So now at last I knew why Millen Carmody had permitted Defoe to turn
the Company into a prison cell for the world. He couldn't forbid it,
because the dead can forbid nothing, and Carmody was sleeping with the
dead. No wonder Defoe was so concerned with the Naples sector!
How long? How long had Carmody been quietly out of the way, while
Defoe made his plans and took his steps, and someone in a little room
somewhere confected "statements" with Millen Carmody's signature on
them and "interviews" that involved only one man?
It could not have been less than five or six years, I thought, counting
back to the time when Defoe's name first began to register with me as
an ordinary citizen, before I had married his cousin. Six years. That
was the date of the Prague-Vienna war. And the year following, Hanoi
clashed with Cebu. And the year after that, Auckland and Adelaide.
What in God's name was Defoe's plan? Nothing as simple as putting
Carmody out of the way so that he could loot the Company. No man could
wish to be that rich! It was meaningless....
Defoe could be playing for only one thing--power.
But it didn't matter; all that mattered was that now I knew that
Carmody was an enemy to Defoe. He was therefore an ally to Rena and to
me, and we needed allies. But how might we get Carmody out of Bay 100?
There weren't any good answers, though Rena and I, with the help of
grumbling comments from Zorchi, debated it until the morning light
began to shine. Frontal assault on the clinic was ridiculous. Even
a diversionary raid such as Rena had staged to try to rescue her
father--only ten days before!--would hardly get us in through the
triple-locked door of Bay 100. Even if Slovetski's movement had still
been able to muster the strength to do it, which was not likely.
It was maddening. I had hidden the hypodermic Rena had brought in Bay
100 to get it out of the way. Undoubtedly it was there still--perhaps
only a few yards from Millen Carmody. If fifty cubic centimeters of a
watery purplish liquid could have been plucked from the little glass
bottle and moved the mere inches to the veins of his arms, the problem
would be solved--for he could open the door from inside as easily as
Zorchi had, and certainly once he was that far we could manage to get
him out.
But the thing was impossible, no matter how we looked at it.
* * * * *
I suppose I fell asleep sitting in that chair, because I woke up in it.
It was in the middle of a crazy nightmare about an avenging angel with
cobalt-blue eyes burning at me out of heaven; and I wanted to run from
him, but I was frozen by a little man with a hypodermic of ice. I woke
up, and I was facing the television set. Someone--Rena, I suppose--had
covered me with a light spread. The set was blaring a strident tenor
voice. Zorchi was hunched over, watching some opera; I might as well
have been a thousand miles away.
I lay blearily watching the tiny figures flickering around the screen,
not so much forgetting all the things that were on my mind as knowing
what they were and that they existed, but lacking the strength to pick
them up and look at them. The opera seemed to concern an Egyptian queen
and a priest of some sort; I was not very interested in it, though it
seemed odd that Zorchi should watch it so eagerly.
Perhaps, after all, there was something to his maudlin
self-pity--perhaps I really did think of him as a monster or a dog, for
I was as uneasy to see him watching an opera as I would have been to
see an ape play the flute.
I heard trucks going by on the highway. By and by it began to penetrate
through the haze that I was hearing a _lot_ of trucks going by on the
highway. I had no idea how heavily traveled the Naples-Caserta road
might be, but from the sound, they seemed nearly bumper to bumper,
whizzing along at seventy or eighty miles an hour.