"Oh, no." He shook his head and succeeded in a tiny smile. "Do you not
see it, Thomas? The great explosion goes off, the world is showered
with particles of death. And then--what then?"
"We die!"
"Die? No! Have you forgotten the vaults of the clinics?"
It staggered me. I'd been reciting all the pat phrases from early
schooling about the bomb! If it had gone off in the Short War, of
course, it would have ended the human race! But I'd been a fool.
The vaults had been built to handle the extreme emergencies that
couldn't be foreseen--even one that knocked out nearly the whole race.
They hadn't expected that a cobalt-cased bomb would ever be used. Only
the conspirators would have tried, and how could they get fissionables?
But they were ready for even that. I'd been expecting universal doom.
"The clinics," Benedetto repeated as I stared at him.
* * * * *
It was the answer. Even radio-poisons of cobalt do not live forever.
Five years, and nearly half of them would be gone; eleven years, and
more than three-quarters would be dissipated. In fifty years, the
residual activity would be down to a fraction of one per cent--and the
human race could come back to the surface.
"But why?" I demanded. "Suppose the Company can handle the population
of the whole world? Granted, they've space enough and one year is the
same as fifty when you're on ice. But what's the use?"
He smiled faintly. "Bankruptcy, Thomas," he whispered. "So you see, we
do not wish to fall into the Company's hands right now. For there is a
chance that we will live ... and perhaps the very faintest of chances
that we will win!"
* * * * *
It wasn't even a faint chance--I kept telling myself that.
But, if anything could hurt the Company, the area in which it was
vulnerable was money. Benedetto had been intelligent in that. Bombing
the Home Office would have been an inconvenience, no more. But to
disrupt the world's work with a fifty-year hiatus, while the air purged
itself of the radioactive cobalt from the bomb, would mean fifty years
while the Company lay dormant; fifty years while the policies ran their
course and became due.
For that was the wonder of Benedetto's scheme: _The Company insured
against everything_. If a man were to be exposed to radiation and
needed to be put away, he automatically went on "disability" benefits,
while his policy paid its own premiums!
Multiply this single man by nearly four billion. The sum came out to a
bankrupt Company.
It seemed a thin thread with which to strangle a monster. And yet,
I thought of the picture of Millen Carmody in my Adjuster's Manual.
There was the embodiment of honor. Where a Defoe might cut through the
legalities and flout the letter of the agreements, Carmody would be
bound by his given word. The question, then, was whether Defoe would
dare to act against Carmody.
Everything else made sense. Even exploding the bomb high over the
Atlantic: It would be days before the first fall-out came wind-borne to
the land, and in those days there would be time for the beginnings of
the mass migration to the vaults.
Wait and see, I told myself. Wait and see. It was flimsy, but it was
hope, and I had thought all hope was dead.
We could not stay in the hotel, and there was only one place for us to
go. Slovetski captured, the Company after our scalps, the whole world
about to be plunged into confusion--we had to get out of sight.
* * * * *
It took time. Zorchi's hospital gave me a clue; I tracked it down and
located the secretary.
The secretary spat at me over the phone and hung up, but the second
time I called him he grudgingly consented to give me another number to
call. The new number was Zorchi's lawyer. The lawyer was opaque and
uncommunicative, but proposed that I call him back in a quarter of an
hour. In a quarter of an hour, I was on the phone. He said guardedly:
"What was left in Bay 100?"
"A hypodermic and a bottle of fluid," I said promptly.
"That checks," he confirmed, and gave me a number.
And on the other end of that number I reached Zorchi.
"The junior assassin," he sneered. "And calling for help? How is that
possible, Weels? Did my _avocatto_ lie?"