Four members of the KVD, the Soviet Secret Police, in old-fashioned pre-cloak, ultra-unfashionable wool suits and narrow, pointed oxfords and knit ties, appeared from nowhere. It was as if they had literally detached themselves, super-science-wise, from the walls of the antechamber in which Lars and the two Wes-bloc United States police stood panting.
Soundlessly, in a slow, ritualized moment of truth, the Wes-bloc and Soviet secret police exchanged identification. They must have carried, Lars decided, ten pounds of ident-material apiece. The swapping of cards and wallets and cephalic buzz-keys seemed to continue forever.
And no one said anything. No one of the six so much as looked at any of the others. All attention was fastened fixedly on the ident-elements themselves.
He walked off, found a hot-chocolate machine, put in a dime and soon had his paper cup; he stood sipping, feeling tired, conscious that his head ached and that he had not bothered to shave. He felt keenly the substandard, inappropriate and just plain rotten-looking sight that he presented. And at this time. In these circumstances.
When the Wes-bloc police had concluded their swapping of ident-material with their Peep-East counterparts, he said caustically, "I feel like a victim of the Gestapo. Rousted out of bed, unshaved and with my worst clothes, having to face—"
"You won't be facing a Reichsgericht" one of the Peep-East police said, overhearing. His English was a trifle artificial in its precision, learned probably from an audio edutape. Lars thought at once of robots, androids, and machinery in general; it was not a sanguine omen. Such plateau, toneless palaver, he recalled, was often associated with certain subforms of mental illness—in fact with brain-damage in general. Silently he groaned. He knew now what T.S. Eliot meant about the world ending with a whimper instead of a bang. It would end with his inaudible moan of complaint at the mechanical aspect of those who had him—and this was the true nature of his situation, whether he enjoyed facing it or not—in captivity.
Wes-bloc, for reasons which would of course not be handed down to him to fathom or appreciate, was permitting the encounter with Lilo Topchev to take place under the jurisdiction of the Soviet Union. Perhaps it showed how little hope General Nitz and those in his entourage had that anything of worth might arise out of this.
"I'm sorry," Lars said to the Soviet policeman. "I don't know any German. You'll have to explain." Or else take it up with Ol' Orville, back at the apartment. In that other, lost now, world.
The officers said, "That's right, you Amis speak no foreign languages. But you have an office in Paris. How do you manage?"
"I manage," Lars said, "by having a mistress who speaks French, as well as Italian and Russian, and is terrific in bed, all of which you can find noted in your folio on me. She heads my Paris office." He turned to the two United States police who had brought him here. "Are you leaving me?"
They answered, with absolutely no sign of guilt or concern, "Yes, Mr. Lars." A Greek chorus of abdication from human, moral responsibility. He was appalled. Suppose the Soviets decided not to return him? Where did Wes-bloc turn for its weapons designs from then on? Assuming of course that the investment of Terra's atmosphere by the alien satellites was contained...
But no one really believed it would be.
That was it. That was what had made him expendable.
"Come along, Mr. Lars." The four Soviet KVB men gathered around him and he found himself escorted up a ramp, across a waiting room in which people—normal, individual, private men and women—sat waiting for transportation or for relatives. Uncanny, he thought; like a dream.
He asked, "Can I stop and buy a magazine at the newsrack?"
"Certainly." The four KVB men steered him to the vast display and watched, like sociologists, as he searched for something to read that might please him. The Bible? he thought. Or perhaps I should try the other extreme.
"How about this?" he asked the KVB men, holding up a comic book printed in cheap, lurid colors. "The Blue Cephalopod Man from Titan." As near as he could tell, it was the worst rubbish on sale here at this enormous display counter. With a U.S. coin he paid the automatic clerk, which thanked him in its autonomic, nasal voice.
As the five of them walked on, one of the KVB men asked him, "You normally read such fare, Mr. Lars?" His tone was polite.
Lars said, "I have a complete file back to volume one, number one."
There was no response; just a formal smile.
"It has declined, though," Lars added. "During the last year." He rolled the comic book up, thrust it into his pocket.
Later, as they buzzed above the rooftops of Fairfax in a USSR government military hopper, he unrolled the comic book and pondered it by the dim dome light above his head.
He had of course never examined such garbage before. It was interesting. The Blue Cephalopod Man, in a long and much honored tradition, burst buildings, knocked out crooks, disguised himself at both ends of each episode as Jason St. James, a colorless computer-operator. That, too, was standard, for reasons lost in the obscurity of the history of comic book art, but having somehow to do with Jason St. James' girl friend, Nina Whitecotton, who wrote a gourmet column for the Monrovia Chronicle-Times, a mythical homeopape cranked forth for sale throughout West Africa.
Miss Whitecotton, interestingly, was a Negro. And so were all the other humans in the comic strip, including the Blue Cephaloped Man himself when he put on mortality as Jason St. James. And the locale was, throughout each episode, "a large metropolitan area somewhere in Ghana."
The comic book was aimed at an Afro-Asia audience. By some fluke of the world-wide autonomic distributing mechanism, it had shown up here in Iceland.
In the second episode the Blue Cephalopod Man temporarily was drained of his abnormal powers by the presence of a meteor of zularium, a rare metal "from the Betelgeuse system." And the electronic device by which the Blue Cephalopod Man's sidekick, Harry North, a physics professor at Leopoldville, restored those lost powers, just in time to nab the monsters from "Proxima's fourth planet, Agakana," was a construct astonishingly like his own weapons design item 204.
Strange! Lars continued reading.
In Episode three, the terminal section of the comic book, another machine peculiarly familiar to him—he could not precisely place it, however—was brought into play by the cunning assistance of timely Harry North. The Blue Cephalopod Man triumphed again, this time over things from the sixth planet of Orionus. And a good thing, too, because these particular things were an abomination; the artist had outdone himself.
"You find that interesting?" one of the KVB men inquired.
I find, Lars thought, it interesting inasmuch as the writer and/or illustrator has made use of KACH to pirate a few of my most technologically interesting ideas. I wonder if there are grounds for a civil suit.
However, now was not the time. He put the comic book away.
The hopper landed on a roof; the engine ceased turning and the door was at once held open for him so that he could disemhopper.
"This is a motel," one of the artificially precise of speech KVB men explained to him. "Miss Topchev occupies the entire establishment. We have cleared out the other guests and posted security sentries. You will not be disturbed."
"Really? On the level?"
The KVB man reflected, turning the phrase about in his mind. "You may call for assistance at any time," he said at last. "And of course for maintenance-service such as sandwiches, coffee, liquor."
"Drugs?"
The KVB man turned his head. Like solemn owls, all four men stared at Lars.
"I'm on drugs," Lars explained. "I thought KACH had told you that, God. I take them hourly!"
"What drugs?" The inquiry was cautious, if not downright drenched with suspicion.
Lars said, "Escalatium."
That did it. Consternation. "But Mr. Lars! Escalatium is brain-toxic! You wouldn't live six months!"