“No!” Pete said instantly.
“Why not?” Lars said.
“Because of the telepathic empathy-circuit. Don’t you get it, you nut? The kid running the maze identifies with the victim. He’s it. It’s him in the maze; that’s what empathy means—you know that. Hell, the kid would no more make it tough for that little critter than he’d—stab himself.”
“I wonder,” Lars said, “what would happen if the telepathic empathy-circuit’s output were stepped up.”
Pete said, “The kid would be hooked deeper. The distinction, on an emotional level, between himself and the victim there in that maze—” He paused, licked his lip.
“And suppose,” Lars continued, “the controls were also altered, so that both studs tended, but in a diffuse manner, only to augment the difficulty which the maze-victim is experiencing. Could that be done, technically-speaking?”
After a while Pete said, “Sure.”
“And run off autofac-wise? In high-production quantity?”
“Why not?”
Lars said, “This roly-poly Venusian wub creature. It’s non-Terran, an organism to us. And yet because of the telepathic faculty it possesses it creates an empathic relationship with us. Would such a circuit, as represented here in this toy, tend to affect any highly-evolved sentient life form the same way?”
“It’s possible.” Pete nodded. “Why not? Any life form that was intelligent enough to receive the emanations would be affected.”
“Even a chitinous semi-reflex machine life form?” Lars said. “Evolved from exoskeleton progenitors? Not mammals? Not warm-blooded?”
Pete stared at General Nitz. “He wants to step up the output,” he said excitedly, stammering in anger, “and rewire the manual controls so that the operator is hooked deep enough not to break away when he wants to, and can’t ease the severity of the barriers inhibiting the goddam maze-victim—and the result—”
“It could induce,” Lars said, “a rapid, thorough mental disintegration.”
“And you want Lanferman Associates to reconstruct this thing and run it off in quantity on our autofac system. And distribute it to them.” Pete jerked his thumb upward. “Okay. But we can’t distribute it to the aliens from Sirius or whatever they are; that’s beyond our control.”
General Nitz said, “But we can. There is one way. Quantities of these can be available in population centers that the aliens acquire. So when they get us they get these, too.”
“Yeah,” Pete agreed.
General Nitz said to him, “Get on it! Get building.”
Glumly, Pete stared at the floor, his jaw working. “It’s reaching them where they have a decent streak. This—” he gestured furiously at the maze-toy on the table—“wouldn’t work on them otherwise. Whoever dreamed this up is getting at living creatures through their good side. And that’s what I don’t like.”
Reading the brochure which had accompanied the maze-toy, General Nitz said, “‘This toy is psychologically sophisticated, in that it teaches the child to love and respect, to cherish, other living creatures, not for what they can do for him, but for themselves.’” He folded up the brochure, tossed it back to Lars, asked Pete, “By when?”
“Twelve, thirteen days.”
“Make it eight.”
“Okay. Eight.” Pete reflected, licked his parched lower lip, swallowed and said, “It’s like booby-trapping a crucifix.”
“Cheers,” Lars said. And, manipulating the two studs, one on either side of the maze, he confronted the appealing, roly-poly wub-like victim with a declining difficulty. He made it easier and easier until it seemed the victim was about to reach the exit.
And then, at that moment, Lars touched the stud on the left. The circuitry of the maze inaudibly shifted—and a last and totally unexpected barrier dropped in the victim’s path, halting him just as he perceived freedom.
Lars, the operator, linked by the weak telepathic signal emanating from the toy, felt the suffering—not acutely, but enough to make him wish he had not touched the left-handed stud. Too late now, though; the victim of the maze was once again openly entangled.
No doubt about it, Lars realized. This does, as the brochure says, teach sympathy and kindness.
But now, he thought, it is our turn to work on it. We cogs, we who are the rulers of this society; we who hold literally in our hands the responsibility of protecting our race. Four billion human beings who are looking to us. And—we do not manufacture toys.
THIRTY
After the alien slavers from Sirius had withdrawn their satellites—at the end there had been eight satellites orbiting the sky of earth—the life of Lars Powderdry began to sink back into normalcy.
He felt glad.
But very tired, he realized one morning as he woke slowly up in his bed in his New York apartment, and saw beside him the tumble of dark hair which was Lilo Topchev’s. Although he was pleased—he liked her, loved her, was happy in a life commingled with hers—he remembered Maren.
And then he was not so pleased.
Sliding from bed he walked from the bedroom and into the kitchen. He poured himself a cup of the perpetually hot and fresh coffee maintained by one small plowshared gadget wired onto the otherwise ordinary stove.
Seated at the table, alone, he drank the coffee and gazed out the window at the high-rise conapt buildings to the north.
It would be interesting, he mused, to know what Maren would have said about our weapon in the Big War, the way in which we caused them to lay off. We made ourselves, unvaluable. Presumably the chitinous citizens of Sirius’ planets are still slavers, still posting satellites in other peoples’ skies.
But not here.
And UN-W Natsec, plus the cogs of Peep-East in all their finery, were still considering the utility of introducing The Weapon into the Sirius system itself …
I think, he thought, Maren would have been amused.
Sleepily, blinking in perplexity, Lilo, in her pink nightgown, appeared at the kitchen door. “No coffee for me?”
“Sure,” he said, rising to get a cup and saucer for her. “Do you know what the English word ‘to care’ comes from?” he said, as he poured her coffee for her from the obedient gadget wired to the stove.
“No.” She seated herself at the table, looked gravely at the ashtray with its moribund remains of yesterday’s discarded cigars and winced.
“The Latin word caritas. Which means love or esteem.”
“Well.”
“St. Jerome,” he said, “used it as a translation of the Greek world agape which means even more.”
Lilo drank her coffee, silently.
“Agape,” Lars said, standing at the window and looking out at the conapts of New York, “means reverence for life; something on that order. There’s no English word. But we still possess the quality.”
“Hmm.”
“And,” he said, “so did the aliens. And that was the handle by which we grabbed and destroyed them.”
“Fix an egg.”
“Okay.” He punched buttons on the stove.
“Can an egg,” Lilo said, pausing in her coffee-drinking, “think?”
“No.”
“Can it feel what you said? Agape?”
“Of course not.”
“Then,” Lilo said, as she accepted the warm, steaming, sunny-side-up egg from the stove, plate included, “if we’re invaded by sentient eggs we’ll lose.”
“Damn you,” he said.
“But you love me. I mean, you don’t mind; in the sense that I can be what I am and you don’t approve but you let me anyhow. Bacon?”
He punched more buttons, for her bacon and for his own toast, applesauce, tomato juice, jam, hot cereal.
“So,” Lilo decided, as the stove gave forth its steady procession of food as instructed, “you don’t feel agape for me. If, like you said, agape means caritas and caritas means to care. You wouldn’t care, for instance, if I—” She considered. “Suppose,” she said, “I decided to go ba
ck to Peep-East, instead of running your Paris branch, as you want me to. As you keep urging me to.” She added, thoughtfully, “So I’d even more fully replace her.”
“That’s not why I want you to head the Paris branch.”
“Well …” She ate, drank, pondered at length. “Perhaps not, but just now, when I came in here, you were looking out the window and thinking, What if she was still alive. Right?”
He nodded.
“I hope to God,” Lilo said, “that you don’t blame me for her doing that.”
“I don’t blame you,” he said, his mouth full of hot cereal. “I just don’t understand where the past goes when it goes. What happened to Maren Faine? I don’t mean what happened that day on the up-ramp when she killed herself with that—” he eradicated a few words which came, savagely, to mind—“that Beretta, I mean. Where is she? Where’s she gone?”
“You’re not completely awake this morning. Did you wash your face with cold water?”
“I did everything that I’m going to do. I just don’t understand it; one day there was a Maren Faine and then there wasn’t. And I was in Seattle, walking along. I never saw it happen.”
Lilo said, “Part of you saw it. But even if you didn’t see it, the fact remains that now there is no Maren Faine.”
He put down his cereal spoon. “What do I care? I love you! And I thank God—I find it incredible—that it wasn’t you who were killed by that pelfrag cartridge, as I first thought.”
“If she had lived, could you have had us both?”
“Sure!”
“No. Impossible. How?”
Lars said, “I would have worked it somehow.”
“Her by day, me at night? Or her on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, me on—”
“The human mind,” he said, “couldn’t possibly be defeated by that situation, if it had the chance. A reasonable chance, without that Beretta and what it did. You know something that old Vincent Klug showed me, when he came back as the old war veteran, so-called, that Ricardo Hastings? It’s impossible to go back.” He nodded.
“But not yet,” Lilo said. “Fifty years from now, maybe.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “I just want to see her.”
“And then what?” Lilo asked.
“Then I’d return to my own time.”
“And you’re going to idle away your life, for fifty years or however long it is, waiting for them to invent that Time Warpage Generator.”
“I’ve had KACH look into it. Somebody’s undoubtedly already doing basic research on it. Now that they know it exists. It won’t be long.”
“Why,” Lilo said, “don’t you join her?”
At that he glanced up, startled. “I am not kidding,” Lilo said. “Don’t wait fifty years—”
“More like forty, I calculate.”
“That’s too long. Good God, you’ll be over seventy years old!”
“Okay,” he admitted.
“My drug,” Lilo said quietly. “You remember; it’s lethal to your brain metabolism or some damn thing— anyhow three tablets of it and your vagus nerve would cease and you’d die.”
After a pause he said, “That’s very true.”
“I’m not trying to be cruel. Or vengeful. But—I think it would be smarter, saner, the better choice, to do that, take three tablets of Formophane than to wait forty to fifty years, drag out a life that means absolutely nothing—”
“Let me think it over. Give me a couple of days.”
“You see,” Lilo said, “not only would you be joining her immediately, without waiting more years than you’ve lived already, but—you’d be solving your problems the way she solved hers. So you’d have that bond with her, too.” She smiled, grimly. Hatingly.
“I’ll give you three tablets of Formophane right now,” she said, and disappeared into the other room.
He sat at the kitchen table, staring down at his bowl of cooling cereal and then all at once she was back. Holding out something to him.
He reached up, took the tablets from her, dropped them into the shirt-pocket of his pajamas.
“Good,” Lilo said. “So that’s decided. Now I can go get dressed and ready for the day. I think I’ll talk to the Soviet Embassy. What’s that man’s name? Kerensky?”
“Kaminsky. He’s top-dog at the embassy.”
“I’ll inquire through him if they’ll take me back. They have some idiots they’re using in Bulganingrad as mediums, but they’re no good—according to KACH.”
She paused. “But of course it’s not the same as it was. It’ll never be like that again.”
THIRTY - ONE
He held the three tablets of Formophane in his hand and considered the tall, cool glass of tomato juice on the table before him. He tried to suppose—as if one really could—how it would be, swallowing the tablets here and now, as she—the girl in the bedroom, whatever her name was—dressed for the day ahead.
While she dressed, he died. That simple. That simple, anyhow, to the easy scene-fabrication faculty available within the psychopathically-glib human mind.
Lilo paused at the bedroom door, wearing a gray wool skirt and slip, barefoot. She said, “If you do it I won’t grieve and hang around forty years waiting for that Time Warpage Generator so I can go back to when you were alive. I want you to be certain of that, Lars, before you do it.”
“Okay.” He hadn’t expected her to. So it made no difference.
Lilo, remaining there at the door, watching him, said, “Or maybe I will.”
Her tone, it seemed to him, was not contrived. She was genuinely considering it, how she would feel, what it would be like. “I don’t know. I guess it would depend on whether Peep-East takes me back. And if so, what my life there would be like. If it was like the way they treated me before—” She pondered. “I couldn’t stand that and I’d begin to remember how it was here with you. So maybe I would; yes, I think I would start grieving for you, the way you are for her.” She looked up at him, alertly. “Consider this aspect before you take those Formophane tablets.”
He nodded in agreement; it had to be considered.
“I really have been happy here,” Lilo said. “It’s been nothing like life was at Bulganingrad. That awful ’classy’ apartment I had—you never saw it, but it was ugly. Peep-East is a tasteless world.”
She came padding out of the bedroom toward him. “I tell you what. I’ve changed my mind. If you still want me to I will take charge of the Paris office.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning,” Lilo said levelly, “that I will do exactly what I said I wouldn’t do. I’ll replace her. Not for your sake but for mine, so I don’t wind up in an apartment in Bulganingrad again.” She hesitated and then said, “So I don’t wind up the way you are, sitting there in your pajamas with those tablets in your hand, trying to decide whether you want to wait out the forty years or take care of it right now. You see?”
“I see.”
“Self-preservation.”
“Yes.” He nodded.
“I have that instinct. Don’t you? Where is it in you?”
He said, “Gone.”
“Gone even if I head the Paris branch?”
Reaching for the glass of tomato juice with one hand he put the three tablets in his mouth with the other, lifted the glass … he shut his eyes, felt the cool, wet rim of the glass against his lips and thought then of the hard, cool can of beer that Lilo Topchev had so long ago presented him that first moment together in Fairfax when they met. When, he thought, she tried to kill me.
“Wait,” Lilo said.
He opened his eyes, holding in the three tablets, undissolved because they were hard-coated for easier swallowing, on his tongue.
“I have,” Lilo said, “a gadget plowshared from item —well, it doesn’t matter much which. You’ve used it before. In fact I found it here in the apartment. Ol’ Orville.”
“Sure,” he said, mumbling because of the tablets. “I know, I remember Ol’ Orville. How i
s Ol’ Orville, these days?”
Lilo said, “Ask his advice before you do it.”
That seemed reasonable. So carefully he spat out the undissolved tablets and restored them, stickily, to his pajama pocket, sat waiting while Lilo went and got the intricate electronic quondam guidance-system, now turned household amusement and crypto-deity, Ol’ Orville. The featureless little head that, and Lilo did not know this, he had last consulted in company with Maren Faine.
She set Ol’ Orville before him on the breakfast table.
“Ol’ Orville,” Lars said, “how in hell are you today?” You who were once weapon-design-sketch number 202, he thought. First called to my attention, in fact, by Maren. You and your fourteen-thousand—or is it sixteen or eighteen?—minned parts, you poor plowshared freak. Castrated, like me, by the system.
“I am fine,” Ol’ Orville replied telepathically.
“Are you the same, the very same Ol’ Orville,” Lars said, “that Maren Faine—”
“The same, Mr. Lars.”
“Are you going to quote Richard Wagner in the original German again to me?” Lars said. “Because if you are, this time it won’t be enough.”
“That is right,” Ol’ Orville’s thoughts croaked in his brain. “I recognize that. Mr. Lars, do you care to ask me a distinct question?”
“You understand the situation that faces me?”
“Yes.”
Lars said, “Tell me what to do.”
There was a long pause as the enormous number of superlatively miniaturized components of the original guidance-system of item 202 clacked away. He waited.
“Do you want,” Ol’ Orville asked him presently, “the elaborated, fully documented answer with all the citations included, the original source-material in Attic Greek, Middle-Low-High German and Latin of the—”
“No,” Lars said. “Boil it down.”
“One sentence?”
“Or less. If possible.”
Ol’ Orville answered, “Take this girl, Lilo Topchev, into the bedroom and have sexual intercourse with her.”