"Fine!" Eleanor slipped behind the desk, one hand raised, the other on the bust. "You know the oath?"
Benteley knew the fealty oath by heart, but gnawing doubt slowed him almost to a halt. Wakeman stood examining his nails, looking disapproving and bored. Eleanor Stevens watched avidly, her face intense with emotions that altered each moment. With a growing conviction that things were not right, Benteley began reciting his fealty oath to the small plastic bust.
The doors of the office slid back and a group of men entered noisily. One towered over the rest; a huge man, lumbering and broad-shouldered, with a grey, weathered face and thick iron-streaked hair. Reese Verrick, surrounded by those of his staff in personal fealty to him, halted as he saw the procedure taking place at the desk.
Wakeman glanced up and caught Verrick's eye. He smiled faintly but said nothing. Eleanor Stevens had become as rigid as stone. As soon as Benteley had finished she snapped into life. She carefully hurried the plastic bust out of the office and then returned, hand held out.
"I want your power-card, Mr. Benteley. We have to have it."
"Who's this fellow?" Verrick mumbled, with a wave towards Benteley.
"An eight-eight." Eleanor nervously grabbed up her things from the desk; her good luck charms dangled and vibrated excitedly. "I'll get my coat."
"Eight-eight? Biochemist?" Verrick eyed Benteley with interest. "Is he any good?"
"He's all right," Wakeman said. "What I found out seemed to be top-notch."
Eleanor slammed the cupboard door, then threw her coat over her shoulders. "He just came in, from Oiseau-Lyre." She breathlessly joined the group clustered round Verrick. "He doesn't know, yet."
Verrick's heavy face was wrinkled with fatigue and worry, but a faint spark of amusement lit up his deep-set eyes.
"The last crumbs, for a while. The rest goes to Cartwright, the Prestonite." He addressed Benteley. "What's your name?"
They shook hands as Benteley replied. Verrick's massive hand crunched his bones has Benteley feebly asked: "Where are we going? I thought——"
"Chemie Hill." Verrick and his group moved towards the exit—all but Wakeman, who remained behind to await the new Quizmaster. To Eleanor Stevens, Verrick explained briefly: "We'll operate from there. The lock I put on Chemie last year was to me personally. I can still claim loyalty there, in spite of this."
"In spite of what?" Benteley demanded, suddenly horrified. The outside doors were open; for the first time the cries of the newsmachines came loudly to his ears. As the party moved down the ramp towards the waiting intercon transports Benteley demanded hoarsely: "What's happened?"
"Come on," Verrick grunted. "You'll know all about it before long."
Benteley slowly followed the party. He knew, now. It was being shrilled on all sides of him, screamed out by the mechanical voices of public newsmachines.
"Verrick quacked!" the machines cried. "Prestonite bottled to One! A twitch of the bottle this morning at nine-thirty Batavia time! Verrrrrick quaaaaaacked!"
The power switch had come, the event the harbingers had expected. Verrick had been switched from the number One position; he was no longer Quizmaster. He had plunged to the bottom, out of the Directorate completely.
And Benteley had sworn an oath to him.
It was too late to turn back. He was on his way to the A.G. Chemie Hill. All of them were caught up together in the rush of events that was shivering through the nine-planet system like a winter storm.
Chapter II
Early in the morning Leon Cartwright drove carefully along the narrow, twisting streets in his ancient '82 Chevrolet. As usual, he wore an outmoded but immaculate suit and a shapeless hat was crushed against his head. Everything about him breathed obsolescence and age; he was perhaps sixty, a lean, sinewy man, tall and straight but small-boned, with mild blue eyes and liver-spotted wrists. His arms were thin but strong and wiry. He had an almost gentle expression on his gaunt face.
In the back seat lay heaps of mailing-tapes ready to be sent out. The floor sagged under heavy bundles of metal-foil to be imprinted and franked. An old raincoat was in the corner, together with a lunchbox and a number of discarded overshoes.
The buildings on both sides of Cartwright were old and faded, peeling things with dusty windows and drab neon signs. Relics of the last century, like himself and his car. Drab men in faded clothing, eyes blank and unfriendly, lounged in doorways. Dumpy middle-aged women in shapeless coats dragged rickety shopping carts into dark stores, to pick fretfully over the stale food to be lugged back to their restless families.
Mankind's lot, Cartwright ruminated, hadn't changed much, of late. The Classification system, the elaborate Quizzes, hadn't done many people any good.
In the early twentieth century the problem of production had been solved; after that, it was the problem of consumption that plagued society. In the nineteen fifties and sixties consumer commodities and farm products began to pile up in towering mountains all over the Western World. As much as possible was given away—but that threatened to subvert the open market. By 1980 the pro tem solution was to heap up the products and burn them—billions of dollars' worth, week after week.
Each Saturday townspeople had collected in sullen, resentful crowds to watch the troops squirt petrol on the cars and clothes and oranges and coffee and cigarettes that nobody could buy, igniting them in a blinding bonfire. In each town there was a burning-place, fenced off, where the fine things that could not be purchased were systematically destroyed.
The Quizzes had helped, a trifle. If people couldn't afford to buy the expensive manufactured goods, they could still hope to win them. The economy was propped up for decades by elaborate give-away devices that dispensed tons of glittering merchandise. But for every man who won a car and a refrigerator and a television set there were millions who didn't. Gradually, over the years, prizes in the Quizzes grew from material commodities to more realistic items: power and prestige. And at the top, the final exalted post: the dispenser of power, the Quizmaster.
The disintegration of the social and economic system had been gradual. It went so deep that people lost faith in natural law itself. Nothing seemed stable or fixed; the universe was a sliding flux. Nobody knew what came next. Nobody could count on anything. Statistical prediction became popular; the very concept of cause and effect died out. People lost faith in the belief that they could control their environment.
The theory of Minimax—the M-game—was a kind of stoic withdrawal, a non-participation in the aimless swirl in which people struggled. The M-game player never really committed himself; he risked nothing, gained nothing... and wasn't overwhelmed. He sought to hoard his pot and strove to outlast the other players. The M-game player sat waiting for the game to end; that was the best that could be hoped for.
Minimax, the method of surviving the great game of life, was invented by two twentieth-century mathematicians: von Neumann and Morgenstern. It had been used in the Second World War, in the Korean War, and in the Final War. Military strategists and then financiers had played with the theory. In the middle of the century von Neumann was appointed to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, recognition of the burgeoning significance of his theory. And in two centuries and a half it became the basis of government.
That was why Leon Cartwright, electronics repairman and human being with a conscience, had become a Prestonite. Cartwright pulled his ancient car to the kerb. Ahead of him the Society building gleamed white in the May sun, a narrow three-storey structure of wood, its single sign jutting up above the laundry next door.