"You!" barked a plump old V.G. with a lieutenant's shoulder bars. "You want to see the Captain? Come on in."
Chesley marched into an office with a soft and slanting floor and, keeping his balance with some difficulty, saluted, reported, and turned over his list of persons who had offered him bribes.
Captain Carsten stared at him in frank incredulity. "They tried to bribe you?" he asked.
"Yes, sir."
"And you—you're reporting them to me?"
"Yes, sir."
"I see." Carsten shook his head slowly, as though it were impossible to believe. And, in fact, he was baffled. He tried to clear up the confusion in his own mind. "You mean to say," he began, "that these people all offered you bribes, that you accepted the money, that you have brought the money to me here as evidence, and that you are turning their names in for punishment?"
"That's absolutely right, sir," Chesley said gratefully. He was very relieved; at first he had almost thought the captain didn't understand.
"I see," said the captain again. He picked up the pile of bills and the list of would-be bribe-givers. "There's quite a respectable sum here, Chesley," he said warmly. "And it requires a great deal of fortitude to resist keeping it. I must commend you."
"Thank you very much, sir!" Chesley felt the stirrings of pleasure in his tranquil little heart. "Shall I keep them under observation?"
"Eh? Keep who?"
"The people on the list, sir."
"Oh." The captain pursed his lips. "No," he said, "that won't be necessary. I'll take over, Chesley. I see that you have much more uncommon abilities than I had suspected, so that I think perhaps you should be transferred to—to a more advanced position." He nodded briskly, wadded up the money and put it in his pocket. "I'll keep the, uh, evidence. Pending the proper time, of course. Now, Chesley, dismissed!"
Chesley marched out, feeling quite good—until a couple of days later, when he made another routine check and came across the Portland cement salesman. "You?" Chesley said, astonished. "But I thought—"
"You thought what, pal?" the salesman snarled.
"I thought—" Chesley had been going to say that he'd thought the salesman would long since have passed on, accompanied by a violet flare and a bam. But obviously that hadn't happened, and he floundered.
"Ah," snarled the salesman, "you give me a pain. A thousand bucks wasn't enough for you, huh? You had to pass me on to Carsten, huh? What do you think I was bothering with you for? Just because I couldn't afford his prices—and now he's got me down for a weekly payoff, and, believe me, it isn't any measly grand. Get out of here, you! I don't have to bother with you small-timers any more—now that I'm paying for real protection, I'm going to get it!"
Truly, thought Chesley in his analytical way, the V.G. was a strange and educational organization.
But time went on, and Chesley's ears slowly dried, and it was only a matter of months before he had his own list, and more than five hundred lesser V.G.s under him to help in the collections. For the mortality rate among the human population itself was high, but among that segment of the race that had joined the V.G., it was fabulous. Nearly one execution out of ten, Chesley discovered with interest, was of a V.G.—V.G. caught conspiring to defraud, V.G. caught suborning forbidden research, V.G. under the influence of alcohol, V.G.—more often than any of these—the victim of a de sire for advancement on the part of one of his subordinates.
For if mortality was rapid, so was advancement. It was Major Chesley now, and the old apartment up the block from Mrs. Morgenstern was only a memory; the Chesleys lived in a penthouse over a pagoda-shaped Project of orange crystal.
The Viceroy could have blotted out his enemies en masse only at the cost of blotting out the human race, and forfeiting the work he wanted done. For his own sake, he had to ferret out hostile groups and individuals and destroy them without destroying too many of the others at the same time. Hence, he needed his international army, the V.G.
But the army was shot through with corruption. Men who spied on their fellow men for the sake of an inhuman ruler had little of ordinary human feelings. They robbed and reported for annihilation with relative impunity—at least until they aroused the opposition of other V.G. men. Then they themselves were robbed and reported. And another violet flare and bam.
Captain Carsten—now Colonel Carsten—got it one fine day. Major Morgenstern—now General Morgenstern—found out he was on a marshal's list, and hanged himself in panic. Major Chesley watched and profited; he made it a point never, never to interfere with an other V.G. man, at least one of superior rank.
And so, when the Viceroy at last was impelled to act in enormous wholesale fashion, Major Chesley ceased being even a major; there was a renewed loyalty check and a doubling of the hidden microphones; Major Chesley became Generalissimo Chesley.
The long procession of stepping stones, it seemed, had finally led to a goal.
IV
Chesley's wife cooed:
"Arthur, you look so handsome! Just think, my Arthur's a generalissimo! Oh, if only Elsie Morgenstern's husband down the block could see you now!"
"I have to go," Chesley said.
"Oh, don't go yet, Arthur. Let me look at you. My, blue is your color. And those comets on your shoulder—Arthur, you're handsomer than you were when we were married." She giggled.
Chesley said uneasily, "Dear, I must go. The Viceroy himself has sent for me."
"The Viceroy?" His wife's mouth went wide with surprise—yes, and with fright. "Arthur! You mean—"
"I only know that he sent for me," Chesley said.
"But that's what happened with Elsie Morgenstern's husband, Arthur! The Viceroy sent for him, and Elsie said the poor man knew it was—And he just couldn't bear the suspense, knowing that he was on somebody's list, so he— Arthur, please don't go. Stay here, Arthur! Oh, Arthur, I knew all this would end up with some kind of terrible thing. How can I tell my mother if you— And think of the disgrace! My own husband blasted by the Viceroy for disloyalty! I won't be able to hold up my head. Just when the other ladies were—Arthur, come back here!"
But it wasn't his death sentence that was being passed after all. Chesley had been pretty sure it wasn't that—though there were uneasy moments, waiting in the purplish gloom of the Viceroy's own outer office, when he would have given his blue V.G. uniform and his generalissimo's comets cheerfully for the privilege of once again being an ordinary common citizen in an ordinary world.
But it wasn't bad news; it was good; how good, Chesley would never have dared to guess.
The Viceroy's personal aide-de-camp, white-faced, sweating, let Chesley in. Chesley walked past the man and thought objectively how terrible it must be to be exposed continually to the ultimate wrath of the Viceroy—and how short the life expectancy of a personal aide had come to be, with the average duration in the post running to not much over a week.
But then he was in the presence of the Viceroy, and he had no time to think of things concerning mere humans.
And yet—the Viceroy himself, even, had an aura of humanity that was new and strange.
It wasn't that he looked human. His features were twice the size of a man's, and utterly blank, carved out of heartless granite, as though it weren't worth the trouble to him of assuming an expression. It wasn't as though he sounded human —his voice had a curious mechanical harshness, more so than ever before, as though he had not bothered to dress it up with earthly intonations and overtones.