And they, in return, believe US. Thank God we can communicate back and forth to that degree. Undoubtedly both blocs have checked out the small fry: France and Israel and Egypt and the Turks. It’s not any of them either. So it’s no one. Q.E.D.
On foot he crossed the drafty landing field and hailed an autonomic hopper car.
“Your destination, sir or madam?” the hopper car inquired as he crawled into it.
It was a good question. He did not feel like going to Mr. Lars, Incorporated. Whatever it was that was going on in the sky dwarfed his commercial activities—dwarfed even the activities of the Board, evidently. He could probably induce the hopper car to take him all the way to Festung Washington, D.C.—which probably, despite General Nitz’ sarcasm, was where he belonged. He was, after all, a bona fide member of the Board and when it sat in formal session he should by rights be present. But—
I’m not needed, he realized. It was as simple as that.
“Do you know a good bar?” he asked the hopper car.
“Yes, sir or madam,” the autonomic circuit of the hopper car answered. “But it is only eleven in the morning. Only a drunk drinks at eleven in the morning.”
“But I’m scared,” Lars said.
“Why, sir or madam?”
Lars said, “Because they’re scared.” My client, he thought. Or employer or whatever the Board is. Their anxiety has gotten down, all the way along the line, until it’s reached to me. In that case I wonder how the pursaps feel, he wondered.
Is ignorance any help in this situation?
“Give me a vidphone,” he instructed the car.
A vidphone slid creakily out, to repose leadenly in his lap, and he dialed Maren, at the Paris branch.
“You heard?” he said, when her face at last appeared before him in gray miniature. It was not even a color vidphone—the circuit was that archaic.
Maren said, “I’m glad you called! All kinds of stuff is showing up at the, you know, Greyhound bus station locker at Topeka, out of Geldthaler Gemeinschaft. From them. It’s incredible.”
“This is not a mistake?” Lars broke in. “They did not put up that new sat?”
“They swear. They affirm. They beg us to believe. No. In the name of God. Mother. The soil of Russia. You name it. The insane thing is that they, and I’m talking about the most responsible officials, the entire twenty-five men and women on SeRKeb, they’re actually groveling. No dignity, no reserve. Maybe they have unbelievably guilty consciences; I don’t know.” She looked weary; her eyes had lost their glitter.
“No,” he said. “It’s the Slavic temperament. It’s a manner of address, like their invective. What specially do they propose? Or has that gone directly to the Board and not through us?”
“Straight to Festung. All the lines are open, lines that are so gucked up with rust that it’s impossible they’d carry a signal, and yet they are. They’re now in use—maybe because everybody at the other end is yelling so loud. Lars, honest to God, one of them actually cried.”
Lars said, “Under the circumstances it’s easy to understand why Nitz hung up on me.”
“You talked to him? You actually got through? Listen.” Her voice was controlled by her intensity. “An attempt has already been made to deposit weapons on the alien satellite.”
“Alien,” he echoed, dazed.
“And the robot weapons teams vanished. They were protected right up to their scalps, but they’re just not there any more.”
“Probably returned to hydrogen atoms,” Lars said.
“It was our coup,” Maren said. “Lars?”
“Yes.”
“That Soviet official who blubbered. It was a Red Army man.”
“The thing that gets me,” Lars said, “is that all at once I’m on the outside, like Vincent Klug. It’s a really terrible feeling.”
“You want to do something. And you can’t even blubber.”
He nodded.
“Lars,” Maren said, “do you understand? Everyone’s on the outside; the Board, the SeRKeb—they’re on the outside; there is no inside. Not here, anyhow. That’s why I’m already hearing the word ‘alien.’ It’s the worst word I ever heard! We’ve got three planets and seven moons that we can think of as ‘us’ and now all of a sudden—” She clamped her jaws shut morosely.
“May I tell you something?”
“Yes.” Maren nodded.
He said huskily, “My first impulse. Was. To jump.”
“You’re airborne? In a hopper?”
He nodded, unable to speak.
“Okay. Fly here to Paris. So it costs. Pay! Just get here and then you and I together.”
Lars said, “I’d never make it.” I’d jump somewhere along the way, he realized. And he saw, she realized it, too.
Levelly, with that great female earth-mother coolness of conduct, that supernatural balance that a woman could draw on when she had to, Maren said, “Now look, Lars. Listen. You’re listening?”
“Yep.”
“Land.”
“Okay.”
“Who’s your doctor? Outside of Todt?”
“Got no doctor outside of Todt.”
“Lawyer?”
“Bill Sawyer. You know him. That guy with a head like a hardboiled egg. Only the color of lead.”
Maren said, “Fine. You land at his office. Have him draw up what’s called a writ of mandamus.”
“I don’t get it.” He felt like a small boy with her again, obedient but confused. Faced by facts beyond his little ability.
“The writ of mandamus is to be directed at the Board,” Maren said. “It shall require them to permit you to sit with them in session. That is your goddam legal right, Lars. I mean it. You have a legal, God-given right to walk in there to that conference room down in the kremlin and take your seat and participate in everything that’s decided.”
“But,” he said hoarsely, “I’ve got nothing to offer them: I have nothing. Nothing!” He appealed to her, gesturing.
“You’re still entitled to be present,” Maren said. “I’m not worried about that dung-ball in the sky; I’m worried about you.” And, to his astonishment, she began to cry.
12
Three hours later—it had taken his attorney that long to get a judge of the Superior Court to sign the writ—he boarded a pneumatic-tube null-lapse train and shot from New York down the coast to Festung Washington, D.C. The trip took eighty seconds, including braking-time.
The next he knew he was in downtown Pennsylvania Avenue surface traffic, moving at an abalone’s pace toward the dinky, transcendentally modest above-surface edifice which acted as an entrance to the authentic subsurface kremlin of Festung Washington, D.C.
At five-thirty p.m. he stood with Dr. Todt before a neat young Air Arm officer, who held a laser rifle, and silently presented his writ.
It took a little time. The writ had to be read, studied, certified, initialed by a sequence of office-holders left over from Harding’s administration. But at last he found himself with Dr. Todt descending by silent, hydraulic elevator to the subsurface, the very subsurface, levels below.
With them in the elevator was a captain from the Army, who looked wan and tense. “How’d you make it in here?” the captain asked him; evidently he was a dispatch-runner or some such fool thing. “How’d you get all that security fnug?”
Lars said, “I lied.”
There was no more conversation.
The elevator doors opened; the three of them exited. Lars—with Dr. Todt, who had been silent throughout the entire trip and ordeal of presenting the writ—walked and walked until they reached the last and most elaborate security barrier which sealed off the UN-W Natsec Board, in session within its chambers.
The weapon which here and now pointed directly at him and Dr. Todt came, he realized with pride, from a design emanating from Mr. Lars, Incorporated. Through a meager slot in the transparent but impenetrable ceiling-to-floor bulkhead he presented all his documents. On the far side a civilian official, grizzled, bent with canny experience, with even wisdom engraved on his raptor-like features, inspected Lars’ ident-papers and the writ. He pondered for an excessive time… but perhaps it was not excessive. Who could say, in a situation like this?
By means of a wall speaker the ancient, efficient official said. “You may go in, Mr. Powderdry. But the person with you can’t.”
“My doctor,” Lars said.
The grizzled old official said, “I don’t care if he’s your mother.” The bulkhead parted, leaving an opening just wide enough for Lars to squeeze through; at once an alarm bell clanged. “You’re armed,” the old official said philosophically and held out his hand. “Let me have it”
From his pockets Lars brought every object out for inspection. “No arms,” he said. “Keys, ballpoint pen, coins. See?”
“Leave everything there.” The old official pointed. Lars saw a window open in the wall. Through it a hard-eyed female clerk was extending a small wire basket.
Into the basket he dumped the entire contents of his pockets and then, upon instruction, his belt with its metal buckle, and last of all, dreamlike, he thought, his shoes. In his stocking feet he padded on to the big chamber room and, without Dr. Todt, opened the door and entered.