Master Of Life And Death Read online

  “It’s a natural, Roy. You don’t have to worry.”

  “ I want to read it beforehand!” Walton snapped.

  “Okay, okay. Don’t chew my ears off. I’ll ship it to you posthaste, man. Ease up. Pop a pill. You aren’t loose, Roy.”

  “I can’t afford to be,” Walton said.

  He broke contact and almost instantly the next call blossomed on the screen. Walton recognized the man as one of the technicians from Communications, floor twenty-three.

  “Well?”

  “We heard from McLeod again, sir. Message came in half an hour ago and we’ve been trying to reach you ever since.”

  “I wasn’t in. Give me the message.”

  The technician unfolded a slip of paper. “It says, ‘Arriving Nairobi tonight, will be in New York by morning. McLeod.’”

  “Good. Send him confirmation and tell him I’ll keep the entire morning free to see him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Oh—anything from Venus?”

  The technician shook his head emphatically. “Not a peep. We can’t make contact with Dr. Lang at all.”

  Walton frowned. He wondered what was happening to the terraforming crew up there. “Keep trying, will you? Work a twenty-four-hour-a-day schedule. Draw extra pay. But get in touch with Lang, dammit!”

  “Y-yes, sir. Anything else?”

  “No. Get off the line.”

  As the contact snapped Walton smoothly broke connection again, leaving ten more would-be callers sputtering. A row of lights a foot long indicated, their presence on the line. Walton ignored them and turned instead to his newsscreen.

  The 1400 news was on. He fiddled with the controls and saw his own face take form on the screen. He was standing outside the Cullen Building, looking right out of the screen at himself, and in the background could be seen a huddled form under a coat. The dead Herschelite.

  Walton of the screen was saying, “… The man was asking for trouble. Popeek represents the minds and hearts of the world. Herschel and his people seek to overthrow this order. I can’t condone violence of any sort, naturally, but Popeek is a sacred responsibility to me. Its enemies I must regard as blind and misguided people.”

  He was smiling into the camera, but there was something behind the smile, something cold and steely, that astonished the watching Walton. My God, he thought. Is that genuine? Have I really grown so hard?

  Apparently he had. He watched himself turn majestically and stride into the Cullen Building, stronghold of Popeek. There was definitely a commanding air about him.

  The commentator was saying, “With those heartfelt words, Director Walton goes to his desk in theCullenBuilding to carry out his weighty task. To bring life out of death, joy out of sadness—this is the job facing Popeek, and this is the sort of man to whom it has been entrusted. Roy Walton, we salute you!”

  The screen panned to a still of Director FitzMaugham. “Meanwhile,” the commentator went on, “Walton’s predecessor, the late D. F. FitzMaugham, went to his rest today. Police are still hoping to uncover the group responsible for his brutal slaying, and report a good probability of success. Tonight all channels will carry a memorial program for this great leader of humanity. D. F. FitzMaugham, hail and farewell!”

  A little sickened, Walton snapped the set off. He had to admire Lee Percy; the propaganda man had done his job well. With a minor assist from Walton by way of a spontaneous speech, Percy had contrived to gain vast quantities of precious air time for Popeek. All to the good.

  The annunciator was still blinking violently; it seemed about to explode with the weight of pent-up, frustrated calls. Walton nudged a red stud at the top and Security Chief Sellors entered the screen.

  “Sellors, sir. We’ve been looking for this Lamarre. Can’t find him anywhere.”

  “What?”

  “We checked him to his home. He got there, all right. Then he disappeared. No sign of him anywhere in the city. What now, sir?”

  Walton felt his fingers quivering. “Order a tracer sent out through all of Appalachia. No, cancel that—make it country-wide. Beam his description everywhere. Got any snaps?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get them on the air. Tell the country this man is vital to global security. Find him, Sellors.”

  “We’ll give it a try.”

  “Better than that. You’ll find him. If he doesn’t turn up within eight hours, shift the tracer to world-wide. He might be anywhere—and he has to be found!”

  Walton blanked the screen and avoided the next caller. He called his secretary and said, “Will you instruct everyone now calling me to refer their business downstairs to Assist Administrator Eglin. If they don’t want to do that, tell them to put it in writing and send it to me. I can’t accept any more calls just now.” Then he added, “Oh, put me through to Eglin myself before you let any of those calls reach him.”

  * * *

  Eglin’s face appeared on the private screen that linked the two offices. The small man looked dark-browed and harried. “This is a hell of a job, Roy,” he sighed.

  “So is mine,” Walton said. “Look, I’ve got a ton of calls on the wire, and I’m transferring them all down to you. Throw as many as you can down to the subordinates. It’s the only way to keep your sanity.”

  “Thanks. Thanks loads, Roy. All I need now is some more calls.”

  “Can’t be helped. Who’d you pick for your replacement as director of field agents?” Walton asked.

  “Lassen. I sent his dossier to you hours ago.”

  “Haven’t read it yet. Is he on the job already?”

  “Sure. He’s been there since I moved up here,” Eglin said. “What—”

  “Never mind,” said Walton. He hung up and called Lassen, the new director of field agents.

  Lassen was a boyish-looking young man with stiff sandy hair and a sternly efficient manner. Walton said, “Lassen, I want you to do a job for me. Get one of your men to make up a list of the hundred biggest private estates still unequalized. I want the names of their owners, location of the estates, acreage, and things like that. Got it?”

  “Right. When will you want it, Mr. Walton?”

  “Immediately. But I don’t want it to be a sloppy job. This is top important, double.”

  Lassen nodded. Walton grinned at him—the boy seemed to be in good control of himself—and clicked off.

  He realized that he’d been engaged in half a dozen high-power conversations without a break, over a span of perhaps twenty minutes. His heart was pounding; his feet felt numb.

  He popped a benzolurethrin into his mouth and kept on going. He would need to act fast, now that the wheels were turning. McLeod arriving the next day to report the results of the faster-than-light expedition, Lamarre missing, Fred at large and working for a conspiracy of landowners—Walton foresaw that he would be on a steady diet of tranquilizers for the next few days.

  He opened the arrival bin and pulled out a handful of paper. One thick bundle was the dossier on Lassen; Walton initialed it and tossed it unread into the Files chute. He would have to rely on Eglin’s judgment; Lassen seemed competent enough.

  Underneath that, he found the script of the FitzMaugham memorial program to be shown that evening. Walton sat back and started to skim through it.

  It was the usual sort of eulogy. He skipped rapidly past FitzMaugham’s life and great works, on to the part where Interim Director Walton appeared on the screen to speak.

  This part he read more carefully. He was very much interested in the words that Percy had placed in his mouth.

  XI

  The speech that night went over well… almost.

  Walton watched the program in the privacy of his home, sprawled out on the foamweb sofa with a drink in one hand and the text of Percy’s shooting-script in the other. The giant screen that occupied nearly half of his one unbroken wall glowed in lifelike colors.

  FitzMaugham’s career was traced with pomp and circumstance, done up in full glory: plenty
of ringing trumpet flourishes, dozens of eye-appealing color groupings, much high-pitched, tense narrative. Percy had done his job skillfully. The show was punctuated by quotations from FitzMaugham’s classic book, Breathing Space and Sanity. Key government figures drifted in and out of the narrative webwork, orating sonorously. That pious fraud, M. Seymour Lanson, President of the United States, delivered a flowery speech; the old figurehead was an artist at his one function, speechmaking. Walton watched, spellbound. Lee Percy was a genius in his field; there was no denying that.

  Finally, toward the end of the hour, the narrator said, “The work of Popeek goes on, though its lofty-minded creator lies dead at an assassin’s hand. Director FitzMaugham had chosen as his successor a young man schooled in the ideals of Popeek. Roy Walton, we know, will continue the noble task begun by D. F. FitzMaugham.”

  For the second time that day Walton watched his own face appear on a video screen. He glanced down at the script in his hand and back up at the screen. Percy’s technicians had done a brilliant job. The Walton-image on the screen looked so real that the Walton on the couch almost believed he had actually delivered this speech— although he knew it had been cooked up out of some rearranged stills and a few brokendown phonemes with his voice characteristics.

  It was a perfectly innocent speech. In humble tones he expressed his veneration for the late director, his hopes that he would be able to fill the void left by the death of FitzMaugham, his sense of Popeek as a sacred trust. Half-listening, Walton began to skim the script.

  Startled, Walton looked down at the script. He didn’t remember having encountered any such lines on his first reading, and he couldn’t find them now. “This morning,” the pseudo-Walton on the screen went on, “we received contact from outer space! From a faster-than-light ship sent out over a year ago to explore our neighboring stars.

  “News of this voyage has been withheld until now for security reasons. But it is my great pleasure to tell you tonight that the stars have at last been reached by man… A new world waits for us out there, lush, fertile, ready to be colonized by the brave pioneers of tomorrow!”

  Walton stared aghast at the screen. His simulacrum had returned now to the script as prepared, but he barely listened.

  He was thinking that Percy had let the cat out for sure. It was a totally unauthorized newsbreak. Numbly, Walton watched the program come to its end, and wondered what the repercussions would be once the public grasped all the implications.

  * * *

  He was awakened at 0600 by the chiming of his phone. Grumpily he climbed from bed, snapped on the receiver, switched the cutoff on the picture sender in order to hide his sleep-rumpled appearance, and said, “This is Walton. Yes?”

  A picture formed on the screen: a heavily-tanned man in his late forties, stocky, hair close-cropped. “Sorry to roust you this way, old man. I’m McLeod.”

  Walton came fully awake in an instant. “McLeod? Where are you?”

  “Out on Long Island. I just pulled into the airport half a moment ago. Traveled all night after dumping the ship at Nairobi.”

  “You made a good landing, I hope?”

  “The best. The ship navigates like a bubble.” McLeod frowned worriedly. “They brought me the early-morning telefax while I was having breakfast. I couldn’t help reading all about the speech you made last night.”

  “Oh. I—”

  “Quite a crasher of a speech,” McLeod went on evenly. “But don’t you think it was a little premature of you to release word of my flight? I mean—”

  “It was quite premature,” Walton said. “A member of my staff inserted that statement into my talk without my knowledge. He’ll be disciplined for it.”

  A puzzled frown appeared on McLeod’s face. “But you made that speech with your own lips! How can you blame it on a member of your staff?”

  “The science that can send a ship to Procyon and back within a year,” Walton said, “can also fake a speech. But I imagine we’ll be able to cover up the pre-release without too much trouble.”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” said McLeod. He shrugged apologetically. “You see, that planet’s there, all right. But it happens to be the property of alien beings who live on the next world. And they’re not so happy about having Earth come crashing into their system to colonize!”

  Somehow Walton managed to hang onto his self-control, even with this staggering news crashing about him. “You’ve been in contact with these beings?” he asked.

  McLeod nodded. “They have a translating gadget. We met them, yes.”

  Walton moistened his lips. “I think there’s going to be trouble,” he said. “I think I may be out of a job, too.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Just thinking out loud,” Walton said. “Finish your breakfast and meet me at my office at 0900. We’ll talk this thing out then.”

  * * *

  Walton was in full command of himself by the time he reached the Cullen Building.

  He had read the morning telefax and heard the news-blares: they all screamed the sum and essence of Walton’s speech of the previous night, and a few of the braver telefax outfits went as far as printing a resume of the entire speech, boiled down to Basic, of course, for benefit of that substantial segment of the reading public that was most comfortable while moving its lips. The one telefax outfit most outspokenly opposed to Popeek, Citizen, took great delight in giving the speech full play, and editorializing on a subsequent sheet against the “veil of security” hazing Popeek operations.

  Walton read the Citizen editorial twice, savoring its painstaking simplicities of expression. Then he clipped it out neatly and shot it down the chute to public relations, marked Attention: Lee Percy.

  “There’s a Mr. McLeod waiting to see you,” his secretary informed him. “He says he has an appointment.”

  “Send him in,” Walton said. “And have Mr. Percy come up here also.”

  While he waited for McLeod to arrive, Walton riffled through the rest of the telefax sheets. Some of them praised Popeek for having uncovered a new world; others damned it for having hidden news of the faster-than-light drive so long. Walton stacked them neatly in a heap at the edge of his desk.

  In the bleak, dark hours of the morning, he had expected to be compelled to resign. Now, he realized, he could immeasurably strengthen his own position if he could control the flow of events and channel them properly.

  The square figure of McLeod appeared on the screen. Walton admitted him.

  “Sir. I’m McLeod.”

  “Of course. Won’t you sit down?”

  McLeod was tense, stiffly formal, very British in his reserve and general bearing. Walton gestured uneasily, trying to cut through the crackle of nervousness.

  “We seem to have a mess on our hands,” he said. “But there’s no mess so messy we can’t muddle through it, eh?”

  “If we have to, sir. But I can’t help feeling this could all have been avoided.”

  “No. You’re wrong, McLeod. If it could have been avoided, it would have been avoided. The fact that some idiot in my public relations department gained access to my wire and found out you were returning is incontrovertible; it happened, despite precautions.”

  “Mr. Percy to see you,” the annunciator said.

  The angular figure of Lee Percy appeared on the screen. Walton told him to come in.

  Percy looked frightened—terrified, Walton thought. He held a folded slip of paper loosely in one hand.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “Good morning, Lee.” Walton observed that the friendly Roy had changed to the formal salutation, sir. “Did you get the clipping I sent you?”

  “Yes, sir.” Glumly.

  “Lee, this is Leslie McLeod, chief of operations of our successful faster-than-light project. Colonel McLeod, I want you to meet Lee Percy. He’s the man who masterminded our little newsbreak last night.”

  Percy flinched visibly. He stepped forward and laid his slip of paper on Walton�
�s desk. “I m-made a m-mistake last night,” he stammered. “I should never have released that break.”

  “Damned right you shouldn’t have,” Walton agreed, carefully keeping any hint of severity from his voice. “You have us in considerable hot water, Lee. That planet isn’t ours for colonization, despite the enthusiasm with which I allegedly announced it last night. And you ought to be clever enough to realize it’s impossible to withdraw and deny good news once you’ve broken it.”

  “The planet’s not ours? But—?”

  “According to Colonel McLeod,” Walton said, “the planet is the property of intelligent alien beings who live on a neighboring world, and who no more care to have their system overrun by a pack of Earthmen than we would to have extrasolar aliens settle on Mars.”

  “Sir, that sheet of paper…” Percy said in a choked voice. “It’s—it’s—”

  Walton unfolded it. It was Percy’s resignation. He read the note carefully twice, smiled, and laid it down. Now was his time to be magnanimous.

  “Denied,” he said. “We need you on our team, Lee. I’m authorizing a ten percent pay-cut for one week, effective yesterday, but there’ll be no other penalty.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He’s crawling to me, Walton thought in amazement. He said, “Only don’t pull that stunt again, or I’ll not only fire you but blacklist you so hard you won’t be able to find work between here and Procyon. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay. Go back to your office and get to work. And no more publicity on this faster-than-light thing until I authorize it. No—cancel that. Get out a quick release, a followup on last night. A smoke screen, I mean. Cook up so much cloudy verbiage about the conquest of space that no one bothers to remember anything of what I said. And play down the colonization angle!”

  “I get it, sir.” Percy grinned feebly.

  “I doubt that,” Walton snapped. “When you have the release prepared, shoot it up here for my okay. And heaven help you if you deviate from the text I see by as much as a single comma!”