Gods and Pawns (Company) Page 29

  “You did, eh?” he remarked. “How old are you?”

  “About twenty thousand years,” I answered. Wham, he hit me with that deadweight stare again.

  “Really?” he said. “A little fellow like you?”

  I ask you, is five foot five really so short? “We were smaller back then,” I explained. “People were, I mean. Diet, probably.”

  He just nodded. After a moment he asked: “You’ve lived through the ages as an eyewitness to history?”

  “Yeah. Yes, sir.”

  “You saw the Pyramids built?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.” I prayed he wouldn’t ask me how they did it, because he’d never believe the truth, but he pushed on:

  “You saw the Trojan War?”

  “Well, yes, I did, but it wasn’t exactly like Homer said.”

  “The stories in the Bible, are they true? Did they really happen? Did you meet Jesus Christ?” His eyes were blazing at me.

  “Well—” I waved my hands in a helpless kind of way. “I didn’t meet Jesus, no, because I was working in Rome back then. I never worked in Judea until the Crusades, and that was way later. And as for the stuff in the Bible being true…Some of it is, and some of it isn’t, and anyway it depends on what you mean by true.” I gave in and pulled out a handkerchief, mopping my face.

  “But the theological questions!” Hearst leaned forward. “Have we got souls that survive us after physical death? What about Heaven and Hell?”

  “Sorry.” I shook my head. “How should I know? I’ve never been to either place. I’ve never died, remember?”

  “Don’t your masters know?”

  “If they do, they haven’t told me,” I apologized. “But then there’s a lot they haven’t told me.”

  Hearst’s mouth tightened again, and yet I got the impression he was satisfied in some way. I sagged backward, feeling like a wrung-out sponge. So much for my suave, subtle Mephistopheles act.

  On the other hand, Hearst liked being in control of the game. He might be more receptive this way.

  Our coffee arrived. Hearst took half a cup and filled it the rest of the way up with cream. I put cream and four lumps of sugar in mine.

  “You like sugar,” Hearst observed, sipping his coffee. “But then, I don’t suppose you had much opportunity to get sweets for the first few thousand years of your life?”

  “Nope,” I admitted. I tasted my cup and set it aside to cool. “No Neolithic candy stores.”

  There was a discreet double knock. Jerome entered after a word from Mr. Hearst. He brought in my suitcase and set it down between us. “Thanks,” I said.

  “You’re welcome, sir,” he replied, without a trace of sarcasm, and exited as quietly as he’d entered. It was just me, Hearst, and the dog again. They looked at me expectantly.

  “All right,” I said, drawing a deep breath. I leaned down, punched in the code on the lock, and opened the suitcase. I felt like a traveling salesman. I guess I sort of was one.

  “Here we are,” I told Hearst, drawing out a silver bottle. “This is your free sample. Drink it, and you’ll taste what it feels like to be forty again. The effects will only last a day or so, but that ought to be enough to show you that we can give you those twenty years with no difficulties.”

  “So your secret’s a potion?” Hearst drank more of his coffee.

  “Not entirely,” I said truthfully. I was going to have to do some crypto-surgery to make temporary repairs on his heart, but we never tell them about that part of it. “Now. Here’s something I think you’ll find a lot more impressive.”

  I took out the viewscreen and set it up on the table between us. “If this were, oh, a thousand years ago and you were some emperor I was trying to impress, I’d tell you this was a magic mirror. As it is…you know that Television idea they’re working on in England right now?”

  “Yes,” Hearst replied.

  “This is where that invention’s going to have led in about two hundred years,” I said. “Now, I can’t pick up any broadcasts because there aren’t any yet, but this one also plays recorded programs.” I slipped a small gold disc from a black envelope and pushed it into a slot in the front of the device, and hit the PLAY button.

  Instantly the screen lit up pale blue. A moment later a montage of images appeared there, with music booming from the tiny speakers: a staccato fanfare announcing the evening news for April 18, 2106.

  Hearst peered into the viewscreen in astonishment. He leaned close as the little stories sped by, the attractive people chattering brightly: new mining colonies on Luna, Ulster Revenge League terrorists bombing London again, new international agreement signed to tighten prohibitions on Recombinant DNA research, protesters in Mexico picketing Japanese-owned auto plants—

  “Wait,” Hearst said, lifting his big hand. “How do you stop this thing? Can you slow it down?”

  I made it pause. The image of Mexican union workers torching a sushi bar froze. Hearst remained staring at the screen.

  “Is that,” he said, “what journalism is like, in the future?”

  “Well, yes, sir. No newspapers anymore, you see; it’ll all be online by then. Sort of a print-and-movie broadcast,” I explained, though I was aware the revelation would probably give the poor old guy future shock. This had been his field of expertise, after all.

  “But, I mean—” Hearst tore his gaze away and looked at me probingly. “This is only snippets of stuff. There’s no real coverage; maybe three sentences to a story and one picture. It hasn’t got half the substance of a news-reel!”

  Not a word of surprise about colonies on the Moon.

  “No, it’ll be pretty lightweight,” I admitted. “But, you see, Mr. Hearst, that’ll be what the average person wants out of news by the twenty-second century. Something brief and easy to grasp. Most people will be too busy—and too uninterested—to follow stories in depth.”

  “Play it over again, please,” Hearst ordered, and I restarted it for him. He watched intently. I felt a twinge of pity. What could he possibly make of the sound bites, the chaotic juxtaposition of images, the rapid, bouncing, and relentless pace? He watched, with the same frown, to about the same spot; then gestured for me to stop it again. I obeyed.

  “Exactly,” he said. “Exactly. News for the fellow in the street! Even an illiterate stevedore could get this stuff. It’s like a kindergarten primer.” He looked at me sidelong. “And it occurs to me, Mr. Denham, that it must be fairly easy to sway public opinion with this kind of pap. A picture’s worth a thousand words, isn’t it? I always thought so. This is mostly pictures. If you fed the public the right little fragments of story, you could manipulate their impressions of what’s going on. Couldn’t you?”

  I gaped at him.

  “Uh—you could, but of course that wouldn’t be a very ethical thing to do,” I found myself saying.

  “No, if you were doing it for unethical reasons,” Hearst agreed. “If you were on the side of the angels, though, I can’t see how it would be wrong to pull out every trick of rhetoric available to fight for your cause! Let’s see the rest of this. You’re looking at these control buttons, aren’t you? What are these things, these hieroglyphics?”

  “Universal icons,” I explained. “They’re activated by eye movement. To start it again, you look at this one—” Even as I was pointing, he’d started it again himself.

  There wasn’t much left on the disc. A tiny clutch of factoids about a new fusion power plant, a weather report, a sports piece, and then two bitty scoops of local news. The first was a snap and ten seconds of sound, from a reporter at the scene of a party in San Francisco commemorating the two-hundredth anniversary of the 1906 earthquake. The second one—the story that had influenced the Company’s choice of this particular news broadcast for Mr. Hearst’s persuasion—was a piece on protesters blocking the subdivision of Hearst Ranch, which was in danger of being turned into a planned community with tract housing, golf courses, and shopping malls.

  Hearst ca
ught his breath at that, and if I thought his face had been scary before I saw now I had had no idea what scary could be. His glare hit the activation buttons with almost physical force: replay, replay, replay. After he’d watched that segment half a dozen times, he shut it off and looked at me.

  “They can’t do it,” he said. “Did you see those plans? They’d ruin this coastline. They’d cut down all the trees! Traffic and noise and soot and—and where would all the animals go? Animals have rights, too.”

  “I’m afraid most of the wildlife would be extinct in this range by then, Mr. Hearst,” I apologized, placing the viewer back into its case. “But maybe now you’ve got an idea about why my Company needs to control certain of your assets.”

  He was silent, breathing hard. The little dog was looking up at him with anxious eyes.

  “All right, Mr. Denham,” he said quietly. “To paraphrase Dickens: Is this the image of what will be, or only of what may be?”

  I shrugged. “I only know what’s going to happen in the future in a general kind of way, Mr. Hearst. Big stuff, like wars and inventions. I’m not told a lot else. I sincerely hope things don’t turn out so badly for your ranch—and if it’s any consolation, you notice the program was about protesting the proposed development only. The problem is, history can’t be changed, not once it’s happened.”

  “History, or recorded history, Mr. Denham?” Hearst countered. “They’re not at all necessarily the same thing, I can tell you from personal experience.”

  “I’ll bet you can,” I answered, wiping away sweat again. “O.K., you’ve figured something out: there are all kinds of little zones of error in recorded history. My Company makes use of those errors. If history can’t be changed, it can be worked around. See?”

  “Perfectly,” Hearst replied. He leaned back in his chair and his voice was hard, those violets of sound transmuted to porphyry marble. “I’m convinced your people are on the level, Mr. Denham. Now. You go and tell them that twenty years is pretty much chickenfeed as far as I’m concerned. It won’t do, not by a long way. I want nothing less than the same immortality you’ve got, you see? Permanent life. I always thought I could put it to good use and, now that you’ve shown me the future, I can see my work’s cut out for me. I also want shares in your Company’s stock. I want to be a player in this game.”

  “But—” I sat bolt upright in my chair. “Mr. Hearst! I can manage the shares of stock. But the immortality’s impossible! You don’t understand how it works. The immortality process can’t be done on old men. We have to start with young mortals. I was only a little kid when I was recruited for the Company. Don’t you see? Your body’s too old and damaged to be kept running indefinitely.”

  “Who said I wanted immortality in this body?” said Hearst. “Why would I want to drive around forever in a rusted old Model T when I could have one of those shiny new modern cars? Your masters seem to be capable of darned near anything. I’m betting that there’s a way to bring me back in a new body, and if there isn’t a way now, I’ll bet they can come up with one if they try. They’re going to have to try, if they want my cooperation. Tell them that.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, and then I thought—why argue? Promise him anything. “O.K.,” I agreed.

  “Good,” Hearst said, finishing his coffee. “Do you need a telephone to contact them? My switchboard can connect you anywhere in the world in a couple of minutes.”

  “Thanks, but we use something different,” I told him. “It’s back in my room and I don’t think Jerome could find it. I’ll try to have an answer for you by tomorrow morning, though.”

  He nodded. Reaching out his hand, he took up the silver bottle and considered it. “Is this the drug that made you what you are?” He looked at me. His dog looked up at him.

  “Pretty much. Except my body’s been altered to manufacture the stuff, so it pumps through me all the time,” I explained. “I don’t have to take it orally.”

  “But you’d have no objection to sampling a little, before I drank it?”

  “Absolutely none,” I said, and held out my empty coffee cup. Hearst lifted his eyebrows at that. He puzzled a moment over the bottlecap before figuring it out, and then poured about three ounces of Pineal Tribrantine Three cocktail into my cup. I drank it down, trying not to make a face.

  It wasn’t all PT3. There was some kind of fruit base, cranberry juice as far as I could tell, and a bunch of hormones and euphoriacs to make him feel great as well as healthy, and something to stimulate the production of telomerase. Beneficial definitely, but not an immortality potion by a long shot. He’d have to have custom-designed biomechanicals and prosthetic implants, to say nothing of years of training for eternity starting when he was about three. But why tell the guy?

  And Hearst was looking young already, just watching me: wonder-struck, scared, and eager. When I didn’t curl up and die, he poured the rest of the bottle’s contents into his cup and drank it down, glancing furtively at his hidden camera.

  “My,” he said. “That tasted funny.”

  I nodded.

  And of course he didn’t die either, as the time passed in that grand room. He quizzed me about my personal life, wanted to hear about what it was like to live in the ancient world, and how many famous people I’d met. I told him all about Phoenician traders and Egyptian priests and Roman senators I’d known. After a while Hearst noticed he felt swell—I could tell by his expression—and he got up and put down the little dog and began to pace the room as we talked, not with the heavy cautious tread of the old man he was but with a light step, almost dancing.

  “So I said to Apuleius, ‘But that only leaves three fish, and anyway what do you want to do about the flute player—’” I was saying, when a door in the far corner opened and Marion stormed in.

  “W-w-where were you?” she shouted. Marion stammered when she was tired or upset, and she was both now. “Thanks a lot for s-sneaking out like that and leaving me to t-t-talk to everybody. They’re your guests too, y-you know!”

  Hearst turned to stare at her, openmouthed. I really think he’d forgotten about Marion. I jumped up, looking apologetic.

  “Whoops! Hey, Marion, it was my fault. I needed to ask his advice about something,” I explained. She turned, surprised to see me.

  “Joe?” she said.

  “I’m sorry to take so long, dear,” said Hearst, coming and putting his arms around her. “Your friend’s a very interesting fellow.” He was looking at her like a wolf looks at a lamb chop. “Did they like the picture?”

  “N-n-no!” she said. “Half of ’em left before it was over. You’d think they’d s-stay to watch Bing C-Crosby.”

  If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the millennia, it’s when to exit a room.

  “Thanks for the talk, Mr. Hearst,” I said, grabbing my black case and heading for the elevator. “I’ll see if I can’t find that prospectus. Maybe you can look at it for me tomorrow.”

  “Maybe,” Hearst murmured into Marion’s neck. I was ready to crawl down the elevator cable like a monkey to get out of there, but fortunately the car was still on that floor, so I jumped in and rattled down through the house like Mephistopheles dropping through a trapdoor instead.

  It was dark when I emerged into the assembly hall, but as soon as the panel had closed after me light blazed up from the overhead fixtures. I blinked, looking around. Scanning revealed a camera mount, way up high, that I hadn’t noticed before. I saluted it Roman style and hurried out into the night, over the Pompeiian floor. As soon as I had crossed the threshold, the lights blinked out behind me. More surveillance. How many faithful Jeromes did Hearst have, sitting patiently behind peepholes in tiny rooms?

  The night air was chilly, fresh with the smell of orange and lemon blossoms. The stars looked close enough to fall on me. I wandered around between the statues for a while, wondering how the hell I was going to fool the master of this house into thinking the Company had agreed to his terms. Gee: for that matter, how was I
going to break it to the Company that they’d underestimated William Randolph Hearst?

  Well, it wasn’t going to be the first time I’d had to be the bearer of bad news to Dr. Zeus. At last I gave it up and found my way back to my wing of the guest house.

  There was a light on in the gorgeously gilded sitting room. Lewis was perched uncomfortably on the edge of a sixteenth-century chair. He looked guilty about something. Jumping to his feet as I came in, he said: “Joseph, we have a problem.”

  “We do, huh?” I looked him over wearily. All in the world I wanted right then was a hot shower and a few hours of shuteye. “What is it?”

  “The, ah, Valentino script has been stolen,” he said.

  My priorities changed. I strode muttering to the phone and picked it up. After a moment a blurred voice answered.

  “Jerome? How you doing, pal? Listen, I’d like some room service. Can I get a hot fudge sundae over here at La Casa del Sol? Heavy on the hot fudge?”

  “Make that two,” Lewis suggested. I looked daggers at him and went on:

  “Make that two. No, no nuts. And if you’ve got any chocolate pudding or chocolate cake or some Hershey bars or anything, send those along, too. O.K.? I’ll make it worth your while, chum.”

  “…so I just thought I’d have a last look at it before I went to bed, but when I opened the case it wasn’t there,” Lewis explained, licking his spoon.

  “You scanned for thermoluminescence? Fingerprints?” I said, putting the sundae dish down with one hand and reaching for cake with the other.

  “Of course I did. No fingerprints, and judging from the faintness of the thermoluminescence, whoever went through my things must have been wearing gloves,” Lewis told me. “About all I could tell was that a mortal had been in my room, probably an hour to an hour and a half before I got there. Do you think it was one of the servants?”

  “No, I don’t. I know Mr. Hearst sent Jerome in here to get something out of my room, but I don’t think the guy ducked into yours as an afterthought to go through your drawers. Anybody who swiped stuff from Mr. Hearst’s guests wouldn’t work here very long,” I said. “If any guest had ever had something stolen, everybody in the Industry would know about it. Gossip travels fast in this town.” I meant Hollywood, of course, not San Simeon.