“I’m Maren Faine,” Maren said, matter-of-factly. She was not impressed.
Lilo hopefully extended her hand, evidently as a sign of friendship. “I am very glad,” she began, “and I think we can—”
Raising the tiny gun, Maren fired.
The filth-encrusted and yet clean-shiny little gadget expelled what once would have been certified as a dum-dum cartridge, in its primordial state of technological development.
But the cartridge had evolved over the years. It still possessed the essential ingredient—that of exploding when it contacted its target—but in addition it did more. Its fragments continued to detonate, reaping an endless harvest that spread out over the body of the victim and everything near him.
Lars dropped, fell away instinctually, turned his face and cringed; the animal in him huddled in a fetal posture, knees drawn up, head tucked down, arms wrapped about himself, knowing there was nothing he could do for Lilo. That was over, over forever. Centuries could pass like drops of water, unceasing, and Lilo Topchev would never reappear in the cycles and fortunes of man.
Lars was thinking to himself like some logical machine built to compute and analyze coolly, despite the outside environment: I did not design this, not this weapon. This predates me. This is old, an ancient monster. This is all the inherited evil, carried here out from the past, carted to the doorstep of my life and deposited, flung to demolish everything I hold dear, need, desire to protect. All wiped out, just by the pressure of the first finger against a metal switch which is part of a mechanism so small that you could actually swallow it, devour it in an attempt to cancel out its existence in an act of oral greed—the greed by life for life.
But nothing would cancel it now.
He shut his eyes and remained where he was, not caring if Maren chose to fire again, this time at him. If he felt anything at all it was a desire, a yearning that Maren would shoot him.
He opened his eyes.
No longer the up-ramp. The roof field. No Maren Faine, no tiny Italian weapon. Nothing in its ravaged state lay nearby him; he did not see the remnants, sticky organic, lashing and decomposed and newly-made, the bestial malignancy of the weapon’s action. He saw, but did not understand, a city street, and not even that of New York. He sensed a change in temperature, in the composition of the atmosphere. Mountains ice-topped, remote, were involved; he felt cold and he shivered, looked around, heard the honking racket of surface traffic.
His legs, his feet ached. And he was thirsty. Ahead, by an autonomic drugstore, he saw a public vidphone booth. Entering it, his body stiff, creaking with fatigue and soreness, he picked up the directory, read its cover.
Seattle, Washington.
And time, he thought. How long ago was that? An hour? Months? Years; he hoped it was as long as possible, a fugue that had gone on interminably and he was now old, old and rotted away, wind-blown, discarded. This escape should not have ever ended, not even now. And in his mind the voice of Dr. Todt came incredibly, by way of the parapsychological power given him, that voice as it had on the flight back from Iceland hummed and murmured to itself: words not understandable to him, and yet their terrible tone, their world, as Dr. Todt had hummed to himself an old ballad of defeat. Und die Hunde schnurren an den alten Mann. And then all at once Dr. Todt in English told him. And the dogs snarl, Dr. Todt said, within his mind. At the aged man.
Dropping a coin into the phone-slot he dialed Lanferman Associates in San Francisco. “Let me talk to Pete Freid.”
“Mr. Freid,” the switchboard chick at Lanferman said brightly, “is away on business. He cannot be reached, Mr. Lars.”
“Can I talk to Jack Lanferman, then?”
“Mr. Lanferman is also—I guess I can tell you, Mr. Lars. Both of them are at Festung Washington, D.G. They left yesterday. Possibly you could contact them there.”
“Okay,” he said. “Thanks. I know how.” He rang off.
He next called General Nitz. Step by step his call mounted the ladder of the hierarchy, and then, when he was about ready to call it quits and hang up, he found himself facing the C. in C.
“KACH couldn’t find you,” Nitz said. “Neither could the FBI or the CIA.”
“The dogs snarled,” Lars said. “At me. I heard them. In all my life, Nitz, I never heard them before.”
“Where are you?”
“Seattle.”
“Why?”
“I dunno.”
“Lars, you really look awful. And do you know what you’re doing or saying? What’s this about ‘dogs’?”
“I don’t know what they are,” he said. “But I did hear them.”
General Nitz said, “She lived six hours. But of course there was never any hope and anyhow now it’s over; or maybe you know this.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“They held up the funeral services thinking you might show up, and we kept on trying to locate you. Of course you realize what happened to you.”
“I went into a trance-state.”
“And you’re just now out?”
Lars nodded.
“Lilo is with—”
“What?” Lars said.
“Lilo is at Bethesda. With Ricardo Hastings. Trying to develop a useable sketch; she’s produced several so far but—”
Lars said, “Lilo is dead. Maren killed her with an Italian Beretta pelfrag .12 pistol. I saw it. I watched it happen.”
Regarding him intently, General Nitz said, “Maren Faine fired the Beretta .12 pelfrag pistol that she carried with her. We have the weapon, the fragments of the slug, her fingerprints on the gun. But she killed herself, not Lilo.”
After a pause Lars said, “I didn’t know.”
“Well,” General Nitz said, “when that Beretta went off, somebody had to die. That’s how those pelfrag pistols are. It’s a miracle it didn’t get all three of you.”
“It was suicide. Deliberate. I’m sure of it.” Lars nodded. “She probably never intended to kill Lilo, even if she thought so herself.” He let out a ragged sigh of weariness and resignation. The kind of resignation that was not philosophical, not stoical, but simply a giving up.
There was nothing to be done. During his trance-state, his fugue, it had all happened. Long, long ago. Maren was dead; Lilo was at Bethesda; he, after a timeless journey to nowhere, into emptiness, had wound up in downtown Seattle, as far away, evidently, as he could manage to get from New York and what had taken place—or what he had imagined had taken place.
“Can you get back here?” General Nitz said. “To help out Lilo? Because it’s just not coming; she takes her drug, that East German goofball preparation, goes into her trance, placed of course in proximity to Ricardo Hastings with no other minds nearby to distract her. And yet when she sobers up she has only—”
“The same old sketches. Derived from Oral Giacomini.”
“No.”
“You’re sure?” His limp, abused mind came awake.
“These sketches are entirely different from anything she’s done before. We’ve had Pete Freid examine them and he agrees. And she agrees. And they’re always the same.”
He felt horror. “Always what?”
“Calm down. Not of a weapon at all, not of anything remotely resembling a ‘Time Warpage Generator.’ They’re of the physiological, anatomical, organic substance of—” General Nitz hesitated, trying to decide whether to say it over the probably-KVB-tapped vidphone.
“Say it,” Lars grated.
“Of an android. An unusual type, but still an android. Much like those that Lanferman Associates uses subsurface in its weapons proving. You know what I mean. As human as possible.”
Lars said, “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
26
At the immense parking-field atop the military hospital he was met by three snappily uniformed young Marines. They escorted him, as if he were a dignitary, or perhaps, he reflected, a criminal, or a gestalt of both combined, down-ramp at once to the high security floor on which it was taking place.
It. No such word as they. Lars noted the attempt to dehumanize the activity which he had come here to involve himself in.
He remarked to his escort of Marines, “It’s still better than falling into the hands, if they do have hands, of alien slavers from some distant star system.”
“What is, sir?”
“Anything,” Lars said.
The tallest Marine, and he really was tall, said, “You’ve got something there, sir.”
As their group passed through the final security barrier, Lars said to the tall Marine. “Have you seen this old war vet, this Ricardo Hastings, yourself?”
“For a moment.”
“How old would you guess he is?”
“Maybe ninety. Hundred. Older, even.”
Lars said, “I’ve never seen him.”
Ahead, the last door—and it had some super-sense, in that it anticipated exactly how many persons were to be allowed through—swung temporarily open; he saw white-clad medical people beyond. “But I’ll make a bet with you,” he said, as the sentient door clicked in awareness of his passage through. “As to Ricardo Hastings’ age.”