Beyond the picture a section of wall had been torn away. A crude false passage ran parallel to the hall; workmen were swarming around, hunting within the passage for additional concealed entrances.
“We suppose there’s some kind of emergency exit,” the foreman explained. “We’re looking for it, now.”
Verrick folded his arms and studied the photograph of John Preston. Preston had been a small man, like most cranks. He was a tiny withered leaf of a creature with prominent wrinkled ears pulled forward by his heavy hornrimmed glasses. There was a wild tangle of dark gray hair, rough and uncut and uncombed, and small, almost feminine lips. His stubbled chin was not prominent, but hard with determination. He had a crooked, lumpish nose, a jutting Adam’s apple and unsightly neck protruded from his food-stained shirt.
It was Preston’s eyes that attracted Verrick: harsh, blazing, two uncompromising steel-sharp orbs that smoldered behind his thick lenses. Preston glared out, furious with wrath, like an ancient prophet. One crabbed hand was up, fingers twisted with arthritis. It was almost a gesture of defiance, but more of _pointing_. The eyes glowered fiercely at Verrick; their aliveness startled him. Even behind the dust-thick glass of the photograph, the eyes were hot with fire and life and feverish excitement. Preston had been a bird-like cripple, a bent-over half-bund scholar, astronomer and linguist . . . _And what else?_
“We located the escape passage,” Verrick’s foreman said to him. “It leads to a cheap public sub-surface garage. They probably came and went in ordinary cars. This building seems to have been their only headquarters. They had some kind of clubs spread around Earth, but those met in private apartments and didn’t number over two or three members apiece.”
“Is everything loaded?” Verrick demanded.
“All ready to go: the crypt, the stuff we found in the building, and snap-models of the layout here, for future reference.”
Verrick followed his foreman back to the construction ship. A few moments later they were on their way back to Farben.
Herb Moore appeared immediately, as the yellowed cube was being lowered to a lab work-table. “This is his crypt?” he demanded.
“I thought you were hooked into that Pellig machinery,” Verrick said, taking off his greatcoat.
Moore ignored him and began rubbing dirt from the translucent shield that covered John Preston’s withered body. “Get this stuff off,” he ordered his technicians.
“It’s old,” one of them protested. “We have to work carefully or it’ll turn to powder.”
Moore grabbed a cutting tool and began severing the shield from its base. “Powder, hell. He probably built this thing to last a million years.”
The shield split, brittle and dry with age, Moore clawed it away and dropped it to splinter against the floor. From the opened cube a cloud of stale musty air billowed out; swirls of dust danced in the faces of Moore and his assistants and made them cough and pull back. Around the worktable vidcameras ground away, taking a permanent record of the procedure and materials examined.
Moore impatiently signalled. Two MacMillans lifted the wizened body from the hollow cube and held it suspended at eye-level on their surface of magnetic force. Moore poked at the face of the body with a pointed probe; suddenly he grabbed the right arm and yanked. The arm came off without resistance and Moore stood holding it foolishly.
The body was a plastic dummy.
“See?” he shouted. “Imitation!” He threw the arm down violently; one of the MacMillans caught it before it reached the floor. Where the arm had been attached a hollow tear gaped. The body itself was hollow. Metal ribs supported it, careful struts placed by a master builder.
Moore walked all around it, face dark and brooding, saying nothing to Verrick until he had examined it from all sides. Finally he took hold of the hair and tugged. The skull-covering came off, leaving a dully-gleaming metal hemisphere. Moore tossed the wig to one of the robots and then turned his back on the exhibit.
“It looks exactly like the photograph,” Verrick said admiringly.
Moore laughed. “Naturally! The dummy was made first and then photographed. But it’s probably about the way Preston looked.” His eyes flickered. “Looks, I mean.”
Eleanor Stevens detached herself from the watching group and approached the dummy cautiously. “But is this anything new? Your work goes much farther than this. Presumably Preston adapted the MacMillan papers the way you did. He built a,synthetic of himself the way you built Pellig.”
“What we heard,” Moore said, “was Preston’s actual voice. It was not a vocal medium artificially constructed. No two voices have the same tape-pattern. Even if he’s modeled a synthetic after his own body—”
“You think he’s still alive in his own body?” Eleanor demanded. “That isn’t possible!”
Moore didn’t answer. He was staring moodily at the dummy of John Preston; he had picked up the arm again and was mechanically pulling loose the artificial fingers one by one. The look on his face was nothing Eleanor had ever seen before.
“My synthetic,” Moore said very faintly, “will live a year. Then it deteriorates. That’s as long as it’s good for.”
“Hell!” Verrick grunted, “if we haven’t destroyed Cartwright in a year it won’t make any difference!”
“Are you sure a synthetic couldn’t be built so accurately that the aud and vidtapes would—” Eleanor began, but Moore cut her off.
“I can’t do it,” he stated flatly. There was a strange note in his voice. “If it can be done, I sure as hell don’t understand how.” Abruptly he shook himself and hurried to the door of the lab. “Pellig should be entering the teep defense network. I want to be integrated in the apparatus when that happens.”
Verrick and Eleanor Stevens followed quickly after him, the dummy of John Preston forgotten.
“This should be interesting,” Verrick said briefly, as he hurried toward his office. Anticipation gleamed from his heavy face as he rapidly snapped on the screen the ipvic technicians had set up for him. With Eleanor standing nervously behind him, Verrick prepared himself for the sight of Keith Pellig as he stepped from the intercon transport, onto the field at Batavia.
Keith Pellig took a deep breath of warm fresh air and then glanced around him.
Fluttering excitedly, Margaret Lloyd rushed down the ramp after him. “I want you to meet Walter, Mr. Pellig. He’s around somewhere. Oh, dear! All these people . . .”
The field was crowded. Commuters were getting off transports, hordes of Directorate bureaucrats were lined up for transportation home. Milling groups of passengers waiting fussily for interplan ships. There were stacks of luggage and hard-working MacMillans everywhere, and a constant din of noise and furious activity, the voices and the roar of ships, public loudspeakers, the rumble of surface cars and busses.
Al Davis noted all this, as he halted the Pellig body and waited warily for Miss Lloyd to catch up with him. The more people the better: the ocean of sound obscured his own mental personality.
“There he is,” Margaret Lloyd gasped, breasts quivering, bright-eyed and entranced by the sights. She began waving frantically. “Look, he sees us! He’s coming this way!”
A thin-faced man in his middle forties was solemnly edging through the throngs of talking, laughing, perspiring people. He looked patient and bored, a typical classified official of the Directorate, part of its vast army of desk men.
He waved to Miss Lloyd and called something, but his words were lost in the general uproar.
“We can have dinner someplace,” Miss Lloyd said to Pellig. “Do you know a place? Walter will know a place; he knows just about everything. He’s been here a long time and he’s really got to where he—” Her voice momentarily faded, as a giant truck rumbled by.
Davis wasn’t listening. He had to keep moving; he had to get rid of the chattering girl and her middle-aged companion and start toward the Directorate buildings. Down his sleeve and into his right hand poured the slender wire that fed his thumb-gun. The first sight of Cartwright, the first moment the Quizmaster appeared in front of him—a quick movement of his hand, thumb raised, the tide of pure energy released . . .
At that moment he caught sight of the expression on Walter’s face.
Al Davis blindly moved the Pellig body through the milling people, toward the street and the lines of surface cars. Walter was a teep, of course. The moment of recognition was evident as he caught Davis’ thoughts and his brief run-through of his program of assassination. A group of people separated and the Pellig body sprawled clumsily against a railing. With one bound Davis carried it over the railing and onto the sidewalk.
He glanced around . . . and felt panic. Behind him, Walter had kept on coming.
Davis started down the sidewalk. _He had to keep moving._ He came to an intersection and hurried to the other side. Surface cars honked and roared around him; he ignored them and raced on.