“To hang Boadshah,” I said.
“Yes — to begin with. Next we will need to do away with the dogmatists. I can perceive that even now. Next comes the realization of our legitimate claims. After that, something else will come up. And only then, and after many other things, will abundance arrive. I am an optimist, but I don’t believe I will live to see it. Don’t you worry — we’ll manage somehow. If we can stand hunger then we can take abundance for sure…. The dogmatists prattle that abundance is not an end, but a means. We reply that every means was once an goal. Today, abundance is a goal. Tomorrow, perhaps it may become a means.”
I got up.
“Tomorrow may be too late,” I said. “It is incorrect of you to fall back on great revolutionaries. They would not have accepted your shibboleth: now you are free — enjoy yourselves. They spoke otherwise: now that you are free — work. After all, they never fought for abundance for the belly, they were interested in abundance for the soul and the mind.”
His hand twitched toward the holster again, and again he caught himself.
“A Marxist!” he said with astonishment. “But then again, you are a visitor. We have almost no Marxists, we take them and…”
I kept control of myself.
Passing by the window, I took another look at him. He sat with his back to the street and ate and ate, his elbows stuck out.
When I got home, the living room was already vacant. The youngsters had piled the bedsheets and pillows in the corner. There was a note under the telephone on the desk. Written in a childish scrawl, it read: “Take care. She has plotted something. She was fussing in the bedroom.” I sighed and sat down in the armchair.
There was still an hour until the meeting with Oscar, assuming he came. There was no sense in going to sleep, but in addition, it might not be safe — Oscar could bring company, and come earlier than expected, possibly not through the door. I got the pistol out of the suitcase, put in a clip, and dropped it in my side pocket. Next I climbed into the bar, brewed myself some coffee, and went back to the study.
I took the slug out of my radio and the one out of Rimeyer’s, lay them down in front of me on the table, and attempted again to recollect where indeed I had seen just such components and why I thought that I had seen them before and more than once. And then it came to me. I went into the bedroom and brought in the phonor. I didn’t even need a screwdriver. I took the case off the phonor, stuck my index finger under the odorizer horn, and, catching it with my finger nail, extracted a vacuum tubusoid FX-92-U, four outputs, static field, capacity equals two. Sold in consumer electronic stores at fifty cents each. In local patois — a slug.
It had to be, I thought. We are disoriented by conversations about a new drug. We are constantly derailed by talk about horrific new inventions. We have already made several similar blunders.
There was the time when Alhagana and Burris served up a complaint in the U.N. that the separatists were using a new type of weapon — freeze bombs. We threw ourselves furiously into a search for underground laboratories and even arrested two genuine underground inventors (sixteen and ninety-six years old, respectively). And then it turned out that the inventors were in no way connected, and the awful freeze bombs were acquired by the separatists in Munich from a refrigerator warehouse — and were in fact reject super-freezers. True, the effect of these super-freezers was indeed horrible. Used in conjunction with molecular detonators (widely used by undersea archaeologists in the Amazon for dispersing crocs and piranhas), the super-freezers were capable of instantaneous temperature depression of one hundred and fifty degrees centigrade over a radius of twenty meters. Afterward, we spent much effort indoctrinating ourselves with the concept that we should keep in mind that in our times, literally every month, masses of new inventions appear with the most peaceful of applications, but with the most unexpected side effects. These characteristics are often such that lawbreaking in the area of weapons manufacture and stockpiling becomes meaningless. We became extremely cautious about new types of armament, employed by various extremists, and only a year later got caught by another twist, when we went looking for a mysterious apparatus with which poachers lured pterodactyls from the Uganda Preserve at a great distance. We found a clever do-it-yourself adaptation of the “Up-down” toy in combination with a fairly generally available medical device.
And now we had caught slug — a combination of a standard radio with a standard tubusoid and a standard chemical and very common plumbing-supplied hot water.
To make a long story short, there would be no need to search for secret factories. We’d have to look for some very adroit and unprincipled speculators who sensed very delicately indeed that they found themselves in the Country of the Boob…. They’d be like trichinae in a ham. Five or six enterprising self-seekers. An innocent cottage somewhere in the suburbs. Just go to a department store, buy the vacuum tubusoid for fifty cents, peel off the plastic wrapping, and place in an elegant box with a glassite cover. And then sell it for fifty marks — “only to you and only through friends.” True, there was still the inventor. Probably he was not alone, and most certainly he was not the only one…. But probably they had not survived; for this was nothing like a lure for pterodactyls. Anyway, was the matter really one of speculators? Let them sell another forty slugs, or a hundred. Even in the City of Boobs, people had to figure out in the end what it was all about. And when that happened, slug would spread like wildfire.
The first ones to see to that would be the moralists from the Joy of Living. They would be followed by Dr. Opir, who would sally forth and announce that according to scientific endings, slug was conducive to clarity of thought and was unsurpassed in the treatment of alcoholism and depression. In general, the future ideal was a vast trough filled with hot water. Then they would stop writing the word “slug” on the fences.
That’s who should be taken by the throat, I thought, if anybody. The trouble is not the profiteers. The trouble is that there exists this Country of the Boob, this filthy misconstruction. It has taken the shivers under its wing and can’t wait to legalize slug….
There was a knock on the door. Oscar came into the study, and he was not alone. With him was Matia himself, stocky, gray, with dark glasses and thick cane, as always, looking like a veteran who has lost his sight. Oscar was smirking self-satisfiedly.
“Hello, Ivan,” said Matia. “Meet your back-up, Oscar Pebblebridge, from the southwest section.”
We shook hands. What I have always disliked about our Security Council is the plethora of mossy traditions, and especially infuriating is the idiotic system of cross-investigation, due to which we are constantly tripping over each other’s sleuthing, busting each other’s mugs, and not uncommonly shooting each other with fair accuracy. I can hardly see that as serious work — more like adolescents playing at detectives. Let them go soak their heads in a swamp.
“I was going to take you in today,” confided Oscar. “Never in my life have I seen such a suspicious character.”
Without saying a word, I took the pistol out of my pocket, unloaded it, and threw it in the desk drawer. Oscar followed my actions with approval. I said, addressing Matia, “I guess that the investigation would simply collapse, without getting started, had I known about Oscar. But I must inform you that I almost maimed him yesterday.”
“I read you right,” said Oscar smugly.
Grunting, Matia lowered himself into the armchair.
“I can’t ever remember a situation,” he said, “when Ivan was pleased with everything. But conspiracy is the foundation of our business…. Take a chair and sit down, both of you. You, Oscar, had no right to be maimed, and you, Ivan, had no right to be arrested. That’s how you should regard it. And what have you got here?” he said, taking off his dark glasses to look at the slugs, “Taking up radio as a hobby in between your work? Laudable, laudable!”
It was evident that they didn’t know a thing. Oscar was leafing through his notebook, where everything was encrypted in his own personal code, and was apparently preparing himself to make a report, while Matia scanned over the slugs with his fleshy nose, holding the glasses aloft in his hand. There was something symbolic in this spectacle.
“And so, agent Zhilin is enriching his leisure with radio technology,” continued Matia, restoring his glasses and leaning back in his chair. “He has lots of free time, he has switched to a four-hour day…. And bow do you stand on the question of the meaning of life, agent Zhilin? It appears you may have found it. I hope it won’t be necessary to take you away like agent Rimeyer?”