All of their treatment involved revolutionary new and in some cases experimental ways of treating victims of burns and dehydration, and he was told that, even if they had survived the volcanic fury, an impossibility that had happened, and had survived the transport as well, they would have died within days in the hospital had it been even a year earlier. There was also the fact that the best specialists were immediately flown in, and money was no object.
The next day, the money walked in the door. The King, without whose help all along it would have been impossible to get as far as they did, looked simultaneously grim and overjoyed.
“I couldn’t stay away any longer,” said Alan Kimmel Bonner, President and Chief Operating Officer of Magellan. “You aren’t supposed to have any visitors yet, but you’d be surprised what money and influence can do.”
“I saw it—on the island,” he said weakly.
“Well, yes. But even when they found out that their fight was a civil war with other elements of the company, they were so overconfident that they ignored us.”
“You want a debriefing?”
“That’ll wait. I already know the main facts, even the specific ones.”
“But the Bishop—the Dark Man. …”
Bonner sighed. “Yeah, I know. I’ll get your side when you’re ready. I don’t really need it right now, except for the record.”
“If—you know—then you—can tell me,” MacDonald managed. “Was it truly the devil? I’ve got to know!”
“Easy! Take it easy! Officially, and totally classified and buried, that is, it was a mad computer of a generation that maybe we weren’t ready to handle yet programmed by even madder individuals. How the magic worked we may never know—but someday we might—but certainly the computer, working with people on the inside and possibly partly on its own, solved the basic matter to energy conversion problem and could somehow project that power wherever and whenever it was needed. Officially, and only for certain people very high in the company, the thing channeled all its reserves into a monstrous image, a fluid, plastic sort of energy, in the air above the institute. It reached down, then, to connect itself to Angelique, and instead the Bishop got in the way. We don’t know for sure, but the official theory is that he was trailing something, perhaps a wire, all the way off the stage and onto the ground. When he stuck the cross into the field, the thing was grounded, and it discharged and shorted. Either that or it was partly touching that stone or whatever, to which it was connected, and it created a ground loop. Either way, the energy was forced back on itself, and so great was the power involved that it quite literally melted the rock beneath the Institute down to a depth where it reactivated the volcano. That do it?”
“The Dark Man—an animated corpse. Sir Reginald said he predated SAINT. Said it was his dead brother. …”
“Well, we checked that out. For the record, Geoffrey is still in his grave. It was hell to get clearances on that, but I just had to know. We know from Angelique that they were masters at mind control as well as transmutation. There’s no doubt that Sir Reginald believed everything he told you, but there’s some question as to whether or not those memories were implanted later and back dated to fit the facts. As for the corpse, well, the thing could create a giant lizard to order, in energy first and then solid as need be. If it could do that, why not something that looked like an animated corpse? The ancients had a word for it. Homunculus. Laboratory created intelligence. The bright boys think it was the prototype for what it eventually wanted to do with Angelique— create a human extension for itself.”
MacDonald stared at him. “Do you believe that?”
The corporate president looked uncomfortable. Finally he said, “I don’t know. I’d like to believe it, but there are just a few too many things that can only be explained by stretching the laws of probability beyond their limits. If you ask me if we had a mad computer on our hands, I’d say yes. If you ask me if it went mad because of the madness of its creator, I’d say yes. But if you ask me if there wasn’t something else, something lurking there, waiting, taking advantage of all this and moving in to seize control—well, it’s pretty unscientific, but I could feel it, and so could you. There was something there that came down and heightened the madness of the world beyond even its normal insanity levels, who pushed and probed and saw an opportunity and reached out to take it. It wasn’t something new, but something very old, something usually forgotten or rationalized away until it strikes. We beat it in the past, and we beat it this time, but the opportunities our age gives it means we have to keep up the watch and the fight.”
“The Bishop—he thought it all would fail from the beginning. He always planned right from the start to do exactly what he did.”
Bonner nodded. “Yes. He and the girl. No disrespect to you and the others, but he had more guts than any human being I could imagine.”
“Not guts, sir. Faith. He told me that fighting the ultimate evil required sacrifice. That only by sacrifice could we show God that we were deserving of being saved. He saw the key to the spread of the evil. We all had our price. Mostly it’s a threat to life, but in Angelique’s case it was the fear of total incapacity for a lifetime at first, then my life became the price. Sir Reginald was bought with the lure of the ultimate knowledge and understanding of his life’s work and passion. For the others, like the leaders and politicians in the meadow and most of the Institute management and security staffs, it was the even older price—the promise of sheer power, the same thing that seduced the German leaders in the last war.” He sighed. “I wasn’t immune, either, although I kidded myself that I was. Right at the end they found it, and I forfeited my right to really end this thing. In the end, they wouldn’t find the Bishop’s price, though; they never found a weak spot, and that’s what did them in. They didn’t find it because of his rock solid faith in his God, even to knowing that God well enough to understand that no materialist threat, no Frawley with his equations and his bomb, could stop them. Only an act of total faith could do so. He looked in the eye something that caused everyone else there to bow down before it merely because they looked on it, and he walked up and spit in its eye before them all.”
Bonner nodded slowly and said, “Yeah.”
“What about Magellan? Has it survived the loss of its computer heart?”
Bonner chuckled. “Sure. There was never any question of that. Data was always backed up to three remote units every time it was sent or received. It’s not as efficient, but the company goes on, as even Sir Robert knew it would when he put that erase program in SAINT.”
MacDonald started. “You mean there are three more SAINTs?”
“No, no. Although the Japanese have several that are somewhat SAINT-like, we don’t, and even they lack whatever it was that was added to those circuits by Sir Reginald. But, some day, there’s going to be another SAINT, or even worse. Nothing is more certain than that you can not un-invent something once it’s been invented. Eventually, when we’ve sanitized and rationalized the data as much as possible, we’ll issue a big public report on SAINT’s perversion and madness in the hopes that it will be guarded against in the future, but we can only warn.”
“There aren’t many nuclear power plants any more,” MacDonald pointed out. “It scared too many people.”
“Uh-uh. If you think that, you’re deluding yourself. Nuclear power died because it became too expensive. Fusion remains in small laboratory and prototype units for the same reason. It’s not the same with computers. SAINT was no larger than the average bedroom in a one room apartment. Not too many years ago, to get that kind of power and storage would have filled up half the world with chips and circuits. This is a technology that gets cheaper every day, and all it really takes is time and enough money to put together folks smart enough to build it.”
“Then—it was all for nothing? All of it? The next time it’ll be a dozen SAINTs, or a hundred?”
“Perhaps. We set them back, that’s all, like we always have so far. We took out key leaders and some of the best minds likely to serve that sort of cause, but we didn’t take out the enemy. Violence is down. Random, insane violence is way down, and even the official kind—wars and very violent movements—is back to its old slow bloodletting levels, for the moment. Our own forefathers bought our generation with their blood and their lives. You, Angelique, Bishop Whitely, Lord Frawley, and the others bought the next generation, but they, too, will have to fight or lose. It’s a hell of a system, and lord how it costs, but it’s the way things are run around here and we’re stuck with it.”
The President of Magellan got up and looked like he was preparing to leave. “You know,” he said, “you’ll always be on the payroll. Not much salary, but your expense account is higher than mine. A plane is waiting for me. I have to go. You remember, though—anything you want, anything you need, is no problem. You just tell us. It’s the least we can do.”
“What I want and need is beyond even Magellan’s capacity, I’m afraid,” Mac Donald said sadly.
Bonner stared at him for a moment, then scratched his chin and said, “You can’t be a businessman or a politician, and I’m both, and ever expect a pat hand. Happily ever aftering is for fairy tales. This was more of a—morality play. In a fairy tale, the brave company endures many trials and terrors to fight the dragon holding captive the princess, and when they slay it, finally, the prince and princess go riding off into the sunset. Now the poet sees the struggle as the thing and the fight as really inconsequential. Folks like me look at it and say that if the damned monster was so easily disposed of, he probably wasn’t what he was cracked up to be in the first place. No, the old mythologies, for all their monsters and gods had a much better view of the way the world is run. In them, the fight was as important as the struggle, the threat as horrible as its name, and when the dragon fought it fought well and gave the prince and princess terrible wounds. They kill it, but their wounds are severe and never really heal. There’s always been a high cost to anything worthwhile. Saving the kingdom which could not save itself has to be first priority, but somebody’s got to pay.”
MacDonald looked at him glumly, but said nothing.
“It seems to me that you accept the cost, and by the wounds remember the evil but also remember the accomplishment they bought and paid for. You take what you have left, and you do the best you can, out of respect for those who got you through. Somebody cared enough to make sure that both you and Angelique were so coated with some kind of goo that you managed to survive the heat of the eruption itself. Somebody also got that cross over Angelique’s head when it might have saved them, instead. Seems to me that your lives were bought with an even heavier price. Seems to me you lost sight of that girl in that wheelchair, all paralyzed from neck to toe, who you were attracted to because she wanted to get on with life and do what she could rather than sink into what she couldn’t do. Maybe you ought to think about that.”
MacDonald smiled, and wished he could grab the man’s hand. He was emotionally touched by the speech, which struck at the very heart of his own dark thoughts and fears. Instead, all he said was, “I didn’t know you were a philosopher and a poet, sir. Thanks.”
“I’m not,” replied Bonner, reaching for the door. “I’m a businessman and a politician. I steal only from the very best.” And, with that, he left.
They noted an improvement in his attitude after that, a deep down decision that maybe he did want to live after all. A day later, they sent in Dr. St. Cyr, the King’s Rook in their guerrilla organization inside the company. The Jamaican professor was as kind and strong as always.
“The kinds of medical wizards they have on your case are like no others in the world,” he told MacDonald, “but, like most experts, their bedside manner leaves a lot to be desired. They’ve got psychiatrists and psychologists all over the place, and if you want them they’re available, but it was thought that you just needed some plain talk from somebody you knew.”
“I appreciate that,” responded the man in the plastic case. “All I’ve wanted all along is some plain talk and a little truth, like when I’m going to be out of this thing and out of here.”
St. Cyr sighed. “All right. First, let’s talk injuries. You know some, but I’ll give you the litany.” And a litany it was—of broken bones, severe external burns, weakened and scorched lungs, and the like. “All of those have responded well to treatment, and the artificial skin has taken to you like a glove. It’s bonded so well you’ll never know which is which, and in a few years normal wear and tear will cause it to be unnoticeably replaced with your own. You’ll need exercise and a physiotherapy program, since your muscles are nothing right now, but six months from now you’ll even have all your hair back, at least on your head, or so they tell me. It’s snow white—I can see the fuzz—but it’s growing out rather well.”
He nodded. “And when does this start?”
“Tomorrow, if you’re willing. All things considered, even if we accept the miracle of your survival, you should be horribly crippled and disfigured. You aren’t. With therapy and some time you’ll look and be able to do pretty much what you always did—with one exception.”
He’d known it, but he’d still dreaded it being spoken.
“I know you suspected, but couldn’t tell for sure with all that automatic apparatus clamped on down there. This isn’t easy to say, but the Dark Man took what you thought he took, and it’s still beyond medical science or anything short of what blew in that volcano to restore it to you.”
“I—knew. Doctor Bonner as much as told me.”
“All right. When they were operating down there, they had to make some decisions very fast. They found enough tissue from the scrotum stuffed in there to graft some of this incredible artificial skin to match. They couldn’t ask you, naturally, so they went ahead and formed a vagina and a clitoris like they do for trans-sexuals. It’s an old procedure. But so far they’ve been maintaining your normal male hormone levels. The whole area has formed and mended well, but they have to have a decision before starting any program of rehabilitation with you. You can still attain orgasm, but not in the old way. They can construct a living prosthesis there out of the artificial stuff, but there would be no feeling in it and there’s no prostate left. Or they can change the hormones and introduce permanent peptides into your brain that would turn you physically and probably emotionally but not genetically female.”
“Huh? What do you mean, ’emotionally?’ ”
“My boy, they know enough about neural receptors now that they could introduce a substance that would make you fall madly in love for life with the next person you saw.”
The idea frightened him. The next battlefield for the enemy? he wondered. The idea frightened him even more than SAINT.
“Let me think about it. See myself as I am. But—what about Angelique? They wouldn’t tell me anything at all except she was recovering and they refuse to let me see her.”
“You will. She’s needed more help than you, not so much for the outside as for the inside. When she thinks she’s ready, you’ll meet her.” He paused for a moment. “This isn’t the worst of it, though.”
He grew suddenly concerned. “What?”
“Nine hundred and thirty one men, women and children were evacuated to make way for their doings and held pretty much incommunicado at an old French army base in Guyana leased for the purpose. They’re not prisoners any more, and it’s been impossible to keep the press away from them. Bonner has managed a very smooth, scientific line complete with the mad computer warnings, but there’s a worldwide hue and cry against all large computers. Magellan will survive, but only because it does so little business directly with the public and so much vital to governments, but the whole story is coming out and being splashed across the newspapers and television stations of the world. Even Tass, which is showing how huge capitalistic monoliths, in the name of profits, let such a thing happen beyond the control of weak western governments. Naturally, you and Angelique could hardly be kept out of it. An old associate of yours who calls himself ‘Red’ has already sold the story of you and he being chased by a monstrous thing to Hollywood for a good sum.”
“Well, I guess it was inevitable. Doctor Bonner was setting things up when he was here, I guess. He knew they couldn’t keep a lid on it. So what’s the problem?”