You believe her? Lars wondered. A man in your business? Or is it that I’m not supposed to know?
No sir, he thought; you couldn’t be fooled. You’re a professional. And even I can tell an accident from the real thing. This was real. She made a try and then she got afraid because it would have been the end of her, too. She must have understood that when she saw the drug actually begin to work, the violence of the somatic response. She is just not an adult, he thought. She couldn’t foresee.
But why? he wondered. Fear that I’d replace her? Or fear of another kind entirely.
A much more rational fear.
He said, speaking to Lilo, “It’s the weapon.”
“Yes.” Rigidly she nodded.
He said, “You thought that it would come. By means of us as they hoped for.”
“It would be too much,” Lilo said.
He comprehended. “The old days, before the Protocols,” he said. “When there was no deal. No hoax. When it was the real thing.”
“It was returning,” Lilo said in a whisper. “I felt it as soon as I set eyes on you. Together we’d do it and it’d be done and no one could change that. We in our expanded consciousness where they can’t go, even with mescaline-psilocybin-Psilocybe mexicana-Stropharia cubensis-d-lysergic acid diethylamide, everything combined; they can’t follow us. And they know it.”
Angrily, Major Geschenko said to her in a loud voice, almost a shout, “The satellites! Three! Do you hear me? And there’s going to be a fourth and a fifth and it’s the end of us!”
“All right,” she said, with composure. “I hear. You’re undoubtedly right.” She sounded defeated.
To Lars, Major Geschenko said with bitter, sardonic wrath, “Undoubtedly.” He scrutinized Lars, seeking his reaction.
Lars said with difficulty, “You never will have to worry about me or my attitude. She’s wrong, emotionally. I see that clearly—why you’ve always kept her under such surveillance. I understand perfectly. From now on I want Dr. Todt—”
“He’ll be here in several minutes,” Major Geschenko assured him. “And he’ll be with you constantly, so the opportunity for her to try some other psychotic coup to defend herself against imaginary attack won’t be even remotely possible. And if you want, in addition one of our own medical officers can—”
“Todt is enough,” he said, and sat up.
“I hope you’re right,” Major Geschenko said. He sounded as if he had grave reservations. “Anyhow we’ll defer to your preferences in this matter.” To Lilo he said, “You could be arraigned, you know.”
She said nothing.
“I want to take the chance,” Lars said. “I want to go on working with her. Actually we haven’t started. We should, right away; I think the situation insists on it.”
Hands shaking, without a word, Lilo Topchev relit her cigar. Ignoring him, staring fixedly at the match in her hand, she puffed gray smoke.
He knew then that he would not trust her for a long, long time. Nor even understand her.
“Tell me,” he said to Major Geschenko. “Do you have the authority to ask her to put that cigar out? It makes it hard for me to breathe.”
Two plainclothes KVB men at once stepped toward Lilo.
She dropped the burning cigar to the floor, defiantly.
The room was silent as everyone watched her.
“She’ll never pick it up,” Lars said. “You can wait forever.”
A KVB man stooped, picked up the cigar and ground it out in a nearby ashtray.
Lars said, “But I will work with you. Do you follow me?” He watched her intently, trying to guess what she was thinking and feeling, but he saw nothing. Even the professionals around him seemed to see no harbinger. She has eluded us, he thought. We will just have to go ahead on this bad basis. And she has our lives at stake in those childish hands.
Jesus, he said to himself. What a mess!
Major Geschenko helped him up. Everyone in the room tried to assist, thwarting one another in a silent-movie routine that at any other time would have struck Lars as funny. The major led him off to one side where the two of them could talk.
Geschenko said, “You understand why we were able to get to you so soon.”
Lars said, “She pointed out the aud and vid receptors.”
“And you can see why they were installed.”
“I don’t care why they were installed.”
“She will function,” Major Geschenko assured him. “We know her. At least we’ve done our best to learn enough in order to predict.”
“You didn’t foresee this, though.”
“What we didn’t see,” Geschenko said, “was that a preparation benign to her brain-metabolism would be toxic to yours. And we’re puzzled as to how she knew, unless she was guessing.”
“I don’t think she was guessing.”
“Is there a pre-cog aspect to you mediums?”
“Maybe,” Lars said. “Is she ill in the clinical sense?”
“You mean psychologically? No. She’s reckless; she’s full of hate; she doesn’t like us or want to cooperate. But not ill.”
“Try letting her go,” Lars said.
“Go? Go where?”
“Anywhere. Free her. Walk away from her. Leave her. You don’t understand, do you?” It was obvious; he was wasting his time. But he tried just a little further. The man he was addressing was not an idiot, not a fanatic. Geschenko was merely firmly gripped in the paws of his environment. “Do you know what a fugue is?” Lars asked.
“Yes. Flight.”
“Let her run until she’s run enough to—” He hesitated.
Mockingly, Geschenko said, with the wisdom of an age not confined to his own, not limited to the Soviet world of his here and now, “To what, Mr. Lars?”
He waited for an answer.
Lars said doggedly, “I want to sit down with her and as soon as possible begin the work she and I have to do. In spite of this. It shouldn’t be allowed to cause delay because that would encourage the tendencies in her that act toward dissolving the cooperative effort that we have to initiate. So get everyone else out and let me see my doctor.”
Dr. Todt said to Lars, “I’d like to do a multi-phasic on you now.”
Putting his hand on Todt’s shoulder Lars said, “She and I have to work. We’ll run the tests some other time. When I’m back in New York.”
“‘De gustibus,’” tall, morose, thin-beaked Dr. Todt said fatalistically, “‘non disputandum est.’ I think you’re insane. They’ve got the formula for that poison held back so we can’t analyze it. Only God Himself knows what it did to you.”
“It didn’t kill me and we’re going to have to be content with that. Anyhow you keep your eyes open all the time, during our trance-states. And if you have any measuring devices you want to keep hooked up to me—”
“Oh yes. I’ll be running an EEG and an EKG continually. But just on you. Not her. They can assume responsibility for her; she’s not my patient.” Dr. Todt’s tone was envenomed. “You know what I think?”
Lars said, “You think I ought to go home.”
“The FBI can get you out of—”
“You have the Escalatium and the Conjorizine spansules?”
“Yes, and thank God you’re not going to inject. That’s the first rational decision you’ve made.” Todt handed him two small bulging envelopes.
“I don’t dare inject. They might potentiate that damn poison she gave me.” He considered himself warned. It would be a while before he took any more chances with even those drugs whose action he was familiar with. Or imagined he was familiar with.
Walking over to Lilo Topchev he stood confronting her; she returned his gaze with poise.
“Well,” he said, by way of an appeasing introduction, “I suppose you could have given me four of those instead of two. It could be worse.”
“Oh, hell,” she said tragically. “I give up. There’s no way out of this idiotic fusion of our minds, is there? I have to cease b
eing an individual, what little they’ve left me. Wouldn’t you be surprised, Mr. Lars, if I put those satellites up there? Through a parapsychological talent no one knows about yet?” She smiled happily. The idea seemed to please her, even if it was a fantasy, patently not true. “Do I scare you by saying that?”
“Nope.”
“I’ll bet I could scare somebody by saying that. Gosh, if only I had access to the info-media, the way you have. Maybe you could say it for me; you could quote me.”
Lars said, “Let’s start.”
“If you work in unison with me,” Lilo Topchev said quietly, “I promise something will happen to you. Don’t go on. Please.”
“Now,” he said. “With Dr. Todt right here.”
“Dr. Dead.”
“Pardon?” He was taken aback.
“That’s right,” Dr. Todt said from behind him. “That’s what my name means in German. She’s perfectly right.”
“And I see that,” Lilo said, half to herself, in an almost singsong chant. “I see death. If we go on.”
Dr. Todt held a cup of water toward Lars. “For your medication.”
In ritualistic fashion, as before each trance-state, Lars downed one Escalatium and one Conjorizine. Downed rather than injected. The method differed but the results, he hoped, would be the same.
Watching him narrowly, Dr. Todt said, “If Formophane, which is essential to her, is toxic to you, acts to suppress your sympathetic nervous-system, you might ask yourself this. ‘How does the structure of my parapsychological talent differ from hers?’ Because this is a high order of evidence that it does. Does in fact radically.”
“You don’t think she and I can function together?”
“Probably not,” Dr. Todt said quietly.
“I guess we’ll know fairly soon,” Lars said.
Lilo Topchev, detaching herself from her place at the far wall, walked toward him and said, “Yes. I guess we will.”
Her eyes were bright.
EIGHTEEN
When Surley Febbs reached Festung Washington, D.C. he was astonished to discover that, despite his to-the-last-letter perfect assemblage of identification, he could not get in.
Because of the hostile alien satellites in the sky new security measures, formalities and procedures had taken effect. Those who were already within stayed within. Surley G. Febbs, however, was outside.
And thus he remained.
Seated gloomily in a downtown park, gazing in morose frustration at a group of children playing, Febbs asked himself, Is this what I came here for? I mean, it’s a racket! They notify you you’re a concomody and then, when you show up, they ignore you.
It passed comprehension.
And those satellites, that’s just an excuse, he realized. The bastards just want to keep a monopoly on their power. Anyone with half an eye who has insight into these matters, who has given long study to the human mind and society as I have, can tell this at a glance.
What I need is a lawyer, he decided. Top legal talent, which I could hire if I wanted to.
Only he did not feel like spending the money right now.
Go to the homeopapes, then? But their pages were full of screaming sensational scare headlines about the satellites. No mass sap cared about anything else, such as human values and what was being done to certain individual citizens. As usual, the ignorant average goof was completely taken in by the trash of the day. Not so Surley G. Febbs. But that still did not get him into the kremlin below Festung Washington, D.C.
An ancient, tottering apparition approached in what appeared to be the much-darned, patched and washed remnants of a military uniform of some sort. It made its way slowly to the bench on which Febbs sat, hesitated, and then creakily lowered itself.
“Afternoon,” the old man said in a rusty squeak. He sighed, coughed, rubbed his wet, liverish lips with the back of his hand.
“Mmmmmm,” Febbs grunted. He did not feel like talking, especially with this tattered scarecrow. Should be in a veterans’ home, he said to himself, bothering all the other jerries—the worn-out old folks who ought to have been dead a long time ago.
“Look at those kids.” The ancient war veteran gestured and despite himself Febbs looked. “‘Olly, olly, oxen free.’ Know what that’s a corruption of? ‘All the, all the, outs in free.’” The jerry chuckled. Febbs groaned. “That goes back before you were born. Games never change. Best game ever invented was Monopoly. Ever play that?”
“Mmmmmm,” Febbs said.
“I got a Monopoly board,” the old war vet said. “Not with me, but I know where I can lay my hands on it. At the clubhouse.” Again he pointed; his finger was like a winter tree-stalk. “Want to play?”
“No,” Febbs said clearly.
“Why not? It’s an adult game. I play all the time, like eight hours a day sometimes. I always buy the high-priced property at the end, like Park—”
Febbs said, “I’m a concomody.”
“What’s that?”
“A high official of Wes-bloc.”
“You a military man?”
“Hardly.” Military men! Fatbutts!
“Wes-bloc,” the old veteran said, “is run by military men.”
“Wes-bloc,” Febbs said, “is an economic, political gestalt the ultimate responsibility for the effective functioning of which rests on the shoulders of a heterogeneous Board composed of—”
“Now they’re playing Snum,” the old veteran said.
“What?”
“Snum. I remember that. Did you know what I was in the Big War?”
“Okay,” Febbs said, and decided it was time to move along. In his present mood—denied his legal right to sit on the UN-W Natsec Board—he was not disposed to hear a prolix account of this senile, feeble, tattered old relic’s onetime so-called “exploits.”
“I was main-man for a T.W.G. Maintenance, but I was in uniform. We were right at the line. Ever see a T.W.G. in action? One of the finest tactical weapons ever invented but always giving trouble in the power-feed assembly. One surge and the whole turret burned out—you probably remember. Or maybe that was before your time. Anyhow, we had to keep the feedback from—”
“Okay, okay,” Febbs said, writhing with irritation; he rose to his feet and started off.
“I got hit by a shatter-cone that tore loose from the sword-valve system,” the old war vet was saying as Febbs departed.
Big War my foot, Febbs said to himself. Some minor rebellion of some colony. Some fracas over in a day. And “T.W.G.!” God knows what obsolete thrown-away heap of junk that was, probably back in the primordial 100 series. They ought to make mandatory the scrapping of the operators along with the weapons; it’s a disgrace, an old wreck like that wasting really valuable people’s time.
Since he had been driven from the park, he decided to make one more stab at entering the kremlin.
Presently he was saying to the guard on duty, “It’s a violation of the Wes-bloc constitution! It’s nothing but a kangaroo court that’s in session down there without me. Nothing it decides on is legal without my vote. You call your superior, your O.D. You tell him that!”
The sentry stared stonily ahead.
All at once a huge black government hopper hovered overhead, to descend toward the concrete field beyond the guard’s station. Instantly the guard whipped out a vid receiver-transmitter, began giving orders.
“Whozat?” Febbs asked, devoured by an ant-army of curiosity.
The hopper landed. And from it stepped—General George Nitz.
“General!” Febbs shrieked; his voice carried past the reinforced barrier controlled by the guard, to the man in uniform who had disemhoppered. “I’m your compeer! I’ve got papers that prove I’m a legal rep to the Board, a concomody, and I demand that you use your authority to let me in, or I’m going to file a civil action for tort violation or some goddam such thing! I haven’t talked to a lawyer yet, but I mean it, General!” His voice died away as General Nitz continued on and disappeared into
the surface structure which was the meager portion of the Festung that stood above ground.
A cold Washington, D.C. wind blew about Febbs’ legs. The only sound was the guard’s voice as he gave instructions into his vidphone.
“Sheoot,” Febbs said, in despair.
A small, dilapidated civilian for-hire type hopper now coasted up to the barrier and halted. From it a middle-aged woman in an old-fashioned grime-colored cloth coat stepped. Approaching the guard she said timidly, but with a certain air of firmness, “Young man, how do I find the UN-W Natsec Board? My name is Martha Raines and I’m a newly elected concomody.” She fumbled in her purse for proof of her assertion.
The guard lowered his vidphone and said briefly, “No one with an AA-class or higher pass is to be admitted, madam. Emergency-sit priority of security rating-ruling in effect as of six a.m. time-zone one-fifty this morning. I’m sorry, madam.” He turned his attention back to his vidset thereupon.
Febbs thoughtfully approached the middle-aged woman.
“Miss, I’m in exactly the same disgraceful position as you are,” he informed her. “We are being denied our legal prerogatives and I have seriously considered the possibility of major litigation against the parties responsible.”
“Is it those satellites?” Martha Raines asked, mouse-like. But her suspicion was almost equal to his own. “It must be them. Everyone’s busy about them and they don’t care about us. I came all the way from Portland, Oregon, and this just is too much for me; I voluntarily relinquished my greeting-card shop—turned it over to my sister-in-law—in order to perform my patriotic task. And now look! They’re just not going to admit us—I can see that.” She seemed more stunned than angry. “This is the fifth entrance I’ve tried at,” she explained to Febbs, glad of a sympathetic audience at last. “I tried gates C, D, and then even E and F, and now here. And every time they say the same. They must be instructed to.” She nodded solemnly. It was all abundantly, un-Wes-blocly clear.
“We’ll get in,” Febbs said.
“But if every one of these—”
“We’ll find the other four new concomodies,” Febbs decided. “We shall act as a group. They won’t dare refuse all of us—it’s only by splitting us off from each other that they’ve been able to lord it over us. I seriously doubt if they’d turn all six of us down, because that would be to admit that they’re conducting their policy-level sessions in deliberate illegality. And I bet if all six of us marched over to one of those autonomic TV interviewers, like one of Lucky Bagman’s, and told it, they’d find time to take off from babbling about those satellites long enough to demand that justice be done!”