"Maybe you don't know who you're talking to."
"That is correct," Smith said tersely. "I don't know, and I don't care."
"I'm Samuel P. Longtree," the man said with exaggerated dignity.
"I never heard of you."
The man stopped short, then laughed. "I didn't think you had. I'm a chemist. My brilliant career ended at the age of forty with my greatest discovery."
Smith sighed, knowing that Samuel P. Longtree wouldn't leave him alone until he took the bait. "Which was?" he asked wearily.
Longtree brightened. "This cocktail," he said, sipping his drink. "Cheers."
"Congratulations." Smith moved away.
"It's really quite remarkable. It affects the cortex of the brain so that a person's anxiety is all but eliminated. Imagine that— an instant cure for guilt, tension, performance anxiety, nervousness, apprehension, dread, fear—"
"And rational thought," Smith added.
"Ah, that's where you're wrong, my friend. The beauty of my concoction is that it leaves the drinker utterly lucid. You can perform the most complex and detailed mental tasks and still be flying higher than Betelgeuse. All it does is free you of your inhibitions."
Smith looked at him fully for the first time, his mind piecing together the information with what he knew about Peabody and the other two assassins. "Guilt, you said? No guilt?"
"Zero. Good-bye, mother-in-law. So long, lawnmower."
Smith inhaled deeply. "No guilt, no ethics, no morals..."
The man laughed. "Hey, who needs morals in Paradise? Only dirty minds need fig leaves."
"How long have you been here?"
"Who knows? Who cares?"
"Did you happen to see a man named Peabody here? He was possibly with two others." He described the dead American assassin.
The man thought for a moment before a glimmer of recognition came to his eyes. "I think so. Came from Ohio or someplace?"
"That's the one."
"Well, I didn't see much of him. I've been busy adapting the ingredients in my cocktail into other forms. Do you know that it can be snorted, smoked, or shot?" He smiled knowingly. "Just name your poison. Of course, the injectable form isn't quite right yet. It produces some unfortunate side effects at first. Unconsciousness, that sort of thing. But the smokable version is a gas. Hey, maybe you want a joint?"
"Absolutely not," Smith said, unnerved. "Who would have seen more of Peabody?"
The fat man shrugged. "I don't know.... Vehar, I guess. He's the ad man on my task force." He pointed proudly to the pink ribbon he wore. "Say, you aren't tagged."
"Tagged?"
"Your task force. Pink, blue, or gold?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"You're new here, aren't you? Well, you'll find out soon enough. The colored ribbons designate what group you're assigned to. Task forces, they call them. Each of the task forces works on one phase of the Great Plan."
"The Great Plan?" Smith repeated dryly.
"The Great Plan of Abraxas. In capital letters." Smith was stunned. "He's here? Abraxas?"
"He, it... whatever Abraxas is, his spirit has devised the Great Plan, and we are its instruments," he said solemnly. He looked from side to side. "I think I got it right."
"And what is this... er... Great Plan?" Smith asked.
"No one knows it all. The Plan is too vast for the human mind to comprehend, even the superior minds gathered here. All we know is the phase covered by our task forces."
"What phase includes your cocktails?" Smith asked.
"I'm part of Phase One," Longtree said eagerly. "It's called Unity. The job of my task force is to establish Abraxas and his good works all over the world."
"And Vehar, the advertising man. You said he's part of that, too?"
"Oh, Vehar's the big honcho in Phase One. Your friend Peabody was his drone."
"His drone? Wasn't Peabody part of your group?"
Longtree scoffed. "Oh, no. Peabody was a nobody. Nobodies aren't invited here. Only the crème de la crème. That's you and me, friend." He winked. "Peabody and the other two guys were just part of Vehar's experiment."
"What was he experimenting with?"
"You'll have to ask him. That's Vehar over there, the tall guy. But whatever it was, you can be sure it was for the good of humanity. That's what the Great Plan of Abraxas is all about."
Smith whirled to face him. "I'll tell you what your Great Plan was all about. When Peabody and the other two men left here, they went out in the world and murdered people."
Longtree smiled indulgently, snatching a drink off a passing waiter. "Hey, maybe that was their thing, right? Don't be so uptight. Have a drink."
"Excuse me," Smith said stiffly and walked away.
He approached a handsome young man dressed in expensively tailored playclothes, who was holding forth in the middle of a group of adoring listeners sipping pink cocktails. "Are you Vehar?" he asked.
"Hey-hey-hey," the man greeted expansively, pumping Smith's hand. "Look who's here. How're you doing, Kemosabe? Remind me to give you the address of my tailor. How's the little woman?"
"Do you know me?" Smith asked, bewildered by the man's overwhelming friendliness.
"Don't I?"
"I don't know you," Smith said.
Vehar straightened, casting a sneer in Smith's direction. "Then get out of here. I can't have riffraff imposing on my time. Besides, your suit looks like you bought it with green stamps." There was sycophantic laughter all around.
"I want to talk to you about Orville Peabody."
"Peabody? What's a Peabody?" He tweaked a young woman's nipple to her squeals of delight.
"Your drone," Smith said flatly.
"Ah, yes. It would take one to know one." His words were received with gleeful appreciation.
"How did you get him to assassinate Franco Abbrodani?"
"My dear fellow," the ad man drawled, playing the crowd. "How you managed to find a place in this think tank is beyond me. Any individual with even a moderately interesting I.Q. could deduce that Mr. Peabody's mission was accomplished through the power of television."
"Television?"
"Plus a forger for his personal documents, of course. We certainly couldn't allow Peabody's actions in Rome to be traced to this place, could we?" The crowd tittered.
"The medium is the message," Vehar pontificated. He was no longer directing his remarks to Smith. The faces in the group were rapt with attention. "Send out a series of ultra-short-wave directives long enough, and every person capable of receiving the message will follow your orders to the letter. Am I correct?"
"Whatever you say, baby," a woman agreed, staring hard at Vehar's fly.
"Subliminal communication," Smith mused.
He knew that years ago, in the early days of television, enterprising advertising executives had managed to tap into the subconscious minds of viewers by flashing commercial messages on the screen at speeds too fast to be converted into conscious thought. All the viewers knew was that the brand names of certain soft drinks and household goods kept swimming uncontrollably through their brains, urging them to buy products about which, often, they had no knowledge.
Subliminal advertising was touted, among industry "in" circles, as the wave of the future until some legislators, seeing its dangerous possibilities, outlawed the practice.
"That's against the law," Smith said quietly. The group surrounding Vehar roared with mirth.
"Mister, ah—"
"Smith."
"How appropriate," Vehar said, fingering the lapel of Smith's suit. "Allow me to enlighten you. The law was devised for a society without a true leader. With such a leader, however, laws are unnecessary except to enforce that leader's plans."
"You're talking about a dictatorship."
"Abraxas is not a dictator," Vehar said hotly. "He is a being of supreme wisdom. And in his wisdom he saw that Franco Abbrondani and his kind were the pariahs of the human race, a cancer. I was the surgeon who removed that cancer. Peabody and the others were my tools."