After a pause Eric said to Molinari, ‘What I’m waiting for is the day when I trans a new brain for Virgil.’ The irritability in his own voice surprised him; probably it had been the mention of Kathy that had set it off. ‘I’ve got several on stand-by. One is a real goozler.’
‘”Goozler,”‘ Molinari murmured. ‘I’ve missed out on the argot of recent months… just plain too busy. Too many official documents to prepare; too much establishment talk. It’s a goozlery war, isn’t it, doctor?’ His great, dark, pain-impregnated eyes fixed on Eric, and Eric saw something he had never come across before; he saw an intensity that was not normal or human. And it was a physiological phenomenon, a swiftness of reflex, due surely to a unique and superior laying down of the neural pathways during childhood. The Mole’s gaze exceeded in its authority and astuteness, its power alone, anything possessed by ordinary persons, and in it Eric saw the difference between them all and the Mole. The primary conduit linking the mind with external reality, the sense of sight, was, in the Mole, so far more developed than one anticipated that by it the man caught and held whatever happened to venture across his path. And, beyond all else, this enormity of visual prowess possessed the aspect of wariness. Of recognition of the imminence of harm.
By this faculty the Mole remained alive.
Eric realized something then, something that had never occurred to him in all the weary, dreadful years of the war.
The Mole would have been their leader at any time, at any stage in human society. And – anywhere.
‘Every war,’ Eric said with utmost caution and tact, ‘is a hard war for those involved in it, Secretary.’ He paused, reflected, and then added, ‘We all understood this, sir, when we got into it. It’s the risk a people, a planet, takes when it voluntarily enters a severe and ancient conflict that’s been going on a long time between two other peoples.’
There was silence; Molinari scrutinized him wordlessly.
‘And the ‘Starmen,’ Eric said, ‘are of our stock. We are related to them genetically, are we not?’
Against that there was only a silence, a wordless void which no one cared to fill. At last, reflectively, Molinari farted.
Tell Eric about your stomach pains,’ Virgil said to Molinari.
‘My pains,’ Molinari said, and grimaced.
The whole point in bringing you together—’ Virgil began.
‘Yes,’ Molinari growled brusquely, nodding his massive head. ‘I know. And you all know. It was for exactly this.’
‘I’m as certain as I am of taxes and labor unions that Dr Sweetscent can help you, Secretary,’ Virgil continued. The rest of us will go across the hall to the suite of rooms there, so you two can talk in private.’ With unusual circumspection he moved away, and, one by one, the blood clan and firm officers filed out of the room, leaving Eric Sweetscent alone with the Secretary General.
After a pause Eric said, ‘All right, sir; tell me about your abdominal complaint, Secretary.’ In any case a sick man was a sick man; he seated himself in the form-binding armchair across from the UN Secretary General and, in this reflexively assumed professional posture, waited.
FOUR
That evening as Bruce Himmel tromped up the rickety wooden stairs to Chris Plout’s conapt in the dismal Mexican section of Tijuana, a female voice said from the darkness behind him, ‘Hello, Brucie. It looks as if this is an all-TF&D night; Simon Ild is here, too.’
On the porch the woman caught up with him. It was sexy, sharp-tongued Katherine Sweetscent; he had run into her at Plout’s gatherings a number of times before and so it hardly surprised him to see her now. Mrs Sweetscent wore a somewhat modified costume from that which she employed on the job; this also failed to surprise him. For tonight’s mysterious undertaking Kathy had arrived naked from the waist up, except of course, for her nipples. They had been – not gilded in the strict sense – but rather treated with a coating of living matter, sentient, a Martian life form, so that each possessed a consciousness. Hence each nipple responded in an alert fashion to everything going on.
The effect on Himmel was immense.
Behind Kathy Sweetscent ascended Simon Ild; in the dim light he had a vacant expression on his sappy, pimply, uneducated face. This was a person whom Himmel could do without; Simon – unfortunately – reminded him of nothing so much as a bad simulacrum of himself. And there was nothing for him quite so unbearable.
The fourth person gathered here in the unheated, low-ceilinged room of Chris Plout’s littered, stale-food-smelling conapt was an individual whom Himmel at once recognized – recognized and stared at, because this was a man known to him through pics on the back of book jackets. Pale, with glasses, his long hair carefully combed, wearing expensive, tasteful Io-fabric clothing, seemingly a trifle ill-at-ease, stood the Taoist authority from San Francisco, Marm Hastings, a slight man but extremely handsome, in his mid-forties, and, as Himmel knew, quite well-to-do from his many books on the subject of oriental mysticism. Why was Hastings here? Obviously to sample JJ-180; Hastings had a reputation for essaying an experience with every hallucinogenic drug that came into being, legal or otherwise. To Hastings this was allied with religion.
But as far as Himmel knew, Marm Hastings had never shown up here in Tijuana at Chris Plout’s conapt. What did this indicate about JJ-180? He pondered as he stood off in a corner, surveying the goings-on. Hastings was occupied in examining Plout’s library on the subject of drugs and religion; he seemed uninterested in the others present, even contemptuous of their existence. Simon Ild, as usual, curled up on the floor, on a pillow, and lit a twisted brown marijuana cigarette; he puffed vacantly, waiting for Chris to appear. And Kathy Sweetscent – she crouched down, stroking reflexively at her hocks, as if grooming herself flywise, putting her slender, muscular body into a state of alertness. Teasing it, he decided, by deliberate, almost yogalike efforts.
Such physicalness disturbed him; he glanced away. It was not in keeping with the spiritual emphasis of the evening. But no one could tell Mrs Sweetscent anything; she was nearly autistic.
Now Chris Plout, wearing a red bathrobe, his feet bare, entered from the kitchen; through dark glasses he peered to see if it was time to begin. ‘Marm,’ he said. ‘Kathy, Bruce, Simon, and I, Christian; the five of us. An adventure into the unexplored by means of a new substance which has just arrived from Tampico aboard a banana boat… I hold it here.’ He extended his open palm; within lay the five capsules. ‘One for each of us – Kathy, Bruce, Simon, Marm, and me, Christian; our first journey of the mind together. Will we all return? And will we be translated, as Bottom says?’
Himmel thought. As Peter Quince says to Bottom, actually.
Aloud, he said, “Bottom, thou art translated.”‘
‘Pardon?’ Chris Plout said, frowning.
‘I’m quoting,’ Himmel explained.
‘Come on, Chris,’ Kathy Sweetscent said crossly, ‘give us the jink and let’s get started.’ She snatched – successfully – one of the capsules from Chris’s palm. ‘Here I go,’ she said. ‘And without water.’
Mildly, Marm Hastings said with his quasi-English accent, ‘Is it the same, I wonder, taken without water?’ Without movement of his eye muscles he clearly succeeded in making a survey of the woman; there was that sudden stricture of his body which gave him away. Himmel felt outraged; wasn’t this whole affair designed to raise them all above the flesh?
‘It’s the same,’ Kathy informed him. ‘Everything’s the same, when you break through to absolute reality; it’s all one vast blur.’ She then swallowed, coughed. The capsule was gone.
Reaching, Himmel took his. The others followed.
‘If the Mole’s police caught us,’ Simon said, to no one in particular, ‘we’d all be in the Army, serving out at the front.’
‘Or working in vol-labe camps at Lilistar,’ Himmel added. They were all tense, waiting for the drug to take effect; it always ran this way, these short seconds before the jink got to them. ‘For good old Freneksy, as it’s translated into English. Bottom, thou art translated as Freneksy.’ He giggled shakily. Katherine Sweetscent glared at him.
‘Miss,’ Marm Hastings said to her in an unperturbed voice, ‘I wonder if I haven’t met you before; you do seem familiar. Do you spend much time in the Bay area? I have a studio and architect-designed home in the hills of West Marin, near the ocean … we hold seminars there often; people come and go freely. But I would remember you. Oh yes.’
Katherine Sweetscent said, ‘My damn husband – he wouldn’t ever let me. I’m self-supporting – I’m more than economically independent – and yet I have to put up with the rasping little noises and squeaks he makes whenever I try to do something original on my own.’ She added, ‘I’m an antique buyer, but old things become boring; I’d love to—’