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Epilogue

 

They brought Duna up from the vault under the ridge where Frazier had hidden her, and for forty-eight hours the best brains in ETORP's cryothesia lab worked over her. Then they called me in and I was there when she opened her eyes and smiled and said, "Daddy, I brought you some flowers."

That was twenty years ago. She's grown now, and a member of the first Mars Expedition. All the programs that had been stalled for a hundred and fifty years are moving ahead now, pushed by a force of nature that's like the grass root that cracks open a mountainside: population pressure.

I released the immortality drug for general distribution, free, the same day I opened the Ice Palace and started bringing the Old Ones out. Some talk has started up that I ought to reconvene Congress and hand the reins back over to the politicians, but I've got a theory that the world's not ready for that yet. I've set up a system that makes education tapes available to everybody, as many as they can absorb, on any subject. Some day I'll see signs that the race is growing up, and that there are men around who are wise instead of just smart; when that day comes, I'll retire and take that trip to Alpha, if I'm still around. Maybe that's arrogance; or maybe it's a sense of responsibility. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.

The Old Man kept a journal. It gave me the answers to a lot of questions that had been on my mind. The skeleton in the shaft was Number Six. He'd been shot, but managed a getaway back into the shaft via a fake air intake in the top-floor equipment room. It didn't look big enough, but it was. He killed two Blackies on the way out, and no one saw where he went; so he kept his secret.

The reason the Old Man hadn't closed off the route in via the tunnel was the easy one: he never found it. Frazier had concealed it so it would stay concealed.

The dead boy Jess and I had found was Number Two. He'd killed him and left him like that, as a warning to the next one; if there was a next one. By that time, he was a worried man. And then he had another idea: he meant what he said about taking me in. He wanted somebody else to do the sitting up nights, while he had a brain transfer to a new body—a young, anonymous one—and settled back to enjoy owning the world.

I brought Minka to the Keep, and married her. She and Duna got along swell. They should have. She was Marion's great-granddaughter, which made Duna some kind of great aunt. She told me about Jess and his Secret Society. It didn't amount to much, after being handed down by word-of-mouth tradition for four generations. Most of it had been forgotten, and anyway, Frazier hadn't tried to saddle his descendants with a load of fossilized hates. But he'd left them the job of fighting ETORP, any way they could. Jess' way was hunting Blackies in the park. As I said, Jess was a guy who was full of surprises.

There was one thing that stumped me for a long time: how had Frazier gotten the jump on his boss, gotten the frozen child away from him? But I finally worked it out. Back in the early years, when the Old Man had had about the same life expectancy as the rest of the race, he'd set up a corporation to take over his affairs after his death, and operate it in Duna's name, hold it in trust for her until she was revived. He'd used all the pressure he had to set it up so it couldn't be broken, and to hire the best brains he could buy to run it.

It was a good idea—until the day when his top medical boys told him they'd cracked the Big One, and that now a chosen few could go on living as long as ETORP and its labs held out. That made a difference. He didn't need an heir, then.

By that time, there was a power struggle going on inside the organization that would have made the battle among Alexander's successors look like a pillow fight. That charter—and Duna, alive—was all the opposition needed to take over ETORP, lock, stock, and freeze tanks. And he couldn't have that. In the end Frazier realized the Old Man wouldn't be content for very long to have that small body waiting in the vault, hanging over him day and night; in the end he'd have turned the switch himself.

So Frazier set up the fake equipment failure, the phony funeral, and took Duna to a place where she'd be safe. The Old Man had really believed Duna was dead.

Oh yeah, one other thing. Yesterday a bell rang in a private alert station that's manned twenty-four hours a day, just down the hall from where I sleep. Number Eight is awake and moving—somewhere. I've sent my men out to try to find him, but he seems to be an elusive character.

I'm waiting for him now. When he shows up, I hope I can convince him that what I'm doing is the right thing. If I can't—well, I've got all the weight on my side, but Steve Dravek at twenty was a hard man to beat.

We'll see.

 

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Framed