“What will be done about the counterfeit money you’ve already spent, financing your subversion?” she asked.

  Elder Compassion was writing on his board. “Three miles beneath this city lies a vein of gold,” he wrote. “The Microfabridae are this minute plumbing the earth to reach it. We will leave full payment for our fiscal sins.”

  Dink took Orison’s hand. “You’ll come with us?” he asked. “I will, Dink”

  “Then I, Rex-Imperator, Son of the Triple Crown, Prince Porphyrogenous of Empire, take you to wife,” he said.

  “If you’re sure this is quite legal,” Orison said, “I do.”

  “There are voices all about us,* Elder Compassion spoke in their minds. “The traitor, Kraft, is in the vault, bound and seated in the midst of wealth. We must go, or there will be more violence.”

  “The moment the Microfabridae have left their golden payment for our folly, Elder Cousin, guide them to the ship,” Dink said. “I long to show my Princess her dominions.” “She is the first,” the voice spoke again. “The first of the irresistible conquerors from Earth.”

  THE QUALITY

  OF MERCY

  Daniel Keyes

  In his dream, he screamed and fought them off and begged them not to take him. He saw them slipping up silently in the night and taking him down to the long black service-jet waiting in the street below.

  He opened his eyes quickly and reassured himself that he was still in his own room. The sheets and his pillow were damp with his sweat, as they were every morning now since his sickness had become worse. A glance at the latticed window, where the sky showed through like strips of gray felt, told him that it was too early to get up. They had not come for him tonight.

  He fought back the urge to reach over his head for a dorcaine tablet from the dispenser. Just a touch of his signet ring to the dispenser plate and he would have the pain-soothing drug—enough to cool his feverish body and give him rest. He would wait. Illegally, for over three months now, he’d restricted the use of dorcaine—the drug that the law required him to take at the first sign of severe physical discomfort.

  He could hold out a little longer, telling himself over and over that every symptom he could diminish or hide or control for a while gave them that much less data to go on, that much less of an upward curve on their graphs, interfering—however slightly—with that final, irrevocable diagnosis.

  It was worth the suffering if it delayed for one day their awareness of his disease. It would be that much longer before the Service and Repair Center could send a servo crew down to investigate. He would have just that much longer to live.

  Lying awake, he stared at the ceiling, wondering how successful his desperate deception had been. Although they might be temporarily thrown off by the false dorcaine average on his records, he knew too well that the Dispatcher could not be sidetracked for long. And when the secret was out— what then? Would there be a front-page scandal when it was discovered that Paul Dorn, the head of the Maintenance Division of Service and Repair, was a waster?

  He couldn’t push the foul word from his mind. Waster. Yes, he felt ashamed—but as long as he was able to conceal it, he would hang on to life.

  The Service and Repair Center was a long arc of tall white buildings on the outskirts of New Virginia, not far from where the ancient Capitol Ruins stood. As his copter approached the area, Paul Dorn identified himself to the Dispatcher-plate with his signet ring. The electronic brain accepted his signal and freed the beam that would guide him, auto-controlled, into his port atop the Maintenance Building of the Center.

  As he landed, he noticed that a detail of servos was hauling away the wreckage of a black-and-orange copter that looked for all the world like a giant, crushed butterfly. Calling out to the leader of the servo-detail, he asked what had happened.

  “An unauthorized ship,” said the servo, “tried to land without clearance from the Dispatcher.”

  Paul Dorn was still thinking about it down in his lab when the call came over the loudspeaker. He was asked to come down to the Records Division right away. Chief Abel Jennings wanted to see him.

  At Records, the Chief was talking with someone on the TV line, and he waved for Paul to have a seat. The Chief, sixty and well tanned, had a huge, lumpy face that always reminded Paul of a potato.

  Flipping the switch off, the Chief leaned back in his chair to study Paul. “There’s been an accident.”

  “I know. I saw them clearing away the mess before I came in. Some fool trying to cheat the Mercy Vault?”

  The potato eyes bulged wide. “That’s not funny!”

  “No, you’re right. I’m sorry. Is he alive?”

  “They’ve got him down in the Examination Ward right now. Paul, it’s your brother.”

  Paul had started to light a cigarette and his hand froze in mid-air. “Victor—tried to land—without a clearance beam?”

  The Chief nodded. “They called me first because he used to work in my department. Made a wreck of himself. From what they say, Spare Parts might have been able to provide replacements for most of his damaged organs and a new right leg. But—”

  “What else?”

  “His left arm—up to the shoulder—his kidneys, and his left eye.”

  Paul nodded slowly and let his hand drop to the arm-rest of his chair. The headstrong kid. He had heard that Victor’s left arm and kidneys had already been replaced after the accident last month in a public tube. Both his eyes were also “seconds”—‘the originals had been lost in a childhood accident. Paul knew too well die bio-physical law: one replacement of a part to a customer. The nerve freezing process for the resynthesis of nerve cells could be done only once and never again.

  “There just wasn’t enough left to patch up,” growled the big man. He put his hand on Paul’s shoulder. “How long since you last spoke to him?”

  “Not since you fired him, seven months ago. We had a quarrel about his hanging around with those A-D people. I called him some nasty names. I even blamed him for the blast in the Dispatcher’s Vault that nearly finished the two of us. He was always a sensitive kid, and his feelings were hurt. I haven’t seen him since.”

  “Paul,” said the Chief, looking down at his desk, “you knew, when you recommended Victor for a job here, that he was Anti-Dispatcher.”

  “When he was in college. I had no idea he was still hanging around with those A-D people—”

  The Chief’s fist came down on the desk. “And yet you put me on the spot. I pressured through his application because you asked me to. If I’d had a hint about such ideas and past associations, I’d never have given him a job in Records— even if he was Isaac Dorn’s son. Your father’s name got Victor off at the hearing, but to me a man is what he is, not what his ancestors were—and for my money that blast was no accident. It gives me the shakes sometimes when I think that just six feet closer to the synchro-computer and—”

  “Hold on, Chief. You’re making some pretty big judgments.”

  “Am I? Are you forgetting what it cost you?”

  “Me?” Paul was shocked for a moment, until he realized what the Chief was referring to. “Oh, you mean this—” Paul held up his right hand, opening and clenching the fingers as if they were still strange to him. “My first replacement. A little thinner than my left one, and the knuckles are a little sharper, but otherwise it wasn’t a bad match.” He paused. “You know, I find myself wondering what the guy was like who owned it before he was donated to the Center.” “Don’t be morbid, Paul. It could have been a lot worse than a replaced hand and only a touch of radiation.”

  The Chief reminded him that in the old days—before Isaac Dorn had revolutionized things—when they still had humans standing watch in the Vaults instead of servos, there were men who had picked up incurable cases of radiation-cancer. Paul, the Chief said, had the Dispatcher to thank for being alive and healthy.

  “And no thanks to your accident-prone brother that you’re still here,” concluded the Chief. “You could have done lots worse.”

  That’s how much you know. That’s how much anyone knows. . .

  The Chief outlined quickly what he wanted Paul to do: “Visit your brother in the Examination Ward before they send him home for the funeral. There have been reports about the Dispatcher making mistakes and the A-D movement using them to discredit the Center. Find out what he knows. But most important, I want to know when and how they’re going to try to sabotage the synchro-computer that your father built—”

  “Sabotage?”

  The Chief nodded. Security police had learned from informants that the A-Ds had developed an underground striking force of partisans determined to cripple the Dispatcher. “There’s a leak somewhere. Any plan to attack the Vault would have to be based on inside help from someone who knows something about the works, the computer, and the time locks on the Vaults—”

  “You think Victor is in on it?”

  “That,” mused the Chief, “is what I want you to find out from him. You have two days before the funeral and a full day before Mercy Service puts him away. Get his confidence; make him believe you sympathize with him and want to join the A-D underground. Anything. Only get him to give you names, dates and places before they shove him into the Freezer.”

  At the Examination Ward of Mercy Service, it shocked Paul Dorn the way his brother had aged in seven months. Instead of twenty-four, he looked like forty. The scar tissue across his cheeks and the patch over his left eye reminded Paul of some of the ancient men who were still around to tell stories of the Anti-Dispatcher riots and battles of the Automation War. Victor’s scars were not fresh ones from yesterday’s crash. There had been many other accidents since the time of their quarrel.

  “How are you feeling, Vic?”

  Victor turned on his cot and looked at him out of his single eye, so red-webbed that Paul had the feeling that his brother was looking at him from behind a bloody net. If he wept, what color would his tears be?

  “Paul—” When he smiled, it seemed as if the hard-ridged clay of his face would crack. “How you been, Paul? It’s been a long time …”

  Paul lit a cigarette and offered one to Victor. “I heard how you tried to redecorate the grounds outside the Records Building.”

  Victor’s laugh turned into a cough. “Messy landing, huh? Boy, would Dad have given me a going over for that one if he were around to—” Victor’s voice trailed off.

  “Vic, that was eight years ago. Forget it.”

  “Easy to say, ‘forget it.’ How can I forget when it keeps coining up in my mind that, if not for me, Dad would be here today—”

  “Cut it, Vic! It wasn’t your fault. You were only a kid and you weren’t to blame for the accident.” That was a lie, of course, and the look in Victor’s eye said that he knew Paul knew it was a lie. Though Paul had been away at S & R Tech when it happened, he’d learned that Victor had been target-shooting when their father walked out from behind that tree. And Victor had been dead drunk at the time.

  “That was my first serious accident, Paul. You know I never had one before that. Maybe I was a little wild, but I never hurt anyone—” ’

  “All right, kid. Take it easy. No one blames you for anything.”

  “—and then the accident in the Vault last year—what I did to you—” He became silent and waited as the servo-nurse came in and set a lunch tray on the table beside the bed. When the servo had gone, Victor grasped Paul’s arm. “Tell me, how are you feeling? Is it very bad?”

  “Bad?” Paul frowned. “What do you mean? Why should it be bad? I’m okay now. Just a touch of radiation, and my new right hand fits perfectly—”

  Victor looked around to make sure they were alone. “Listen, Paul, I know all about it. You think I was just loafing and horsing around before Chief Jennings kicked me out of my job at Records, but I wasn’t. I know the shape you’re in—”

  “What do you mean?” Paul’s head came up sharply. It wasn’t possible. No one else could know.

  Victor’s whisper was hardly more than a movement of his swollen lips. “/ know you passed the death-line a month ago. I know you’re just as dead as I am.”

  “You’re crazy. They’ve given you too much dorcaine.”

  Victor reached out and grabbed him by the shirt. His eye glared red. “Sure I’m doped up, I could never take it the way you could. Dad always said you had more guts than I would ever have. But don’t forget that I worked in Records until seven months ago. I saw your stat-tapes. At first, when your radiation-curve turned downward, I was happy because I thought that was the end of it. But when it turned upward again after that sharp dip, I realized what it was—” “Now that’s brilliant,” interrupted Paul, “but if you’d bothered to check the other records, like the dorcaine curve and the absentee average—”

  “That’s what had me confused at first. The fact that your dorcaine was normal and didn’t follow the pain-curve. It stumped me until I realized what you were doing—holding back on the drugs. That was smart, Paul, because nobody else would have bothered to pick out your radiation chart from the files without a sign from the dorcaine curve. Nobody but me. I knew, before the Chief canned me, that you were heading for the death-line.”

  Paul tried to cover his own confusion. “You’ve built this up in your mind, Victor. You know that all the other symptoms, the radiation, the energy decrease and the rest, would have been picked up by the Dispatcher. The dorcaine level alone wouldn’t sidetrack the electronic brain. It’s the full stat-profile that counts, not one or two factors.”

  Victor smiled again, and the scar across his cheek twitched. He patted Paul’s hand. “That’s what I want to tell you. Before I left, I worked out a way. I changed your stats with a rocket-pilot’s death record and gave you a nice, low radiation curve to match your dorcaine average. You may have passed the death-line, Paul, but Mercy won’t come for you yet. Maybe—if things go right—you won’t have to make your donation to the Center for a long time to come.”

  Victor leaned in closer to Paul. “There have been other things, Paul.” He looked around and paused, as if afraid to say it. “I took the chance with your stats, and the Dispatcher passed them through without correction. I figured it out while I was still working in the stacks. No one else suspects, yet. And there have been other Dispatcher mistakes “That’s impossible!” Paul exclaimed.

  “Don’t you see yet? The synchro-computer isn’t foolproof. You know that Dad always said his experiments weren’t finished. This is the thing he was always worrying about. Something’s gone wrong with the Dispatcher!”

  Paul squirmed in his chair. “If I thought that was really true—no, it couldn’t be. Dad felt that his work wasn’t really finished, but the synchro-computer was perfected.”

  “Just listen. I’m going to tell you something I never mentioned before. While you were away at college, Dad and I got pretty close to each other. He talked about things he usually kept to himself. He told me that someday the synchro-computer would have to be destroyed—”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying!” Paul knew that what Victor suggested was impossible. Never was there a man more opposed to destruction of any kind than Isaac Dorn. Bitter as he was in that last year, he would never have considered the destruction of his life’s work.

  “I’m saying that our time has come to do what Dad wanted. We know enough now to put the Dispatcher out of commission. We’ll turn back the clock to the time when human beings worked out their own destinies, when everybody—not just an upper crust of professionals and technicians—had the right to work and have ambitions and a purpose. Throw in with us, Paul. You’ve got nothing to gain any more by fighting us.”

  This was exactly the way the Chief had expected Victor to talk. And yet the Chief couldn’t have known how Paul would be torn. The Chief couldn’t know—as Victor obviously knew—how important it was for him to stay alive, clinging to the hope that maybe there was a chance that someone might come up with a cure for radiation-cancer. He didn’t want to be one of those quick-frozen just a few weeks before someone shattered all statistical predictions and came up, ahead of time, with a cure for an incurable disease.

  He would never forget the look on his father’s face when the news came out that a researcher in Trinidad had stumbled on a cure for Grove’s Disease of the spinal column just a month after Mercy Service took their mother away. Isaac Dorn had always believed in the “rightness” of his work on the Dispatcher’s new synchro-computer, and he’d brought up both his sons to believe in the noble aims of Mercy Service Through Complete Automation. But when Mom was needlessly taken away, Paul remembered the way his father mourned and wept for months afterward, and the bitterness that followed as he tried fruitlessly to take his own life. Paul remembered how the house was filled with misery and sorrow until he went away to college. And then he heard about the accident with Victor’s hunting rifle.

  “Believe me,” Victor was saying, “my friends can save you from the freezer. Others have been saved already. And we can use you, Paul, with your knowledge of the Dispatcher’s Vault and the time locks. We’ve got an organization—and we’ve got proof that Dad’s suspicions were right. The Dispatcher isn’t perfect. It’s making mistakes—horrible mistakes.”

  “Proof?”

  “Listen, you’re my big brother, and if you’re with us, I trust you. Just keep quiet a minute and listen. When they pick me up, after the funeral, to take me to the Freezer, go to my apartment—I’ve moved back to the Basin now. There’s a safe in a hidden wall panel behind that old picture I had framed of Mom and Dad. You’ll find photo-copies I made of some claims records and other data. There’s also a list of some people you can contact. You’ll see that everything I’ve said is true. Then get in touch with a man named Zetti. He’ll be at my funeral. I’ll introduce you to him there.”