Maybe the vitamin C affected the metabolism of my brain, I conjectured. After all, it’s highly acid; such quantities in the system would produce a highly acid brain. Mentation, neural firing, improves under conditions of acidity. Perhaps the vivid phosphene activity, the multicolored graphics, had been projections of rapid synchronous neural firing along never-before-used circuits. In that case Leningrad had nothing to dq with it; everything was a function and an activity within my head.
GABA fluid, I suddenly realized. What I saw was the effect of a vast drop in GABA fluid. There was new neural firing, along otherwise inhibited circuits. Good thing I haven’t written Leningrad yet.
I wonder what kind of neural circuits they are, I asked myself. Probably I will find out, in time.
I stayed home from work that day. Toward noon the mail came; I walked unsteadily down the outside stairs to the row of metal mailboxes, retrieved the mail, and came back in.
As I laid the letters and ads out on the coffee table in the living room, an acute impression came over me and I said to Rachel, “A letter will be coming the day after tomorrow, from New York. It is highly dangerous. I want to be here to get it, as soon as it comes.” I felt this overwhelmingly.
“A letter from who?” Rachel said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Will . . . you recognize jt?”
“Yes,” I said.
No mail at all came the next day. But the day after that seven letters arrived. Most of them were from aspiring young artists, the letters forwarded to me from Progressive. After I had glanced at the envelopes without opening them, I turned to one last remaining letter; my name and address were on it, but no return address at all. That’s the one,” I said to Rachel. “Aren’t you going to open it?”
“No,” I said. I was trying to think what I was supposed to do with the letter.
Til open it,” Rachel said, and did so. “It’s just a printed ad,” she said, laying the contents out on the coffee table; instinctively, for reasons not known to me, I turned my head so as not to see it. “For shoes,” she said. “Mail-order shoes. Something called „Real World Shoes.“ With a special sole so that -”
“It’s not an ad,” I said. “Turn it over.” She did so. “Somebody’s jotted their name and address on the back,” she said. “A woman. Her name is – “
“Don’t read it aloud,” I said sharply. “I don’t want to know her name; if you read it to me I’ll remember it. It’ll go into my memory banks.”
“She must be the distributor,” Rachel said. “But Nick, this isn’t anything; it’s just shoes.”
“Get me a pen and about three sheets of typing paper,” I said, “and I’ll show you.” Meanwhile I was still trying to introspect and come up with the answer as to what to do about this – with it and about it. Acute dread hung over me as I sat at the table with this shoe ad, as Rachel got the pen and paper.
I had to read it to decode it. Superimposed on the black type, in a liquid, bright red, I saw certain words of the ad as if embossed. Rapidly, I copied them onto a separate piece of paper and then, when I had finished, handed it to Rachel. “Read it,” I said. “But just to yourself, not to me.” Rachel said falteringly, “It’s a message to you. Your name is in it.”
“What does it tell me to do?”
“Something about recording certain – it has to do with your job, Nick. Something about Party members who – I can’t make sense out of it. Your handwriting is – “
“But it is to me,” I said. “And it does have to do with Progressive and my job there, and recording Party members.”
“How can it be?” Rachel said. “In a printed ad for shoes? I saw you with my own eyes get this message out of it, by picking words here and there . . . the words are really in it; I can see them myself now, when I look at the ad. But how did you know which words to pick?”
“Different in color,” I said. They’re in color and the other words are ordinary black, without color.”
“All of the ad is black!” Rachel protested.
“Not to me,” I said. I was still deep in heavy fearful thought. “Code from the Party,” I said. “Instructions and the name of my – whatever she is – my boss; it’s written in her hand on the back. My official contact.”
“Nick,” Rachel whispered, “this is awful. Are you -”
“I’m not a Communist,” I said truthfully.
“But you knew this was coming. And you knew how to decode it. You were waiting for it.” She stared at me wide-eyed.
I picked up the shoe ad, for the first time, turned it over, and as I did so a voice spoke inside my head. A transforming of my own thought processes, to confer on me a message.
The authorities.”
Just those two words – the authorities – as I held the piece of paper. This had not come from a KGB agent operating out of New York, as it appeared to have. It was not instructions from the Party. It was a forgery. The thing operated on three levels: on the surface, to Rachel’s eyes, it was an ordinary ad. For some reason, unexplained, I had been able to penetrate to the encoded information within the meaningless data. Never mind why, I thought; all that matters is that I did, I had been able to, readily. On the third and deepest level it was a fake, a plant by the police. And here I sat with it in the living room of my own apartment: prime evidence of my treasonable activities. Enough to send me to jail for life and completely ruin me and my family.
I have to get rid of this, I realized. Burn it. But what good will that do? There will be more like this coming to me in the mail. Until they have me.
The voice inside my head spoke again. I identified it now. The sibyl’s voice, as I had heard her in my visionary dreams.
“Phone FA P in LA. I will talk for you.”
Getting the phone book I looked up the emergency number of the main FAP headquarters for Southern California, located in Los Angeles.
“What are you doing?” Rachel said apprehensively, following me. “You’re going to call – FAP? But why? Good lord, Nick, you’re going to destroy yourself. Burn the thing!”
I dialed.
“Friends of the American People.”
Inside my mind the sibyl stirred, and at once I lost power over my own vocal apparatus; I was struck dumb. And then she began to speak for me, using my voice.
Calmly, implacably, she spoke to the FAP agent on the other end of the line.
“I wish to report,” my voice said, in a measured way not at all resembling my own cadences, “that I am being threatened by the Communist Party. For months they have been attempting to obtain my cooperation in a business matter and I have refused. They now are attempting to get their wish by coercion, force, and intimidation. Today I received a coded message from them in the mail, telling me what I must do for them. I will not do it, even if they murder me. I would like to turn this coded message over to you.”
After a pause the FAP agent on the other end said, “Just a moment, please.” A few clicks, then silence.
Time is of the essence,” I said to Rachel.
“Hello,” a different voice said, older in sound. “Would you repeat what you just told the operator?”
“The Communist Party,” I said, “is blackmailing me to force me to cooperate with them in a business matter. I’ve refused.”
“What kind of business matter?”
“I’m an executive at a recording firm,” I said. “We record folk artists. The Party wants to compel me to record pro-Communist singers so their message, including coded messages, will be played on American radios.”
“Your name.”
I gave him my name, address, and telephone number. Rachel stricken, merely gazed mutely at me. She could not believe I was doing what I was doing. Neither could I.
“How are they blackmailing you, Mr Brady?” the voice asked.
“I’m beginning to receive hit mail from them,” I said.
““Hit mail“?”
I said, “Mail designed to provoke a reaction out of fear
>f reprisal. In code. I can’t read all the code, but – “
“We’ll send someone over. Hang on to the written material you have in your possession. We will want to see it.”
I said, or rather my voice uttered, „They’ve given me the name of someone back east to contact.”