‘Has she been shown the video tape of the healthy Molinari?’
Festenburg glanced up swiftly. ‘A wise thought. Has Mary seen the tape? Yes, maybe or no – check one. Not to my knowledge. But if you suppose my alternate-present theory, and that it’s not a robant on that tape, if it’s a human being, that magnetic, fire-eating, striving demigod, and if Mary catches sight of it – you can assume the following: the other Molinaris will disappear. Because what you saw on that tape is exactly what Mary Reineke wants — insists — that Gino be.’
It was an extraordinary thought. Eric wondered if Gino was aware of this aspect of the situation; if so, it might explain why he had waited so long to employ this tactic.
‘I wonder,’ he said to Festenburg, ‘how the sick Gino, whom we know, could be a robant, in view of Mary Reineke’s existence.’
‘How so? Why not?’
‘To put it in delicate terms … wouldn’t Mary be somewhat peeved by being the mistress of a product of GRS Enterprises?’
‘I’m getting tired, doctor,’ Festenburg said. ‘Let’s write finis to this discussion – you go and fix up your swinkly new conapt which they’ve donated to you for your loyal services here at Cheyenne.’ He moved toward the door; the two top-position Secret Service men stepped aside.
Eric said, ‘I’ll give you one opinion of my own. Having met Gino Molinari I refuse to believe GRS could construct something so human and—’
‘But you haven’t met the one they filmed,’ Festenburg said quietly. ‘It’s interesting, doctor. By drawing on himself from the alternates contained in the mishmash of time Gino may have collected an ensemble capable of facing the ally. Three or four Gino Molinaris, forming a committee, would be rather formidable… don’t you agree? Think of the combined ingenuity; think of the harebrained, clever, wild schemes they could hatch up working collectively.’ As he opened the door he added, ‘You’ve met the sick one and glimpsed the well one – weren’t you impressed?’
‘Yes,’ Eric admitted.
‘Would you now vote with those who want to see him sacked? And yet when you try to pin down what he’s actually done that’s so impressive – it isn’t there. If we were winning the war, or forcing back Lilistar’s investment of our planet… but we’re not. So what is it specifically, doctor, that Gino’s done that so impresses you? Tell me.’ He waited.
‘I – guess I can’t say specifically. But—’
A White House employee, a uniformed robant, appeared and confronted Eric Sweetscent. ‘Secretary Molinari has been looking for you, doctor. He’s waiting to see you in his office; I’ll lead the way.’
‘Oops,’ Festenburg said, chagrined and all at once quite nervous. ‘Evidently I kept you too long.’
Without a further exchange Eric followed the robant up the corridor to the elevator. This was probably important; he had that intuition.
In his office Molinari sat in a wheel chair, a blanket over his lap, his face gray and sunken. ‘Where were you?’ he said, as Eric came into sight. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter; listen, doctor – ‘Starmen have called a conference and I want you to be with me while I attend. I want you to be on hand constantly, just in case. I’m not feeling well and I wish this damn get-together could be avoided or at least postponed for a few weeks. But they insist.’ He began to wheel himself from the office. ‘Come on. It’s going to start any time.’
‘I met Don Festenburg.’
‘Brilliant rat, isn’t he? I put complete faith in our eventual success in him. What did he show you?’
It seemed unreasonable to tell Molinari that he had been viewing his corpse, especially in view of the fact that the man had just now said he did not feel well. So Eric merely said, ‘He took me around the building.’
‘Festenburg has the run of the place – because of the trust I put in him.’ At a bend in the corridor a gang of stenographers, translators, State Department officials, and armed guards met Molinari; his wheel chair disappeared into the corporate body and did not reappear. Eric, however, could still hear him talking away, explaining what lay ahead. ‘Freneksy is here. So this is going to be rough. I have an idea what they want, but we’ll have to wait and see. Better not to anticipate; that way you do their work for them, you sort of turn on yourself and do yourself in.’
Freneksy, Eric thought with a sensation of dread. Lilistar’s Prime Minister, here personally on Terra.
No wonder Molinari felt sick.
NINE
The members of Terra’s delegation to the hastily called conference occupied seats on one side of the long oak table, and now, on the far side, the personages from Lilistar began to emerge from side corridors and find chairs. As a whole they did not look sinister; they looked, in fact, overworked and harried, caught up, as was Terra, by the strain of conducting the war. Obviously they had no time to spare. They were clearly mortal.
‘Translation,’ a ‘Starman said in English, ‘will be done by human agency not by machine, as any machine might make a permanent record, which is contrary to our desires here.’
Molinari grunted, nodded.
Now Freneksy appeared; the ‘Star delegation and several members of the Terran rose in a show of respect; the ‘Starmen clapped their hands as the bald, lean, oddly round-skulled man took a chair at the center of the delegation and began without preliminaries to open a briefcase of documents.
But his eyes. Eric noticed that, as Freneksy glanced briefly up at Molinari and smiled in greeting, Freneksy had what Eric thought of – and recognized in his practice as – paranoid eyes. Once he had learned to spot this, future identification generally came easy. This was not the glittering, restless stare of ordinary suspicion; this was a motionless gaze, a gathering of the totality of faculties within to comprise a single undisturbed psychomotor concentration. Freneksy did not decide to do this; in fact he was helpless, compelled to confront his compatriots and adversaries alike in this fashion, with this unending ensnaring fixity. It was an attentiveness which made empathic understanding impossible; the eyes did not reflect any inner reality; they gave back to the viewer exactly what he himself was. The eyes stopped communication dead; they were a barrier that could not be penetrated this side of the tomb.
Freneksy was not a bureaucrat and he did not – could not even if he tried – subordinate himself to his office. Freneksy remained a man – in the bad sense; he retained, in the midst of the busy activity of official conduct, the essence of the purely personal, as if to him everything was deliberate and intentional – a contest between people, not one between abstract or ideal issues.
What Minister Freneksy does, Eric realized, is to deprive all the others of the sanctity of their office. Of the security-producing reality of their titled position. Facing Freneksy, they became as they were born: isolated and individual, unsupported by the institutions which they were supposed to represent.
Take Molinari. Customarily, the Mole was the UN Secretary; he as an individual had – and properly so – dissolved into his function. But facing Minister Freneksy, the naked, hapless, lonely man reemerged – and was required to stand up to the Minister in this unhappy infinitude. The normal relative-ness of existence, lived with others in a fluctuating state of more or less adequate security, had vanished.
Poor Gino Molinari, Eric thought. Because facing Freneksy the Mole might as well not have become UN Secretary. And meanwhile Minister Freneksy became even more cold, more lifeless; he did not burn with the desire to destroy or dominate: he merely took away what his antagonist possessed – and left him nothing and nowhere, literally.
It was perfectly clear to Eric, at this point, why Molinari’s procession of lethal illnesses had not proved fatal. The illnesses were not merely a symptom of the stress under which he lay; they were simultaneously a solution to that stress.
He could not as yet make out quite precisely how the illnesses behaved in order to function as a response to Freneksy. But he had the deep and acute intuition that he would very soon; the confrontation between Freneksy and Molinari lay only moments away, and everything which the Mole had would have to be trotted out, if the Mole wished to survive.
Beside Eric a minor State Department official muttered, ‘Oppressive in here, isn’t it? Wish they’d open a window or turn on the vent system.’
Eric thought, No mechanical vent system will clear this air. Because the oppression emanates from those seated across from us and it will not depart until they depart – and perhaps not even then.
Leaning toward Eric, Molinari said, ‘Sit here beside me.’ He drew the chair back. ‘Listen, doctor, do you have your bag of instruments with you?’