At the table General Nitz’ chief aide, Mike Dowbrowsky, also a general, but three-star, glanced up at him. Expressionlessly he nodded in greeting and pointed—peremptorily—at a seat vacant beside him. Lars padded over and noiselessly accepted the seat The discussion continued with no pause, no acknowledgment of his entrance.
An akprop man—Gene Something—had the floor. He was on his stocking feet, gesticulating and talking in a high-pitched squeak. Lars put on an expression of solemn attention, but in reality he simply felt tired. He was, within himself, resting. He had gotten in. What happened now appeared to him an anticlimax.
“Here is Mr. Lars,” General Nitz interrupted Gene Something, all at once, startling Lars. He sat up at once, keeping himself from visibly jerking.
“I got here as quickly as I could,” he said stupidly.
General Nitz said, “Mr. Lars, we told the Russians that we knew they were lying. That they put BX-3, our code for the new sat, up there. That they had violated section ten of the Plowshare Protocols of 2002. That within one hour, if they did not acknowledge having launched it into its orbit, we intended to release a g-to-a mis and knock it down.”
There was silence. General Nitz seemed to be waiting for Lars to say something. So Lars said, “And what did the Soviet Government reply?”
“They replied,” General Mike Dowbrowsky said, “that they would be happy to turn over their own tracking-stations’ data on the sat, so that our missile could get an exact fit on it. And they have done so. In fact they supplied additional material, spontaneously, as to a warping field which their instruments had detected and ours had not, a distortion surrounding BX-3, kept there evidently for the purpose of misleading a thermotropic missile.”
“I thought you sent up a team of robot weapon percept-extensors,” Lars said.
After a pause General Nitz said, “If you live to be a hundred, Lars, you will say, to everyone you ever meet, including me, that there was no team of robot percept-extensors sent up. And, that since this is the case, the fabrication that this ‘team’ was vaporized is the invention of rancid homeopape reporters. Or if that doesn’t do it, the deliberate, sensation-mongering invention of that TV personality—what’s his name?”
“Lucky Bagman,” said Molly Neumann, one of the concomodies.
“That a creature like Bagman would naturally dream it up to keep his audience deluded into believing he has a conduit to Festung W, here.” He added, “Which he doesn’t. Whether they like it or not.”
After a pause Lars said, “What now, general?”
“What now?” General Nitz clapped his hands together before him atop the pile of memoranda, micro-docs, reports, abstracts ribbon-style that covered his share of the great table. “Well, Lars—”
He glanced up, the weary carrot-like face corrupted with utterly unforeseen, unimaginable, feckless amusement.
“As strange as it may sound, Lars, somebody in this room, somebody a bona fide participant of this meeting, actually suggested—you’ll laugh—suggested we try to get you to go into one of your song-and-dance acts, you know, with the banjo and blackface, your—” the carrot-like features writhed—”trances. Can you obtain a weapon from hyper-dimensional space, Lars? Honestly, now. Can you get us something to take out BX-3? Now, Lars, please don’t pull my leg. Just quietly say no and we won’t vote you out of here; we’ll just quietly go on and try to think of something else.”
Lars said, “No, I can’t.”
For a moment General Nitz’ eyes flickered; it was, possibly but not very probably, compassion.
Whatever it was, it lasted only an instant. Then the sardonic glaze reinstated itself. “Anyhow you’re honest, which is what I asked for. Ask for a no answer, get a no answer.” He laughed barkingly.
“He could try,” a woman named Min Dosker said in an oddly high, lady-like voice.
“Yes,” Lars agreed, taking the bit before General Nitz could seize it and run with it. “Let me clarify. I—”
“Don’t clarify,” General Nitz said slowly. “Please, as a favor to me personally. Mrs. Dosker, Lars, is from SeRKeb. I failed to tell you, but—” He shrugged. “So, in view of that fact, don’t treat us to an interminable recitation of how you can operate and what you can and can’t do. We’re not being entirely candid because of Mrs. Dosker’s presence here.” To the SeRKeb rep, General Nitz said, “You understand, don’t you, Min?”
“I still think,” Mrs. Dosker said, “that your weapons medium could try.” She rattled her micro-docs irritably.
“What about yours?” General Dowbrowsky demanded. “The Topchev girl?”
“I am informed,” Mrs. Dosker said, “that she is—” She hesitated; obviously, she, too, was constrained to be to some extent reticent.
“Dead,” General Nitz grated.
“Oh no!” Mrs. Dosker said, and looked horrified, like a Baptist Sunday school teacher shocked by an improper word.
“The strain probably killed her,” Nitz said lazily.
“No, Miss Topchev is—in shock. She fully understands the situation, however. She is under sedation at the Pavlov Institute at New Moscow, and for the time being she can’t work. But she’s not dead.”
“When?” one of the concomodies, a male nullity, asked her. “Will she be out of shock soon? Can you predict?”
“Within hours, we hope,” Mrs. Dosker said emphatically.
“All right,” General Nitz said, in a sudden brisk voice; he rubbed his hands together, grimaced, showing his yellow, irregular, natural teeth. Speaking to Lars he said, “Powderdry, Mr. Lars, Lars, whatever you are—I’m glad you came here. I truly am. I knew you would. People like you can’t stand being hung-up on.”
“What kind of person—” Lars began, but General Bronstein, seated on the far side of General Dowbrowsky, shot him a look that made him cease—and God forbid, flush. General Nitz said, “When were you last at Fairfax, Iceland?”
“Six years ago,” Lars said.
“Before that?”
“Never.”
“You want to go there?”
“I’d go anywhere. I’d go to God. Yes, I’ll be glad to go.”
“Fine.” General Nitz nodded. “She ought to be out of shock by, say, midnight Washington time. Right, Mrs. Dosker?”
“I’m positive,” the SeRKeb rep said, her head wobbling up and down like a vast, colorless pumpkin on its thick stalk.
“Ever tried working with another weapons medium?” an akprop—it would be an akprop—man asked Lars.
“No.” Happily, he was able to keep his voice steady. “But I’ll be pleased to pool my ability and years of experience with Miss Topchev’s. As a matter of fact—” He hesitated until he could find a political way of finishing his utterance. “I’ve speculated for some time that such a merger might be highly profitable for both blocs.”
General Nitz said, deliberately offhandedly, “We have this psychiatrist at Wallingford Clinic. There are currently three new proposed weapons media—is that the proper plural? No—who are relatively untested but whom we could draw on.” To Lars he said with abrupt bluntness, “You wouldn’t like that, Mr. Lars; you wouldn’t want that at all. So we’ll spare you that. For the time being.”
With his right hand General Nitz made a tic-like gesture. At the far end of the chamber, a youthful U.S. commissioned officer bent and clicked on a vidset. Speaking into an in-grafted throat microphone, the officer conferred with persons not present in the room; then, straightening, he pointed to the vidset indicating that now it—whatever it was—could be considered ready.
On the vidset formed a face, a mystifying source of human essence, wavering slightly in indication that the signal was being relayed from a quite distant spot via a satellite.
Pointing at Lars, General Nitz said, “Can our boy put his head together with your girl?”
On the vidscreen the far-distant eyes of the wavering face scrutinized Lars, while at his microphone the young officer translated.
“No,” the face on the screen said.
“Why not, Marshal?” Nitz said.
It was the face of Peep-East’s highest dignity and holder of power, the Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party as well as Secretary of the SeRKeb. The man on the screen, deciding against the fusion, was the Soviet Marshal of the Red Army, Maxim Paponovich. And that man, overruling every other living person in the world on this matter, said, “We must keep her from the publicity. She is poorly. You know; sick? I regret. It is a shame.” And, cat-like, Paponovich, with smoldering eyes, surveyed Lars for his reaction as if reading him out of a well-broken, long known code.
Rising respectfully to his feet, Lars said, “Marshal Paponovich, you’re making a dreadful error. Miss Topchev and I can be looked to for redress. Is the Soviet Union opposed to the search for remedy in this bad situation?”
The face, tangibly hating him, continued to confront him from the screen.
“If I’m not permitted to cooperate with Miss Topchev,” Lars said, “I will shore up the security of Wes-bloc and call it quits. I’m asking you now to change your mind, for the protection of the billions of people of Peep-East. And I’m prepared to make public the nature of our attempt to compile our separate talents, despite what this formal Board may instruct. I have direct access to infomedia such as the Lucky Bagman interviewers. And your refusal—”