It was a wonder anyone recognized him.

The officer did, and apparently without trouble—one glance at the photo, one at Grant. The I.D. card was whipped out, handed back, and he was waved on.

The scooter turned right, passed through an archway and then down a long corridor, marked off for traffic, two lanes each way. Traffic was heavy, too, and Grant was the only one not uniformed.

Doors repeated themselves at almost hypnotically periodic intervals on either side, with pedestrian lanes immediately adjacent the walls. Those were less heavily populated.

The scooter approached another archway over which was a sign reading: “Medical Division.”

An M.P. on duty in a raised box like that of a traffic policeman hit a switch. Heavy steel doors opened and the scooter slid through and came to a stop.

Grant wondered what part of the city he was under by now.

The man in the general’s uniform, who was approaching hastily, looked familiar. Grant placed him just before they had closed to within hand-shaking stage.

“Carter, isn’t it? We met on the Transcontinental a couple of years ago. You weren’t in uniform then?”

“Hello, Grant. —Oh, darn the uniform. I wear it only for status in this place. It’s the only way we can establish a chain of command. Come with me. —Granite Grant, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, well.”

They passed through a door into what was obviously an operating room. Grant glanced out through the observation window to see the usual sight of men and women in white, bustling about in almost visible asepsis, surrounded
by the hard gleam of metalware, sharp and cold; and all of it dwarfed and rendered insignificant by the proliferation of electronic instruments that had converted medicine into a branch of engineering.

An operating table was being wheeled in, and a full shock of grizzled hair streamed out over the white pillow.