“All right,” said Art, brushing the subject aside. “Listen, do you have any idea where Luther and Morey might be, or when they’re due back?”
“Not the faintest,” George admitted. “Luther has his cat farm up near Turino—he might have gone there—but he might just as easily have run over to Praha or even Wembley for a couple of days. Morey might have gone back to North America—I hope so—but in any case I don’t see how we can risk a ’gram without giving the whole show away.”
“No,” agreed Art. He scowled and bit his lip. “Just the same, we’ve got to locate them. I have a hunch the S. P. is just as anxious to find them as we are.”
George lifted one eyebrow. “You think they’re clairvoyant?”
“No. I think that up till an hour ago, Golightly’s crowd took me just seriously enough to want me out of the way. But since you’ve pulled that television-serial act with the ’copter, I’m willing to bet that they’re seriously alarmed. I told you they must have our meeting on tape, so they’ll know Luther and Morey are involved. You, too, of course.”
George sat down on the edge of a large, circular divan, upholstered in aphrodisia red. He said thoughtfully, “Well, what do we do? If we all run, then we’ll just be advertising our whereabouts, won’t we?”
Art nodded grimly But if the S. P. gets hold of any of the four of us, I wouldn’t give much for our chances of seeing daylight again.” .
George stared at him. “I suppose I’m naive, but it seems to me that you’re implying they’ll use illegal methods—truth serum and so on.”
“I think they will,” Art said positively. “George, you were born into this society, so I wouldn’t expect you to realize, emotionally, just how unstable it really is. You’ve read about the series of religious wars that followed the big blowup, and the Asian massacres, but I suppose it’s never occurred to you that that kind of thing could happen again. It could, and nobody knows it better than Golightly. By education and technology and, let’s face it, by the execution of everybody who really objected, this planet has been forced to keep its birth-rate at zero. But the1 urge to reproduce,’ next to the survival instinct, is one of the strongest forces in nature. Tilt the balance of control just enough, and Golightly’s government would go over like a house of cards. And just incidentally, Golightly is about as paranoid as you can get without being locked up. I know the man. He’ll do anything to keep himself in the driver’s seat.”
George felt himself going a trifle pale. He said, “In that case, I suppose I’d better get busy. I’ll call every place they could possibly be. You stay here, Art. I’ll come back and report as soon as I can”
He found a public booth in the concourse nearby, and spent an expensive twenty minutes trying to locate Morey at his headquarters in Des Moines, and Luther at Turino, Praha, Wembley and points in between.
Gloomily, he called Art at the vice house, using the name he had given in registering. “No luck so far,” he said in German. “See here, have you looked at the fax or the video newscasts?”
“Yes. Nothing of interest there.”
“Do you think they may have been found already?”
“It’s possible,” said Art’s earnest voice, “but I think it’s unlikely. Anyone like those two is terribly hard to track down at a moment’s notice, as you are finding out. If we can get them within the next few hours, I think We’ll be in time. Keep trying.”
George rang off and sat thinking for a moment. Actually, the possible number of places where either Luther or Morey might be at this moment included everything within a day’s flight from Venice, meaning the major part of Earth’s surface. If he kept on calling relay stations at random, it might easily take him days to hit the right one. There had to be a quicker way.
How about the agony columns in the Telefax papers? George considered the probable cost briefly, and whistled softly to himself. Another difficulty was that it would mean showing his hand; the S. P. would almost certainly see the messages, whether Luther and Morey did or not. But he could think of no other answer.
He plucked a doodle-sheet from the pad fixed to the wall of the booth, and set down a rough draft of the message. Dissatisfied, he scratched it out and tried again. After six attempts, he had:
WORLD FATHERS OF VERMONT AND LOUISIANA: Serious charges have been leveled against revered Father Owl of California. Abandon your worldly identities immediately and fly to consult with your brethren. The meeting will assemble in the place of the Drowned Insect.
It sounded silly enough, he hoped, to pass as an ordinary notice intended for one of the innumerable crackpot sects which had sprung up after the power of the organized churches had been crushed. He couldn’t make it more specific, but he hoped “Vermont and Louisiana” would serve to attract Luther’s and Morey’s attention—the name of a man’s home state will usually stand out from a page of type almost as well as his own name — and “World Fathers” and “Father Owl of California” would make the identification certain.
The last line was a long shot. He had to indicate a meeting place without naming it; “the place of the Drowned Insect” was a restaurant in (Venice where the three of them, a few years before, had been served a tureen of soup with a dead cockroach floating in the center of it. Also, he had to tell them to assume false names, and if possible get across the idea that they were to disguise themselves. Here again, he couldn’t be too explicit; “abandon your worldly identities” was the best he could think of.
When he read it over, it seemed like a forlorn hope either that the two men would see the notice or that they would read it correctly. But he took the slidewalk down to the nearest fax agency and fed the message into a machine, adding the code numbers for all the local papers served by the Mediterranean Agency, which covered southern and eastern Europe, part of what had once been the Soviet Union and most of North Africa.
The cost was approximately two hundred times the amount of cash he was carrying, and this worried him until he reflected that he was undoubtedly on the S. P. list, if Art was right; there was no point in trying to conceal his tracks. He wrote a check and fed it into the machine.
While he waited for its acknowledgment, he set up the same message on another machine and coded it for the PanAmerican Syndicate. He went through the same procedure twice more, once for the North Atlantic Agency and once for the All-Asia Syndicate.
When he was finished, his Venetian bank account was in a state of near collapse.
The bank itself was only a few blocks away, near the Rialto bridge. As an afterthought, he went there and closed out his account, pocketing the cash. It had occurred to him that, again supposing that Art was right, the government would very likely impound their property. He wished he had included a suggestion of this kind in the message to Luther and Morey, but it was too late to worry about it.
He went back to the vice hoгse, conferred with Art, and then took himself to “the Place of the Drowned Insect.”
The restaurant was an old-fashioned one, catering to those who liked human service well enough to pay the almost astronomical prices imposed by the waiters’ salaries. At that, George noticed, the place was understaffed. In another century or so, he supposed, nobody would be able to hire any kind of servant for less than a division chief’s pay.
He found an inconspicuous table at the rear, ordered minestrone and spaghetti marinara, and waited. When the spaghetti gave out, he ordered a half bottle of claret. He made the wine last as long as he could, then bought a newspaper at the fax machine across the room and ordered another half-bottle.