From a wall-speaker a business-like voice said, “Miss Topchev, you must synchronize your Alpha-wave pattern for the trance-phase to Mr. Lars. Should I send in a doctor?”
“No,” she said quickly. The nimbus faded. “No one from the Pavlov Institute! I can manage it.” She glided from her chair to kneel beside Lars. She rested her head against his, and some of her radiance seeped back from the physical contact; he felt it as pure warmth.
Dr. Todt said nervously to her, “Twenty-five seconds and Mr. Lars will be under. Can you manage? Your brain-metabolism stimulant?”
“I took it.” She sounded irritable. “Can’t you leave so that it’s just the two of us? I guess not.” She sighed. “Lars,” she said, “Mr. Powderdry. You weren’t afraid even when you realized you were dying; I saw you and you knew. Poor Lars.” She ruffled his hair, clumsily. “And do you know what? I’ll tell you something. You keep your mistress in Paris, because she probably loves you, and I don’t. Let’s see what sort of weapon we can make between us. Our baby.”
Dr. Todt said, “He can’t answer you but he can hear you.”
“What a child for two strangers to pawn,” Lilo said. “Does my killing you make us friends? Good friends? Bosom. Is that the idiom? Or breast-friends; I like that.” She pressed his head down against the scratchy black wool of her sweater.
All this he felt. This black, soft scratchiness; the rise and fall as she breathed. Separated, he thought, from her by organic fiber and also no doubt by an inner layer of synthetic undergarment and then perhaps one additional layer after that, so there are three layers separating me from what is within, and yet it’s only the thickness of a sheet of bookbond paper from my lips.
Will it always be like this?
“Maybe,” Lilo said softly, “you can die in this posture. Lars. Like my child. You instead of the sketch. Not our baby but mine.” To Dr. Todt she said, “I’m slipping under, too. Don’t worry; he and I will go together. What’ll we do in the non-space-time realm where you can’t follow? Can you guess?” She laughed. And again, this time less crudely, rumpled his hair.
“God knows,” Todt’s voice came distantly to Lars.
And then he was gone. At once the soft black scratchiness departed. That foremost of all, and first.
But he grabbed to retain it, scrabbling like a beclawed beast; yet, even so, instead of the slim shape of Miss Topchev he found his fingers gripping—grotesquely, and hideously disappointingly—a ballpoint pen.
On the floor lay a scribbled sketch. He was back. It seemed impossible, not to be accepted or believed. Except for the fact of his fright; that made it real.
Dr. Todt, busily glancing at the sketch said, “Interesting, Lars. It is, by the way, one hour later. You have emerged with a simple design for—” he chuckled, Dr. Dead chuckling—”a donkey-type steam engine.”
Sitting up groggily, Lars picked the sketch from the floor. He saw to his dulled incredulity that Dr. Todt was not joking. A simple, ancient steam donkey-engine. It was too funny even to try to laugh over.
But that was not all.
Lilo Topchev was crumpled into a heap—like a completed but for reasons unknown discarded android—and one which had been dropped, too, from some immense height. She clutched a wadded sheet of paper. On it was another sketch and this, he saw instantly, even in his semiconscious state, was not any archaic contraption. He had failed but Lilo had not.
He took the sketch from her stiff fingers. She was still quite flown.
“God,” Lilo said distinctly. “Do I have a headache!” She did not move or even open her eyes. “What’s the result? Yes? No? Just something to plowshare?” She waited, eyes squeezed shut. “Please, somebody answer me.”
Lars saw that the sketch was not hers. It was his, too, or at least partly his. Some of the lines were unnatural to him—he recognized them from the material which KACH had shown him over the years. Lilo had done part of this and he had done the rest: they had manipulated the writing-stylus in unison. Had they actually gripped simultaneously? Dr. Todt would know. So would the Soviet big-shots who scanned the vid and aud tape-tracks, and later so would the FBI when these were transmitted to them… or perhaps even an arrangement had been made to provide both intelligence agencies with the result at one exact synchronized instant.
“Lilo,” he said, “get up.”
She opened her eyes, raised her head. Her face was haggard, wild, hewn hawk-like.
“You look awful,” he said.
“I am awful. I’m a criminal: didn’t I tell you?” She staggered to her feet, stumbled and half-fell; expressionless. Dr. Todt caught her. “Thank you, Dr. Dead,” she said. “Did KACH tell you that I’m as a rule sick at my stomach after a trance-phase? Dr. Dead, take me into the bathroom. Quick. And phenothiazine: do you have some?” She tottered away, Todt assisting her.
Lars remained seated on the floor with the two sketches. One of a steam-driven donkey-engine. The other—
It looked, he thought, like an antonomic, homeostatic, thermotropic wise rat catching-device. Only for rats with an IQ of 230 or better or who had lived a thousand years—mutant rats such as never existed and if all went well in the scheme of things never would.
He knew, intuitively and totally, the device was hopeless.
And, down the back of his neck, a giant blew a dying breath of terror. The chill of failure froze him as he sat rocking back and forth, on the floor of the motel room, listening to the far-off noise of the girl he had fallen in love with being sick.
20
Later, they had coffee. He and Lilo Topchev, Dr. Todt and the Red Army officer who was their warden and protector against the insanities within themselves, Red Army Intelligence Major Tibor Apostokagian Geschenko. The four of them drank what Lars Powderdry knew to be a toast to ruin.
Lilo said abruptly, “It’s a failure.”
“And how,” Lars nodded without meeting her gaze.
In a Slavic gesture, Geschenko patted the air, priest-like, with his open hand. “Patience. By the way.” He nodded, and an aide approached their circular table with a homeopape—in Cyrillic type. Russian. “An additional alien satellite is up,” Geschenko said. “And it is reported that a field of some variety, a warpage of electromagnetic—I don’t understand it, being no physicist. But it has affected your city New Orleans.”
“Affected how?”
Geschenko shrugged. “Gone? Buried or hidden? Anyhow, communication is cut and sensitive measuring apparatus nearby records a lowering of mass. And an opaque barrier conceals what transpires, a field identified as connected with that of the satellites. Isn’t this approximately what we foresaw?” He deliberately slurped his coffee.
“I don’t understand,” Lars said tightly. And the drum of fear beat and beat inside him.
“Slavers.” Geschenko added, “They are not landing. They are I think taking pieces of population, New Orleans first.” He shrugged. “We will knock them down, don’t worry. In 1941 when the Germans—”
“With a steam donkey-engine?” Lars turned to Lilo. “This is the true, undefiled reason that moved you to try to kill me, isn’t it? So we’d never have to arrive at this point, sit here and drink coffee like this!”
Major Geschenko said with psychological acumen, “You give her an easy out, Mr. Lars. That is unhealthy, because she can divest herself further of responsibility.” To Lilo he said, “That was not the reason.”
“Say it was,” Lars said to her.
“Why?”
“Because then I can think you wanted to spare us both even the knowledge of this. It was a form of mercy.”
“The unconscious,” Lilo said, “has ways of its own.”
“No unconscious!” Major Geschenko said emphatically, reciting his doctrine. “That’s a myth. Conditioned response; you know that, Miss Topchev. Look, Mr. Lars; there’s no merit in what you’re trying to do. Miss Topchev is subject to the laws of the Soviet Union.”
Lars sighed, and from his pocket he brought out the rolled-up comic book which he had bought at the enormous news-counter at the space terminal. He passed it to Lilo: the Blue Cephalopod Man From Titan and His Astonishing Adventures Among the Fierce Protoplasms of Eight Deadly Moons. She accepted it curiously.
“What is it?” she asked him presently, large-eyed.
“A glimpse,” Lars said, “into the outside world. What life would be like for you if you could come with me, leave this man and Peep-East.”
“This is what is for sale in Wes-bloc?”
“In West Africa, mostly,” he answered. Lilo turned the pages, inspected the lurid and really downright dreadful drawings. Major Geschenko meanwhile stared off into space, lost in gloomy thought; his fine, clear face showed the despair which he had so far kept from his voice. He was, undoubtedly, thinking about the news from New Orleans… as any sane man would. And the major was indubitably sane. He would not be looking at a comic book, Lars realized. But Lilo and I—we are not quite sane, at this point. And for good reason. Considering the magnitude of our spectacular failure.