“Yeah, Brooks,” said Beau St. Clair. He hadn’t been there as long as the rest of them, and he was looking green. “For the love of Christ,” said Beau.
“Christ,” Brooks ranted at them through gritted teeth, “would have had nothing to do with this! Even Christ would have been too merciful to raise this thing from the dead!”
The man allegedly in charge of the group, who had not had the guts to go into the Interface after the baby when it had seemed to them all to suddenly explode in there, felt as if he had to make some kind of leadership gesture. He cleared his throat a couple of times, to make sure that what came out wouldn’t be just a noise, and said, “Brooks, we do the best we can. For the greater good of all mankind, Brooks. I think Christ would understand.”
Christ would understand? Brooks stared at Arnold Dolbe, who watched him warily and backed off a step or two more. Arnold was not going to take a chance on being handed that baby, that was very clear.
“God allowed His beloved Son to be sacrificed, for a greater good,” explained Arnold solemnly. “You see the parallel, I’m sure.”
“Yeah,” spat Showard. “But God only allowed crucifixion and a whipping or two, you pitiful pious shit. He would not have allowed this.”
“We do what we have to do,” said Dolbe. “Somebody has to do it, and we do the best we can, like I said already.”
“Well, I won’t do it again.”
“Oh, you’ll do it again, Showard! You’ll do it again, because if you don’t we’ll see to it that you take the whole rap for this all to yourself. Won’t we, men?”
“Oh, shut up, Dolbe,” Showard said wearily. “You know what bemdung that is… one word about this, one word, and we will all — every one of us, right down to the lowliest servomechanism that cleans the toilets in this establishment — be dumped. Just like the babies, Dolbe. Mercilessly. Permanently. We’ll disappear like none of us had ever existed. And you know it, and I know it, and everybody knows it. So shut up already. Be your effing age, Dolbe.”
“Yeah,” agreed Lanky Pugh. “There’d be an ‘unfortunate incident’ that just conveniently happened to vaporize everything out to about two feet past the G.W. property lines. With no danger whatsoever to the population, of course, no cause for alarm, folks, it’s just one of our little routine explosions. Shitshingles, Dolbe… we’re all in this together.”
Brooks Showard laid the horrible pile of distorted tissues that had only recently been a healthy human infant down on the floor at his feet, and he sat down beside it very gently. He laid his head on his knees, wrapped his arms around them, and began to cry. It was only by the quick intervention of Arnold Dolbe that the servomechanism speeding across the floor to pick up what it interpreted as garbage was intercepted. Dolbe snatched the baby from under the edge of the cylinder and almost ran to the vaporizer slot… and when he had shoved the body through it he rubbed his hands violently against the sides of his lab coat, scrubbing them. There goes your boy, Mr. and Mrs. Ned Landry, he thought crazily, and have we got a medal for you!
“Thank you, Dolbe,” sighed Lanky. “I didn’t want to look at that thing any longer, either. It wasn’t really… decent.”
Lanky was thinking of Mr. and Mrs. Ned Landry too. Because he was the one who had to dump all the data out of the computers after each failure, and he remembered stuff like the names of the parents. He wasn’t supposed to. He was supposed to dump it out of his head at the same time. But he was the one who had to write the names down on a piece of paper before he dumped them, and he was the one that had to transfer the names to the data card in his lockbox, so there wouldn’t be any chance of losing what had been dumped. Lanky knew all forty-three sets of names by heart, in numerical order.
In the small conference room, with Showard in reasonable control of himself once again, if you ignored the shaking hands, the four G.W. techs sat and listened while the representative from the Pentagon laid it out for them. Neat and sweet, wasting nothing. He wasn’t overpoweringly pleased with them.
“We have got to crack that language,” he told them bluntly. “And I mean that one hundred percent. Whatever that thing in the Interface has for a language, we’ve got to get at it — it sure as hell can’t use PanSig to communicate. We absolutely must find a way to do that — communicate with it, I mean. With it, and all its flickering friends. This is a matter of the utmost urgency.”
“Oh, sure,” said Brooks Showard. “Sure it is.”
“Colonel,” snapped the Pentagon man, “it’s not a question of just wanting to chat with the things, you know. We need what they’ve got, and we can’t do without it. And there’s no way of getting it without negotiating with them.”
“We need what they’ve got… we always ‘need’ what something’s got, General. You mean we want what they’ve got, don’t you?”
“Not this time. Not this time! This time we really do have to have it.”
“At any cost.”
“At any cost. That’s correct.”
“What is it, the secret of eternal life?”
“You know I can’t tell you that,” the general said patiently, as he would have spoken to a fretful woman he was indulgent with.
“We’re supposed to take it on faith, as usual.”
“You can take it on anything you like, Showard! It makes no difference to me what you take it on. But I sit here, empowered by the federal government of this great nation to support you and a rather sizable staff in the carrying out of acts that are so far past illegal and criminal, and so far into unspeakable and unthinkable, that we can’t even keep records on them. And I’m here to give you my sacred oath that I’m not going to participate in that kind of thing for trinkets and gewgaws and a new variety of beads; and neither are the officials who — with tremendous reluctance, I assure you — authorize me to serve in this capacity.”
Arnold Dolbe flashed his teeth at the general, trying not to think that the uniform was quaint. There were good and excellent reasons for keeping the ancient uniforms, and he was familiar with them. Tradition. Respect for historical values. Antidote to Future Shock Syndrome. Etc. And he wanted to be certain that the general remembered him as a cooperative fellow, a real Team Player in the finest reaganic tradition. He meant to see to it that the general was fully aware of that. He felt that a brief speech was in order, something tasteful but still memorable, and he thought he was not overstating the case when he considered himself to be topnotch at the impromptu brief speech.
“We understand that, General,” he began, all sugar and snakeoil, “and we appreciate it. We are grateful for it. Beelieve you me, there’s not one member of this team, not one man on this team, that doesn’t support this effort all the way — those without a need to know always excepted, of course. Not that they don’t support the effort, that is — they just don’t know… in detail… what it is that they’re supporting. We do — those of us in the room — we do know. And we feel a certain humility at being chosen for this noble task. Colonel Showard is a little overstressed at the moment, understandably so, but he’s behind you all the way. It’s just been an unpleasant morning here at Government Work, don’t you see. And yet — ”