“This indicates accord?”
“Groovy.”
“Groovy? Yes. It is so quaint, your language, here, so poetical, with such a richness of analogy. Yes, groovy.”
“Dig it, man,” Laszlo pressed on regardless. “Them pills are where it’s at, baby. I mean, like, I could sell ’em for…”
“Now,” interrupting, “we commence to — what is it, your clever word? Yes, escalate. Now we escalate to phase two. You agree?”
“Phase two?”
“Of course.”
I couldn’t place the other voice’s accent. (I couldn’t place Laszlo’s, either, but that was mainly because he’d made it up himself.) It didn’t seem particularly Russian, but who knows? Commies weren’t necessarily Russian in those days. There was still China, for instance. “Red China,” we called it. But the accent didn’t seem particularly Chinese, either. Oh well.
“No more small tests, youthful Laszlo, no. No further pills.”
“Hey!”
“Now must we begin to operate upon a grander scale. Mass testing now is called for. Phase two. Then comes phase three and finishes. Soon now, youthful Laszlo, very soon, and you shall come into your own, as we agreed.”
“No more pills?” Laszlo sounded gratifyingly pained. “Hey, baby, wait up. We gotta try it out some more, you dig?” He was nearly articulate in his despair. “I mean, like, dig it: we ain’t tried it out, you know, on teachers an’ like that, you dig? I mean…”
“Maintain a lowered temperature, youthful Laszlo. The pills are grown unnecessary now. Obsolete? Yes, obsolete. Now we must all think of larger things, and soon…”
Laszlo groveled fluently, never quite saying what he had in mind. I knew what he was after, of course. No more pills meant no more Laszlo Scott monopoly. But the strange accent kept explaining dispassionately that the pills were no longer necessary. I imagined Laszlo could’ve had as many pills as he wanted for the asking, but I couldn’t imagine him doing anything so honest and overt as asking for them. Neither, it seemed, could he.
For once, though, I was on Laszlo’s side. Now that I’d had some experience with the pills myself, the thought of phase two — whatever it might be — was frightening.
The discussion grew heated, at least on Laszlo’s side. The air grew thick with phrases like you dig?, like man, and dig it. I decided, hardly noticing how brave of me it was, to sneak up to that door under cover of Laszlo’s broken rhetoric and try for a peek inside. First, though, I whispered my plans into the radio. “Keep in touch,” Mike’d told me.
“But you must comprehend, youthful Laszlo, that the pills are inefficient on such a scale,” the voice was saying as I silently removed my boots — an engineering feat of which I was briefly proud. “Tomorrow night this city, then this world,” the voice continued. This sounded ominous, and Laszlo sounded unimpressed.
More stealthily than the cats of Queen Berúthiel I made my way to the door and peered in ever so cautiously. I was lucky: they had their backs to me, and I got a good, long look.
My mind very carefully boggled.
“Well,” I told myself, sneaking back to my packing case, “so much for Mike and his Communist plot.”
The other voice belonged to a six-foot-tall, deep blue lobster. This was getting more interesting than I really liked.
Half an hour later, nothing worth mentioning had changed. Laszlo and his lobster-friend were still inside, I was still behind my packing case in the dark hall, all that coffee I’d absorbed while waiting for Laszlo was still where it had been for altogether too long now, my lunch (I kept thinking of lobster thermidor) was still in the indeterminate future, Mike was wherever the hell Mike was, alas, and things showed little sign of getting better.
I’d spent the half hour whispering to my left wrist and trying to get my boots back on, with little luck in either project. My feet seemed to have swollen.
Some days it’s hard to maintain one’s native dignity. If I could’ve gotten my boots on I’d’ve split, having lost my taste for heroism, but I couldn’t bring myself to walk home in my stocking feet. “Anything,” says an old Anderson proverb, “is better than embarrassment.”
What I’d been saying to the radio all this time, disregarding random words on which the UNCC would frown loudly if I was being (hopefully) monitored, was mostly along the lines of, “Help! Get me out of here! Call out the Marines! Like, help!” plus everything the lobster was telling Laszlo.
Laszlo being Laszlo, this was plenty. The lobster, with amazing patience for a lobster, explained everything at least five times before I stopped counting, everything in this case being an elaborate extraterrestrial plot to conquer the Earth.
Honestly. It offended my sense of propriety something fierce, this hackneyed invasion-from-outer-space routine, but the lobster sounded quite sincere, and who was I to doubt the word of a six-foot-tall blue lobster?
Who indeed?
So all this while I crouched behind the packing case, elaborately not sneezing, ignoring even more pressing other needs, becoming acutely uncomfortable and frustrated, listening to an absurd blue crawdad telling Loathsome Laszlo how the Reality Pill was going to conquer Terra without endangering precious lobsters or involving them in anything so crude as physical violence.
Lobster: “We, of course, cannot inflict pain or,” rattling shudder, “death upon another rational being, dissimilarly to you so vicious aborigines that do such things for — what is your word? — kicks. Impossible. Not since we left our oceans, now some ten to the seventh years ago, have we been able to commit such things except as final acts of defense, and few of us could long survive such acts. You must comprehend that we are a mature culture, we Kkkkk,” a sound like a flam paradiddle, doubtless what the lobsters called themselves.
Laszlo: “But dig it, man, you’re pushin’ it too fast, you dig? We gotta — you know — test them pills like Uptown, unnerstan’? I mean, like…”
Anderson, uncomfortably: “Michael? Oh, Michael. Do you, what’d you call it, read me? Oh hell. Michael?”
Lobster: “But, youthful Laszlo, we need room, new shorelines and new seas. We Kkkk are a growing race and long-lived. We must grow or die, and to grow we must conquer. Do you comprehend?”
Laszlo: “Look, man, give it another week, you dig? I mean, like, in a week I can prob’ly…”
Lobster: “However this is not the paradox it might seem to your unsophisticated intellect. Your science, biochemistry, is to us an art form. Likewise your psychology. We need but study any race some while in order to produce such clever drugs as will induce said race to be its own conquistadores. Yes? Nor is our skill in forming psychological devices any less.”
Laszlo: “At least gimme another day or two, huh? Whaddaya say?”
Lobster: “Whereupon we show ourselves when the native violence subsides, reestablish order, and become as gods or heroes to our newly subject peoples. All so simple. Many hundred times has this been done, nor have we ever failed. We cannot fail.”
Laszlo: “You don’t unnerStan’!”
Lobster: “We are kindly masters. Have no fear.”
Anyhow, after thirty minutes of this double monologue, something finally happened. I was standing, boots in my right hand, briefcase in my left, peering over the top of my friendly packing case at the shadows Laszlo and the conquering lobster cast on the hall floor, trying simultaneously to figure out what to do and how to get away, when something hard and cold, but not metallic, suddenly grabbed me under both armpits, hoisted me a good four feet off the floor, and carried me off toward the lighted room.
I screamed, spectacularly gave up on the coffee problem, dropped my boots and briefcase, and kicked vigorously, all to no avail at all. What had grabbed me was another blue lobster, somewhat taller than Laszlo’s buddy, who took great care not to hurt me or let me go, and paid absolutely no attention to my attempts to hurt him.