"What's the moral of the book?" I said.
"It's just entertainment. It has no moral. Well, it -never mind."
I foresaw the moral. People should not trust creatures different from themselves: anything alien, from another planet, was vile and disgusting. Man was the one pure species. He stood alone against a hostile universe... probably led by his glorious Fiihrer.
"Is mankind saved from these blind worms?" I asked.
"Yes. By their Supreme Council, who are genetically higher humans, cloned from one aristocratic - "
"I hate to tell you," I said, "but it's been done. Back in the thirties and forties."
Vivian said, "It shows the virtues of humanity. Despite some of its glaring luridness, it's a good novel; it teaches a valuable message."
"Confidence in leadership," I said. "Is the one aristocrat the Supreme Council is cloned from named Ferris Fremont?"
After a pause Vivian said, "In certain ways they resemble President Fremont, yes."
"This is a nightmare," I said, feeling dizzy. "Is this what you came here to tell me?"
"I came to tell you I'm sorry Nicholas died before you could talk to him. You can talk to the other one, the woman he was conspiring with, Sadassa Aramchek. Do you know her?"
"No," I said. "I don't know her."
"Do you want to talk to her?"
"No," I said. Why would I want to talk with her? I wondered.
"You can tell her how he died," Vivian said.
"Are you going to shoot her?" I said.
Vivian nodded.
"I'll talk to her," I said.
Signaling to a guard, Vivian Kaplan said, "Good. You can tell her better than we can that Nicholas is dead. We haven't told her. And also you can tell her -"
Til say what I want to say," I said.
"You can tell her that after you're through talking to her," Vivian continued, unperturbed, "we will shoot her too."
After the passage of ten or fifteen minutes -1 couldn't be sure; they had taken my watch - the door of the cell opened and the guards let in a small girl with heavy glasses and an Afro-natural hairstyle. She looked solemn and unhappy as the door locked after her.
I rose unsteadily. "You're Ms Aramchek?" I said.
The girl said, "How is Nicholas?"
"Nicholas," I said, "has been killed." I put my hands on her shoulders and felt her sway. But she did not faint and she did not cry; she merely nodded.
"I see," she said faintly.
"Here," I assisted her to the cot and helped her sit down.
"And you're sure it's true."
"I'm sorry," I said. "I saw him. It's true. Do you know who I am?"
"You're the science fiction writer, Phil, Nicholas's longtime friend. He talked about you. Well, I guess I'm next. To be shot. They invariably shoot or poison members of Aramchek. No trial, not even an interrogation any more. They're afraid of us because they know what's inside us. I'm not scared, not after what I've gone through already. I don't think they'll shoot you, Phil. They'll want you alive to write crappy books for them full of government propaganda."
„That's right," I said.
"Are you going to cooperate with them?"
"I'm not going to be allowed to write the crappy books," I said. They've got them written already. It'll just.be my name on them/
"Good," Sadassa said, nodding. "It means they don't trust you. It's when they trust you that it's bad - bad for you, for your soul. You never want to be on that side. I'm proud of you." She smiled at me then, her eyes alive and warm behind her glasses. Reaching out, she patted my hand. Reassuringly. I took her hand and held it. How small it was, the fingers so thin. Incredibly thin. And lovely.
"The Mind-Screwers," I said. "That's the first title."
Sadassa stared at me, and then, astonishingly, she laughed, a rich, hearty laugh. "No kidding. Well, leave it to a committee. Art in America. Like art in the USSR. How neat, how really neat. The Mind-Screwers. All right."
There won't be many books by me after that," I said. "Not from the description Vivian Kaplan gave me of it. You should hear the plot. This blind worm, see, migrates from -"
*Clark Ash ton Smith," Sadassa said instantly.
"Of course," I said. "His kind of thing. Mixed up with Heinlein's politics."
We were both laughing, now. "A mixture of Clark Ash ton Smith and Robert Heinlein," Sadassa said, gasping. Too much. What a winner! And the next one... let me see. I've got it, Phil; it'll be called The Underground City of the Mind-Screwers, only this time it'll be in the style of -"
"A series," I broke in. "In the first one, the mind-screwers arrive from outer space; in the next one they bore up from below the surface of Earth; in the third one - "
"Return to the Underground City of the Mind-Screwers," Sadassa said.
I continued. "They slip through from between dimensions, from another time period. In the fourth one the mind-screwers arrive from an alternate universe. And so forth."
"Maybe there could be a fifth one where some archaeologist finds this ancient tomb and opens a great casket, and all these horrible mind-screwers tumble out and right away gang-bang all the native workmen and then fan out and screw every mind in Cairo, and from there the world." She took off her glasses and wiped her eyes.
"You okay?" I said.
"No," she said. "I'm scared, very scared. I hate the slammer. I was in the slammer for two days one time, because I didn't show up for a traffic ticket. They put out an APB on me. I had mono then; I was just out of the hospital. This time I just went into remission from lymphoma. Oh, well; I'm not going into the slammer this time, evidently."
"I'm sorry," I said, not knowing what else to say or what to do.
"It's okay," Sadassa said. "We are immortal, all of us. Valis conferred that on us, and he will on everyone, someday; we just have it now... the firstfruits, as it's said. So I don't feel too bad. We put up a good fight; we did a good job. We were always doomed, Phil; we never had a chance, but that's not our fault. All we had was some information that should have done it. But they had us before - you know. Before we could act. And without the satellite..." She shrugged, unhappily. "No one to protect us, as in the past."
"Nicholas said - " I began, and then I shut up, because of course the jail cell was bugged, and I didn't want the authorities to know that another satellite, as Nicholas had told me, was on the way. But then I remembered that he had told me at the ball park, so they knew. Still, they might have missed it. So I said nothing.
A guard came to the door. "All right, Miss Aramchek. Time to go."
She smiled at me. "Don't tell them how lousy their books are," she said. "Let them find out the hard way."
I kissed her on the mouth, and she held onto me warmly and tightly for a moment. Then she was gone; the cell door rattled and clanged shut.
After that there is a lot I do not remember. I think Vivian Kaplan stopped by to inform me that Sadassa Aramchek had been shot, as Nicholas had been, but I'm not sure; if so, I repressed it and forgot it and did not know it had happened. But sometimes in the later nights I woke up and saw a FAPer standing pointing a pistol at a small figure, and in those lucid moments I knew she was dead, that I had been told and could not remember.
Why would I want to remember that? Why would I want to know it? Enough is enough, I sometimes say, as a sort of cry of misery, of having entered regions exceeding my capacity to endure, and this was one of them. I had withstood the death of my friend Nicholas Brady, whom I had known and loved most of my life, but I could not adjust to the death of a girl I didn't even know.