Moore began pacing around, cheeks flushed with excitement, gesturing vividly, highly animated by the flow of words beginning to pour out of his mouth. “Reese Verrick was Quizmaster ten years. He was Challenged daily and he met every Challenge. Essentially, Verrick is a skilled leader. He operated this job with more knowledge and ability than all the Quizmasters before him put together.”
“Except McRae,” Shaeffer pointed out, as he entered the lounge. “Don’t forget him.” He warmed up quickly. “Good old McRae.”
Cartwright felt sick at his stomach. He threw himself down in one of the soft chairs and lay wearily back as it adjusted to his weight and posture. The argument continued without him; the rapid words that flowed between the two teeps and Verrick’s bright young man were remote and dreamlike. He tried to concentrate on the reasonings, but they didn’t appear to concern him.
In many ways Herb Moore was right. He had blundered into somebody else’s office, position, and problems. He wondered vaguely where the ship was. Unless something had gone wrong it would soon be heading out toward Mars and the asteroid belt. Hadn’t customs fallen behind already? He examined his watch. The ship was gaining velocity at this very moment.
Moore’s sharp voice brought him back. He sat up straight and opened his eyes. “All right!” Moore was saying excitedly. “The word’s gone out on the ipvic. The Convention will probably be held at the Westinghouse Hill; there’s more hotel space there.”
“Yes,” Wakeman was saying tightly. “That’s the usual place for the murderers to collect. There’s plenty of rooms at low rates.”
Wakeman and Moore were discussing the Challenge Convention.
Cartwright got unsteadily to his feet. “I want to talk to Moore. You two clear out of here. Go someplace else.”
The teeps conferred silently, then moved toward the door. “Be careful,” Wakeman warned him. “You’ve had a lot of emotional shocks today. Your thalamic index is too high.”
Cartwright closed the door after them and turned to face Moore. “Now we can get this settled once and for all.”
Moore smiled confidently. “Anything you say, Mr. Cartwright. You’re the boss.”
“I’m not your boss.”
“No, that’s so. A few of us stayed loyal to Reese. A few of us didn’t let him down.”
“You must think a lot of him.”
Moore’s expression showed that he did. “Reese Verrick is a big man, Mr. Cartwright. He’s done a lot of big things. He works on a vast scale.” He glowed happily. “He’s fully rational.”
“What do you want me to do? Give him back his position?” Cartwright heard his own voice waver with emotion. “I’m not giving this up. I don’t care how irrational this is. I’m here and I’m staying here. You can’t intimidate mel You can’t laugh me out!”
His voice echoed; he was shouting. He forced himself to calm down. Herb Moore smiled brightly and basked in his own warmth.
He’s young enough to be my son, Cartwright found himself thinking. He can’t be over thirty, and I’m sixty-three. He’s just a boy, a child prodigy. Cartwright tried to keep his hands from shaking, but he couldn’t. He was excited, too excited. He could hardly speak. He was all wrought up. And he was afraid.
“You can’t operate this,” Moore said quietly. “This isn’t your line. What are you? I examined the records. You were born October 5, 2140, outside the Imperial Hill. You’ve lived there all your life; this is the first time you’ve been on this side of Earth, let alone on another planet. You had ten years of nominal schooling in the charity department of the Imperial Hill. You never excelled in anything. From high school on you dropped courses that dealt with symbolization and took manual shop courses. You took welding and electronic repair, that sort of thing. You tried printing, for awhile. After you got out of school you worked in a turret factory as a mechanic. You designed a few circuit improvements in plimp board design, but the Directorate rejected your patents as trivial.”
“The improvements,” Cartwright said with difficulty, “were incorporated in the bottle itself, a year later.”
“From then on you were bitter. You serviced the bottle at Geneva and saw your own designs in operation. You tried over five thousand times to win a classification, but you never had enough theoretical knowledge. When you were forty-nine you gave up. When you were fifty you joined this crackpot outfit, this Preston Society.”
“I had been attending meetings six years.”
“There weren’t many members at the time, and you finally were elected president of the Society. You put all your money and time into the crazy thing. It’s become your driving conviction, your mania.” Moore beamed happily, as if cracking an intricate equation. “And now you hold this position, quizmaster, over a whole race, billions of people, endless quantities of men and material, maybe the sole civilization in the universe. And you see all this only as a means of expanding your Society.”
Cartwright choked futilely.
“What are you going to do?” Moore persisted. “Print a few trillion copies of Preston’s tracts? Distribute immense 3-D pictures of him and spread them all over the system? Supply statues, vast museums full of his clothing, false teeth, shoes, fingernail parings, buttons, shrines for the faithful to visit? You already have one monument to go to: his worldly remains, in a broken-down wooden building in the Imperial slums, his bones on exhibit, the remains of the saint, to be touched and prayed over.
“Is that what you’re planning: a new religion, a new god to worship? Are you going to organize vast fleets of ships, send out endless armadas to search for his mystic planet?” Moore saw Cartwright flinch white; he plowed on, “Are we all going to spend our time combing space for his Flame Disc, or whatever he called it? Remember Robin Pitt, Quizmaster number thirty-four. He was nineteen years old, a homosexual, a psychotic. He lived with his mother and sister all his life. He read ancient books, painted pictures, wrote psychiatric stream-of-consciousness material.”
“Poetry.”
“He was Quizmaster one week; then the Challenge got him—thank God. He was wandering around the jungle back of these buildings, gathering wild flowers and writing sonnets. You’ve read about that. Maybe you were alive; you’re certainly old enough.”
“I was thirteen when he was murdered.”
“Remember what he had planned for mankind? Think back. Why does the Challenge-process exist? The whole bottle system is to protect us; it elevates and deprives at random, chooses random individuals at random intervals. Nobody can gain power and hold it; nobody knows what his status will be next year, next week. Nobody can plan to be a dictator: it comes and goes according to subatomic random particles. The Challenge protects us from something else. It protects us from incompetents, from fools and madmen. We’re completely safe: no despots and no crackpots.”
“I’m not a crackpot,” Cartwright muttered hoarsely. The sound of his own voice amazed him. It was weak and forlorn, without conviction. Moore’s broad smile increased; there was no doubt in his mind. “It’ll take me awhile to adjust,” he finished lamely. “I need time.”
“You think you can adjust?” Moore asked.
“Yes!”
“I don’t. You have approximately twenty-four hours. That’s about how long it takes to convene a Challenge Convention and pick the first candidate. There should be a lot to choose from.”
Cartwright’s thin body jerked. “Why?”
“Verrick has put up a million gold dollars to the one who gets you. The offer is good until won, until you’re dead.”
Cartwright heard the words, but they didn’t register. He was vaguely aware that Wakeman had come into the lounge and was moving up to Moore. The two of them walked away talking in low tones. He hardly heard them.
Like a frigid nightmare, the phrase a million gold dollars dripped and leaked into his brain. There’d be plenty of takers. With that much money an unk could buy a variety of classifications on the black market. The best minds in the system would gamble their lives for that, in a society that was a constant gamble, an unceasing lottery.
Wakeman came over to him shaking his head. “What a hopped-up mind. There was a lot of wild stuff we couldn’t catch. Something about bodies and bombs and assassins and randomness. He’s gone, now. We sent him off.”
“What he said is true,” Cartwright gasped. “He’s right; I have no place here. I don’t belong here.”
“His strategy is to make you think that.”
“But it’s true!”
Wakeman nodded reluctantly. “I know. That’s why it’s such a good strategy. We have a good strategy, too, I think. When the time comes, you’ll know about it.” He suddenly grabbed Cartwright by the shoulder. “Better sit down. Ill pour you a drink; Verrick left some genuine Scotch around here, a couple of full cases.”
Cartwright shook his head mutely.
“Suit yourself.” Wakeman got out his pocket handkerchief and mopped his forehead. His hands were shaking. “I think I’ll have one, if you don’t mind. After teeping that high-powered blur of pathological drive, I can use a drink, myself.”