“I’m not.” Eleanor halted at the window and stood gazing moodily out at the streets and ramps below. “They’ll be shrilling, soon. It won’t be long now.” She reached up jerkily and ran her thin fingers over her temples. “God, maybe I made a mistake. But it’s over; there’s nothing I can do.”
“It was a mistake,” Wakeman agreed. “When you’re a little older, you’ll realize how much of a mistake.”
A flash of fear slithered over the girl’s face. “I’ll never leave Verrick. I have to stay with him!”
“Why?”
“I’ll be safe. Hell take care of me; he always has.”
“The Corps will protect you.”
“I don’t want to have anything to do with the Corps.” Her red lips drew back against her even white teeth. “My _family_. My willing uncle Peter—up for sale, like his Hills.” She indicated Benteley. “And he thinks he won’t find it here.”
“It’s not a question of sale,” Wakeman said. “It’s a principle. The Corps is above man.”
“The Corps is a fixture, like this desk.” Eleanor scraped her long nails against the surface of the desk. “You buy all the furniture, the desk, the lights, the ipvics, the Corps.” Disgust glowed in her eyes. “A Prestonite, is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“No wonder you’re anxious to see him. In a morbid way I suppose I’m curious, too. Like I would be about some sort of bizarre animal from one of the colony planets.”
At the desk, Benteley roused himself from his thoughts. “All right,” he said aloud. “I’m ready.”
“Fine.” Eleanor slipped behind the desk, one hand raised, the other on the bust. “You know the oath? Do you need help?”
Benteley knew the fealty oath by heart, but gnawing doubt slowed him almost to a halt. Wakeman stood examining his nails and looking disapproving and bored, a small negative field of radiation. Eleanor Stevens watched avidly, her face intense with a complex series of emotions that altered each moment. With a growing conviction that things were not right, Benteley began reciting his fealty oath to the small plastic bust.
As he was halfway through, the doors of the office slid back and a group of men entered noisily. One towered over the rest; he was a huge man, lumbering and broad-shouldered, with a gray, weathered face and thick iron-streaked hair. Reese Verrick, surrounded by those of his staff in personal fealty to him, halted as he saw the procedure taking place at the desk.
Wakeman glanced up and caught Verrick’s eye. He smiled faintly and said nothing; but his attitude clearly showed. Eleanor Stevens had turned rigid as stone. Cheeks flushed, body taut with feeling, she waited out Benteley’s uneasy words. As soon as he had finished, she snapped into life. She carefully hurried the plastic bust out of the office and then returned, hand held out.
“I want your p-card, Mr. Benteley. We have to have it.”
Benteley, numbed, turned over his card. There it went, once again.
“Who’s this fellow?” Verrick rumbled, with a wave toward Benteley.
“He swore on just now. An 8-8.” Eleanor nervously grabbed up her things from the desk; between her breasts her good luck charms dangled and vibrated excitedly. “I’ll get my coat.”
“8-8? Biochemist?” Verrick eyed Benteley with interest. “Is he any good?”
“He’s all right,” Wakeman said. “What I teeped seemed to be top-notch.”
Eleanor hurriedly slammed the closet door, threw her coat around her bare shoulders, and stuffed her pockets full. “He just came in, from Oiseau-Lyre.” She rushed breathlessly up to join the group clustered around Verrick. “He doesn’t know, yet.”
Verrick’s heavy face was wrinkled with fatigue and worry, but a faint spark of amusement lit his deep-set eyes, the hard gray orbs far down in the ridge of thick brow-bone. “The last crumbs, for awhile. The rest goes to Cartwright, the Prestonite.” He addressed Benteley, “What’s your name?”
They shook hands, as Benteley mumbled his name. Verrick’s massive hand crunched his bones in a death-grip as Benteley feebly asked, “Where are we going? I thought—”
“Farben Hill.” Verrick and his group moved toward the exit ramp, all but Wakeman who remained behind to await the new Quizmaster. To Eleanor Stevens, Verrick explained briefly, “We’ll operate from there. The lock I put on Farben last year was to me personally. I can still claim loyalty there, in spite of this.”
“In spite of what?” Benteley demanded, suddenly horrified. The outside doors were open; bright sunlight flooded down on them, mixed with the roar of street noises. For the first time the cries of the newsmachines burst up loudly to his ears. As the party moved down the ramp toward the field and the waiting intercon transports, Benteley demanded hoarsely, _”What’s happened?”_
“Come on,” Verrick grunted. “You’ll know all about it, before long. We’ve got too much work ahead to stand around here talking.”
Benteley slowly followed the party, the copper taste of horror thick in his mouth. He knew, now. It was being shrilled on all sides of him, screamed out by the excited mechanical voices of the public newsmachines.
“Verrick quacked!” the machines cried, as they moved among the groups of people. “Prestonite bottled to One! A twitch of the bottle this morning at nine-thirty Batavia time! Verrrrrick totally quaaaaaackedl”
The random power-twitch had come, the event the harbingers had anticipated. Verrick had been twitched from the number One position; he was no longer Quizmaster. He had plunged to the bottom, out of the Directorate completely.
And Benteley had sworn an oath to him.
It was too late to turn back. He was on his way to the Farben Hill. All of them were caught up together in the rush of events that was shivering through the nine-planet system like a breathless winter storm.
TWO
EARLY in the morning Leon Cartwright drove carefully along the narrow, twisting streets in his ancient ’82 Chevrolet, his competent hands firmly gripping the wheel, his eyes on the traffic ahead. As usual, he wore an outmoded but immaculate double-breasted suit. A shapeless hat was crushed against his head, and in his vest pocket a watch ticked to itself. Everything about him breathed obsolescence and age; he was perhaps sixty, a lean, sinewy-built man, very tall and straight, but small-boned, with mild blue eyes and liver-spotted wrists. His arms were thin, but strong and wiry. He had a quiet, almost gentle expression on his gaunt face. He drove as if not completely trusting either himself or the aged car.
In the back seat lay heaps and stacks of mailing-tapes ready to be sent out. The floor sagged under heavy bundles of metalfoil to be imprinted and franked. An old raincoat was wadded in the corner, together with a stale container of lunch and a number of discarded overshoes. Wedged under the seat was a loaded Hopper popper, stuck there years ago.
The buildings on both sides of Cartwright were old and faded, thin peeling things of dusty windows and drab neon signs. They were relics of the last century, like himself and his car. Drab men, in faded pants and workjackets, hands in their pockets, eyes blank and unfriendly, lounged in doorways and against walls. Dumpy middle-aged women in shapeless black coats dragged rickety shopping carts into dark stores, to pick fretfully over the limp merchandise, stale food to be lugged back to their stuffy urine-tinged apartments, to their restless families.
Mankind’s lot, Cartwright observed, hadn’t changed much, of late. The Classification system, the elaborate Quizzes, hadn’t done most people any good. The unks, the unclassified, remained.
In the early twentieth century the problem of production had been solved; after that it was the problem of consumption that plagued society. In the 1950’s and ’60’s, consumer commodities and farm products began to pile up in vast towering mountains all over the Western World. As much as possible was given away—but that threatened to subvert the open market. By 1980, the pro tem solution was to heap up the products and burn them: billions of dollars worth, week after week.
Each Saturday, townspeople had collected in sullen, resentful crowds to watch the troops squirt gasoline on the cars and toasters and clothes and oranges and coffee and cigarettes that nobody could buy, igniting them in a blinding conflagration. In each town there was a burning-place, fenced off, a kind of rubbish and ash heap, where the fine things that could not be purchased were systematically destroyed.
The Quizzes had helped, a trifle. If people couldn’t afford to buy the expensive manufactured goods, they could still hope to win them. The economy was propped up for decades by elaborate give-away devices that dispensed tons of glittering merchandise. But for every man who won a car and a refrigerator and a tv set there were millions who didn’t. Gradually, over the years, prizes in the Quizzes grew from material commodities to more realistic items: power and prestige. And at the top, the final exalted post: dispenser of power—Quizmaster, and that meant running the Quiz itself.