"Ha!" tapped Garth. "What's my crime?"
Paul laughed wonderingly. "Treeslaughter?" he tapped.
"Attempted treeslaughter," tapped Garth. "Thing's still alive, though probably never have acorns again."
"Proteus!" called the cellblock loudspeaker. "Visitors. Stay where you are, Harold."
"Ain' going nowhere, 'cause Ah ain' sorry," said Harold. " 'Cayful, look out, now. Walk facin' the traffic.' "
The cell door buzzed and opened, and Paul walked to the green door of the visitors' room. The green door opened, whispered shut behind him, and he found himself face to face with Anita and Kroner.
Both were dressed funereally, as though not to compete for glamour with the corpse. Gravely, wordlessly, Anita handed him a carton containing a milkshake and a sheaf of funnypapers. She lifted her veil and pecked him on his cheek.
"Paul, my boy," rumbled Kroner. "It's been hard, hasn't it? How are you, my boy?"
Paul stepped back out of reach of the big, sapping, paternal hands. "Fine, thanks."
"Congratulations, Paul, darling," said Anita, her voice tiny.
"For what?"
"She knows, my boy," said Kroner. "She knows you're a secret agent."
"And I'm awfully proud of you."
"When do I get out?"
"Right away. Just as soon as we can transcribe what you found out about the Ghost Shirts, who they are, how they work," said Kroner.
"Home is all ready, Paul," said Anita. "I let the maid off, so we could have an old-fashioned American homecoming."
Paul could see her creating this old-fashioned atmosphere - putting a drop of Tabu on the filter of the electronic dust precipitator, setting the clockwork on the master control panel, which would thaw a steak dinner and load it into the radar stove at the proper moment, and turn on the television just as they crossed the threshold. Goaded by a primitive and insistent appetite, Paul gave her offer cautious consideration. He was pleased to find a higher order of human need asserting itself, a need that made him think, if not feel, that he didn't give a damn if he never slept with her again. She seemed to sense this, too, and, for want of any proclivities to interest Paul save sex, her smile of welcome and forgiveness became a thin and chilling thing indeed.
"Your bodyguards can eat later," said Kroner. He chuckled. "Say, that was quite a letter you wrote for the Ghost Shirts. Sounded wonderful, till you tried to make sense out of it."
"You couldn't?" said Paul.
Kroner shook his head. "Words."
"But it did one thing I'll bet you never expected," said Anita. "Can I tell him - about the new job?"
"Yes, Paul," said Kroner, "the Eastern Division needs a new manager of engineering."
"And you're the man, darling!" said Anita.
"Manager of engineering?" said Paul. "What about Baer?" Somehow Paul had expected the rest of the world to hold firm while his own life went spinning. And of that rest of the world nothing had seemed more firm than the union of Baer, the engineering genius, and Kroner, the rock of faith in technology. "He isn't dead, is he?"
"No," said Kroner sadly, "no, he's still alive - physically, that is." He placed a microphone on a table and moved up a chair, so that Paul might testify in comfort. "Well, who knows - maybe what happened is just as well. Poor Baer never was too stable, you know." He adjusted the microphone. "There. Now, you come over here, Paul, my boy."
"What about Baer?" insisted Paul.
"Oh," sighed Kroner, "he read that fool letter, cleaned out his desk drawers, and walked out. Sit right here, Paul."
The letter, then, had been that good, Paul thought, astonished at the upheaval it had caused in at least one man's life. But then he wondered if the letter hadn't won Baer's support by default of the opposition rather than by its being unanswerable. If someone with quicker wits than Kroner's had been at hand to argue against the letter, perhaps Baer would still have been on the job in Albany. "What was the official reaction to the letter?" asked Paul.
"Classified as top secret," said Kroner, "so anybody trying to circulate it will come under the National Security Act. So don't worry, my boy, it isn't going any farther."
"There is going to be an official reply, isn't there?" said Paul.
"That'd be playing right into their hands, wouldn't it - acknowledging publicly that this Ghost Shirt nonsense is worth the notice of the system? That's exactly what they want to have happen! Come on, now, sit down, and let's get this over with, so you can get home and have a well-earned rest."
Absently, Paul sat down before the microphone, and Kroner switched on the recorder. The official reaction to the Ghost Shirt Society was the official response to so many things: to ignore it, as pressing and complicated matters were ignored in the annual passion plays at the Meadows. It was as though the giving or withholding of official recognition were life or death to ideas. And there was the old Meadows team spirit in the reaction, too, the spirit that was supposed to hold the system together: the notion that the opposition wanted nothing but to win and humiliate, that the object of competition was total victory, with mortifying defeat the only alternative imaginable.
"Now then," said Kroner, "who's really at the head of this monkey business, this Ghost Shirt Society?"
Here it was again, the most ancient of roadforks, one that Paul had glimpsed before, in Kroner's study, months ago. The choice of one course or the other had nothing to do with machines, hierarchies, economics, love, age. It was a purely internal matter. Every child older than six knew the fork, and knew what the good guys did here, and what the bad guys did here. The fork was a familiar one in folk tales the world over, and the good guys and the bad guys, whether in chaps, breechclouts, serapes, leopardskins, or banker's gray pinstripes, all separated here.
Bad guys turned informer. Good guys didn't - no matter when, no matter what.
Kroner cleared his throat. "I said, 'who's their leader, Paul?' "
"I am," said Paul. "And I wish to God I were a better one."
The instant he'd said it, he knew it was true, and knew what his father had known - what it was to belong and believe.
Chapter Thirty-Two
"DO you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?"
"I do," said Paul.
The courtroom television cameras dollied back from his face, to reveal on fifty million television screens the tableau of the Ilium Federal Courtroom's south wall. There, beside and above Doctor Paul Proteus, sat the judge - the Sky Manager, Paul thought. The accused, seated on the witness stand, resembled less a man than an old-fashioned switchboard, with wires running from temperature-, pressure-, and moisture-sensitive instruments at his wrists, armpits, chest, temples, and palms. These, in turn, ran to a gray cabinet under the witness stand, where their findings were interpreted and relayed to a dial a yard in diameter over Paul's head.
The indicator needle on the dial, now pointing straight down, was pivoted so as to swing easily between a black T on the right and a red F on the left, or to a series of arbitrarily calibrated points between them.
Paul had pleaded guilty to conspiring to advocate the commission of sabotage, but was now being tried for treason, three weeks after his arrest.
"Doctor Proteus," said the prosecutor nastily. The television cameras closed in on his sneer and panned to the beads of sweat on Paul's forehead. "You have pleaded guilty to conspiracy to advocate the commission of sabotage, isn't that so?"
"It is." The needle swung toward T, and back to the neutral position, proving that, to the best of Paul's knowledge, it was indeed true.
"This conspiracy, of which you are the head, has as its method, and I quote from your famous letter, 'We are prepared to use force to end the lawlessness, if other means fail.' Those are your words, Doctor?"