‘I’m not confused,’ Eric said, after a pause.
‘Then you know your duty. You’re the artiforg man, aren’t you? The top org-trans surgeon … I read about you in Time, I think. Don’t you think Time is a highly informative magazine in all fields? I read it from cover to cover every week, especially the medical and scientific sections.’
Eric said, ‘Do – you go to school?’
‘I graduated. High school, not college; I’ve got no interest in what they call “higher learning.”‘
‘What did you want to be?’
‘What do you mean?’ She eyed him suspiciously.
‘I mean what career did you intend to enter?’
‘I don’t need a career.’
‘But you didn’t know that; you had no way of telling you’d wind up—’ He gestured. ‘Be here at the White House.’
‘Sure I did. I always knew, all my life. Since I was three.’
‘How?’
‘I was – I am – one of those precogs. I could tell the future.’ Her tone was calm.
‘Can you still do it?’
‘Sure.’
‘Then you don’t need to ask me why I’m here; you can look ahead and see what I do.’
‘What you do,’ Mary said, ‘isn’t that important; it doesn’t register.’ She smiled then, showing beautiful, regular, white teeth.
‘I can’t believe that,’ he said, nettled.
‘Then be your own precog; don’t ask me what I know if you’re not interested in the results. Or not able to accept them. This is a cutthroat environment, here at the White House; a hundred people are clamoring to get Gino’s attention all the time, twenty-four hours a day. You have to fight your way through the throngs. That’s why Gino gets sick – or rather pretends to be sick.’
‘”Pretends,”‘ Eric said.
‘He’s an hysteric; you know, where they think they have illnesses but really don’t. It’s his way of keeping people off his back; he’s just too sick to deal with them.’ She laughed merrily. ‘You know that – you’ve examined him. He doesn’t actually have anything.’
‘Have you read the file?’
‘Sure.’
‘Then you know that Gino Molinari has had cancer at three separate occasions.’
‘So what?’ She gestured. ‘Hysterical cancer.’
‘In the medical profession no such—’
‘Which are you going to believe, your textbooks or what you see with your own eyes?’ She studied him intently. ‘If you expect to survive here you better become a realist; you better learn to detect facts when you meet up with them. You think Teagarden is glad you’re here? You’re a menace to his status; he’s already begun trying to find ways to discredit you – or haven’t you noticed?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I haven’t noticed.’
‘Then you haven’t got a chance. Teagarden will have you out of here so fast—’ She broke off. Ahead lay the sick man’s door and the two rows of Secret Service men. ‘You know why Gino has those pains actually? So he can be pampered. So people will wait on him as if he’s a baby; he wants to be a baby again so he won’t have grownup responsibilities. See?’
‘Theories like that,’ Eric said, ‘sound so perfect, they’re so glib, so easy to say—’
‘But true,’ Mary said. ‘In this case.’ She pushed past the Secret Service men, opened the door, and entered. Going up to Gino’s bed, she gazed down at him and said, ‘Get on your feet, you big lazy bastard.’
Opening his eyes, Gino stirred leadenly. ‘Oh. It’s you. Sorry, but I—’
‘Sorry nothing,’ Mary said in a sharp voice. ‘You’re not sick. Get up! I’m ashamed of you; everybody’s ashamed of you. You’re just scared and acting like a baby – how do you expect me to respect you when you act like this?’
After a time Gino said, ‘Maybe I don’t expect you to.’ He seemed depressed more than anything else by the girl’s tirade. Now he made out Eric. ‘You hear her, doctor?’ he said gloomily. ‘Nobody can stop her; she comes in here when I’m dying and talks to me like that – maybe that’s the reason I’m dying.’ He rubbed his stomach gingerly. ‘I don’t feel them right now. I think that shot you gave me did it; what was in that?’
Not the shot, Eric thought, but the surgery downstairs on McNeil. Your complaint is gone because an assistant cook on the White House staff now has an artiforg heart. I was right.
‘If you’re okay—’ Mary began.
‘Okay,’ Molinari sighed. ‘I’ll get up; just leave me alone, will you, for chrissake?’ He stirred about, struggling to get from the bed. ‘Okay — I’ll get up; will that satisfy you?’ His voice rose to a shout of anger.
Turning to Eric, Mary Reineke said, ‘You see? I can get him out of bed; I can put him back on his feet like a man.’
‘Congratulations,’ Gino murmured sourly as he shakily rose to a standing position. ‘I don’t need a medical staff; all I need is you. But I noticed it was Dr Sweetscent here who got rid of my pains, not you. What did you ever do but bawl me out? If I’m back up it’s because of him.’ He passed by her, to the closet for his robe.
‘He resents me,’ Mary said to Eric. ‘But underneath he knows I’m right.’ She seemed perfectly placid and sure of herself; she stood with her arms folded, watching the Secretary as he tied the sash of his blue robe and got on his deerskin slippers.
‘Big-time,’ Molinari muttered to Eric, jerking his head at Mary. ‘She runs things – according to her.’
‘Do you have to do what she says?’ Eric inquired.
Molinari laughed. ‘Sure. Don’t I?’
‘What happens if you don’t? Does she make the heavens fall?’
‘Yes, she pulls down everything.’ Molinari nodded. ‘It’s a psionic talent she has … it’s called being a woman. Like your wife Kathy. I’m glad to have her around; I like her. I don’t care if she bawls me out – after all, I did get out of bed and it didn’t hurt me; she was right.’
‘I always know when you’re malingering,’ Mary said.
‘Come with me, doctor,’ Molinari said to Eric. There’s something they’ve set up for me to watch; I want you to see it too.’
Trailed by Secret Service men, they crossed the corridor and entered a guarded, locked room which Eric realized was a projection chamber; the far wall consisted of a permanent vidscreen installation on a grand scale.
‘Me making a speech,’ Molinari explained to Eric as they seated themselves. He signaled and a video tape began to roll, projected on the large screen. ‘It’ll be delivered tomorrow night, over all the TV networks. I want your opinion on it in advance, in case there’s anything I should change.’ He glanced slyly at Eric, as if there was more he was not saying.
Why would he want my opinion? Eric wondered as he watched the image of the UN Secretary fill the screen. The Mole in full military regalia as C-in-C of Terra’s armed forces: medals and arm bands and ribbons and, above all, the stiff marshal’s hat with its visor partly shielding the round, heavy-jowled face so that only the lower part, the grimy chin, was visible with its disconcertingly harsh scowl.
And the jowls, unaccountably, were not flabby; they had become, for no reason which Eric could conjure up, firm and determined. It was a rocklike, severe face which showed on the screen, stern and strengthened by inner authority that Eric had not seen before in the Mole … or had he?
Yes, he thought. But it had been years ago, when the Mole had first taken office, when he had been younger and there had not been the crushing responsibility. And now, on the screen, the Mole spoke. And his voice – it was the old original voice from past times; it was exactly as it had been, a decade ago, before this terrible, losing war.
Chuckling, Molinari said from the deep, foam-rubber chair in which he lounged beside Eric, ‘I look pretty good, don’t I?’
‘You do.’ The speech rolled on, sonorous, even containing, now and then, a trace of the awesome, the majestic. And it was precisely this which Molinari had lost: he had become pitiable. On the screen the mature, dignified man in military garb expressed himself clearly in a voice that snapped out its sentences without hesitancy; the UN Secretary, in the video tape, demanded and informed, did not beg, did not turn to the electorate of Terra for help … he told them what to do in this period of crisis. And that was as it should be. But how had it been done? How did the pleading, hypochondriacal invalid, suffering from his eternal half-killing complaints, rise up and do this? Eric was mystified.
Beside him Molinari said, ‘It’s a fake. That’s not me.’ He grinned with delight as Eric stared first at him and then at the screen.