While Rogge-Smith was still at the door, Barlow snapped, “What’s the meaning of this? Why haven’t I been consulted? How far have you people got and why have you been working on something I haven’t authorized?”
“Didn’t want to bother you, Chief,” said Rogge-Smith. “It was really a technical matter, kind of a final cleanup. Want to come and see the work?”
Mollified, Barlow followed his statistician down the corridor.
“You stifi shouldn’t have gone ahead without my okay,” he grumbled. “Where the hell would you people have been without me?”
“That’s right, Chief. We couldn’t have swung it ourselves; our minds just don’t work that way. And all that stuff you knew from Hitler-it wouldn’t have occurred to us. Like poor Black-Kupperman.”
They were in a fair-sized machine shop at the end of a slight upward incline. It was cold. Rogge-Smith pushed a button that started a motor, and a flood of arctic light poured in as the roof parted slowly. It showed a small spaceship with the door open.
Barlow gaped as Rogge-Smith took him by the elbow and his other boys appeared: Swenson-Swenson, the engineer; TsutsugimushiDuncan, his propellants man; Kalb-French, advertising.
“In you go, Chief,” said Tsutsugimushi-Duncan. “This is Poprobterm.”
“But I’m the World Dictator!”
“You bet, Chief. You’ll be in history, all right-but this is necessary, I’m afraid.”
The door was closed. Acceleration slammed Bariow cruelly to the metal floor. Something broke, and warm, wet stuff, salty tasting, ran from his mouth to his chin. Arctic sunlight through a port suddenly became a fierce lancet stabbing at his eyes; he was out of the atmosphere.
Lying twisted and broken under the acceleration, Barlow realized that some things had not changed, that Jack Ketch was never asked to dinner however many shillings you paid him to do your dirty work, that murder wifi out, that crime pays only temporarily.
The last thing he learned was that death is the end of pain.