“Not long,” both policemen said simultaneously.
Lars said, “I’ll do my best. What ails me is this. I’m a failure at my work. And that hurts a man; that makes him fearful. But I’m paid, or have been up to now, to be a failure. That’s what was wanted.”
“You think, Powderdry,” the policeman seated beside him said, “that you and this Lilo Topchev can do it? Before they—” he pointed upward, an almost pious gesture, like that of some ancient tiller of the soil, a job who had been burned and then burned again—”drop whatever it is they’re setting up their sat-network to make the calculations for? So when they do drop it, it’ll hit exactly where they want it? Like for instance, and this is my theory, turning the Pacific to steam and boiling us like a lot of Maine lobsters.”
Lars was silent.
“He’s not going to say,” the policeman at the controls said in a curiously mixed tone. There was anger in his voice but also grief. It was a small-boy sound, and Lars sympathized with it. He must have sounded like this himself, at times.
Lars said, “At the Soviet Embassy they told me, and they meant it, that if Lilo and I came up with nothing or with only the pseudo-weps we’ve all made our livelihoods off of for decades now, they would kill me and her. And they will—if you don’t first.”
At the controls the policeman said, calmly, “We will first. Because we’ll be closer. But not right away; there’ll be a suitable interval.”
“Were you ordered to?” Lars asked, with curiosity. “Or is this your own idea?”
No answer.
“You can’t both kill me,” Lars said, a feeble attempt to be philosophical and flippant. It failed to be the former, and the latter was not appreciated. “Maybe you can,” he said, then. “St. Paul says a man can be born again. He can die and return to life. So if a man can be born twice why can’t he be assassinated twice?”
“In your case,” the policeman beside him said, “it wouldn’t be assassination.”
He did not elect to specify what it in fact would be. Perhaps, Lars thought, it was unspeakable. He felt the burden of their mingled hatred and fear and yet—their trust. They still had hope, as Kaminsky had. They had paid him for years not to produce a genuinely lethal device and now, with absolute naïveté, they clung to his skirts, begging, as Kaminsky had begged—and yet with the ugly undercurrent of threat, of murder in case he failed.
He began to understand much that he had never realized about cog society.
Being on the inside, knowing the real scoop, had not eased their lives. Like him, they still suffered. They were not puffed-up, prideful, shot full, as someone had said to him recently, with hubris. Knowing what was really going on made them uneasy—for the same reason that not knowing made the multitude, the pursaps, able to sleep in peace. Too much of a burden, that of maturity, of responsibility, lay on the cogs… even on these nonentities, these two cops, plus their cohorts back at his conapt who were undoubtedly right now stuffing all his cloaks, shirts, shoes and ties and underwear into boxes and suitcases.
And the essence of the burden was this:
They knew, as Lars himself knew, that their destiny lay in the hands of halfwits. It was as simple as that. Halfwits in both East and West, halfwits like Marshal Paponovich and General Nitz… halfwits, he realized, and felt his ears sear and flame red, like himself. It was the sheer mortality of the leadership that frightened the ruling circles. The last “superman,” the final Man of Iron, had been Josef Stalin. Since then—puny mortals, job-holders who made deals.
And yet, the alternative was frightfully worse—and they all, including even the pursaps, knew this on some level.
They were seeing, in the form of three alien satellites in their sky, that alternative now.
At the controls the cop said, drawlingly, as if it didn’t matter quite so much. “There’s Iceland.”
Below them the lights of Fairfax glowed.
15
Lights blazed, creating a golden-white tunnel for him to walk along. The right-to-the-bone wind from the glaciers to the north snapped longingly at him and he walked rapidly, the two police following. They were shivering too, the three of them making for the closest building as fast as possible.
The building’s door sealed itself shut after them and warmth surrounded them. They halted, panting, the cops’ faces terribly red now and swollen, not so much from the sudden alterations of atmosphere but from tensions, as if they had feared being caught out there and left.
Four members of the KVD, the Soviet Secret Police, in old-fashioned pre-cloak, ultra-unfashionable wool suits and narrow, pointed oxfords and knit ties, appeared from nowhere. It was as if they had literally detached themselves, super-science-wise, from the walls of the antechamber in which Lars and the two Wes-bloc United States police stood panting.
Soundlessly, in a slow, ritualized moment of truth, the Wes-bloc and Soviet secret police exchanged identification. They must have carried, Lars decided, ten pounds of ident-material apiece. The swapping of cards and wallets and cephalic buzz-keys seemed to continue forever.
And no one said anything. No one of the six so much as looked at any of the others. All attention was fastened fixedly on the ident-elements themselves.
He walked off, found a hot-chocolate machine, put in a dime and soon had his paper cup; he stood sipping, feeling tired, conscious that his head ached and that he had not bothered to shave. He felt keenly the substandard, inappropriate and just plain rotten-looking sight that he presented. And at this time. In these circumstances.
When the Wes-bloc police had concluded their swapping of ident-material with their Peep-East counterparts, he said caustically, “I feel like a victim of the Gestapo. Rousted out of bed, unshaved and with my worst clothes, having to face—”
“You won’t be facing a Reichsgericht” one of the Peep-East police said, overhearing. His English was a trifle artificial in its precision, learned probably from an audio edutape. Lars thought at once of robots, androids, and machinery in general; it was not a sanguine omen. Such plateau, toneless palaver, he recalled, was often associated with certain subforms of mental illness—in fact with brain-damage in general. Silently he groaned. He knew now what T.S. Eliot meant about the world ending with a whimper instead of a bang. It would end with his inaudible moan of complaint at the mechanical aspect of those who had him—and this was the true nature of his situation, whether he enjoyed facing it or not—in captivity.
Wes-bloc, for reasons which would of course not be handed down to him to fathom or appreciate, was permitting the encounter with Lilo Topchev to take place under the jurisdiction of the Soviet Union. Perhaps it showed how little hope General Nitz and those in his entourage had that anything of worth might arise out of this.
“I’m sorry,” Lars said to the Soviet policeman. “I don’t know any German. You’ll have to explain.” Or else take it up with Ol’ Orville, back at the apartment. In that other, lost now, world.
The officers said, “That’s right, you Amis speak no foreign languages. But you have an office in Paris. How do you manage?”
“I manage,” Lars said, “by having a mistress who speaks French, as well as Italian and Russian, and is terrific in bed, all of which you can find noted in your folio on me. She heads my Paris office.” He turned to the two United States police who had brought him here. “Are you leaving me?”
They answered, with absolutely no sign of guilt or concern, “Yes, Mr. Lars.” A Greek chorus of abdication from human, moral responsibility. He was appalled. Suppose the Soviets decided not to return him? Where did Wes-bloc turn for its weapons designs from then on? Assuming of course that the investment of Terra’s atmosphere by the alien satellites was contained…
But no one really believed it would be.
That was it. That was what had made him expendable.
“Come along, Mr. Lars.” The four Soviet KVB men gathered around him and he found himself escorted up a ramp, across a waiting room in which people—normal, individual, private men and women—sat waiting for transportation or for relatives. Uncanny, he thought; like a dream.
He asked, “Can I stop and buy a magazine at the newsrack?”
“Certainly.” The four KVB men steered him to the vast display and watched, like sociologists, as he searched for something to read that might please him. The Bible? he thought. Or perhaps I should try the other extreme.
“How about this?” he asked the KVB men, holding up a comic book printed in cheap, lurid colors. “The Blue Cephalopod Man from Titan.” As near as he could tell, it was the worst rubbish on sale here at this enormous display counter. With a U.S. coin he paid the automatic clerk, which thanked him in its autonomic, nasal voice.