"Yes, of course," Juanito had replied eagerly. "I am
from Argentina myself, and from very near Rio Cuerto. I
lived everywhere on the Pampas. My name is Montoya.
Juanito Montoya. Or Twenty-two, if these oiler slaves can
understand Speak."
The School had its own language. A secret blend of all
that was fluid and philologically valuable in Spanish,
French, English and German, with the preciseness of the
Portuguese, and the absence of complexity to be found in
Esperanto. They called it Speak. It was a primary password in itself; if another person in the darkness could Speak, then he. was partway to being id�ntifi.ed as another
student of the School.
They spoke to each other in Speak, and Thirty-eight
grinned hugely. "These oilers can barely speak at all,
much less understand us. They are brought in from the
surrounding countryside by the Seekers, and hypnotrained for one or two jobs-see?" He booted his oiler in the back, knocking the poor, dumb worker onto his side.
The oiler got to his knees, a cloddish smile-more idiotic
than complacent-breaking his rough features, and
thanked the stout assassin profusely in broken English.
"Go on back to work," John Grice · commanded im�
periously.
The oiler went to work on Grice's thighs with the
grease applicator.
Juanito had much respect for this big assassin. He was
the model of what a good, well-trained student should be.
He carried himself high, and he had a steely glint to his
green eyes that marked shrewdness, and he knew how to
make men bend to his will. As loftily imperious as he
seemed now, in the field he would be either one of a
crowd, or hidden as he lurked in wirlting, or bravery
personified charging an enemy. Juanito wanted to be just
like him, and feared he was not.
"When did you get here?" Grice asked absently, as
though he were being polite, his thoughts turned elsewhere already.
"I've been here almost four years now," Juanito
answered smartly.
DOOMSMAN
"Ah!" Grice caroled. "Then you'll be ready for the
Probing soon, won't you? Or have you been to the Probing labs yet?"
Juanito nodded in the affirmative. "Yes, they Probed
me just last week."
Grice's full-fleshed face took on a superior confidence.
"I came up with only four myself. They later negated
three of them. How about you?"
Juanito looked surprised for an instant, then said levelly, "There was only one in my banks. They haven't been able to trace it. The name was Eskalyo."
Grice had looked perturbed then, and annoyed, and his
brow had furrowed. "Are you making fun of me?"
Juanito was confused. "I don't know what you mean."
"How did you know Eskalyo was one of the names in
my bank? The one they can't clear. Have you been prying
in the records, or are you a checkpoint spy for Security
Seek?"
J uanito had hastily explained, and soon convinced
Grice he was serious, and in no way making fun of the
other.
They were talking about the Probing. Each student was
forced to undergo a mind probing after he had been in
the School close to four years-during which time his
memories and thought processes would have been altered
enough by the training and the monoiogs to allow the
Probe to do its work peculiarly and properly-to find if
there were any names from the petty Monarchies in the
memory banks of assassin trainees. There were usually a
few names, either picked up through childhood rumor or
from isolated cases of actual contact. And the Probe dug
these out, and tried to check them. Usually they negated
most of the references dug out as being mentioned during
adolescence. But occasionally, as in the case of Eskalyo
being in Juanito's and Grice's mind, the trackback could
not be affected.
·
These were the cases the School and Probers were
most interested in locating, for they invariably contributed some information as to the locating and possible abolition of the Monarchy and its petty ruler.
Thus the two students had talked of Eskalyo, and Juanito pieced together the scant data his own Probing had
DOOMS MAN
revealed, with the facts Grice's mind had vomited up, and
he discovered a strange thing.
He discovered that he had seen the man known as
Eskalyo three years after Eskalyo had �n f�und and
charred by a group of Seekers.
This was startling in itself, but the other thing Juanita
Montoya learned from pieced-together information was
all the more bizarre and memorable:
He-Juanita, Twenty-two-was the son of Eskalyo,
the ruler of the petty Monarchy called Ciudad Rosario. It
did not become clear at first, but as Grice rambled on,
speaking of those things he knew from childhood, deeper
than thought, of the things he had seen and heard, it became clear to Juanito that the son of Eskalyo, of whom Grice spoke, fitted the � and description of Juanita.
It was he, Juanito Montoya, who had tied his father
when the Seekers had come. It had been himself, the boy
who had narrowly escaped death a hundred times, and
shocked into a tense forgetfulness of his origins. He recognized the indefinite incidents Grice spilled out from vague, childhood memory; he recognized them as till now
lost fragments of his youth.
The ffight from Ciudad Rosario. The burrow he had
dug on the edge of an old irrigation ditch as the Seekers
4th Armored Regiment had gone past. The killing of
small game to sustain life. It all came back now, and he
knew he was the son of Eskalyo.
The son of the ruler of a petty Monarchy, somewhere
in what had been South America.
And it had set his mind to whirling.
That had been a year before.
Now Grice was about to be graduated, and though
Juanita had met with him many times since that day in
the Combats Meet, the stout assassin had told him little
more that could aid Juanita in his plan. For he had
formulated a cunning plan, from the linked scraps of information.
No really valuable information had come from
Thirty-eight's lips. Until one day, a week before. He had
hinted that all his knowledge of Eskalyo was not from
childhood, and handed-down. He had hinted that he
knew a way for a man to reach Eskalyo nOW. He had
DOOMSMAN
shied a verbal rock into the deep water of Juanita's consciousness, and it had skipped across, finally sinking and carrying conviction to act with it.
For Grice had said he knew the name of a man in the
AmericaState Chambers-torture chambers-in New
Chicago who was a contact to Eskalyo. And Juanita
Montoya had to find out that name; before Thirty-eight
was graduated day after tomorrow.
But Grice was nowhere among the surging crowd in
the snack bar.
Juanita felt his nerves tighten like piano wires; like the
rubber bands they attached to the rigged braces on his
teeth, when they wanted him bucktoothed for some disguise; like the tightrope t
hey were required to walk during physical training. He knew time was sifting slowly but
swiftly into the past, and he must learn that name.
Thirteen yanked at his arm. "Hey, what do you want?
We're next."
Juanita looked up and saw they were indeed at the
head of the line, and how they had gotten there, he did
not know. "Oh, I don't know. Hell, just get me a cocacola fix without double-shoot."
"I thought today was your pay?" Thirteen gibed back
sharply.
"Oh, yeah, yeah," Juanita hastily amended. "My pay."
He dug into the hip slit of his body-tight training
uniform of black duroplast, and brought out a handful of
the plastoid slips used for currency in the School. "What
do you want?"
"I'm low, cat, how about a glucose-herro feed with a
twist of lemon peel . . . or no, make it straight; I'm that
low."
Juanita edged up to the robomech and dialed what he
wanted. In a moment the two vials came slithering down
the trough, followed by two screw-on needles and a pair
of chaser pills.
He put his plastoid slips in the receiver and the little
glass plate over the trough rolled back, allowing him to
take the narcotics from the machine,
DOOMSMAN
was a sock feeder. He liked his snacks hard and fast. He
hit the main line through the fabric of the skintight suit
without even rolling the sleeve, A beatific smile spread
unbidden across his mouth, and a low, soft air-whoooosh
of ahhhh came from him. He sagged against the wall, and
hit one twitch with his left foot boom!
Juanita had never taken to the constant stimulation of
the assassin. He wanted no fanaticism or herro-cocaine
fogging. He wanted to do what he had to do cool and
calm and sweet.
He took his coca-cola fix slowly, feeding it into the
bloodstream, drawing it out intermingled with the scarlet
fluid, feeding it back in, drawing it out again-kicking it
higher-and at last sending it into the bloodstream for its
final journey.
It was good. His insides felt cola-happy. But not
fogged and hopped-up. His small colon f�lt sticky good.
Thenmnmn throoo thuh guh-uh-uh-oood uvvv thuh
feeelinnnguhhh, he snapped to alertness! Grice had come
into the snack bar. He was avoiding the fix machines, and
heading right for the sandwich counter, He was eating
solid food. That must mean he had finished classes,
was through his processing, was even perhaps assigned already. He had to get to him now.
With his steps faltering from the fix, and his head higher than his body by three feet, Juanito grubbed in his hip-slit for more plastoid slips, fed them nervously into
the stabilizer-robomech. It sprayed his face with a neutro
compound, and the fix was diluted in his blood. He was
able to function again.
He had not even felt himself walking across the big
snack bar to the neutro machine. But now he knew what
he was doing, and he elbowed rouahly past clots of students, keeping the stout, tight back of Grice firmly in sight.
He caught the assassin by the elbow, and the stout man
whirled on him, the feral eyes narrowed-as any good
assassin's eyes would narrow under sudden attack.
"What do you want?"
Juanito was shocked and battered back momentarily
by the rudeness of the other's tone.
"I-I wanted to speak to you a moment."
"Make it fast I'm on the way out."
"You, uh, you know a name
say, let's go out in
•
•
•
the corridm where we can talk more eas-"
"We can talk right here. Say, I haven't got anything to
talk with you anyhow, Twenty-two. So why don't you get
your hand off me before there's trouble in here." His soft
edged face was soft no longer. It was hard and set. He
was not joking; there was nothing to say.
Juanita recognized the futility of pressing his point.
He turned and strode away, shoving through the crowd
quickly.
At one point in his passage, Thirteen flopped a flaccid
hand onto his shoulder, muttering under the effects of the
heavy fix. Juanita shook the hand off, and left the snack
bar.
He signed . the class register for "private study" and
went to his cubicle to think.
It took some doing, but it had been the only way. Mter
Grice had been graduated and assigned, Juanita had to
wait for his time. One night it came, when he was as·
signed an all-week Awake Alert-a rigorous test of his
stamina which involved the student remaining awake and
sharp for seven full days. During the fifth night, he was
able to employ the very break-in tactics he had been
taught, to rifle the memory banks of the compUvacs in
AmericaState Records, School subdivision. The assignment records. He found the punch spool he wanted: the list of assignments of assassins in class 401. Grice's
class.
He spun the pool onto the treads, and turned on the
emergency power for the . smallest compUvac in the
office
•
•
•
School, or set off the specially triggered alarms hooked to
the energy outlets. It was enough to start the mighty ma·
chine working at softer levels, and though the information
was dim in the glow box when he read it, he engraved it
in his mind carefully.
The frame of light read:
401: 38 GRICE, JOHN GREGORY, Rio Cuerto,
DOOMS MAN
Argentina
ent: 5 Oct 2178; grad: 4 Oct 2184; rating: AAA+
assgnd: Pe�nce Sqd, N. Chicago, TDY Alaska Hi.
Juanita read it again to make certain he had it correct,
then cut the power, respun the reel by hand, and loaded
it back into its bin. He sat in the darkness of the Records
offices, thinking.
Grice had been assigned to the Persy Squad on constant clean- and mop-up detail in New Chicago. But he was currently on TDY, or loan to the Hi Guard in Alaska, for some job or other.
That meant Juanita had to get himself assigned to
Alaska, and fast. He had to see Grice again, under conditiom more favorable to Juanita's worming some intelligence from the stout assassin as to who the man in the N.
Chicago Chambers was. It was only fifty-four days till
graduation and he knew many assignments were already
cut. He had to do some fast maneuvering of his orders, or
lose out completely.
He pondered the problem for well over a week, trying
desperately to drag a solution from the welter of information he held, and the need to find the man in the New Chicago Chambers. Finally, he thought he had hit
on an answer; perhaps not the best answer, but one that
would do for now.
iHe went to see the head Probesman.
"Probesman Languor," he said, when he had been
seated in that worthy's cubicle, "A thing has been
troubling me.••
And the Probesman, whose mien and manner were
much like those of priests in the world outside the School,
replied, "Yes, student brother? Is there a thing with
which I can help?'
Juanita nodded, studying the Probesman. The man was
no fool. He was big, with a face hewn from granite and
lead. His eyes were small, deepset blue circles a! the centers of ringed bullseyes that were dark around the eyes.
His mouth was a hard, wired line that bespoke ot sternness before mercy. He was no fool. this Probesman Languor.
"Ever since my Probing, over a year ago, sir, I have
DOOMS MAN
waited for clearance from SecuritySeek on the name Eskalyo in my banks-" He noted with inner satisfaction that the Probesman started at the mention of the South
American's name, "-but no such clearance has come, and
I feel impure, sir."
The Probesman's small eyes narrowed down even more,
till he studied Juanita through impossible slits. "Oh?"
It was the game of silence now. Who could say the
least, and learn the most; for no student ever came to a
Probesman, unless there was good cause. The Probers
were the pariahs of the School. They were the brainpickers; their job was a necessary one, but who could have respect or affection for a man who knew your very intimate thought and hidden fear and concealed shame? They were more than tolerated, for they were also specially
trained for their jobs. But they were never approached as
men-only as Probesmen. The affectation of holiness they
clung to was a defensive air held over from their first days.
Juanita played the game: "Yes."
They sat silently, looking into each other's eyes.
"Uh-what would you have me do?"
"Have you a suggestion, Probesman?"
"None, for I know not what your problem may be.
Can you be more definite?"
"Well; it is touchy."
"Go on."
"I have no real wish to go on."
The Probesman was growing exasperated with the stu�
dent assassin's hedging and dodging. He lunged verbally:
"Well, why have you come to me, then, if you don't want
a solution to your problem?"
Juanito stepped into the off-guard opening in the conversation. "I am impure, for there has been no clearance on the name 'Eskalyo' and I want to do penance with a
difficult assignment."
·