“Sure,” he said, mumbling because of the tablets. “I know, I remember Ol’ Orville. How is Ol’ Orville, these days?”
Lilo said, “Ask his advice before you do it”
That seemed reasonable. So carefully he spat out the undissolved tablets and restored them, stickily, to his pajama pocket, sat waiting while Lilo went and got the intricate electronic quondam guidance-system, now turned household amusement and crypto-deity, Ol’ Orville. The featureless little head that, and Lilo did not know this, he had last consulted in company with Maren Faine.
She set Ol’ Orville before him on the breakfast table.
“Ol’ Orville,” Lars said, “how in hell are you today?” You who were once weapon-design-sketch number 202, he thought. First called to my attention, in fact, by Maren. You and your fourteen-thousand—or is it sixteen or eighteen?—minned parts, you poor plowshared freak. Castrated, like me, by the system.
“I am fine,” Ol’ Orville replied telepathically.
“Are you the same, the very same Ol’ Orville,” Lars said, “that Maren Faine—”
“The same, Mr. Lars.”
“Are you going to quote Richard Wagner in the original German again to me?” Lars said. “Because if you are, this time it won’t be enough.”
“That is right,” Ol’ Orville’s thoughts croaked in his brain. “I recognize that. Mr. Lars, do you care to ask me a distinct question?”
“You understand the situation that faces me?”
“Yes.”
Lars said, “Tell me what to do.”
There was a long pause as the enormous number of superlatively miniaturized components of the original guidance-system of item 202 clacked away. He waited.
“Do you want,” Ol’ Orville asked him presently, “the elaborated, fully documented answer with all the citations included, the original source-material in Attic Greek, Middle-Low-High German and Latin of the—”
“No,” Lars said. “Boil it down.”
“One sentence?”
“Or less. If possible.”
Ol’ Orville answered, “Take this girl, Lilo Topchev, into the bedroom and have sexual intercourse with her.”
“Instead of—”
“Instead of poisoning yourself,” Ol’ Orville said. “And also instead of wasting forty years waiting on something which you had already decided to abandon—and you have ignored this, Mr. Lars—when you went to Fairfax to see Miss Topchev the first time. You had already stopped loving Maren Faine.”
There was silence.
“Is that true, Lars?” Lilo asked.
He nodded.
Lilo said. “Ol’ Orville is smart.”
“Yes,” he agreed. He rose to his feet, pushed his chair back, walked toward her.
“You’re going to follow its advice?” Lilo said. “But I’m already half-dressed: we have to be at work in forty-five minutes. Both of us. There isn’t time.”
She laughed happily, however, with immense relief.
“Oh yes,” Lars said. And picked her up in his arms, lugged her toward the bedroom. “There’s just barely enough time.” As he kicked the bedroom door shut after them he said, “And just barely enough is enough.”
32
Far below Earth’s surface in drab, low-rent conapt 2A in the least-desirable building of the wide ring of substandard housing surrounding Festung Washington, D.C., Surley G. Febbs stood at one end of a rickety table at which sat five didascalic individuals.
Five motley, assorted persons, plus himself. But they had, however, been certified by Univox-50R, the official government computer, as able to represent the authentic, total trend of Wes-bloc buying-habits.
This secret meeting of these six new concomodies was so illegal as to beggar description.
Rapping on the table, Febbs said shrilly, “The meeting will now come to order.”
He glanced up and down in a severe fashion, showing them who was in charge. It was he, after all, who had brought them, in the most circumspect manner possible, with every security precaution that a genuine uniquely clever human mind (his) could devise, together in this one dingy room.
Everyone was attentive—but nervous, because God knew the FBI or the CIA or KACH might burst in the door any moment despite the inspired security precautions of their leader, Surley G. Febbs.
“As you know,” Febbs said, his arm folded, feet planted wide apart so as to convincingly demonstrate that he was solidly planted here, was not about to be swept away by the hired creeps of any institutional police force, “it is illegal for us six concomodies even to know one another’s names. Hence, we shall begin this confabulation by reciting our names.” He pointed to the woman seated closest to him.
Squeakily, she said, “Martha Raines.”
Febbs pointed to the next person in turn.
“Jason Gill.”
“Harry Markison.”
“Doreen Stapleton.”
“Ed L. Jones.” The last man, at the far end, spoke firmly. And that was that. In defiance of the law of Wes-bloc and its police agencies they knew one another by name.
Ironically, since the Emergency had passed, the UN-W Natsec Board now “allowed” them to enter the kremlin and officially participate in its meetings. And that’s because individually, Febbs realized as he looked around the rickety table, each of us possesses nothing. Is nothing. And the Board knows it. But all six of us together—
Aloud he said commandingly, “Okay; let’s begin. Every one of you when you walked through this door brought your component of that new weapon, that item 401 they call the Molecular Restriction-Beam Phase-Inverter. Right? I saw a paper bag or neutral, ordinary-looking plastic carton under everyone’s arm. Correct?”
Each of the five concomodies facing him mumbled a yes, Mr. Febbs or nodded or both. In fact each had placed his package on the table, in plain sight, as a show of courage.
Febbs instructed in a sharp, emotion-laden voice, “Open them up. Let’s see the contents!”
With shaking fingers and great trepidation, the paper bags and cartons were opened.
On the table rested the six components. When assembled (assuming that someone in this room could accomplish this) they formed the dread new Molecular Restriction-Beam Phase-Inverter.
Tapes of the tearwep in action at Lanferman Associates’ huge subsurface proving-levels indicated that no defense against it existed. And the entire UN-W Natsec Board, including the six at-last-allowed-in concomodies, had solemnly viewed those tapes.
“Our task,” Febbs declared, “of rebuilding these components back to form the original tearwep falls naturally onto myself. I personally shall take full responsibility. As you all know, the next formal meeting of the Board is one week from today. So we have less than seven days in which to reassemble the Molecular Restriction-Beam Phase-Inverter, item 401.”
Jason Gill piped, “You want us to stick around while you put it back together, Mr. Febbs?”
“You may if you so desire,” Febbs said.
Ed Jones said, “Can we offer suggestions? The reason I ask that is, see, my job in real life—I mean before I was a concomody—was standby electrician at G.E. in Detroit. So I know a little about electronics.”
“You may offer suggestions,” Febbs decided, after some thought. “I will permit it. But you understand our sacred pact. As a political organization we are to allow policy to be decided by our elected leader without bureaucratic, hampering-type restrictions. Correct?”
Everyone mumbled correct.
Febbs was that unhampered, unbureaucratically restricted, elected leader. Of their clandestine political revolutionary-type organization which (after long debate) had titled itself, menacingly, the BOCFDUTCRBASEBFIN, The Benefactors of Constitutional Freedoms Denied Under the Contemporary Rule By a Small Elite By Force If Necessary. Cell One.
Picking up his component and Ed Jones’, Febbs seated himself and reached into the bin of brand-new tools with which at great cost the organization had provided itself. He brought out a long, slender, tapered, German-made screwdriver with autonomic clockwise or anti-clockwise rotation action (depending on which way you pressed the plastic handle) and began his work.
Reverently, the other five members of the organization watched.
An hour later Surley G. Febbs grunted sweatily, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief as he halted to take a breather, said, “This will take time. It isn’t easy. But we’re getting there.”
Martha Raines said nervously, “I hope a roving, random police monitor doesn’t happen to cruise by above-surface and pick up our thoughts.”
Politely, Jones pointed and said, “Um, I believe that doodad there fits up against that template. See where those screw-holes are?”
“Conceivably so,” Febbs said. “This brings me to something I intended to take up later. But since I’m pausing for a while I might as well say it to you all now.” He glanced around at them to be sure he had their individual, undivided attention, and then spoke as authoritatively as possible. Given a man of his ability and knowledge this was very authoritative. “I want all of you comprising Cell One clear in your minds as to the exact type of socio-economic, pol-struc of society we shall install in place of the undemo-tyr by the privileged cog elite which now holds power.”
“You tell ’em Febbs,” Jones said encouragingly.
“Yeah,” Jason Gill agreed. “Let’s hear once again! I like this part, what happens after we run ’em out of office with this item 401.”
With superlative calm, Febbs continued, “Everyone on the UN-W Natsec Board will of course be tried as war criminals. We’ve agreed on that.”