As Maren reentered the office, coat over her shoulders, he said, “You really don’t care what goes on here.”
“You mean the enterprise? The incorporated?” Her cat-eyes flew wide, merrily; she was way ahead of him. “Look, you have my soma at night and my mind all day long. What else do you want?”
Lars said, “I hate education. I’m not kidding. Soma. Where’d you learn that?” He felt hungry, irritable, at loose ends. Due to the buggery of contemporary time-zone computation he had in actuality been on his feet sixteen hours.
“You hate me,” Maren said, in the tone of a marriage counselor, I know your real motivations, the tone implied. And it also implied: And you don’t.
Maren gazed at him squarely, unafraid of anything he might do or say. He reflected that although technically he could fire her by day, or kick her out of his Paris conapt by night, he had really no hold over her. Whether her career meant anything to her or not, she could get a good job anywhere. Any time. She did not need him. If they parted company she would miss him for a week or so, grieve to the extent of bawling unexpectedly after the third martini… but that would be it.
On the other hand, if he were to lose her the wound would never close.
“Want dinner?” he said unenthusiastically.
Maren said, “No. Want prayer.”
He stared at her. “W-what?”
Calmly she said, “I want to go to church and light a candle and pray. What’s so strange about that? I do it a couple of times a week, you know that. You knew it when you first—” Delicately she finished, “Knew me. In the Biblical sense. I told you that first night.”
“Candle for what?” Lighting a candle had to be for something.
Maren said, “My secret.”
Feeling baffled he said, “I’m going to bed. It may be six o’clock to you but it’s past two a.m. for me. Let’s go to your conapt and you can fix me something light to eat and then I’ll get some sleep and you can go pray.” He started toward the door.
“I heard,” Maren said, “that a Soviet official managed to get to you today.”
That startled him. “Where’d you hear that?”
“I got a warning. From the Board. An official reprimand to the firm, telling us to beware of short old men.”
“I doubt it.”
Maren shrugged. “The Paris office ought to be informed, don’t you agree? It did happen in a public place.”
“I didn’t seek the idiot out! He approached me—I was just having a cup of coffee.” But he felt uneasy. Had the Board really transmitted an official reprimand? If so, it ought to have come to his attention.
“That general,” Maren said, “whose name I always forget—the fat one you’re so afraid of. Nitz.” She smiled; the spear in his side twisted. “General Nitz contacted us here in Paris via the ultra-closed-circuit vidline and he said to be more careful. I said talk to you. He said—”
“You’re making this up.” But he could see she wasn’t. Probably it had happened within the hour of his meeting with Aksel Kaminsky. Maren had had all day to relay General Nitz’ warning to him. It was like her to wait until now, when his blood-sugar was low and he had no defense. “I better call him,” he said, half to himself.
“He’s in bed. Consult the time-zone chart for Portland, Oregon. Anyhow I explained it all to him.” She walked out into the hall and he followed, reflexively; together they waited for the elevator which would carry them to the roof field where his hopper, property of the firm, was parked. Maren hummed happily to herself, maddening him.
“You explained it how?”
“I said you had been considering for a long time that in case you weren’t liked, appreciated here, you intended to ‘coat.”
Levelly, he said, “And what was his answer?”
“General Nitz said yes, he realized that you could always ‘coat. He appreciated your position. In fact the military on the Board, at their special closed session at Festung Washington, D.C. last Wednesday had discussed this. And General Nitz’s staff reported that they had three more weapons fashion designers standing by. Three new mediums which that psychiatrist at the Wallingford Clinic at St. George, Utah had turned up.”
“Is this on the level?”
“Sort of.”
He made a quick computation. “It’s not two a.m. in Oregon; it’s noon. High noon.” Turning, he started back toward her office.
“You’re forgetting,” Maren said, “that we’re now on Toliver Econ-time time.”
“But in Oregon the sun’s in the middle of the sky!”
Patiently, Maren said, “But still by T.E.T. it’s two a.m. Don’t call General Nitz; give up. If he had wanted to talk to you he would have called the New York office, not here. He doesn’t like you; that’s what it is, midnight or midday.” She smiled pleasantly.
Lars said, “You’re sowing seeds of discontent.”
“Truth-telling,” she disagreed. “W.t.k.w.y.t.i.?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t want to know what my trouble is.”
“Your trouble—”
“Lay off.”
Maren continued. “Your trouble is that you feel uneasy when you have to deal with myths, or as you would put it, lies. So all day long you go around uneasy. But then when someone starts talking the truth you break out in a rash; you get psychosomatically ill from head to toe.”
“Hmm.”
“The answer,” Maren said, “at least from the standpoint of those who have to deal with you, temperamental and mercurial as you are, is to tell you the myth—”
“Oh, shut up. Did Nitz give any details about these new mediums they’d uncovered?”
“Sure. One small boy, fat as Tweedledee, sucking a lollypop, very disagreeable. One middle-aged spinster lady in Nebraska. One—”
“Myths,” Lars said. “Told so they seem true.”
He strode back up the corridor to Maren’s office. A moment later he was unlocking her vidset, dialing Festung Washington, D.C. and the Board’s mundane stations.
But as the picture formed he heard a sharp click. The picture minutely—but perceptibly, if you looked closely enough—shrank. And at the same time a red warning light lit up.
The vidset was tapped somewhere along its transmitting cable. And not by a mere coil but by a splice-in. At once he rang off, got to his feet, rejoined Maren, who had let one elevator go by and was serenely waiting for him.
“Your set’s tapped.”
“I know,” Maren said.
“And you haven’t called PT&T to come in and remove the lap?”
Maren said graciously, as if talking to someone with severe intellectual limitations, “Look, they know anyhow.” A vague-enough reference: they. Either KACH, the disinterested agency, hired by Peep-East, or exten-tensions of Peep-East itself such as its KVB. As she as much as said, it didn’t matter. They knew it all anyhow.
Still, it annoyed him, trying to reach his client through a conduit tapped in such a way that no effort, not even the formality, had been made to conceal the introduction of a hostile, self-serving, highly unnatural bit of electronic mechanism. Maren said thoughtfully, “It was put on last week sometime.
Lars said, “I do not object to a monopoly of knowledge by one small class. It doesn’t upset me, that there are a few cogs and a lot of pursaps. Every society is really run by an elite.”
“So what’s the trouble, darling dear?”
“What bothers me,” Lars said as the up-elevator came and he and Maren entered it, “is that the elite, in this case, doesn’t even bother to guard that knowledge which makes it the elite.” There is, he thought, probably a free pamphlet, distributed by UN-West for the asking, filled something like, HOW WE RULE YOU FELLAS AND WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?
“You’re in authority,” Maren reminded him.
Glancing at her he said, “You do keep that telepathic brain-add turned on. Despite Behren’s Ordinance.”
Maren said, “It cost me fifty mil to get it installed. You think I’m going to set it to the off position, really? Look how it earns its keep. It tells me if you’re faithful or off in some conapt with—”
“Read my subconscious, then.”
“I have been. Anyhow, why? Who wants to know where you keep the nasty things you don’t want to know—”
“Read it anyhow! Read the prognosticating aspects. What I’m going to do, the potential actions still in germinal form.”
Maren shook her head. “Such big words and such little ideas.”
She giggled at his response. The ship, now on auto-auto, had reached a height above the commute-layer, was on its way out of town. He had reflexively instructed it to vacate Paris… God knew why.
“I’ll analyze you, dear duck,” she said. “It’s really touching, what you’re thinking over and over again deep down there in that substandard mind of yours—substandard if you don’t count that knob on the frontal lobe that makes you a medium.”