"I also take Conjorizine," Lars said. "It balances the metabolic toxicity. I mix them together, grind them into a powder with a round teaspoon, make the mixture into a water-soluble near precipitate and take it as an injectable—"
"But, sir, you'd die! From motor-vascular convulsions. Within half an hour." The four Soviet policemen looked appalled.
"All I ever got as a side-effect," Lars said, "was postnasal drip."
The four KVB men conferred and then one of them said to Lars, "We will have your Wes-bloc physician, Dr. Todt, flown here. He can supervise your drug-injection procedures. Ourselves, we can't take responsibility. Is this stimulant-combination essential for your trance-state to happen?"
"Yep."
Again they conferred. "Go below," they instructed him, at last. "You will join Miss Topchev—who does not to our knowledge rely on drugs. Stay with her until we can produce Dr. Todt and your two medications."
They glowered at him severely. "You should have told us or brought the drugs and Dr. Todt with you! The Wes-bloc authorities did not inform us." Clearly, they were sincerely angry.
"Okay," Lars said, and started toward the down-ramp.
A moment later, accompanied by one of the KVB men, he stood at the door of Lilo Topchev's motel room.
"I'm scared," he said, aloud.
The KVB man knocked. "Afraid, Mr. Lars, to pit your talent against that of our medium's?" The mocking overtones were enormous.
Lars said, "No, not that." Afraid, he thought, that Lilo will be what Kaminsky had said, a blackened, shriveled, dried-up leather-like stick of bones and skin, like a discarded purse. Consumed, perhaps, by her vocational demands. God knows what she may have been forced to give by her "client." Because they are much harsher on this side of the world... as we have known all along.
In fact, he realized, that might explain why General Nitz wanted our joint efforts as weapons design to take place under the administration of Peep-East, not Wes-bloc authority. Nitz recognizes that more decisive pressures are brought to bear here. He may think that under them I will function better.
In other words, Lars thought dully, that I've been holding back all these years. But here, under KVB jurisdiction, under the eyes of the Soviet Union's highest body, the SeRKeb, it will be different.
General Nitz had more faith in Peep-East's capacities to wrest results from its employees than in his own establishment's. What a queer, bewildering, yet somehow true-ringing last little touch. And, Lars realized, I believe it, too. Because it's probably actually the case. The door opened and there stood Lilo Topchev. She wore a black jersey sweater, slacks and sandals, her hair tied back with a ribbon. She looked, was, no more than seventeen or eighteen. Her figure was that of an adolescent just reaching toward maturity. In one hand she held a cigar and held it wrongly, awkwardly, obviously trying to appear grown-up, to impress him and the KVB man.
Lars said huskily, "I'm Lars Powderdry." Smiling, she held out her hand. It was small, smooth, cool, crushable; it was accepted by him gingerly, with the greatest deference. He felt as if by one unfortunate squeeze he could impair it forever. "Hi," she said. The KVB man bumped him bodily inside the room. And the door shut after him, with the KVB man on the other side.
He was alone with Lilo Topchev. The dream had come to pass.
"How about a beer?" she said. He observed when she spoke that her teeth were exceedingly regular, tiny and even. German-woman-like. Nordic, not Slavic.
"You've got a damn good grasp of English," he said. "I wondered how they'd solve the language-barrier." He had anticipated a deft, self-deprecating, but always present, third-person-on-hand translator. "Where'd you learn it?" he asked her.
"In school."
"You're telling the truth? You've never been to Wes-bloc?"
"I've never been out of the Soviet Union before," Lilo Topchev said. "In fact most of Peep-East, especially the Sino-dominated regions, are out of bounds to me." Walking lithely to the kitchen of the more or less cog-class luxurious motel suite to get him the can of beer, she gestured suddenly, attracting his attention. She nodded toward the far wall. And then facing him, her back to the wall, she formed with her lips—but did not say aloud—the word bug.
A video-audio system was busily monitoring them. Of course. How could it be otherwise? Here comes the chopper, Lars thought, remembering Orwell's great old classic, 1984. Only in this case we know we're under scrutiny and, at least theoretically, it's by our good friends. We're all friends, now. Except that as Aksel Kaminsky said, and truthfully, if we do not manage to properly jump through the flaming hoop, Lilo and I, our good friends will murder us.
But who can blame them? Orwell missed that point. They might be right and we might be wrong.
She brought him the beer.
"Lots of luck," Lilo said, smiling.
He thought, I'm already in love with you.
Will they kill us, he thought, for that? God help them if so. Because they and their joint civilization, East and West, would not be worth preserving at that price.
"What's this about drugs?" Lilo said. "I heard you talking with the police outside. Was that true or were you just—you know—making their job difficult?"
Lars said, "It's true."
"I couldn't catch the names of the drugs. Even though I had my door open and I was listening."
"Escalatium."
"Oh, no!"
"Conjorizine. I mix them together, grind them—"
"I heard that part. You inject them as a mixture; you really do. I thought you just said that for their benefit." She regarded him with a dignified expression overlaid with amusement. It was not disapproval or shock that she felt, not the moral indignation of the KVB man—who was inevitably simple-minded: that was his nature. With her it was near admiration.
Lars said, "So I can't do a thing until my physician arrives. All I can do—" he seated himself on a black wrought-iron chair—"is drink beer and wait." And look at you.
"I have drugs."
"They said otherwise."
"What they say is as the tunneling of one worm in one dung heap." Turning to the audio-video monitor which she had just now pointed out to him she said, "And that goes for you, Geschenko!"
"Who's that?"
"The KVB surveillance-team Red Army intelligence major who will scan the tape that's being made right now of you and me. Isn't that right, Major?" she said to the concealed monitor."
"You see," she explained to Lars calmly, "I'm a convict."
He stared at her. "You mean you committed a crime, a legal, specified crime, were tried and—"
"Tried and convicted. All as a pseudo—I don't know what to call it. A mechanism; that's it, a mechanism. By which I am legally at this moment, despite all the political, civil guarantees in the Constitution of the USSR, a person absolutely without recourse. I have no remedy whatsoever through the Soviet courts; no lawyer can get me out. I'm not like you. I know about you, Lars, or Mr. Lars. Or Mr. Powderdry, whatever you want to be called. I know how you're set up in Wes-bloc. How I've envied over the years your position, your freedom and independence!"
He said, "You think that I could spit in their eye at any time."
"Yes. I know it. KACH told me; they got it to me, in spite of the dung-heap inhabitants like Geschenko."
Lars said, "KACH lied to you."
16
She blinked. The dead cigar and the can of beer trembled, Lars said, "They have me right now as much as they've had you."
"Didn't you volunteer to come here to Fairfax?"
"Oh, sure!" He nodded. "In fact I personally talked Marshal Paponovich into the idea. Nobody made me come here; nobody put a pistol to my head. But somebody brought a pistol out of a desk drawer and let me view it, and let me know."
"An FBI man?" Her eyes were enormous, like those of a little child hearing the exploits of the fabulous.
"No, not an FBI man, technically. A friend of the FBI, in this friendly, cooperative world in which we live. It's not important; we don't have to depress ourselves into talking about this. Except that you ought to know that they could have gotten to me any time. And when it mattered they let me know it."