Part 6

I stared out over the heads of the dreadfully silent throng in the entrance hall, looking toward the glass doors, as was everyone else inside. Beyond the doors, an arc of expediters was retreating toward us; they paused, fired a round of gas-shells over the heads of the mob outside, and retreated again.

Then the mob was on them, in a burst of screaming fury. Hidden gas guns appeared, and clubs, and curious things that looked like slingshots. The crowd broke for the entrance. The line of expediters wavered but held. There was a tangle of hand-to-hand fights, each one a vicious struggle. But the expediters were professionals; outnumbered forty to one, they savagely chopped down their attackers with their hands, their feet and the stocks of their guns. The crowd hesitated. No shot had yet been fired, except toward the sky.

* * * * *

The air whined and shook. From low on the horizon, a needle-nosed jet thundered in. A plane! Aircraft never flew in the restricted area over the Company's major installations. Aircraft didn't barrel in at treetop height, fast and low, without a hint of the recognition numbers every aircraft had to carry.

From its belly sluiced a silvery milt of explosives as it came in over the heads of the mob, peeled off and up and away, then circled out toward the sea for another approach. A hail of tiny blasts rattled in the clear space between the line of expediters and the entrance. The big doors shook and cracked.

* * * * *

The expediters stared white-faced at the ship. And the crowd began firing. An illegal hard-pellet gun peppered the glass of the doors with pock-marks. The guarding line of expediters was simply overrun.

Inside the waiting room, where I stood frozen, hell broke out. The detachment of expediters, supervising the hundreds inside leaped for the doors to fight back the surging mob. But the mob inside the doors, the long orderly lines before the interviewing clerks, now split into a hundred screaming, milling centers of panic. Some rushed toward the doors; some broke for the halls of the vaults themselves. I couldn't see what was going on outside any more. I was swamped in a rush of women panicked out of their senses.

Panic was like a plague. I saw doctors and orderlies struggling against the tide, a few scattered expediters battling to turn back the terrified rush. But I was swept along ahead of them all, barely able to keep my feet. An expediter fell a yard from me. I caught up his gun and began striking out. For this was what Lawton had feared--the mob loose in the vaults!

I raced down a side corridor, around a corner, to the banked elevators that led to the deeps of the clinic. There was fighting there, but the elevator doors were closed. Someone had had the wit to lock them against the mob. But there were stairs; I saw an emergency door only a few yards away. I hesitated only long enough to convince myself, through the fear, that my duty was to the Company and to the protection of its helpless wards below. I bolted through the door and slammed it behind me, spun the levers over and locked it. In a moment, I was running down a long ramp toward the cool immensities of the vaults.

If Lawton had not mentioned the possible consequences of violence to the suspendees, I suppose I would have worried only about my own skin. But here I was. I stared around, trying to get my bearings. I was in a sort of plexus of hallways, an open area with doors on all sides leading off to the vaults. I was alone; the noise from above and outside was cut off completely.

No, I was not alone! I heard running footsteps, light and quick, from another ramp. I turned in time to see a figure speed down it, pause only a second at its base, and disappear into one of the vaults. It was a woman, but not a woman in nurse's uniform. Her back had been to me, yet I could see that one hand held a gas gun, the other something glittering and small.

I followed, not quite believing what I had seen. For I had caught only a glimpse of her face, far off and from a bad angle--but I was as sure as ever I could be that it was Rena dell'Angela!

* * * * *

She didn't look back. She was hurrying against time, hurrying toward a destination that obsessed her thoughts. I followed quietly enough, but I think I might have thundered like an elephant herd and still been unheard.

We passed a strange double-walled door with a warning of some sort lettered on it in red; then she swung into a side corridor where the passage was just wide enough for one. On either side were empty tiers of shelves waiting for suspendees. I speeded up to reach the corner before she could disappear.

But she wasn't hurrying now. She had come to a bay of shelves where a hundred or so bodies lay wrapped in their plastic sacks, each to his own shelf. Dropping to her knees, she began checking the tags on the cocoons at the lowest level.

She whispered something sharp and imploring. Then, straightening abruptly, she dropped the gas gun and took up the glittering thing in her other hand. Now I could see that it was a hypodermic kit in a crystal case. From it she took a little flask of purplish liquid and, fingers shaking, shoved the needle of the hypodermic into the plastic stopper of the vial.

Moving closer, I said: "It won't work, Rena."

She jumped and swung to face me, holding the hypodermic like a stiletto. Seeing my face, she gasped and wavered.

I stepped by her and looked down at the tag on the cocooned figure. _Benedetto dell'Angela, Napoli_, it said, and then the long string of serial numbers that identified him.

It was what I had guessed.

"It won't work," I repeated. "Be smart about this, Rena. You can't revive him without killing him."

Rena half-closed her eyes. She whispered, "Would death be worse than this?"

I hadn't expected this sort of superstitious nonsense from her. I started to answer, but she had me off guard. In a flash, she raked the glittering needle toward my face and, as I stumbled back involuntarily, her other hand lunged for the gas gun I had thrust into my belt.

Only luck saved me. Not being in a holster, the gun's front sight caught and I had the moment I needed to cuff her away. She gasped and spun up against the tiers of shelves. The filled hypodermic shattered against the floor, spilling the contents into a purple, gleaming pool of fluorescence.

* * * * *

Rena took a deep breath and stood erect. There were tears in her eyes again.

She said in a detached voice: "Well done, Mr. Wills."

"Are you crazy?" I crackled. "This is your father. Do you want to kill him? It takes a doctor to revive him. You're an educated woman, Rena, not a witch-ridden peasant! You know better than this!"

She laughed--a cold laugh. "Educated! A peasant woman would have kicked you to death and succeeded. I'm educated, all right! Two hundred men, a plane, twenty women risking themselves up there to get me through the door. All our plans--and I can't remember a way to kill you in time. I'm too educated to hate you, Claims Adjuster Wills!" She choked on the words. Then she shook her head dully. "Go ahead, turn me in and get it over with."

I took a deep breath. Turn her in? I hadn't thought that far ahead. True, that was the obvious thing to do; she had confessed that the whole riot outside was a diversion to get her down in the vaults, and anyone who could summon up that sort of organized anti-Company violence was someone who automatically became my natural enemy.

But perhaps I was too educated and too soft as well. There had been tears on her face, over her father's body. I could not remember having heard that conspirators cried.

And I sympathized a little. I had known what it was like to weep over the body of someone I loved. Despite our difficulties, despite everything, I would have done anything in the world to bring Marianna back to life. I couldn't. Rena--she believed--could revive her father.

I didn't want to turn her in.

I _shouldn't_ turn her in. It was my duty _not_ to turn her in, for hadn't Defoe himself ordered me to investigate the dissident movement of which she was clearly a part? Wouldn't it be easier for me to win her confidence, and trick her into revealing its secrets, than to have her arrested?

The answer, in all truth, was _No_. She was not a trickable girl, I was sure. But it was, at least, a rationale, and I clung to it.

* * * * *

I coughed and said: "Rena, will you make a bargain?"

She stared drearily. "Bargain?"

"I have a room at the Umberto. If I get you out of here, will you go to my room and wait for me there?"

Her eyes narrowed sharply for a second. She parted her lips to say something, but only nodded.

"Your word, Rena? I don't want to turn you in."

She looked helplessly at the purple spilled pool on the floor, and wistfully at the sack that held her father. Then she said, "My word on it. But you're a fool, Tom!"

"I know it!" I admitted.

I hurried her back up the ramp, back toward the violence upstairs. If it was over, I would have to talk her out of the clinic, somehow cover up the fact that she had been in the vaults. If it was still going on, though--

It was.

We blended ourselves with the shouting, rioting knots. I dragged her into the main waiting room, saw her thrust through the doors. Things were quieting even then. And I saw two women hastening toward her through the fight, and I do not think it was a coincidence that the steam went out of the rioters almost at once.

I stayed at the clinic until everything was peaceful again, though it was hours.

I wasn't fooling myself. I didn't have a shred of real reason for not having her arrested. If she had information to give, I was not the type to trick it out of her--even if she really was waiting at the Umberto, which was, in itself, not likely. If I had turned her in, Defoe would have had the information out of her in moments; but not I.

She was an enemy of the Company.

And I was unable to betray her.

VII

Dr. Lawton, who seemed to be Chief Medical Officer for Anzio Clinic, said grimly: "This wasn't an accident. It was planned. The question is, why?"

The expediters had finished driving the rioters out of the clinic itself, and gas guns were rapidly dispersing the few left outside the entrance. At least thirty unconscious forms were scattered around--and one or two that were worse than unconscious.

I said, "Maybe they were hoping to loot the clinic." It wasn't a very good lie. But then, I hadn't had much practice in telling lies to an officer of the Company.

Lawton pursed his lips and ignored the suggestion. "Tell me something, Wills. What were you doing down below?"

I said quickly, "Below? You mean a half an hour ago?"

"That's what I mean." He was gentle, but--well, not exactly suspicious. Curious.

I improvised: "I--I thought I saw someone running down there. One of the rioters. So I chased after her--after _him_," I corrected, swallowing the word just barely in time.

He nodded. "Find anything?"

It was a tough question. Had I been seen going in or coming out? If it was coming out--Rena had been with me.

I took what we called a "calculated risk"--that is, I got a firm grip on my courage and told a big fat and possibly detectable lie. I said, "Nobody that I could find. But I still think I heard something. The trouble is, I don't know the vaults very well. I was afraid I'd get lost."

Apparently it was on the way in that I had been spotted, for Lawton said thoughtfully, "Let's take a look."

We took a couple of battered expediters with us--I didn't regard them as exactly necessary, but I couldn't see how I could tell Lawton that. The elevators were working again, so we came out in a slightly different part of the vaults than I had seen before; it was not entirely acting on my part when I peered around.

Lawton accepted my statement that I wasn't quite sure where I had heard the noises, without argument. He accepted it all too easily; he sent the expediters scouring the corridors at random.

And, of course, one of them found the pool of spilled fluorescence from the hypodermic needle I had knocked out of Rena's hand.

* * * * *

We stood there peering at the smear of purplish color, the shattered hypodermic, Rena's gas gun.

Lawton mused, "Looks like someone's trying to wake up some of our sleepers. That's our standard antilytic, if I'm not mistaken." He scanned the shelves. "Nobody missing around here. Take a look in the next few sections of the tiers."

The expediters saluted and left.

"They won't find anyone missing," Lawton predicted. "And _that_ means we have to take a physical inventory of the whole damn clinic. Over eighty thousand suspendees to check." He made a disgusted noise.

I said, "Maybe they were scared off before they finished."

"Maybe. Maybe not. We'll have to check, that's all."

"Are you sure that stuff is to revive the suspendees?" I persisted. "Couldn't it just have been someone wandering down here by mistake during the commotion and--"

"And carrying a hypodermic needle by mistake, and armed with a gas gun by mistake. Sure, Wills."

The expediters returned and Lawton looked at them sourly.

They shook their heads. He shrugged. "Tell you what, Wills," he said. "Let's go back to the office and--"

He stopped, peering down the corridor. The last of our expediters was coming toward us--not alone.

"Well, what do you know!" said Lawton. "Wills, it looks like he's got your fugitive!"

The expediter was dragging a small writhing figure behind him; we could hear whines and pleading. For a heart-stopping second, I thought it was Rena, against all logic.

But it wasn't. It was a quavery ancient, a bleary-eyed wreck of a man, long past retirement age, shabbily dressed and obviously the sort who cut his pension policies to the barest minimum--and then whined when his old age was poverty-stricken.

Lawton asked me: "This the man?"

"I--I couldn't recognize him," I said.

* * * * *

Lawton turned to the weeping old man. "Who were you after?" he demanded. All he got was sobbing pleas to let him go; all he was likely to get was more of the same. The man was in pure panic.

We got him up to one of the receiving offices on the upper level, half carried by the expediters. Lawton questioned him mercilessly for half an hour before giving up. The man was by then incapable of speech.

He had said, as nearly as we could figure it out, only that he was sorry he had gone into the forbidden place, he didn't mean to go into the forbidden place, he had been sleeping in the shadow of the forbidden place when fighting began and he fled inside.

It was perfectly apparent to me that he was telling the truth--and, more, that any diversionary riot designed to get _him_ inside with a hypodermic and gas gun would have been planned by maniacs, for I doubted he could have found the trigger of the gun. But Lawton seemed to think he was lying.

It was growing late. Lawton offered to drive me to my hotel, leaving the man in the custody of the expediters. On the way, out of curiosity, I asked: "Suppose he had succeeded? Can you revive a suspendee as easily as that, just by sticking a needle in his arm?"

Lawton grunted. "Pretty near, that and artificial respiration. One case in a hundred might need something else--heart massage or an incubator, for instance. But most of the time an antilytic shot is enough."

Then Rena had not been as mad as I thought.

I said: "And do you think that old man could have accomplished anything?"

Lawton looked at me curiously. "Maybe."

"Who do you suppose he was after?"

Lawton said off-handedly. "He was right near Bay 100, wasn't he?"

"Bay 100?" Something struck a chord; I remembered following Rena down the corridor, passing a door that was odd in some way. Was the number 100 on that door? "Is that the one that's locked off, with the sign on it that says anybody who goes in is asking for trouble?"

"That's the one. Though," he added, "nobody is going to get in. That door is triple-plate armor; the lock opens only to the personal fingerprint pattern of Defoe and two or three others."

"What's inside it that's so important?"

He said coldly, "How would I know? I can't open the door." And that was the end of the conversation. I knew _he_ was lying.

* * * * *

I had changed my bet with myself on the way. I won it. Rena was in the room waiting for me. She was sound asleep, stretched out on the bed. She looked as sober-faced and intent in her sleep as a little girl--a look I had noticed in Marianna's sleeping face once.

It was astonishing how little I thought about Marianna any more.

I considered very carefully before I rang for a bellboy, but it seemed wisest to let her sleep and take my chances with the house detective, if any. There was none, it turned out. In fact, the bellboy hardly noticed her--whether out of indifference or because he was well aware that I had signed for the room with an official travel-credit card of the Company, it didn't much matter. He succeeded in conveying, without saying a word, that the Blue Sky was the limit.

I ordered dinner, waving away the menu and telling him to let the chef decide. The chef decided well. Among other things, there was a bottle of champagne in a bucket of ice.

Rena woke up slowly at first, and then popped to a sitting position, eyes wide. I said quickly, "Everything's all right. No one saw you at the clinic."

She blinked once. In a soft voice, she said, "Thank you." She sighed a very small sigh and slipped off the bed.

I realized as Rena was washing up, comparisons were always odious, but--Well, if a strange man had found Marianna with her dress hitched halfway up her thigh, asleep on his bed, he'd have been in for something. What the "something" would be might depend on circumstances; it might be a raging order to knock before he came in, it might only be a storm of blushes and a couple of hours of meticulously prissy behavior. But she wouldn't just let it slide. And Rena, by simply disregarding it, was as modest as any girl could be.

After all, I told myself, warming to the subject, it wasn't as if I were some excitable adolescent. I could see a lovely girl's legs without getting all stirred up. For that matter, I hardly even noticed them, come to think of it. And if I _did_ notice them, it was certainly nothing of any importance; I had dismissed it casually, practically forgotten it, in fact.

She came back and said cheerfully, "I'm hungry!" And so, I realized, was I.

We started to eat without much discussion, except for the necessary talk of the table. I felt very much at ease sitting across from her, in spite of the fact that she had placed herself in opposition to the Company. I felt relaxed and comfortable; nothing bothered me. Certainly, I went on in my mind, I was as free and easy with her as with any man; it didn't matter that she was an attractive girl at all. I wasn't thinking of her in that way, only as someone who needed some help.

I came to. She was looking at me with friendly curiosity. She said, "Is that an American idiom, Tom, when you said, 'Please pass the legs'?"

* * * * *

We didn't open the champagne: it didn't seem quite appropriate. We had not discussed anything of importance while we were eating, except that I had told her about the old man; she evidently knew nothing about him. She was concerned, but I assured her he was safe with the Company--what did she think they were, barbarians? She didn't answer.

But after dinner, with our coffee, I said: "Now let's get down to business. What were you doing in the clinic?"

"I was trying to rescue my father," she said.

"Rescue, Rena? Rescue from what?"

"Tom, please. You believe in the Company, do you not?"

"Of course!"

"And I do not. We shall never agree. I am grateful to you for not turning me in, and I think perhaps I know what it cost you to do it. But that is all, Tom."

"But the Company--"

"When you speak of the Company, what is it you see? Something shining and wonderful? It is not that way with me; what I see is--rows of my friends, frozen in the vaults or the expediters and that poor old man you caught."

There was no reasoning with her. She had fixed in her mind that all the suspendees were the victims of some sinister brutality. Of course, it wasn't like that at all.

Suspension wasn't death; everyone knew that. In fact, it was the antithesis of death. It _saved_ lives by taking the maimed and sick and putting them mercifully to sleep, until they could be repaired.

True, their bodies grew cold, the lungs stopped pumping, the heart stopped throbbing; true, no doctor could tell, on sight, whether a suspendee was "alive" or "dead." The life processes were not entirely halted, but they were slowed enormously--enough so that chemical diffusion in the jellylike blood carried all the oxygen the body needed. But there was a difference: The dead were dead, whereas the suspendees could be brought back to life at any moment the Company chose.

But I couldn't make her see that. I couldn't even console her by reminding her that the old man was a mere Class E. For so was she.

I urged reasonably: "Rena, you think something is going on under the surface. Tell me about it. Why do you think your father was put in suspension?"

"To keep him out of the way. Because the Company is afraid of him."

I played a trump card: "Suppose I told you the _real_ reason he's in the vaults."

* * * * *

She was hit by that, I could tell. She was staring at me with wonder in her eyes.

"You don't have to speculate about it, Rena. I looked up his record, you see."

"You--you--"

I nodded. "It's right there in black and white. They're trying to save his life. He has radiation poisoning. He was a war casualty. It's standard medical practice in cases like his to put them in suspension for a while, until the level of radioactivity dies down and they can safely be revived. Now what do you say?"

She merely stared at me.

I pressed on persuasively: "Rena, I don't mean to call your beliefs superstitions or anything like that. Please understand me. You have your own cultural heritage and--well, I know that it looks as though he is some kind of 'undead,' or however you put it, in your folk stories. I know there are legends of vampires and zombies and so on, but--"

She was actually laughing. "You're thinking of Central Europe, Tom, not Naples. And anyway--" she was laughing only with her eyes now--"I do not believe that the legends say that vampires are produced by intravenous injections of chlorpromazine and pethidine in a lytic solution--which is, I believe, the current technique at the clinics."

I flared peevishly: "Damn it, don't you want him saved?"

The laughter was gone. She gently touched my hand. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to be a shrew and that remark wasn't kind. Must we discuss it?"

"Yes!"

"Very well." She faced me, chin out and fierce. "My father does not have radiation poisoning, Tom."

"He does."

"He does not! He is a prisoner, not a patient. He loved Naples. That's why he was put to sleep--for fifty years, or a hundred, until everything he knew and loved grows away from him and nobody cares what he has to say any more. They won't kill him--they don't have to! They just want him out of the way, because he sees the Company for what it is."

"And what is that?"

"Tyranny, Tom," she said quietly.

* * * * *

I burst out, "Rena, that's silly! The Company is the hope of the world. If you talk like that, you'll be in trouble. That's dangerous thinking, young lady. It attacks the foundations of our whole society!"

"Good! I was hoping it would!"