Once this building had been the Royal Vulcanological Observatory of the
Kingdom of Italy. Now it was a museum on the surface, and underneath
another of the hideouts of Rena's "friends."
But this was a hideout somewhat more important than the one in the
Roman Catacombs, I found. Slovetski made no bones about it.
He said, "Wills, you shouldn't be here. We don't know you. We can't
trust you." He held up a hand. "I know that you rescued dell'Angela.
But that could all be an involved scheme of the Company. You could be
a Company spy. You wouldn't be the first, Wills. And this particular
installation is, shall I say, important. You may even find why, though
I hope not. If we hadn't had to move so rapidly, you would never have
been brought here. Now you're here, though, and we'll make the best of
it." He looked at me carefully, then, and the glinting spark in the
back of his eyes flared wickedly for a moment. "Don't try to leave. And
don't go anywhere in this building where Rena or dell'Angela or I don't
take you."
And that was that. I found myself assigned to the usual sort
of sleeping accommodations I had come to expect in this group.
Underground--cramped--and a bed harder than the Class-C Blue Heaven
minimum.
* * * * *
The next morning, Rena breakfasted with me, just the two of us in a
tower room looking down over the round slope of Vesuvius and the Bay
beneath. She said: "The museum has been closed since the bomb landed
near, so you can roam around the exhibits if you wish. There are a
couple of caretakers, but they're with us. The rest of us will be in
conference. I'll try to see you for lunch."
And she conducted me to an upper level of the Observatory and left me
by myself. I had my orders--stay in the public area of the museum. I
didn't like them. I wasn't used to being treated like a small boy, left
by his mother in a Company day nursery while she busied herself with
the important and incomprehensible affairs of adults.
Still, the museum was interesting enough, in a way. It had been
taken over by the Company, it appeared, and although the legend
frescoed around the main gallery indicated that it was supposed to
be a historical museum of the Principality of Naples, it appeared by
examination of the exhibits that the "history" involved was that of
Naples vis-a-vis the Company.
Not, of course, that such an approach was entirely unfair. If it had
not been for the intervention of the Company, after the Short War, it
is more than possible that Naples as an independent state would never
have existed.
It was the Company's insistence on the dismantling of power centers (as
Millen Carmody himself had described it) that had created Naples and
Sicily and Prague and Quebec and Baja California and all the others.
Only the United States had been left alone--and that, I think, only
because nobody dared to operate on a wounded tiger. In the temper
of the nation after the Short War, the Company would have survived
less than a minute if it had proposed severing any of the fifty-one
states....
The museum was interesting enough, for anyone with a taste for horrors.
It showed the changes in Neapolitan life over the past century or so.
There was a reconstruction of a typical Neapolitan home of the early
Nineteen-forties: a squalid hovel, packed ten persons to the room,
with an American G.I., precursor of the Company expediters, spraying
DDT into the bedding. There was, by comparison, a typical Class-B Blue
Heaven modern allotment--with a certain amount of poetic license; few
Class-B homes really had polyscent showers and auto-cooks.
* * * * *
It was the section on warfare, however, that was most impressive. It
was in the far back of the building, in a large chamber anchored to
bedrock. It held a frightening display of weapons, from a Tiger Tank
to a gas-gun. Bulking over everything else in the room, even the tank,
was the thirty-foot height of a Hell-bomb in a four-story display. I
looked at it a second time, vaguely disturbed by something I hadn't
quite placed--an indigo gleam to the metal of the warhead, with a hint
of evil under its lacquered sheen....
It was cobalt. I bent to read the legend: _This is the casing of the
actual cobalt bomb that would have been used on Washington if the Short
War had lasted one more day. It is calculated that, loaded with a Mark
XII hydrogen-lithium bomb, sufficient radioactive Cobalt-60 would have
been transmuted to end all life on Earth within thirty days._