Carmody had come out and listened, attracted by the broadcast radiation clicking, apparently. Now he asked enough questions to discover Benedetto's idea, and shook his head.
"It wouldn't work," he agreed with me. "Even if I still had control, I couldn't permit such a thing. What good would it do? Could money payments make food for a revived world, Miss dell'Angela? Would bankrupting the only agency capable of rebuilding the Earth be a thing of honor? Besides, even with what I've read, I can see no hope. There's nothing we can do."
"But if you can arouse the other Underwriters against Defoe," she insisted, "at least you can prevent his type of world!"
He shook his head. "How? All communications are in his hands. Even if I could fly to the Home Office, most of the ones I could trust—and there apparently are a few Defoe hasn't been able to retire—would be scattered, out of my reach. A week ago, there might have been a chance. Now, it's impossible. Impossible."
He shook his head sadly and wandered back toward the library. I could see that in his secret thoughts, he was wishing we'd left him safely in the vault. Maybe it would have been just as well.
"Cheer up," I told Rena. "Carmody's an old man—too old to think in terms of direct action, even when it's necessary. Defoe doesn't own the world yet!"
But later, when I located the books I wanted in the library and went out into the vine-covered bower in the formal garden, I wasn't as confident as I'd pretended.
Thinking wasn't a pleasant job, after all the years when I'd let others do my thinking for me. But now I had to do it for myself. Otherwise, the only alternative was to plan some means of quick death for us all before the radiation got too intense. And I couldn't accept that.
Rena had managed something Marianna couldn't have conceived—she'd quietly relinquished her fate into my hands, gambling on me with everything she had. Whether I wanted to or not, I'd taken the responsibility. Carmody was an old man; one who hadn't been able to keep Defoe from taking over in the first place. And Zorchi—well, he was Zorchi.
That night, the radiation detector suddenly took a sharp lift, its needle crossing over into the red. It was probably only a local rise. But it didn't make my thinking any more comfortable.