Now Wait for Last Year (5 page)

'Have you taken it yet?'

'Tonight,' Plout said. 'At my place. I got five caps, one of them for you. If you are interested.'

'What's it do?' Somehow that seemed pertinent.

Plout, undulating with an internal rhythm, said, 'Hallucinogenic. But more than that. Whee, whoo, fic-fic.' His eyes glazed over and he retreated into himself, grinning with beatitude. Himmel waited; at last Plout returned. 'Varies from person to person. Somehow involved with your sense of what Kant called the "categories of perception." Get it?'

'That would be your sense of time and space,' Himmel said, having read the Critique of Pure Reason, it being his style of prose as well as thought. In his small conapt he kept a paperback copy of it, well marked.

'Right! It alters your perception of time in particular, so it ought to be called a tempogogic drug – correct?' Plout seemed transported by his insight. 'The first tempogogic drug ... or rather maltempogogic, to be precise. Unless you believe what you experience.'

Himmel said, 'I have to get back to TF&D.' He started to rise.

Pressing him back down, Plout said, 'Fifty bucks. US.'

'W-what?'

'For a cap. Creaker, it's rare. First I've seen.' Once more Plout allowed the capsule to roll briefly across the table. 'I hate to give it up but it'll be an experience; we'll find the Tao, the five of us. Isn't it worth fifty US dollars to find the Tao during this nurty war? You may never see JJ-180 again; the Mex coonks are getting ready to crack down on shipments from Argentina or wherever it comes from. And they're good.'

'It's really that different from—'

'Oh yes! Listen, Himmel. You know what I almost ran over with my cab just now? One of your little carts. I could have squashed it but I didn't. I see them all the time; I could squash hundreds of them ... I go by TF&D every few hours. I'll tell you something else: the Tijuana authorities are asking me if I know where these goddam little carts are coming from. I told 'em I don't know . .. but so help me, if we don't all merge with the Tao tonight I might—'

'Okay,' Himmel said with a groan. 'I'll buy a capsule from you.' He dug for his wallet, considering this a shakedown, expecting nothing, really, for his money. Tonight would be a hollow fraud.

He couldn't have been further wrong.

Gino Molinari, supreme leader of Terra in its war against the reegs, wore khaki, as usual, with his sole military decoration on his breast, his Golden Cross First Class, awarded by the UN General Assembly fifteen years before. Molinari, Dr Eric Sweetscent noted, badly needed a shave; the lower portion of his face was stubbled, stained by a grime and sootlike blackness that had risen massively to the surface from deep within. His shoelaces, after the manner of his fly, were undone.

The appearance of the man, Eric thought, is appalling.

Molinari did not raise his head and his expression remained dull and unfocused as Virgil's party filed one by one into the room, saw him, and gulped in dumbfoundment. He was very obviously a sick and worn-out man; the general public impression was, it would seem, quite accurate.

To Eric's surprise he saw that in real life the Mole looked exactly as he had of late on TV, no greater, no sturdier, no more in command. It seemed impossible but it was so, and yet he was in command; in every legal sense he had retained his positions of power, yielding to no one – at any rate, no one on Terra. Nor, Eric realized suddenly, did Molinari intend to step down, despite his obviously deteriorated psycho-physical condition. Somehow that was clear, made so by the man's utterly slack stance, his willingness to appear this natu-ral way to a collection of rather potent personages. The Mole remained as he was, with no poise, no posture of the militant heroic. Either he was too far gone to care, or – Eric thought. Or there is too much of genuine importance at stake for him to waste his waning strength at merely impressing people, and especially those of his own planet. The Mole had passed beyond that.

For better or worse.

To Eric, Virgil Ackerman said in a low voice, 'You're a doctor. You are going to have to ask him if he needs medical attention.' He, too, seemed concerned.

Eric looked toward Virgil and thought, I was brought here for this. It has all been arranged for this, for me to meet Molinari. Everything else, all the other people – a cover. To fool the 'Starmen. I see that now; I see what this is and what they want me to do. I see, he realized, whom I must heal; this is the man whom my skills and talents must, from this point on, exist for. The must; it is put that way. The must of the situation: this is it.

Bending, he said haltingly, 'Mr Secretary General—' His voice shook. But it was not awe that stopped him – the reclining man certainly did not promote that emotion – but ignorance; he simply did not know what to say to a man holding such an office. 'I'm a GP,' he said finally, and rather emptily, he realized. 'As well as an org-trans surgeon.' He paused; there came no response, visible or audible. 'While you're here at Wash—'

All at once Molinari raised his head; his eyes cleared. He focused on Eric Sweetscent, then abruptly, startlingly, boomed in his familiar low-toned voice, 'Hell on that, doctor. I'm okay.' He smiled; it was a brief but innately human smile, one of understanding at Eric's clumsy, labored efforts. 'Enjoy yourself! Live it up 1935 style! Was that during prohibition? No, I guess that was earlier. Have a Pepsi-Cola.'

'I was about to try a raspberry Kool-Aid,' Eric said, regaining some of his aplomb; his heart rate returned now to normal.

Molinari said jovially, 'Quite a construct old Virgil has, here. I took the opportunity to glim it over. I ought to nationalize the fniggin' thing; too much private capital invested here, should be in the planet's war effort.' His half-joking tone was, underneath, starkly serious; obviously this elaborate artifact distressed him. Molinari, as all citizens of Terra knew, lived an ascetic life, yet oddly intersticed with infrequent interludes of priapic, little-revealed sybaritic indulgence. Of late, however, the binges were said to have tapered off.

'This individual is Dr Eric Sweetscent,' Virgil said. 'The goddam finest nugging org-trans surgeon on Terra, as you well know from the GHQ personnel dossiers; he's put twenty-five – or is it -six? – separate artiforgs in me during the last decade, but I've paid for it; he rakes in a fat haul every month. Not quite so fat a haul, though, as his ever-loving wife.' He grinned at Eric, his fleshless elongated face genial in a fatherly way.

After a pause Eric said to Molinari, 'What I'm waiting for is the day when I trans a new brain for Virgil.' The irritability in his own voice surprised him; probably it had been the mention of Kathy that had set it off. 'I've got several on stand-by. One is a real goozler.'

'"Goozler,"' Molinari murmured. 'I've missed out on the argot of recent months... just plain too busy. Too many official documents to prepare; too much establishment talk. It's a goozlery war, isn't it, doctor?' His great, dark, pain-impregnated eyes fixed on Eric, and Eric saw something he had never come across before; he saw an intensity that was not normal or human. And it was a physiological phenomenon, a swiftness of reflex, due surely to a unique and superior laying down of the neural pathways during childhood. The Mole's gaze exceeded in its authority and astuteness, its power alone, anything possessed by ordinary persons, and in it Eric saw the difference between them all and the Mole. The primary conduit linking the mind with external reality, the sense of sight, was, in the Mole, so far more developed than one anticipated that by it the man caught and held whatever happened to venture across his path. And, beyond all else, this enormity of visual prowess possessed the aspect of wariness. Of recognition of the imminence of harm.

By this faculty the Mole remained alive.

Eric realized something then, something that had never occurred to him in all the weary, dreadful years of the war.

The Mole would have been their leader at any time, at any stage in human society. And – anywhere.

'Every war,' Eric said with utmost caution and tact, 'is a hard war for those involved in it, Secretary.' He paused, reflected, and then added, 'We all understood this, sir, when we got into it. It's the risk a people, a planet, takes when it voluntarily enters a severe and ancient conflict that's been going on a long time between two other peoples.'

There was silence; Molinari scrutinized him wordlessly.

'And the 'Starmen,' Eric said, 'are of our stock. We are related to them genetically, are we not?'

Against that there was only a silence, a wordless void which no one cared to fill. At last, reflectively, Molinari farted.

Tell Eric about your stomach pains,' Virgil said to Molinari.

'My pains,' Molinari said, and grimaced.

The whole point in bringing you together—' Virgil began.

'Yes,' Molinari growled brusquely, nodding his massive head. 'I know. And you all know. It was for exactly this.'

'I'm as certain as I am of taxes and labor unions that Dr Sweetscent can help you, Secretary,' Virgil continued. The rest of us will go across the hall to the suite of rooms there, so you two can talk in private.' With unusual circumspection he moved away, and, one by one, the blood clan and firm officers filed out of the room, leaving Eric Sweetscent alone with the Secretary General.

After a pause Eric said, 'All right, sir; tell me about your abdominal complaint, Secretary.' In any case a sick man was a sick man; he seated himself in the form-binding armchair across from the UN Secretary General and, in this reflexively assumed professional posture, waited.

That evening as Bruce Himmel tromped up the rickety wooden stairs to Chris Plout's conapt in the dismal Mexican section of Tijuana, a female voice said from the darkness behind him, 'Hello, Brucie. It looks as if this is an all-TF&D night; Simon Ild is here, too.'

On the porch the woman caught up with him. It was sexy, sharp-tongued Katherine Sweetscent; he had run into her at Plout's gatherings a number of times before and so it hardly surprised him to see her now. Mrs Sweetscent wore a somewhat modified costume from that which she employed on the job; this also failed to surprise him. For tonight's mysterious undertaking Kathy had arrived naked from the waist up, except of course, for her nipples. They had been – not gilded in the strict sense – but rather treated with a coating of living matter, sentient, a Martian life form, so that each possessed a consciousness. Hence each nipple responded in an alert fashion to everything going on.

The effect on Himmel was immense.

Behind Kathy Sweetscent ascended Simon Ild; in the dim light he had a vacant expression on his sappy, pimply, uneducated face. This was a person whom Himmel could do without; Simon – unfortunately – reminded him of nothing so much as a bad simulacrum of himself. And there was nothing for him quite so unbearable.

The fourth person gathered here in the unheated, low-ceilinged room of Chris Plout's littered, stale-food-smelling conapt was an individual whom Himmel at once recognized – recognized and stared at, because this was a man known to him through pics on the back of book jackets. Pale, with glasses, his long hair carefully combed, wearing expensive, tasteful Io-fabric clothing, seemingly a trifle ill-at-ease, stood the Taoist authority from San Francisco, Marm Hastings, a slight man but extremely handsome, in his mid-forties, and, as Himmel knew, quite well-to-do from his many books on the subject of oriental mysticism. Why was Hastings here? Obviously to sample JJ-180; Hastings had a reputation for essaying an experience with every hallucinogenic drug that came into being, legal or otherwise. To Hastings this was allied with religion.

But as far as Himmel knew, Marm Hastings had never shown up here in Tijuana at Chris Plout's conapt. What did this indicate about JJ-180? He pondered as he stood off in a corner, surveying the goings-on. Hastings was occupied in examining Plout's library on the subject of drugs and religion; he seemed uninterested in the others present, even contemptuous of their existence. Simon Ild, as usual, curled up on the floor, on a pillow, and lit a twisted brown marijuana cigarette; he puffed vacantly, waiting for Chris to appear. And Kathy Sweetscent – she crouched down, stroking reflexively at her hocks, as if grooming herself flywise, putting her slender, muscular body into a state of alertness. Teasing it, he decided, by deliberate, almost yogalike efforts.

Such physicalness disturbed him; he glanced away. It was not in keeping with the spiritual emphasis of the evening. But no one could tell Mrs Sweetscent anything; she was nearly autistic.

Now Chris Plout, wearing a red bathrobe, his feet bare, entered from the kitchen; through dark glasses he peered to see if it was time to begin. 'Marm,' he said. 'Kathy, Bruce, Simon, and I, Christian; the five of us. An adventure into the unexplored by means of a new substance which has just arrived from Tampico aboard a banana boat... I hold it here.' He extended his open palm; within lay the five capsules. 'One for each of us – Kathy, Bruce, Simon, Marm, and me, Christian; our first journey of the mind together. Will we all return? And will we be translated, as Bottom says?'

Himmel thought. As Peter Quince says to Bottom, actually.

Aloud, he said, "Bottom, thou art translated."'

'Pardon?' Chris Plout said, frowning.

'I'm quoting,' Himmel explained.

'Come on, Chris,' Kathy Sweetscent said crossly, 'give us the jink and let's get started.' She snatched – successfully – one of the capsules from Chris's palm. 'Here I go,' she said. 'And without water.'

Mildly, Marm Hastings said with his quasi-English accent, 'Is it the same, I wonder, taken without water?' Without movement of his eye muscles he clearly succeeded in making a survey of the woman; there was that sudden stricture of his body which gave him away. Himmel felt outraged; wasn't this whole affair designed to raise them all above the flesh?