“Packard,” he said to the KACH-man, “you’re an independent organization. You operate anywhere in the world. Theoretically anyone can employ you.”
“Theoretically,” Packard agreed. “You mean KACH itself, not me personally. I’m hired.”
“I thought you wanted to hear why General Nitz despises you,” Henry Morris said.
“No,” Lars said. “Keep it to yourself.” I’ll hire someone from KACH, a real pro, he decided, to scan UN-W, the whole apparatus if necessary, to find out what they’re really up to regarding me. Especially, he thought, the success to which their next weapons medium has been brought; that’s the crucial region for me to have exact knowledge about.
I wonder what they’d do, he thought, if they knew that it had so often occurred to me that I always could go over to Peep-East. If they, to insure their own safety, to shore up their absolute position of authority, tried to replace me—
He tried to imagine the size, shape and color of someone following him, imprinting their own footsteps in his tracks. Child or youth, old woman or plump middle-aged man… Wes-bloc psychiatrists, yoked to the state as servants, undoubtedly could turn up the psionic talent of contacting the Other World, the hyper-dimensional universe that he entered into during his trance-states. Wade had had it Lilo Topchev had it. He had lots of it. So undoubtedly it existed elsewhere. And the longer he stayed in office the longer the Board had to ferret it out. “May I say one thing,” Morris said, deferentially. “Okay.” He waited, setting himself. “General Nitz knew something was wrong when you turned down that honorary colonelcy in the UN-West Armed Forces.”
Staring at him, Lars said, “But that was a gag! Just a piece of paper.”
“No,” Morris said. “And you knew better—know better right now. Unconsciously, on an intuitive level. It would have made you legally subject to military jurisdiction.”
To no one in particular, the KACH-man said. “It’s true. They’ve called up virtually everyone they sent those gratis commissions to. Put them in uniform.” His face had become professionally impassive.
“God!” Lars felt himself cringe. It had been merely a whim, declining the honorary commission. He had given a gag answer to a gag document. And yet, now, on closer inspection—
“Am I right?” Henry Morris asked him, scrutinizing him.
“Yes,” Lars said, after a pause. “I knew it.” He gestured. “Well, the hell with it.” He turned his attention back to the KACH-collected weapons sketches. Anyhow, it was deeper than that; his troubles with UN-W Natsec went back farther and penetrated further than any inane scheme such as honorary commissions which all at once became the basis of mandatory military subjugation. What he objected to lay in an area where written documents did not exist. An area, in fact, which he did not care to think about.
Examining Miss Topchev’s sketches he found himself confronted by this repellent aspect of his work—the lives of all of them, the Board included.
Here it was. And not by accident. It pervaded each design; he leafed among them and then tossed them back on his desk.
To the KACH-man he said, “Weapons! Take them back; put them in your envelope.” There was not one weapon among them.
“As regards the concomodies—” Henry Morris began.
“What,” Lars said to him, “is a concomody?”
Morris, taken aback, said, “What do you mean, ‘What is a concomody?’ You know. You sit down with them twice a month.” He gestured in irritation. “You know more about the six concomodies on the Board than anyone else in Wes-bloc. Let’s face it, everything you do is for them.”
“I’m facing it,” Lars said calmly. He folded his arms, sat back. “But suppose when that TV autonomic interviewer out there asked me whether I was receiving something really spectacular I told it the truth.”
There was silence and then the KACH-man stirred and said. “That’s why they’d like you in uniform. You wouldn’t be facing any TV cameras. There wouldn’t be any opportunity for something to go wrong.” He left the sketches where they were on Lars’ desk.
“Maybe it’s already gone wrong,” Morris said, still studying his boss.
“No,” Lars said, presently. “If it had you’d know.” Where Mr. Lars, Incorporated, stands, he thought, there’d just be a hole. Neat, precise, without a disturbance in the process to the adjoining high-rise structures. And achieved in roughly six seconds.
“I think you’re nuts,” Morris decided. “You’re sitting here at your desk day after day, looking at Lilo’s sketches, going quietly nuts. Every time you go into a trance a piece of you falls out.” His tone was harsh. “It’s too costly to you. And the upshot will be that one day a TV interviewer will nab you and say, ‘What’s cooking, Mr. Lars, sir?’ and you’ll say something you shouldn’t” Dr. Todt, Elvira Funt, the KACH-man, all of them watched him with dismay but no one did or said anything. At his desk Lars stonily regarded the far wall and the Utrillo original which Maren Faine had given him at Christmas, 2003.
“Let’s talk about something else,” Lars said. “Where no pain’s attached.” He nodded to Dr. Todt, who seemed more narrow and priest-like than ever. “I think I’m psychologically ready now, doctor. We can instigate the autism, if you have your gadgets and you know what else set up.” Autism—a noble reference, dignified.
“I want an EEG first,” Dr. Todt said. “Just as a safety factor.” He rolled the portable EEG machine forward. The preliminaries to the day’s trance-state in which he lost contact with the given, shared universe, the koinos kosmos, and involvement in that other, mystifying realm, apparently an idios kosmos, a purely private world, began. But a purely private world in which an aisthesis koine, a common Something, dwelt What a way, Lars thought, to earn a living.
3
Greetings! said the letter, delivered by ‘stant mail. You have been selected out of millions of your friends and neighbors.
You are now a concomody.
It can’t be, Surley G. Febbs thought as he reread the printed form. It was a meager document, size-wise, with his name and number Xeroxed in. It looked no more serious than a bill from his conapt building’s utility committee asking him to vote on a rate-increase. And yet here it was in his possession, formal evidence which would admit him, incredibly, into Festung, Washington, D.C. and its subsurface kremlin, the most heavily guarded spot in Wes-bloc.
And not as a tourist.
They found me typical! he said to himself. Just thinking this he felt typical. He felt swell and powerful and slightly drunk, and he had difficulty standing. His legs wobbled and he walked unsteadily across his miniature living room and seated himself on his Ionian fnoolfur (imitation) couch.
“But I really know why they picked me,” Febbs said aloud. “It’s because I know all about weapons.” An authority; that’s what he was, due to all the hours—six or seven a night, because like everyone else his work had been recently cut from twenty to nineteen hours per week—that he spent scanning edutapes at the Boise, Idaho, main branch of the public library.
And not only an authority on weapons. He could remember with absolute clarity every fact he had ever learned—as for example on the manufacture of red-stained glass in France during the early thirteenth century. I know the exact part of the Byzantine Empire from which the mosaics of the Roman period which they melted down to form the cherished red glass came, he said to himself, and exulted. It was about time that someone with universal knowledge like himself got on the UN-W Natsec Board instead of the usual morons, the mass pursaps who read nothing but the headlines of the homeopapes and naturally the sports and animated cartoon strips and of course the dirty stuff about sex, and otherwise poisoned their empty minds with toxic, mass-produced garbage which was deliberately produced by the large corporations who really ran things, if you knew the inside story—as for instance I. G. Farben. Not to mention the much bigger electronics, guidance-systems and rocket trusts that evolved later, like A. G. Beimler of Bremen who really owned General Dynamics and I.B.M. and G.E., if you happened to have looked deeply into it. As he had.
Wait’ll I sit down at the Board across from Commander-in-chief Supreme UN-West General George Nitz, he said to himself.
I’ll bet, he thought, I can tell him more facts about the hardware in the, for instance, Metro-gretel homeostatic anti-entrope phase-converter sine-wave oscillator that Boeing is using in their LL-40 peak-velocity interplan rocket than all the so-called “experts” in Festung Washington.
I mean, I won’t be just replacing the concomody whose time on the Board expired and so I got this form. If I can get those fatheads to listen, I can replace entire bureaus.
This certainly beat sending letters to the Boise Star-Times ‘pape and to Senator Edgewell. Who didn’t even respond with a form-letter any more, he was so, quote, busy. In fact this beat even the halcyon days, seven years ago, when due to the inheritance of a few UN-West gov bonds he had published his own small fact-sheet type of newsletter, which he had ‘stant-mailed out at random to people in the vidphone book, plus of course to every government official in Washington. That had—or might well have had, if there weren’t so many lardheads, Commies and bureaucrats in power—altered history… for example in the area of cleaning up the importation of disease-causing protein molecules which regularly rode to Earth on ships returning from the colony planets, and which accounted for the flu that he, Febbs, had contracted in ’99 and really never recovered from—as he had told the health-insurance official at his place of business, the New Era of Cooperative-Financing Savings & Loan Corporation of Boise, where Febbs examined applications for loans with an eye to detecting potential deadbeats.