For about ten seconds we stared at each other; then I saw that he wasn't so much looking at me as he was giving me a chance to look at him. He was something to look at.
I've never had a delicate look, but this face was hewn out of the earth's primordial rock, weathered to a saddle brown and lined a little by time's erosion, then polished with a hand finer than Cellini's to a portrait of power held in restraint. He could have been anywhere from a tough forty-five to a smooth sixty. He was wearing a wine-colored dressing gown with a black collar; his neck projected from it like the trunk of an oak tree. His expression was somewhere between a smile too faint to see and no expression at all.
"All right, you got here," he said in my voice. "Come in and sit down. We have things to talk about."
I moved a step and then remembered I was giving the orders. "Stand up and move away from the desk," I said. "Do it nice and easy. I'm not good enough with this thing to try any near-misses."
He pushed the corners of his mouth up half a millimeter and didn't move. "I tried to find you before you took the risk of coming here—"
"Your boys are second-rate. Soft from too much easy duty, maybe." I motioned with the gun. "I won't tell you three times."
He shook his head; or maybe my eyelid quivered. He wasn't a guy to waste effort on a lot of unnecessary facial expressions.
"You didn't come here to shoot me," he said.
"I could change my plans. Being here makes me nervous. Not having you cooperate makes me even more nervous. When I'm nervous I do some dumb things. I'm going to do one now." I raised the gun and aimed it between his eyes and was squeezing and he came out of the chair fast. He gave me a big smile. You could almost see it.
"If I'd meant to hurt you, I could have done it any time since you crossed the line," he said. "It's wired—"
"The perimeter fence, maybe; not inside. Your own troops would be tripping it a hundred times a day."
"You think you could have gotten this far without my knowing it?"
"You can't lock the world out unless you lock yourself in. Eighty years of waiting could make a man careless."
He gave me a little frown to look at. "Who do you think I am?"
"There are some holes in the picture," I said. "But the part that's there says you're a guy I used to know. His name was Steve Dravek."
"But you're Steve Dravek." He said it the way you tell a kid his dog died.
"I just think I'm Steve Dravek," I told him. "You're the real article."
He frowned a little more. "You mean—you think I'm the original Dravek, born in 1941?"
"It sounds a little funny," I said. "But that's what I think."
He tilted his head a quarter of an inch and did something subtle that changed the frown back into a smile.
"No wonder you're nervous," he said. "My God, boy, put the gun down and sit down and have a drink. I'm not Number One; I'm Number Five!"
I moved around him to a chair and waved him to one and watched him sit, and then I sat, and rested the gun on my knee so the shaky hand wouldn't be so obvious. I wanted a drink the way Romeo wanted Juliet.
"What happened to Four?"
"What you'd expect. He was past his prime—over fifty. I tried to talk to him, but he wouldn't talk. Why should he? He owned the world."
"That would be how long ago?"
"Over forty years. As soon as I'd established myself here—there was a certain amount of pretty delicate maneuvering involved there—I tried to find out if there were any more of us. I drew a blank." He almost blinked. "Until you turned up."
"Tell me about that part."
"The tanks were rigged to signal when they were opened from the inside; just one quick squawk on the microwave band. You'd have to know just where to listen to pick it up. Unfortunately, there was no R and D feature; just the signal saying you were on the way. I tried to find you, but you dropped out of sight."
"It seemed like a good idea; even if your Blackies are lousy shots."
"They were instructed to fire anesthetic pellets."
"Some of those pellets packed quite a wallop."
He nodded. "It was too bad about that little man, Jess Ralph; when the men surprised you there, they jumped to a couple of conclusions—"
"Somebody tipped them. They were waiting."
"Naturally the ETORP reserve is under close guard—"
"Pass that. If you wanted to talk to me, why didn't you leave a message where I'd find it? You would have known where. And it would have been simpler than telling your Blackies to wing me with a needle full of dope."
"Would you have trusted me? As I remember the final instructions Frazier added to my 'cephtape, they painted a pretty black picture of the Old Man. I thought it was better to handle it as I did, let you follow the same trail I did. And it had the added advantage of bringing you here in secret. I think you can see it might complicate things to have the word get out that there were two of us."
"Uh-huh," I said, "maybe. By the way, let's see your wrist."
He looked thoughtful. Then he turned back his right cuff and showed it to me.
"It was the other one, remember?"
He showed me that one. The skin was perfect; there was no sign of the scar that only Number One would have.
"Satisfied now?" He was looking a little more relaxed. Maybe I was, too.
"Suppose you're telling the truth," I said. "How does that change things?"
"It ought to be pretty plain. The Old Man was nuts, power-crazy. I don't share that part of his personality."
"You took over where he left off," I said. "Nothing's changed."
"The world he built wasn't something I could rebuild in a day. It all takes time; if I tried to reform the whole thing at once, I'd have chaos on my hands."
"I got the feeling things were getting worse instead of better."
"It's not surprising you had a few wrong slants, considering the company you were keeping."
"What company would that be?"
"The little man, Jess. I thought you knew. He was Frazier's grandson."
"There seem to be a lot of things I don't know," I said. "Maybe by the time it got to be my turn the brainwashing machine was slipping its clutch. Maybe you'd better give me the whole story, right from the top."
His face tightened and his eyes looked at me and beyond me into the past.
"The first part of it, I remember myself, as if it was really me it happened to—the tapes Frazier took were good ones. Every detail is there, as if it had happened yesterday. . . .
"It started like any other morning. I had breakfast out on the terrace with Marion, drove to the plant, spent some time going over some tax figures with Frazier; then we went down to the new basement wing to see how things were going. It was a big pilot rig for a new process that was going to make us a mint. A new principle that would put us years ahead of anything else on the market.
"It was about half past ten when it happened. Marion was on the way into the city to do some shopping. The kid was with her. They stopped because she had some flowers she'd picked for me. White daisies, the first of the year. There were a lot of them down by the pool. . . .
"They went to the office and when I wasn't there some damned fool told them I was down in the new wing. They came on down.
"Frazier and I were over by the big cryo tank, watching Brownie stitch a plate in. Something slipped, and a piece of quarter-inch got away from the lift and it dropped and cut the high-tension lead from the portable welding rig. There was a lot of arcing and smoke—and right in the middle of it they came in.
"I started over there and waved them away and yelled to them to go back, and she saw me wave and started across and before Marion could grab her, she got into the smoke and lost her bearings, and I yelled to her again to go back and she heard me and turned my way and put a foot on the edge of the plate that was carrying sixty thousand amps.
"I was the first one to her. I grabbed her and yelled for the plant doc and the son of a bitch was off playing golf and there wasn't anybody else near enough to do any good. She wasn't breathing; there was no pulse. I knew five minutes of that and her brain would be gone forever. . . .
"I did the only thing I could do. We had a liquid nitrogen setup running in glass. I took her in there and told Frazier to get the top off the big receiver tank. He argued and I knocked him down. They all thought I'd gone nuts. I got it open myself and came back and Marion was holding her and wouldn't let her go. I had to take her. I carried her in and injected her and got her wrapped and put her inside and closed up and charged the coils and watched the plate frost over. In less than a minute it was done. Then I came back out and they were waiting for me, with guns and a cop they'd gotten in from somewhere. I could have torn 'em apart with my bare hands, but I knew I couldn't afford any mistakes now. She was in there, frozen, at six degrees Kelvin; but it was no good unless I convinced them I knew what I was doing, that it was the only chance.
"I talked to them. I kept calm and I talked to them and told them the kid was dead, and that what I'd done hadn't killed her any deader; and that as long as they left her where I'd put her, she'd stay just the way she was then. If any damage had been done, it was already done, and if it hadn't—well, if it hadn't, it was up to the medics to find out how to bring her back. And that meanwhile she stayed where she was.
"Frazier was the first to see it and side me. He'd been crazy about the kid. He got them under control and cleared the cops out and got a bunch of big-domes from Mayo over there and I went back home and drank a year's supply of booze in the next week. I didn't know where Marion was. They said I'd hit her pretty hard. But I wasn't thinking about Marion. I was only thinking about the kid.
"Some sob sisters got hold of it, then, and the newspapers got into it, and I was indicted for everything from murder to grave-robbery. There were laws that said a body had to be buried within two days, and a lot of other junk.
"Well, I beat 'em. She was underground. The research wing was twelve feet down. And I had witnesses that there was no pulse and no breathing. The papers kept playing the story for a few months, but after a while that stopped, too.
"I had the room where it happened walled off. I never wanted to see it again.
"We went ahead with the new process, and it worked out like I said it would. Food quick-frozen to under ten degrees K would keep forever, and come out as if it had been fresh that morning. Even the leafy stuff, lettuce and potatoes; everything. In a year we had a hundred licensees. In two years we'd stopped licensing and had our own plants, in forty-two countries. I poured every dime back into research, and the more we learned the quicker we learned. I didn't give a damn about the business; all I wanted was the money and the know-how to push the medical program. I went on working like six demons and waiting for the day the docs would give me the go-ahead.
"But they were a cagey bunch. In a year they told me they thought they were on the right track. In two, they were talking about breakthroughs. In five, it was unanticipated complexities in the mechanics of submolecular crystallization. By the time they'd been at it for ten years, to the tune of a hundred million a year, they were doing a lot of cute tricks with frozen mice and cats and lambs and telling me about critical thresholds and optimum permeability mass-ratios and energy transference rates and all that other gobbledygook their kind use to keep the laymen shelling out.
"I called for a showdown, and they said, of course, Mr. Dravek, certainly. Mr. Dravek, whatever you say, Mr. Dravek. But we won't be responsible. . . .
"What could I do? I hired and fired medical directors like baseball managers, but they all gave me the same pitch; wait another year just go be on the safe side. . . . Five more years went by, and another five, and meanwhile Draco Incorporated had grown into the biggest international combine on earth. We were in foods and medicines and the equipment that went with them, and had sidelines that were bigger than most of the world's industrial giants. The government had tried to step in ten different times to break us, but by then I'd made some interesting discoveries about politicians. They bribe easy, and a lot cheaper than you'd think. And for the big boys—the ones who would have laughed at money—we had some other little items. Those sawbones hadn't been just rolling pills; they'd come up with tricks that could make a man look and feel twenty years younger; and the Draco Foundation had been doing a lot with grafts and regeneration. We didn't publicize all this. It was strictly hush-hush, behind-the-walls stuff. Only our friends got in on it. And by then we didn't have a lot of enemies. So they left us alone, and I waited, and now they were talking about next year, maybe, and then a few more months and we'll be ready to take the chance. . . .
"You see, by then they had the techniques for deep-freezing and thawing. Hell, they were doing it on a commercial scale. But we were doing it under controlled cryolab conditions, with everything from tissue salinity to residual muscular electric charge controlled every step of the way.
"But with the kid, I hadn't had time for anything fancy. I'd just injected her with an anti-crystallizer we used in vegetable processing and put her under. That made it different. It gave them an excuse to stall. Because that's what they were doing. Stalling. They figured as soon as I had her back, I'd pull the rug out from under their operation. The damned fools! As if I'd sabotage the program that had made me the richest tycoon that ever lived—and with the power to appoint the whole damned Supreme Court if I'd wanted to!
"So they stalled me. And I was getting older. By then I was over sixty, not that I looked it. Like I said, the pill rollers had come up with some tricks. But I knew I couldn't last forever. And I had a board of directors who were looking ahead, jockeying for the day when one of them would take over where I left off. I knew if I dropped dead the day would never come for the kid. They'd leave her there. But she was my heir, you see? If she was alive, she'd own it all, and they'd be cut out of the pattern. So I had to do something. I had to work out a plan that would carry on after my death, so some day she'd come back, and find her inheritance waiting for her.
"I thought about it, and worked out one plan and then another, and none of 'em were any good, none of 'em were foolproof. Because there was no way to be sure there'd be a man there I could trust. Frazier would have done it, but he was my age; he wouldn't outlast me long. And anyway, the only man I could really trust was—me. And that gave me the idea.
"I called in my Chief of Research and told him what I wanted. He told me I was out of my mind. I said, sure, Doc, but can you do it?"
"He was a long time coming around, but in the end he had to admit there was no reason it was impossible. Illegal, maybe—we'd had some trouble with a bunch of fanatics and we'd had to let a few token laws get on the books—but it wasn't any trickier than what we'd been doing for some of our chums in Congress.
"It was simple enough. We'd been using test tube techniques for growing livestock for a long time; our brood plant in Arizona covered ten acres and produced more beef in a year than the State of Texas used to in ten. They took germ cells from me and started them growing, then planted them in automated life support tanks, like the stock brooders, only fancier. I gave Frazier the job of picking the spots for the vaults to be built out of indetectable nonmetallic material. I gave him orders not even to tell me. That way nobody could squeeze the secret out of me, or step in and act in my name and break up the playhouse; because I didn't know myself where they were.
"The first duplicate was rigged to mature in twenty years. I figured to be around that long. I'd brief him myself, and he'd take over from me, and they could scratch their heads and say that the Old Man was holding up a lot better than anybody figured; and when he'd run his time, the next one would be ready; and so on down the line, until the medics were ready to unfreeze the child. They could stall a long time, but they couldn't stall forever. And when they quit stalling, I'd be ready."
The man behind the desk took a deep breath and looked at me.
"That's where my tape ended. I came to in an abandoned mine shaft in Utah. The tank was set back into a side passage and covered over. There was information waiting for me, food, a full briefing up to the time Frazier had last been there. The rest of the story I had to put together from the Old Man's records.
"It was a swell plan he'd worked out; practically perfect. Just one thing went wrong. He got a hurry-up call from the Old Lab one day. He went over and they told him all bets were off. There'd been a freak power failure and the special tank she was in had lost its chill and the body had been at about a degree Centigrade for a couple of hours when they discovered it. So now Duna was just a corpse like any other corpse. She looked the same, but that little spark they'd been keeping alive all those years—or trying to—was gone.
"It hit him hard, but not as hard as it had the first time. Over thirty years had gone by. He'd learned to live with it. She'd been the biggest thing in his life, once; he could still lie awake at night and remember her voice, the look on her face when she'd come running to meet him when he came home. But that was all it was: just a recollection out of a fairy tale that he'd had once, a long time ago, and lost forever.
"He gave orders to Frazier for the body to be embalmed and buried; but by then Frazier was a little nuts on the subject. He didn't believe the medics. He wanted them to go ahead with the thaw, and when the Old Man wouldn't, he said some things to him that he'd have killed any other man for. Then he left.
"The Old Man went on with the funeral. And just before the grave was closed he had a thought and told them to open the box, and they did; and it was empty. Or almost empty. There was a little scale model of some kind of Indian temple in it, made out of solid gold. Frazier's idea of a joke, maybe. He'd been a good man once, but he was getting old. The Old Man tried to find him, but couldn't. He'd made some plans of his own. He was quite a boy, was Frazier. A billionaire in his own right. He knew how to cover a trail.
"So the Old Man called off the hunt. Frazier had been a good friend for a lot of years. It was too bad he'd gone off his rocker in his old age, but the thing to do was to let it go and forget it. As for the body—well, it was just a body now; in time Frazier would realize that and bury it and it would all be over.
"Meanwhile, there was a business to run. In a way, it was a relief to the Old Man to have the other off his mind. He'd been living in the past too long, trying to hold onto a dream that was a long time dying. Now he could put all his efforts into the important things.
"By this time the food processing empire was the tail that was trying to wag the dog. The sidelines were the big business. Rejuvenation methods that could keep a man looking young at ninety; artificial organs that he manufactured under his own patents—and some he didn't patent, because he didn't want any information leaks through the Patent Office. That was where the money was—and the power.
"After that things moved fast. The Old Man was already running the United States; he branched out then, took control of the French Assembly, then the Scandinavian Parliament, most of South America, Africa, Southeast Asia. He changed the name of the company, and reorganized it along lines that took control out of the hands of the board and put it where it belonged—in his pocket."
"You said you changed the company's name," I butted in. I already knew the answer, but I wanted to hear it from him.
"The Draco Company was all right for a small food-processing firm," he said. "When the outfit grew and moved into the life sciences field, the Old Man decided he needed something with a little more élan. He came up with Eternity, Incorporated."
"Commonly known as ETORP," I said.
He nodded. "He had it all in the palm of his hand; and then one day a man came gunning for him.
"The Plan; the one he'd worked out to insure that things were done his way, even after he died—was backfiring on him. Frazier's work. He'd been the one who set it up; he was the one the Old Man trusted. He'd matured the duplicate Dravek in an LS tank and briefed him to kill. It was a clever scheme. Who else was tough enough to kill Dravek—but Dravek?
"But it didn't work. Dravek Number Two found the Old Man; but the Old Man was too smart for him. He shot first. He had the body dumped where it would be found, so Frazier would hear about it and get the message.
"But Frazier was stubborn. Eighteen years later, another killer made his try. He went the same way. This time the Old Man knew Frazier had to go. He spent three years and a billion dollars, and he found him. But the medics weren't quick enough, and all he got out of him was the one fact: That each vault was set to signal when it opened. He got the details on that and nothing else.
"But when Number Three came out, he was ready for him. He was well over a hundred years old now, and still vigorous, but time was running out. He wanted an heir. So when Three showed, he knocked him out with a sleep gun; and when he came out of it, he told him the story. And he took him in and treated him like a son.
"A few months later the Old Man died in his sleep and Number Three went on where he'd left off.
"But the machine was still grinding. Twenty years later, Number Four came along. There was an accident. Three was killed. And then I showed up.
"I guess Number Four was a little greedy. He didn't try to talk to me, just took a shot at me. But my aim was better.
"Things ran quietly for quite a long time. There were problems, but what Dravek Number One could do, Number Five could do again. I had an idea there'd be a Number Six along, about twenty years back, but he never showed up. I figured the Draveks were all used up. And then you came."
"And where do you figure we go from here?"
"I'm not quite as greedy as Four was, Steve. And like the Old Man, I'm getting along to an age where I'm thinking of an heir. I don't have a son."
"Make it plainer."
"There's plenty here for both of us. In a way, you have as much right to it as I do. I want you to stay; share it with me. The whole world, Steve—and everything that's in it. . . ."
He leaned toward me, and some of the deadness had gone out of his eyes, and the smile he was playing with was starting to be a real smile.
"I've got a lot to show you, Steve, a lot to tell you. . . ." His hand went out to a little table beside him and dipped into a recess under it, and I brought the gun up from my side and shot him through the chest.
The shock half-spun him, knocked him out of the chair. I went after him fast, ready to fire again, but his face already had death written across it. His hand opened and the little silver-framed picture in it fell to the rug. The sleeve that had slid back when he reached was still pulled back almost to the elbow, and I could see the faint white line that ran all the way around his forearm six inches above the wrist.
"Whose arm did you steal, Old Man?" I got the words out. "Number Two's? Or weren't your boys good enough at their graft techniques back then?"
His head turned half an inch. His eyes found me.
"Why. . . . ?"
I stooped and picked up the picture he had reached for. "I thought you were trying for your gun," I said. "But it would have ended that way anyway, as long as we had this between us."
A light crossed his face, like a cloud shadow crossing a field of grain.
"Dead," he gasped out. "Dead. . . . long. . . . ago. . . ."
"She's alive, Old Man."
His eyes were holding mine, holding back death.
"Why did you do it, Old Man?" I gave him back his look. "Afraid a living heir might get in your way, after you'd learned how to make yourself immortal?"
He tried to speak, failed, tried again:
"Searched. . . . all these years. . . . never knew. . . ."
"Frazier outsmarted you after all. You ran the world, but in the end he took it away from you. I wonder what your boys did to him, to try to get him to talk. But he never did. He was loyal to you, Old Man, even after you'd stopped being loyal to yourself."
His face was the color of old ivory under the tan. His mouth opened and moved. I stooped to hear him.
"Tell Duna I said. . . . hello. . . ." His eyes were still on mine, dead eyes now, claiming their last wish.
"Sure," I said. "I'll tell her."