Peter’s. The agency had been able to do nothing else for him except suggest that he sleep in the Shelter, which he was resolved not to do. After all, the agent had told him belligerently, it’s a Holy Year, almost as though he were saying, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?”
And of course his tone had been right. There was a war on. The Enemy was presently fifty light-years away, but He was at the gates all the same.
Something prompted him to check the date of Michelis’ letter. It was, he discovered with astonishment and disquiet, nearly two weeks old. Yet the postmark read today; the letter had been mailed, in fact, only about six hours ago, just in time to catch the dawn missile to Naples. Michelis had been sitting on it—or perhaps adding to it, but the facsimile process and the ensmallment, together with Ruiz’ gathering eyestrain. all conspired to make it impossible to detect differences in the handwriting or the ink.
After a moment, Ruiz realized what importance the discrepancy had for him. It meant that Egtverchi’s 3-V answer to his newspaper critics had been broadcast a week ago, and that he was due on the air again tonight!
Egtverchi’s program was broadcast at 3:00 Rome time; Ruiz was going to be up earlier than the pontiff himself. In fact, he thought grimly, he was going to get no sleep at all.
The express pulled into the Stations Termini in Rome five minutes ahead of schedule with a feminine shriek. Ruiz found a porter with no difficulty, tipped him the standard 100 lire for his two pieces of luggage, and gave directions.
The priest’s Italian was adequate, but hardly standard; it made the facchino grin with delight every time Ruiz opened his mouth. He had learned it by reading, partly in Dante, mostly in opera libretti, and consequently what he lacked in accent he made up for in flowery phrases: he was unable to ask the way to the nearest fruit stall without sounding as though he would throw himself into the Tiber unless he got an answer.
“Be”
“a!” the porter kept saying after every third sentence from Ruiz. “Che be’ ’a!”
Still, that was easier to get along with than the French attitude had been, on Ruiz’ one visit to Paris fifteen years ago. He remembered a taxi driver who had refused to understand his request to be taken to the Continental Hotel until he had written the name down, after which the hackie had said, miming sudden comprehension: “Ah, ah! Le Con-ti-nen-TAL!” This he had found to be an almost universal pretense; the French wanted one to know that without a perfect accent one is not intelligible at all.
The Italians, apparently, were willing to meet one halfway. The porter grinned at Ruiz’ purple prose, but he guided the priest deftly to a newsstand where he was able to buy a news magazine containing a high enough proportion of text over pictures to insure an adequate account of what Egtverchi had said last week; and then took him down the left incline from the station across the Piazza Cinquecento to the corner of the Via Viminale and the Via Diocletian, precisely as requested. Ruiz promptly doubled his tip without even a qualm; guidance like that would be invaluable now that time was so short, and he might see the man again.
He had been left in the Casa del Passegero, which had the reputation of being the finest travelers’ way station in Italy—which, Ruiz quickly discovered, means the finest in the world, for there are no other institutions precisely like the alberghi diurni anywhere else. Here he was able to check his luggage, read his magazine over a pastry in the caffe, have his hair cut and his shoes shined, have a bath while his clothes were being pressed, and then begin the protracted series of telephone calls which, he hoped, would eventually allow him to spend the coming night in a bed—preferably near by, but at least anywhere in Rome but in a Shelter dormitory.
In the coffee shop, in the barber’s chair, and even in the tub, he pored again and again over the account of Egtverchi’s broadcast. The Italian reporter did not give a text, for obvious reasons—a thirteen-minute broadcast would have filled an entire page of the journal in which he was limited to a single column of type—but he digested it skillfully, and he had an inside story to go with it. Ruiz was impressed.
Evidently Egtverchi had composed his rebuttal by weaving together the news items of the evening, just as they had come in to him off the wires beyond any possibility of his selecting them, into a brilliant extempore attack upon Earthly moral assumptions and pretensions. The thread which wove them all together was summed up by the magazine’s reporter in a phrase from the Inferno:
“And in fact,” the Italian reporter added, “it is widely known in Manhattan that QBC officials were on the verge of cutting off the outworlder in mid-broadcast as he began to cover the Stockholm brothel war. They were dissuaded by the barrage of telephone calls, telegrams and radiograms which began to pour down upon QBC’s main office at precisely that moment. The response of the public has hardly diminished since, and it continues to be overwhelmingly approving. The network, encouraged by Signor Egtverchi’s major sponsor, Bridget Bifalco World Kitchens, now is issuing almost hourly releases containing statistics ‘proving’ the broadcast a spectacular success. Signor Egtverchi is now a hot property, and if past experience is any guide (and it is) this means that henceforth the Lithian will be encouraged to display those aspects of his public character for which formerly he was being widely condemned, for which the network was considering taking him off the air in the middle of a word. Suddenly, in short, he is worth a lot of money.”
The report was both literate and overheated—a peculiarly Roman combination—but as long as Ruiz lacked the text of the broadcast itself, he could not take exception to a word of it. Both the reporter’s editorializing and the precise passion of his language seemed no more than justified. Indeed, a case could be made for a claim that the man had indulged in understatement. To Ruiz, at least, Egtverchi’s voice came through. The accent was familiar and perfect. And this for an audience full of children! Had any independent person called Egtverchi ever really existed? If so, he was possessed—but Ruiz did not believe that for an instant. There had never been any real Egtverchi to possess. He was throughout a creature of the Adversary’s imagination, as even Chtexa had been, as the whole of Lithia had been. In the figure of Egtverchi He had already abandoned subtlety; already He dared to show Himself more than half-naked, commanding money, fathering lies, poisoning discourse, compounding grief, corrupting children, killing love, building armies—and all in a Holy Year.
Ruiz-Sanchez froze, one arm halfway into his summer jacket, looking up at the ceiling of the dressing room. He had yet to make more than two telephone calls, neither of them to the general of his Order, but he had already changed his mind. Had he really failed, all this time, to read such obvious signs—or was he as crazed as heretics are supposed to be, smelling the Dies irae, the day of the wrath of God, in the steam of nothing but a public bath? Armageddon—in 3-V? The pit opened to let loose a comedian for the amusement of children?
He did not know. He could only be sure that he needed to hunt for no bed tonight, after all; what he needed was stones. He got out of the Casa del Passegero as quickly as he could, leaving everything he owned behind, and found his way alone back to the Via del Termini; the guidebook showed a church just off there, on the Piazza, della Republica, by the Baths of Diocletian. The book was right. The church was there: Santa Maria d’Angeli. He did not stop in the porch to cool off, though the early evening sunlight was almost as hot as noon. Tomorrow might be much hotter—unredeemably hotter. He went through the portals at once.
Inside, in the chill darkness, he knelt; and in cold terror, he prayed.
It did not seem to do him much good.
XV
All about Michelis the jungle stood frozen in a riot of motionlessness. Filtered through it, the sourceless blue-gray daylight was tinged with deep green, and where the light fell on one or another clear reflection it seemed to penetrate rather than glance off, carrying the jungle on in an inversion of images to the eight corners of the universe. The illusion was made doubly real by the stillness of everything; at any moment it seemed as though a breeze would spring up and ruffle the reflections, but there was no breeze, and nothing but time would ever disturb those images. Egtverchi moved, of course; though his figure was ensmalled as if by distance, he was about the right size for the rest of the jungle, and almost more convincingly colored and in the round. His circumscribed gestures seemed to be beckoning, as though he were attempting to lead Michelis out of this motionless wilderness.
