Lighting an old-fashioned—and illegal—cigarette, the pale, bald young KACH-man murmured, "Mr. Lars, we have something more. It may not interest you, but since you seem to be waiting anyhow..."
He dipped deep into the folio.
Lars said, "I'm waiting because I hate this. Not because I want to see any more. God forbid."
"Umm." The KACH-man brought forth an additional eight-by-ten glossy and leaned back.
It was a non-stereo pic—taken from a great distance, possibly even from an eye-spy, satellite, then severely processed—of Lilo Topchev.
2
"Oh, yes," Lars said with vast caution. "I asked for that, didn't I?" Unofficially, of course. As a favor by KACH to him personally, with absolutely nothing in writing—with what the old-timers called "a calculated risk."
"You can't tell too much from this," the KACH-man admitted.
"I can't tell anything." Lars glared, baffled.
The KACH-man shrugged with professional nonchalance, and said, "We'll try again. You see, she never goes anywhere or does anything. They don't let her. It may be just a cover-story, but they say her trance-states tend to come on involuntarily, in a pseudo-epileptoid pattern. Possibly drug-induced, is our guess off the record, of course. They don't want her to fall down in the middle of the public runnels and be flattened by one of their old surface-vehicles."
"You mean they don't want her to bolt to Wes-bloc."
The KACH-man gestured philosophically.
"Am I right?" Lars asked.
"Afraid not. Miss Topchev is paid a salary equal to that of the prime mover of SeRKeb, Marshal Paponovich. She has a top-floor high-rise view conapt, a maid, butler, Mercedes-Benz hovercar. As long as she cooperates—"
"From this pic," Lars said, "I can't even tell how old she is. Let alone what she looked like."
"Lilo Topchev is twenty-three."
The office door opened and short, sloppy, unpunctual, on-the-brink-of-being-relieved-of-his-position but essential Henry Morris conjured himself into their frame of reference. "Anything for me?"
Lars said, "Come here." He indicated the pic of Lilo Topchev.
Swiftly the KACH-man restored the pic to its folio. "Classified, Mr. Lars! 20-20. You know; for your eyes alone."
Lars said, "Mr. Morris is my eyes." This was, evidently, one of KACH's more difficult functionaries. "What is your name?" Lars asked him, and held his pen ready at a notepad.
After a pause the KACH-man relaxed. "An ipse dixit, but—do whatever you wish with the pic, Mr. Lars." He returned it to the desk, no expression on his sunless, expert face. Henry Morris came around to bend over it, squinting and scowling, his fleshy jowls wobbling as he visibly masticated, as if trying to ingest something of substance from the blurred pic.
The vidcom on Lars' desk pinged and his secretary Miss Grabhorn said, "Call from the Paris office. Miss Faine herself, I believe." The most minuscule trace of disapproval in her voice, a tiny coldness.
"Excuse me," Lars said to the KACH-man. But then, still holding his pen poised, he said, "Let's have your name anyhow. Just for the record. In the rare case I might want to get in touch with you again."
The KACH-man, as if revealing something foul, said reluctantly, "I'm Don Packard, Mr. Lars." He fussed with his hands. The question made him oddly ill-at-ease.
After writing this down, Lars fingered the vidcom to on and the face of his mistress lit, illuminated from within like some fair, dark-haired jack-o-lantern. "Lars!"
"Maren!" His tone was of fondness, not cruelty. Maren Faine always aroused his protective instincts. And yet she annoyed him in the fashion that a loved child might. Maren never knew when to stop.
"Busy?"
"Yeah."
"Are you flying to Paris this afternoon? We can have dinner together and then, oh my God, there's this gleckik blue jazz combo—"
"Jazz isn't blue," Lars said. "It's pale green." He glanced at Henry Morris. "Isn't jazz a very pale green?" Henry nodded.
Angrily, Maren Faine said. "You make me wish—"
"I'll call you back," Lars said to her. "Dear." He shut down the vidcom. "I'll look at the weapons sketches now," he said to the KACH-man. Meanwhile, narrow Dr. Todt and nurse Elvira Funt had entered his office unannounced; reflexively he extended his arm for the first blood-pressure reading of the day, as Don Packard rearranged the sketches and began to point out details which seemed meaningful to the police agency's own very second-rate privately maintained weapons analysts.
Work, at Mr. Lars, Incorporated, had on this day, in this manner, begun. It was, somehow, Lars thought, not encouraging. He was disappointed at the useless pic of Miss Topchev; perhaps that had summoned his mood of pessimism. Or was there more to come?
He had, at ten a.m. New York time, an appointment with General Nitz' rep, a colonel named—God, what was his name? Anyhow, at that time Lars would receive the Board's reaction to the last batch of mockups constructed by Lanferman Associates in San Francisco from earlier Mr. Lars, Incorporated, sketches.
"Haskins," Lars said.
"Pardon?" the KACH-man said.
"It's Colonel Haskins. Do you know," he said meditatively to Henry Morris, "that Nitz has fairly regularly avoided having anything to do with me, lately? Have you noted that puny bit of fact?"
Morris said, "I note everything, Lars. Yes, it's in my death-rattle file." Death-rattle... the fireproof Third-World-War proof, Titanian bolecricket-proof, well-hidden file-cases which were rigged to detonate in the event of Morris' death. He carried on his person a triggering mechanism sensitive to his heartbeat. Even Lars did not know where the files currently existed; probably in a hollow lacquered ceramic owl made from the guidance-system of item 207 in Morris' girlfriend's boy-friend's bathroom. And they contained all the originals of all the weapons-sketches which had ever emanated from Mr. Lars, Incorporated.
"What does it mean?" Lars asked.
"It means," Morris said, protruding his lower jaw and waggling it, as if expecting it to come off, "that General Nitz despises you."
Taken aback, Lars said, "Because of that one sketch? Two-oh-something, that p-thermotropic virus equipped to survive in dead space for a period greater than—"
"Oh no." Morris shook his head vigorously. "Because you're fooling yourself and him. Only he isn't fooled any more. In contrast to you."
"How?"
Morris said, "I hate to say it in front of all these people."
"Go on and say it!" Lars said. But he felt sick. I really fear the Board, he realized. "Client?" Is that what they are to me? Boss; that's the realistic word. UN-W Natsec groomed me, found me and built me up over the years, to replace Mr. Wade. I was there. I was ready and waiting eagerly when Wade Sokolarian died. And this knowledge that I have of someone else waiting right now, prepared for the day when I suffer cardiac arrest or experience the malfunction, the loss, of some other vital organ, waiting, too, in case I become difficult—
And, he thought, I am already difficult.
"Packard," he said to the KACH-man, "you're an independent organization. You operate anywhere in the world. Theoretically anyone can employ you."
"Theoretically," Packard agreed. "You mean KACH itself, not me personally. I'm hired."
"I thought you wanted to hear why General Nitz despises you," Henry Morris said.
"No," Lars said. "Keep it to yourself." I'll hire someone from KACH, a real pro, he decided, to scan UN-W, the whole apparatus if necessary, to find out what they're really up to regarding me. Especially, he thought, the success to which their next weapons medium has been brought; that's the crucial region for me to have exact knowledge about.
I wonder what they'd do, he thought, if they knew that it had so often occurred to me that I always could go over to Peep-East. If they, to insure their own safety, to shore up their absolute position of authority, tried to replace me—
He tried to imagine the size, shape and color of someone following him, imprinting their own footsteps in his tracks. Child or youth, old woman or plump middle-aged man... Wes-bloc psychiatrists, yoked to the state as servants, undoubtedly could turn up the psionic talent of contacting the Other World, the hyper-dimensional universe that he entered into during his trance-states. Wade had had it Lilo Topchev had it. He had lots of it. So undoubtedly it existed elsewhere. And the longer he stayed in office the longer the Board had to ferret it out. "May I say one thing," Morris said, deferentially. "Okay." He waited, setting himself. "General Nitz knew something was wrong when you turned down that honorary colonelcy in the UN-West Armed Forces."
Staring at him, Lars said, "But that was a gag! Just a piece of paper."
"No," Morris said. "And you knew better—know better right now. Unconsciously, on an intuitive level. It would have made you legally subject to military jurisdiction."
To no one in particular, the KACH-man said. "It's true. They've called up virtually everyone they sent those gratis commissions to. Put them in uniform." His face had become professionally impassive.
"God!" Lars felt himself cringe. It had been merely a whim, declining the honorary commission. He had given a gag answer to a gag document. And yet, now, on closer inspection—
"Am I right?" Henry Morris asked him, scrutinizing him.
"Yes," Lars said, after a pause. "I knew it." He gestured. "Well, the hell with it." He turned his attention back to the KACH-collected weapons sketches. Anyhow, it was deeper than that; his troubles with UN-W Natsec went back farther and penetrated further than any inane scheme such as honorary commissions which all at once became the basis of mandatory military subjugation. What he objected to lay in an area where written documents did not exist. An area, in fact, which he did not care to think about.
Examining Miss Topchev's sketches he found himself confronted by this repellent aspect of his work—the lives of all of them, the Board included.
Here it was. And not by accident. It pervaded each design; he leafed among them and then tossed them back on his desk.
To the KACH-man he said, "Weapons! Take them back; put them in your envelope." There was not one weapon among them.
"As regards the concomodies—" Henry Morris began.
"What," Lars said to him, "is a concomody?"
Morris, taken aback, said, "What do you mean, 'What is a concomody?' You know. You sit down with them twice a month." He gestured in irritation. "You know more about the six concomodies on the Board than anyone else in Wes-bloc. Let's face it, everything you do is for them."
"I'm facing it," Lars said calmly. He folded his arms, sat back. "But suppose when that TV autonomic interviewer out there asked me whether I was receiving something really spectacular I told it the truth."
There was silence and then the KACH-man stirred and said. "That's why they'd like you in uniform. You wouldn't be facing any TV cameras. There wouldn't be any opportunity for something to go wrong." He left the sketches where they were on Lars' desk.
"Maybe it's already gone wrong," Morris said, still studying his boss.
"No," Lars said, presently. "If it had you'd know." Where Mr. Lars, Incorporated, stands, he thought, there'd just be a hole. Neat, precise, without a disturbance in the process to the adjoining high-rise structures. And achieved in roughly six seconds.
"I think you're nuts," Morris decided. "You're sitting here at your desk day after day, looking at Lilo's sketches, going quietly nuts. Every time you go into a trance a piece of you falls out." His tone was harsh. "It's too costly to you. And the upshot will be that one day a TV interviewer will nab you and say, 'What's cooking, Mr. Lars, sir?' and you'll say something you shouldn't" Dr. Todt, Elvira Funt, the KACH-man, all of them watched him with dismay but no one did or said anything. At his desk Lars stonily regarded the far wall and the Utrillo original which Maren Faine had given him at Christmas, 2003.
"Let's talk about something else," Lars said. "Where no pain's attached." He nodded to Dr. Todt, who seemed more narrow and priest-like than ever. "I think I'm psychologically ready now, doctor. We can instigate the autism, if you have your gadgets and you know what else set up." Autism—a noble reference, dignified.
"I want an EEG first," Dr. Todt said. "Just as a safety factor." He rolled the portable EEG machine forward. The preliminaries to the day's trance-state in which he lost contact with the given, shared universe, the koinos kosmos, and involvement in that other, mystifying realm, apparently an idios kosmos, a purely private world, began. But a purely private world in which an aisthesis koine, a common Something, dwelt What a way, Lars thought, to earn a living.
3
Greetings! said the letter, delivered by 'stant mail. You have been selected out of millions of your friends and neighbors.
You are now a concomody.
It can't be, Surley G. Febbs thought as he reread the printed form. It was a meager document, size-wise, with his name and number Xeroxed in. It looked no more serious than a bill from his conapt building's utility committee asking him to vote on a rate-increase. And yet here it was in his possession, formal evidence which would admit him, incredibly, into Festung, Washington, D.C. and its subsurface kremlin, the most heavily guarded spot in Wes-bloc.
And not as a tourist.
They found me typical! he said to himself. Just thinking this he felt typical. He felt swell and powerful and slightly drunk, and he had difficulty standing. His legs wobbled and he walked unsteadily across his miniature living room and seated himself on his Ionian fnoolfur (imitation) couch.
"But I really know why they picked me," Febbs said aloud. "It's because I know all about weapons." An authority; that's what he was, due to all the hours—six or seven a night, because like everyone else his work had been recently cut from twenty to nineteen hours per week—that he spent scanning edutapes at the Boise, Idaho, main branch of the public library.