"So that means you don"t understand anything either."
I went to the bar, threw a juice c.o.c.ktail together, and approached him.
"Why is it empty here?" he continued. He had a lively spare face and a bold gaze. "Where are the inhabitants? Why is everything closed up? Everyone is asleep, you can"t get any service."
"You just arrived?"
"Yes."
He pushed an empty plate away, moved up a full one, and gulped some light beer.
"Where are you from?" I asked. He glared at me menacingly, and I added quickly, "If it"s not a secret, of course."
"No," he said, "it"s not a secret," and went back to his eating.
I finished the juice and got ready to leave. Then he said, "They live well, the dogs. Such food and as much as you want, and all for free."
"Well, not quite for free," I contradicted.
"Ninety dollars! Pennies! I"ll show them how to eat ninety dollars within three days!" His eyes stopped roving momentarily, "D-dogs!" he muttered and fell to again.
I was quite familiar with such types. They came from minuscule, totally milked kingdoms and prefectdoms, reduced to utter poverty, and greedily ate and drank, mindful of the hot dusty streets of their home towns, where in the n.i.g.g.ardly ribbons of shade, moribund men and women lay dying and immobile, while children with distended bellies rummaged in the garbage piles of foreign consulates. They were surcharged with hatred and needed only two things -- food and weapons. Food for their own gang, which was the opposition, and weapons to fight the other gang, which was in power. They were the most flaming patriots, who spoke hotly and effusively of their love for the people, but resolutely refused all help from without, because they loved nothing but their power and no one but themselves, and were ready in the name of the people and the victory of high principles to mortify the same people, right down to the last man, if necessary, with hunger and machine gun.
Microhitlers!
"Weapons? Food?" I asked.
He grew wary.
"Yes," he said. "Food and weapons. Only without any silly conditions. And as free as possible. Or on credit. True patriots never have any money. While the ruling clique drowns in luxury...."
"Famine?" I asked.
"Anything you want. While you here swim in luxury." He gazed at me with hatred. "The whole world is drowning in wealth and we alone are starving. But your hopes are in vain! The revolution cannot be stopped!"
"Yes," I said. "And whom is the revolution against?"
"We are fighting the blood leeches of Boadshah! We are against corruption and debauchery of the ruling top layer, we are for freedom and true democracy. The people are with us, but they have to be fed. And you tell us that you"ll give us food only after we disarm. And even threaten intervention.... What filthy, lying demagogy! What deception of the revolutionary ma.s.ses! To disarm in the face of those bloodsuckers -- that means to throw a hangman"s noose over the heads of all the true freedom fighters! We answer you -- no! You will not deceive the people. Let Boadshah and his brutes disarm! Then we shall see what needs doing!"
"Yes," I said. "But Boadshah also, in all probability, does not wish a noose thrown over his neck."
He put the beer down savagely, and his hand moved toward the holster in a habitual gesture. But then he quickly caught himself.
"I should have known you don"t understand a d.a.m.n thing,"
he said. "You who are well fed have grown drowsy from a full stomach, you are too conceited to understand us. You wouldn"t have dared to talk to me like that in the jungle."
In the jungle, I would have talked differently to you, bandit, I thought, and said: "I really don"t understand many things. For instance, I don"t understand what will happen when you gain the upper hand.
Let us imagine that you have won, Boadshah has been hanged, if be, in his turn, hasn"t fled to seek food and weapons --"
"He won"t get away. He"ll get his just deserts. The revolutionary people will tear him to shreds. That"s when we"ll go to work. We will regain the territory seized from us by affluent neighbors, we will carry out the entire program which the lying Boadshah constantly shouts about to deceive the people.... I"ll show them how to strike! They"ll learn about strikes with me on top -- there"ll be no strikes! They"ll all go under arms and forward march! We will win and then..."
He shut his eyes and moaned a bit, shaking his head.
"And then you will be well fed, you will swim in luxury and sleep till noon?"
He laughed.
"I deserve that. The people deserve it. No one will dare reproach us. We will eat and drink as much as we wish, we will live in real houses, we will say to the people: now you are free -- divert yourselves!"
"And don"t think about a thing," I added. "But don"t you think that all that could come out badly for you?"
"Forget it," he said. "That"s sheer demagogy. You are a demagogue. Also a dogmatist. We too have all kinds of dogmatists similar to yourself. Man, they say, will lose the meaning of life. No, we reply, man will lose nothing. Man will acquire and not lose. You have to feel the people. You have to be from the people yourself. The people don"t like sophists.
What the h.e.l.l for do I let myself be fed on by wood leeches and feed on worms myself?" Suddenly he smiled amiably. "You must have taken offense at me a bit, for calling you well fed and other things. Please don"t. Affluence is bad when you don"t have it, but your neighbor does. But achieved affluence -- that"s a great thing! It"s worth fighting for. Everybody fought for it. It must be obtained with weapons in hand, and not traded for freedom and democracy."
"So your final goal is still abundance? Just abundance?"
"Obviously! The final objective always is abundance. The difference is that we are choosy about the means to get it."
"I have already grasped that. But what about man?"
"What do you mean, man?"
I did understand that it was futile to argue.
"You have never been here before?" I asked.
"Why?"
"Look into it, I said. This town gives excellent practical lessons in abundance."
He shrugged his shoulders.
"So far, I like it here." Again he pushed away an empty plate and replaced it with a full one. "These hors d"oeuvres are strange to me.... Everything is tasty and cheap.... It"s enviable." He swallowed a few forkfuls of salad and growled.
"We know that all great revolutionaries fought for abundance.
We don"t have time to theorize, but there is no need for it, anyway. There are enough theories without us. Furthermore, abundance is in no way threatening us. It won"t threaten us for quite a while yet. We have much more pressing problems."
"To hang Boadshah," I said.
"Yes -- to begin with. Next we will need to do away with the dogmatists. I can perceive that even now. Next comes the realization of our legitimate claims. After that, something else will come up. And only then, and after many other things, will abundance arrive. I am an optimist, but I don"t believe I will live to see it. Don"t you worry -- we"ll manage somehow.
If we can stand hunger then we can take abundance for sure....
The dogmatists prattle that abundance is not an end, but a means. We reply that every means was once an goal. Today, abundance is a goal. Tomorrow, perhaps it may become a means."
I got up.
"Tomorrow may be too late," I said. "It is incorrect of you to fall back on great revolutionaries. They would not have accepted your shibboleth: now you are free -- enjoy yourselves.
They spoke otherwise: now that you are free -- work. After all, they never fought for abundance for the belly, they were interested in abundance for the soul and the mind."
His hand twitched toward the holster again, and again he caught himself.
"A Marxist!" he said with astonishment. "But then again, you are a visitor. We have almost no Marxists, we take them and..."
I kept control of myself.
Pa.s.sing by the window, I took another look at him. He sat with his back to the street and ate and ate, his elbows stuck out.
When I got home, the living room was already vacant. The youngsters had piled the bedsheets and pillows in the corner.
There was a note under the telephone on the desk. Written in a childish scrawl, it read: "Take care. She has plotted something. She was fussing in the bedroom." I sighed and sat down in the armchair.
There was still an hour until the meeting with Oscar, a.s.suming he came. There was no sense in going to sleep, but in addition, it might not be safe -- Oscar could bring company, and come earlier than expected, possibly not through the door.
I got the pistol out of the suitcase, put in a clip, and dropped it in my side pocket. Next I climbed into the bar, brewed myself some coffee, and went back to the study.
I took the slug out of my radio and the one out of Rimeyer"s, lay them down in front of me on the table, and attempted again to recollect where indeed I had seen just such components and why I thought that I had seen them before and more than once. And then it came to me. I went into the bedroom and brought in the phonor. I didn"t even need a screwdriver. I took the case off the phonor, stuck my index finger under the odorizer horn, and, catching it with my finger nail, extracted a vacuum tubusoid FX-92-U, four outputs, static field, capacity equals two. Sold in consumer electronic stores at fifty cents each. In local patois -- a slug.
It had to be, I thought. We are disoriented by conversations about a new drug. We are constantly derailed by talk about horrific new inventions. We have already made several similar blunders.
There was the time when Alhagana and Burris served up a complaint in the U.N. that the separatists were using a new type of weapon -- freeze bombs. We threw ourselves furiously into a search for underground laboratories and even arrested two genuine underground inventors (sixteen and ninety-six years old, respectively). And then it turned out that the inventors were in no way connected, and the awful freeze bombs were acquired by the separatists in Munich from a refrigerator warehouse -- and were in fact reject super-freezers. True, the effect of these super-freezers was indeed horrible. Used in conjunction with molecular detonators (widely used by undersea archaeologists in the Amazon for dispersing crocs and piranhas), the super-freezers were capable of instantaneous temperature depression of one hundred and fifty degrees centigrade over a radius of twenty meters. Afterward, we spent much effort indoctrinating ourselves with the concept that we should keep in mind that in our times, literally every month, ma.s.ses of new inventions appear with the most peaceful of applications, but with the most unexpected side effects. These characteristics are often such that lawbreaking in the area of weapons manufacture and stockpiling becomes meaningless. We became extremely cautious about new types of armament, employed by various extremists, and only a year later got caught by another twist, when we went looking for a mysterious apparatus with which poachers lured pterodactyls from the Uganda Preserve at a great distance. We found a clever do-it-yourself adaptation of the "Up-down" toy in combination with a fairly generally available medical device.
And now we had caught slug -- a combination of a standard radio with a standard tubusoid and a standard chemical and very common plumbing-supplied hot water.
To make a long story short, there would be no need to search for secret factories. We"d have to look for some very adroit and unprincipled speculators who sensed very delicately indeed that they found themselves in the Country of the b.o.o.b.... They"d be like trichinae in a ham. Five or six enterprising self-seekers. An innocent cottage somewhere in the suburbs. Just go to a department store, buy the vacuum tubusoid for fifty cents, peel off the plastic wrapping, and place in an elegant box with a gla.s.site cover. And then sell it for fifty marks -- "only to you and only through friends." True, there was still the inventor. Probably he was not alone, and most certainly he was not the only one.... But probably they had not survived; for this was nothing like a lure for pterodactyls.
Anyway, was the matter really one of speculators? Let them sell another forty slugs, or a hundred. Even in the City of b.o.o.bs, people had to figure out in the end what it was all about. And when that happened, slug would spread like wildfire.
The first ones to see to that would be the moralists from the Joy of Living. They would be followed by Dr. Opir, who would sally forth and announce that according to scientific endings, slug was conducive to clarity of thought and was unsurpa.s.sed in the treatment of alcoholism and depression. In general, the future ideal was a vast trough filled with hot water. Then they would stop writing the word "slug" on the fences.
That"s who should be taken by the throat, I thought, if anybody. The trouble is not the profiteers. The trouble is that there exists this Country of the b.o.o.b, this filthy misconstruction. It has taken the shivers under its wing and can"t wait to legalize slug....
There was a knock on the door. Oscar came into the study, and he was not alone. With him was Matia himself, stocky, gray, with dark gla.s.ses and thick cane, as always, looking like a veteran who has lost his sight. Oscar was smirking self-satisfiedly.
"h.e.l.lo, Ivan," said Matia. "Meet your back-up, Oscar Pebblebridge, from the southwest section."
We shook hands. What I have always disliked about our Security Council is the plethora of mossy traditions, and especially infuriating is the idiotic system of cross-investigation, due to which we are constantly tripping over each other"s sleuthing, busting each other"s mugs, and not uncommonly shooting each other with fair accuracy. I can hardly see that as serious work -- more like adolescents playing at detectives. Let them go soak their heads in a swamp.
"I was going to take you in today," confided Oscar. "Never in my life have I seen such a suspicious character."
Without saying a word, I took the pistol out of my pocket, unloaded it, and threw it in the desk drawer. Oscar followed my actions with approval. I said, addressing Matia, "I guess that the investigation would simply collapse, without getting started, had I known about Oscar. But I must inform you that I almost maimed him yesterday."
"I read you right," said Oscar smugly.
Grunting, Matia lowered himself into the armchair.
"I can"t ever remember a situation," he said, "when Ivan was pleased with everything. But conspiracy is the foundation of our business.... Take a chair and sit down, both of you.
You, Oscar, had no right to be maimed, and you, Ivan, had no right to be arrested. That"s how you should regard it. And what have you got here?" he said, taking off his dark gla.s.ses to look at the slugs, "Taking up radio as a hobby in between your work? Laudable, laudable!"
It was evident that they didn"t know a thing. Oscar was leafing through his notebook, where everything was encrypted in his own personal code, and was apparently preparing himself to make a report, while Matia scanned over the slugs with his fleshy nose, holding the gla.s.ses aloft in his hand. There was something symbolic in this spectacle.
"And so, agent Zhilin is enriching his leisure with radio technology," continued Matia, restoring his gla.s.ses and leaning back in his chair. "He has lots of free time, he has switched to a four-hour day.... And bow do you stand on the question of the meaning of life, agent Zhilin? It appears you may have found it. I hope it won"t be necessary to take you away like agent Rimeyer?"
"It won"t be required," I said. "I had not enough time to become addicted. Did Rimeyer tell you anything?"
"But of course not," he said with vast sarcasm. "Why should he do that? He was ordered to find the drug, and he did, and he used it, and now he apparently considers his duty discharged. He became an addict himself, don"t you see. He is silent. He is loaded with this brew up to his ears, and it"s useless to talk to him! He raves that he has murdered you and constantly asks for his radio." Matia stopped short and gazed at the radios. "Strange," he said and looked at me. "However, I like orderliness. Oscar got here first, and he has certain deductions both about the goodies and the conduct of the operation. Let"s begin with him."
I looked at Oscar.
"About what operation?"
"The devil knows," said Matia.
"The raiding of the center. You haven"t located the center yet?"
The hunt is on, I thought, and said, "No, I didn"t. A center I haven"t latched on to. But --"
"All in good order, in proper order," said Matia severely and banged the table with the flat of his hand. "Oscar, you may begin, and as for you, Ivan, you listen attentively and make your deductions. If you are still capable, that is."
Oscar began. Obviously he was a good worker. He moved fast, energetically, and purposefully. True, Rimeyer had twisted him around his finger as well as he had me.
Nevertheless, Oscar had been able to grasp much in spite of it.
He understood that the sought-for "goodies" were known locally as "slug." Very rapidly he had grasped the connection between slug and Devon. He divined that neither the Fishers, nor the Perches, nor the Sorrowers had any relation to our problem. He had deduced with superb insight that in this town it was practically impossible to hide any secret. He had even been able to insinuate himself into the confidence of the Intels, and had established beyond any doubt that there were only two truly secret societies -- the Art Patrons and the Intels. Since the Art Patrons could be eliminated, that left only the Intels....
"It was not contrary to the conviction which I had formed," said Oscar, "that the only people with access to laboratories and capable of conducting scientific or quasi-scientific research were the students and professors in the university. It"s true that the factories in the city also have laboratories. There are only four of them, and I have investigated them all. These laboratories are stringently specialized and are loaded to the limit with ongoing work. As the factories work around the clock, there is no basis whatsoever to postulate that the industrial labs could become centers of slug manufacture. On the other hand, out of the seven university labs, two are obviously surrounded with an atmosphere of mystery. I was unable to determine what goes on in them, but I spotted three students, who, I believe, should know for sure...."
I listened to him intently, amazed at how much he had been able to accomplish here, but it was already all too clear to me where his main error lay. I could see he was following a false trail, and alongside of that, there grew within me a vague feeling of an even more significant error, of a most important error, the error in the underlying premises of the Council.
"I arrived at the visualization," he continued, "of a gangsterlike organization of the vertical type with rigorously separated functions in decentralized sections. The production section is involved in the manufacture and perfection of the slug.... I should inform you that slug, whatever it may be, is being perfected: I was able to establish that in the beginning.
Devon was not employed at all.... Next, the marketing section is concerned with expanding the slug distribution, while the strong-arm section terrorizes the population and interdicts all debate on that topic.... The intimidation of the people..."
Now I understood it all.
"Just a minute, Oscar," I said. "Can you guarantee that in the entire city there are only two secret organizations?"
"Yes," he said. "Only the Art Patrons and the Intels."
"Please continue, Oscar," said Matia with displeasure. "I would ask you not to interrupt, Ivan."
"Sorry," I said. Oscar continued to talk, but I was no longer listening. Something flared in my mind. The traditional initial model for all our undertakings, with its invariant axiom predicating the existence of a ramified organization of evildoers, had been shattered into dust, and I was only amazed that I had failed heretofore to recognize its inane complexity in the context of this simple-minded country. There were no secret shops guarded by gloomy persons with bra.s.s knuckles, there were no wary, unprincipled businessmen, there were no traveling salesmen with double-walled shirt collars stuffed with contraband, and it was quite for nothing that Oscar was drafting the elegant chart of squares and circles, connected by a confusion of lines, and inscribed with the words "center,"