“Do you really think a famous scientist like Georgi Moyashka would – “ I began, but Sadassa, irr her gentle but strict little voice, interrupted imperturbably.
“He does what they tell him. AH Soviet scientists do and say what they’re told. Ever since Topchiev purged the Soviet Academy of Sciences back in the fifties. He was the Party hatchetman in the Academy, then, its official secretary; he personally sent to prison hundreds of the USSR’s top scientists. That’s why their space program is so chunky, so far behind ours. They haven’t even managed to miniaturize their components. They have no microcircuitry at all.”
“Well,” I said, nonplussed. “But in some areas – “
“Big booster rockets,” Sadassa agreed. “They’re still using tubes! The average stereo built in Japan is more advanced than the components used in a Soviet missile.”
“Let’s get down to the business of your job,” I said.
“All right.” She nodded sensibly.
“We can’t pay you very much,” I said. “But the work should be interesting.”
“I don’t need much,” Sadassa said. “How much is much?”
I wrote down a figure and turned it to show her.
“That certainly isn’t much,” she said. Tor how many hours a week?”
“Thirty hours,” I said.
“I guess I could work that into my schedule.”
Exasperated, I said, “I don’t think you’re being realistic. For that few hours it’s good pay, and you’re unskilled. This isn’t typing and filing; this is creative work. I’d have to train you. I think it’s a good deal. You should be glad to get it.”
“What about publishing my lyrics? And using them?”
“We’ll use them. If they’re good enough.”
“I brought some along.” She opened her purse and brought out an envelope. “Here.”
Opening the envelope I removed four pieces of“ paper on which she had written verses in blue fountain-pen ink. Her handwriting was legible but shaky, the aftereffects of her illness.
I read over the poems – they were poems, not lyrics -but my mind was on what she had just said. The Soviet Union was going to do what? Shoot the satellite down? What, then, would become of me? Where would my help come from?
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m having trouble concentrating. They’re very good.” I said it reflexively, without conviction; maybe they were good, maybe not. All I could think of was the dreary, heartbreaking thing she had told me, her conjecture about Soviet intentions. It seemed obvious, now that she had uttered it. Of course they weren’t merely going to shoot it down. They weren’t going to allow an extraterrestrial vehicle, an intruder into our buttoned-down world, to beam split-second subliminal communications to our people, overriding our own managed TV and FM transmissions. Adding God-knew-what information we weren’t supposed to know, Radio Free Alpha Centauri, I said to myself bitterly. Radio Free Albemuth, as I had come to call it. How long are you going to last now that you’ve been found out? They can’t get you with a missile; they will launch a satellite with an H-warhead and simply detonate you in the general blast. No more tight-beamed messages. And, I thought, no more dreams for me.
“Can I take these poems home?” I asked Sadassa. “And read them more leisurely?”
“Of course,” she said. “Hey,” she said suddenly, “what upset you? The poem about my lymphoma? Was that it? Most people are upset by that … I wrote it when I was so sick; you can tell by the content. I didn’t expect to live.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what did it.”
“I shouldn’t have shown that to you.”
“It’s a very powerful poem,” I said. “I’m not sure, frankly, how a poem about someone having cancer could be adapted to use as lyrics for a song. It certainly would be a first.” We both tried to smile; neither of us made it.
The others aren’t so heavy,” Sadassa said; she reached out and patted me on the hand. “Maybe you could use one of them.”
“I’m sure we can,” I said. What a charming, unhappy girl, I thought, struggling against such odds.
I changed my mind and did not ask Sadassa Silvia out for dinner; instead I took off early and drove directly back down to Orange County and home. My mind remained on the new item, on what Sadassa had said – the whole situation frightened and appalled me.
Put very simply, I had come to regard Valis and the AI operators along the communications network as divine, which meant they were not subject to mortal death. One does not blow up God. Here, however, were my wife and my best friend nattering at me that the source of my divine help had been pinpointed: satellite orbiting Earth, beaming down information, and caught in the act now by the USSR’s leading astrophysicist, their great scientific sleuth – Earth’s cosmic cop, armed with radio telescopes, countersatellites with warheads, and God knew what else. As thrilling as the thought was – that an extraterrestrial intelligence from another star system had put one of their vehicles into orbit around our planet and was beaming down covert information to us – it reduced something limitless to a finite reality, vulnerable to ordinary hazards. The entity I had assumed to be omniscient and omnipotent was about to be shot out of the sky. And with it, I realized, went the possibility of deposing Ferris Fremont. When the Soviets, no doubt operating in conjunction with our more sophisticated tracking stations, brought down the ETI satellite, the hopes of free men in both nations died.
Unless, of course, there was no connection between the newly discovered satellite and my experiences. But, as both Rachel and Phil had already noticed, it was too much of a coincidence; it was too close.
God, I thought, I’ve been doing what it told me for years. Moving down to Southern California, going to work for Progressive Records – what am I going to do when they shoot it down? What’ll my life be built around? But then I thought, Maybe Valis will install another satellite in its place. He could do that; with his foresight he would know the Soviet intentions long in advance -from the start, in fact. You cannot take him by surprise.
Or maybe you can.
It is possible, I said to myself as I tailgated a big truck in the righthand lane, that the satellite has done its job. Already transmitted everything in its banks. But I’m used to hearing its voice, that lovely AI voice, informing me, comforting me, helping me … look what it did for Johnny; look what it had done for me. To be deprived of that …
What else have I got to live for? I asked myself. What else did I ever have to live for? My relationship with Rachel isn’t all that much; I love my son, but I see him so rarely; my work is important but not that important. Something such as I have had, to hear that AI voice – it is worse to lose it than it was good ever to have had it. It hurts so much.
Pain of loss, I thought; the greatest pain in the world. My friend will one day soon cease talking with me. That day lies imminently ahead, as surely as the fact that right now the USSR is preparing to launch an intercept satellite. The worldwide tyranny has spotted its enemy and now moves. The big blind engine is being cranked up.
When they blow that satellite out of the sky, I realized, they might as well blow me out of the sky as well. Being rescued from that shoe ad letter accomplishes nothing, now. All the help, all the knowledge and insight, all the coaching and guiding – down the rathole, for nothing: gone. And not just for me; for everybody who wanted a just society, who wanted to be free. For those who heard the AI voice and those who did not: our fate is the same. The one friend we had will one of these days be wiped away as if it never existed.
I felt the decay of the universe as I drove along the freeway: coldness and illness and final oblivion.
I suppose, I said to myself, I could rationalize it and say that because of Valis’s help I have met a nice new girl, attractive and smart … with a life expectancy measured in inches. We have been brought together just in time to go up in smoke. Plans, hopes, dreams – all reduced to smoke. Particles of a satellite which came here to be destroyed, the same as us: born to be blown up. The hell with it all, I thought wretchedly. Better not to have started this or tried. Better not to have even known help existed, to have imagined something happier for us in our lives.
When you attack a tyranny you must expect it to fight back. Why not? Why shouldn’t it? How could I, with some idea of its nature, expect anything else? An H-warhead for the ETI satellite; cancer for Sadassa Silvia; if the shoe ad trap had worked, prison for me – prison or death.