In fact Febbs had seen several TV interviewers since he had appeared here at the main gate. All the info-media agencies were on constant alert, these days, for news pertaining to the satellites.
All that remained was to round up the other four concomodies. And even as he and Martha Raines stood here, another civilian for-hire hopper began to descend; within it sat a nervous, frustrated-looking youth and Febbs had the acute intuition that this was an additional newly drafted concomody.
And when we do get in, Febbs declared to himself grimly, we’ll make them squirm! We’ll tell that fatbutt General George Nitz where to head in to.
He hated General Nitz already … for having paid no attention to him. Nitz did not know that things were about to change. He would soon have to listen, like that time in the old days when Senator Joe McCarthy, that great American of the last century, had made the fatbutts listen. Joe McCarthy in the 1950s had told them off, and now Surley Febbs and five other typical type citizens, armed with absolute, foolproof ident-papers, certifying to their vast status as representing two billion humans, were about to do the same!
As the nervous youth emerged from his hopper, Febbs strode purposefully toward him.
“I’m Surley Febbs,” he said grimly. “And this lady here is Martha Raines. We’re newly drafted concomodies. Are you, sir?”
“Y-yes,” the youth said, swallowing visibly. “And I tried at Gate E and then at—”
“Never mind,” Febbs said, and felt an upsurge of confidence. He had spotted an autonomic TV interviewer. It was coming this way.
Wrathfully, Febbs walked to meet it, the other new concomodies trailing obediently after him. They seemed glad to fall behind him and let him speak.
They had found their leader.
And Febbs felt himself transformed. He was no longer a man. He was a Spiritual Force.
It felt just fine.
NINETEEN
Lars could discern very little, as he sat across from Lilo, watching her intently while Dr. Todt prowled about keeping an eye on the spill of tapes secreted by the EEG and EKG machines attached to his patient. But he thought, The promise which this girl made is going to be kept. Harm will arise somehow from this situation. I feel it already, and I am nothing in this. Already Wes-bloc has those three to replace me. And undoubtedly more mediums exist in the East.
But his enemy, his antagonist, was not Peep-East and its KVB; the Soviet authorities had already proved their keen desire to act in his behalf. They had saved his life. His nemesis sat opposite him, an eighteen-year-old girl who wore a black jersey sweater and sandals and tight slacks, whose hair was pulled back with a ribbon. A girl who in her hatred and fear had, as an introduction, already made her first destructive move in his direction.
But, he thought, you are so goddam physically and sexually, so very amazingly sexually, attractive.
I wonder, he wondered, what you are like under that sweater, without those slacks and barefoot, without even that ribbon. Is there any way we can meet in that dimension? Or would the vid aud monitoring-system preclude that? Personally, he thought, I wouldn’t care if the whole Red Army cadet academy pored over the tapes. But you’d mind. It would make you hate worse, and not hate just them but me as well.
The medication was beginning to affect him. Soon he would go under, and the next he would know, Dr. Todt would be reviving him and there would be—or would not be—a sketch. The production was automatic, neurologically speaking; it either came or it didn’t.
He said to Lilo, “Do you have a lover?”
Her eyebrows knitted ominously. “Who cares?”
“It’s important.”
Dr. Todt said, “Lars, your EEG shows that you’re—”
“I know,” he said, and had difficulty articulating; his jaw had become numbed. “Lilo,” he said, “I have a mistress. She heads my Paris branch. You know what?”
“What?” She continued to glower at him suspiciously.
Lars said, “I’d give Maren up for you.”
He saw her face smooth. Her delighted laugh filled the room. “Wonderful! You mean it?”
He could only nod; it was past the time when speech remained possible. But Lilo saw the nod and the radiance of her face grew to a golden nimbus. Glory incarnate.
From a wall-speaker a business-like voice said, “Miss Topchev, you must synchronize your Alpha-wave pattern for the trance-phase to Mr. Lars. Should I send in a doctor?”
“No,” she said quickly. The nimbus faded. “No one from the Pavlov Institute! I can manage it.” She glided from her chair to kneel beside Lars. She rested her head against his, and some of her radiance seeped back from the physical contact; he felt it as pure warmth.
Dr. Todt said nervously to her, “Twenty-five seconds and Mr. Lars will be under. Can you manage? Your brain-metabolism stimulant?”
“I took it.” She sounded irritable. “Can’t you leave so that it’s just the two of us? I guess not.” She sighed. “Lars,” she said, “Mr. Powderdry. You weren’t afraid even when you realized you were dying; I saw you and you knew. Poor Lars.” She ruffled his hair, clumsily. “And do you know what? I’ll tell you something. You keep your mistress in Paris, because she probably loves you, and I don’t. Let’s see what sort of weapon we can make between us. Our baby.”
Dr. Todt said, “He can’t answer you but he can hear you.”
“What a child for two strangers to pawn,” Lilo said. “Does my killing you make us friends? Good friends? Bosom. Is that the idiom? Or breast-friends; I like that.” She pressed his head down against the scratchy black wool of her sweater.
All this he felt. This black, soft scratchiness; the rise and fall as she breathed. Separated, he thought, from her by organic fiber and also no doubt by an inner layer of synthetic undergarment and then perhaps one additional layer after that, so there are three layers separating me from what is within, and yet it’s only the thickness of a sheet of bookbond paper from my lips.
Will it always be like this?
“Maybe,” Lilo said softly, “you can die in this posture, Lars. Like my child. You instead of the sketch. Not our baby but mine.” To Dr. Todt she said, “I’m slipping under, too. Don’t worry; he and I will go together. What’ll we do in the non-space-time realm where you can’t follow? Can you guess?” She laughed. And again, this time less crudely, rumpled his hair.
“God knows,” Todt’s voice came distantly to Lars.
And then he was gone. At once the soft black scratchiness departed. That foremost of all, and first.
But he grabbed to retain it, scrabbling like a be-clawed beast; yet, even so, instead of the slim shape of Miss Topchev he found his fingers gripping—grotesquely, and hideously disappointingly—a ballpoint pen.
On the floor lay a scribbled sketch. He was back. It seemed impossible, not to be accepted or believed. Except for the fact of his fright; that made it real.
Dr. Todt, busily glancing at the sketch said, “Interesting, Lars. It is, by the way, one hour later. You have emerged with a simple design for—” he chuckled, Dr. Dead chuckling—“a donkey-type steam engine.”
Sitting up groggily, Lars picked the sketch from the floor. He saw to his dulled incredulity that Dr. Todt was not joking. A simple, ancient steam donkey-engine. It was too funny even to try to laugh over.
But that was not all.
Lilo Topchev was crumpled into a heap—like a completed but for reasons unknown discarded android —and one which had been dropped, too, from some immense height. She clutched a wadded sheet of paper. On it was another sketch and this, he saw instantly, even in his semiconscious state, was not any archaic contraption. He had failed but Lilo had not.
He took the sketch from her stiff fingers. She was still quite flown.
“God,” Lilo said distinctly. “Do I have a headache!” She did not move or even open her eyes. “What’s the result? Yes? No? Just something to plowshare?” She waited, eyes squeezed shut. “Please, somebody answer me.”
; Lars saw that the sketch was not hers. It was his, too, or at least partly his. Some of the lines were unnatural to him—he recognized them from the material which KACH had shown him over the years. Lilo had done part of this and he had done the rest: they had manipulated the writing-stylus in unison. Had they actually gripped simultaneously? Dr. Todt would know. So would the Soviet big-shots who scanned the vid and aud tape-tracks, and later so would the FBI when these were transmitted to them … or perhaps even an arrangement had been made to provide both intelligence agencies with the result at one exact synchronized instant.
“Lilo,” he said, “get up.”
She opened her eyes, raised her head. Her face was haggard, wild, hewn hawk-like.
“You look awful,” he said.
“I am awful. I’m a criminal: didn’t I tell you?” She staggered to her feet, stumbled and half-fell; expressionless. Dr. Todt caught her. “Thank you, Dr. Dead,” she said. “Did KACH tell you that I’m as a rule sick at my stomach after a trance-phase? Dr. Dead, take me into the bathroom. Quick. And phenothiazine: do you have some?” She tottered away, Todt assisting her.
Lars remained seated on the floor with the two sketches. One of a steam-driven donkey-engine. The other—
It looked, he thought, like an autonomic, homeostatic, thermotropic wise rat catching-device. Only for rats with an IQ of 230 or better or who had lived a thousand years—mutant rats such as never existed and if all went well in the scheme of things never would.
He knew, intuitively and totally, the device was hopeless.
And, down the back of his neck, a giant blew a dying breath of terror. The chill of failure froze him as he sat rocking back and forth, on the floor of the motel room, listening to the far-off noise of the girl he had fallen in love with being sick.
TWENTY
Later, they had coffee. He and Lilo Topchev, Dr. Todt and the Red Army officer who was their warden and protector against the insanities within themselves, Red Army Intelligence Major Tibor Apostokagian Geschenko. The four of them drank what Lars Powderdry knew to be a toast to ruin.
Lilo said abruptly, “It’s a failure.”
“And how,” Lars nodded without meeting her gaze.
In a Slavic gesture, Geschenko patted the air, priest-like, with his open hand. “Patience. By the way.” He nodded, and an aide approached their circular table with a homeopape—in Cyrillic type. Russian. “An additional alien satellite is up,” Geschenko said. “And it is reported that a field of some variety, a warpage of electromagnetic—I don’t understand it, being no physicist. But it has affected your city New Orleans.”
“Affected how?”
Geschenko shrugged. “Gone? Buried or hidden? Anyhow, communication is cut and sensitive measuring apparatus nearby records a lowering of mass. And an opaque barrier conceals what transpires, a field identified as connected with that of the satellites. Isn’t this approximately what we foresaw?” He deliberately slurped his coffee.
“I don’t understand,” Lars said tightly. And the drum of fear beat and beat inside him.
“Slavers.” Geschenko added, “They are not landing. They are I think taking pieces of population, New Orleans first.” He shrugged. “We will knock them down, don’t worry. In 1941 when the Germans—”
“With a steam donkey-engine?” Lars turned to Lilo. “This is the true, undefiled reason that moved you to try to kill me, isn’t it? So we’d never have to arrive at this point, sit here and drink coffee like this!”
Major Geschenko said with psychological acumen, “You give her an easy out, Mr. Lars. That is unhealthy, because she can divest herself further of responsibility.” To Lilo he said, “That was not the reason.”
“Say it was,” Lars said to her.
“Why?”
“Because then I can think you wanted to spare us both even the knowledge of this. It was a form of mercy.”
“The unconscious,” Lilo said, “has ways of its own.”
“No unconscious!” Major Geschenko said emphatically, reciting his doctrine. “That’s a myth. Conditioned response; you know that, Miss Topchev. Look, Mr. Lars; there’s no merit in what you’re trying to do. Miss Topchev is subject to the laws of the Soviet Union.”
Lars sighed, and from his pocket he brought out the rolled-up comic book which he had bought at the enormous news-counter at the space terminal. He passed it to Lilo: the Blue Cephalopod Man From Titan and His Astonishing Adventures Among the Fierce Protoplasms of Eight Deadly Moons. She accepted it curiously.
“What is it?” she asked him presently, large-eyed.
“A glimpse,” Lars said, “into the outside world. What life would be like for you if you could come with me, leave this man and Peep-East.”
“This is what is for sale in Wes-bloc?”
“In West Africa, mostly,” he answered.
Lilo turned the pages, inspected the lurid and really downright dreadful drawings. Major Geschenko meanwhile stared off into space, lost in gloomy thought; his fine, clear face showed the despair which he had so far kept from his voice. He was, undoubtedly, thinking about the news from New Orleans … as any sane man would. And the major was indubitably sane. He would not be looking at a comic book, Lars realized. But Lilo and I—we are not quite sane, at this point. And for good reason. Considering the magnitude of our spectacular failure.
He asked Lilo, “You notice anything strange about that comic book?”
“Yes.” She nodded vigorously. “They’ve used several of my sketches.”
“Yours!” He had noticed only his own weapons sketches. “Let me look again.”
She showed him the page. “See? My lobotomy gas.” She indicated Major Geschenko. “They conducted tests on political prisoners and showed the results on TV just like this comic strip: it causes the victims to repeat endlessly the last series of instructions arising from the damaged cerebral cortex. The drawist has the Twin-brained Beasts From Io victims of this; he understood what weapon BBA-81D did, so he must have viewed the TV tape made in the Urals. But the tape was only shown last week.”
“Last week?” Incredulous, Lars took the comic book back. Obviously it had been printed longer ago than that. It carried last month’s date, had sat on the newsstand for perhaps sixty days. All at once to Major Geschenko he said, “Major, may I contact KACH?”
“Now? Immediately?”
“Yes,” Lars said.
Major Geschenko silently took the comic book from Lars and glanced through it. Then he rose and gestured; an aide stepped into existence and the two men discoursed in Russian.
“He’s not asking for a KACH-man for you,” Lilo said then. “He’s telling the KVB to investigate this comic book firm, where it originates in Ghana.” She spoke to Major Geschenko in Russian herself. Lars felt, unhappily, the acute linguistic insularity of the American; Lilo was right. Mark of the province, he said to himself, and he wished to God he knew what they were saying. All three of them kept referring to the comic book and at last Major Geschenko handed it over to his aide.
The aide departed with it, rapidly. The door slammed shut, as if the aide were mad.
“That was mine,” Lars said. Not that it counted.
“A KACH-man will come,” Lilo said. “But not immediately. Not what you asked for. They will conduct their own investigation and then let you make your try.”
Lars said to the powerful Red Army intelligence officer, “I want to be returned to the jurisdiction of the FBI. Now. I insist on it.”
“Finish your coffee.”
“Something is wrong,” Lars said. “Something about that comic book. I could tell by your manner; you discovered or thought something. What was it?” Turning to Lilo he said, “Do you know?”
“They’re upset,” Lilo said. “They think KACH has been supplying repros to this comic-book firm. That irks them. They don’t mind if Wes-bloc has access, but not this; this goes too far.”
“I agree,” Lars said. But I think there’s more, he said to himself. I know the
re is; I saw too much agitation, here, just now.
“There is a time-factor,” Major Geschenko said, presently. He poured himself a fresh cup, but the coffee was utterly cold now.
“The comic-book firm got the sketches too soon?” Lars asked.
“Yes.” Major Geschenko nodded.
“Too soon even for KACH?”
“Yes.”
Stricken, Lilo said, “I don’t believe it.”
Major Geschenko glanced at her, briefly and without warmth.
“Not for them,” Lilo said. “Surely we couldn’t be.”
“The final episode in the magazine,” Major Geschenko said. “The Blue Whatever-he-is-man devised as a temporary source of power, while imprisoned on a barren asteroid, a steam engine. To act as an agent by which to reactivate the dead transmitter of his half-demolished ship, the normal power supply having been rayed out of existence by the—” he grimaced—“the Pseudonomic Flower-carnivores from Ganymede.”
Lars said, “Then we are getting it from them. From the artist of that magazine.”
“Perhaps so,” Major Geschenko said, nodding very slowly, as if out of the most intense politeness he was willing to consider it—and for that reason only.
“Then no wonder—”
“No wonder,” Major Geschenko said, sipping cold coffee, “that you can’t perform your function. No wonder there is no weapon when we need it. Must have it. How could there be, from such a source?”
He raised his head, eyed Lars with a peculiarly bitter, accusing pride.
Lars said, “But if we are simply reading some comic artist’s mind, how could there be anything?”