Now Wait for Last Year (11 page)

And then she thought, I'll tell Eric. He's a doctor; he'll be able to help me. I'll go to Cheyenne for that, not for them.

'Will you do me one favor?' Jonas Ackerman was saying to her. 'For heaven's sake, Kathy; listen.' Again he squeezed her arm.

'I'm listening,' she said with irritation. 'And let go.' She tugged her arm away, stepped back from him, feeling rage. 'Don't treat me like this; I can't stand it.' She glared at him.

Carefully, in a deliberately calm voice, Jonas said to her, 'We'll let you follow your husband to Cheyenne, Kathy, if you promise to wait twenty-four hours before you go.'

'Why?' She could not understand.

'So that this initial period of shock at the separation has a chance to wear off,' Jonas said. 'I'm hoping that in twenty-four hours you'll see your way clear to changing your mind. And meanwhile—' He glanced at Virgil; the old man nodded in agreement. 'I'll stay with you,' Jonas said to her. 'All day and night, if necessary.'

Appalled, she said, 'Like hell you will. I won't—'

'I know there's something wrong with you,' Jonas said quietly. 'It's obvious. I don't think you should be left alone. I'm making it my responsibility to see that nothing happens to you.' He added in a low voice, 'You're too valuable to us to do something terminal.' Again, and this time with harsh firmness, he took hold of her arm. 'Come on; let's go downstairs to your office – it'll do you good to get wrapped up in your work, and I'll just sit quietly, not interfering. After work tonight, I'll fly you up to L.A. to Spingler's for dinner; I know you like sea food.' He guided her toward the door of the office.

She thought, I'll get away. You're not that smart, Jonas; sometime today, perhaps tonight. I'll lose you and go to Cheyenne. Or rather, she thought with nausea and an upsurge of her former terror, I'll lose you, dump you, slip away from you in the labyrinth that's the night city of Tijuana, where all kinds of things, some of them terrible, some of them wonderful and full of beauty, happen. Tijuana will be too much for you. It's almost too much for me. And I know it fairly well; I've spent so much of my time, my life, in Tijuana at night.

And look how it's worked out, she thought bitterly. I wanted to find something pure and mystical in life and instead I wound up spliced to people who hate us, who dominate our race. Our ally, she thought. We ought to be fighting them; it's clear to me now. If I ever get to see Molinari alone at Cheyenne – and maybe I will – I'll tell him that, tell him we have the wrong ally and the wrong enemy.

'Mr Ackerman,' she said, turning urgently to Virgil. 'I have to go to Cheyenne to tell the Secretary something. It affects all of us; it has to do with the war effort.'

Virgil Ackerman said drily. Tell me and I'll tell him. There's a better chance that way; you'll never get to see him ....ot unless you're one of his bambinos or cousins.'

'That's it,' she said. 'I'm his child.' It made perfect sense to her; all of them on Terra were children of the UN Secretary. And they had been expecting their father to lead them to safety. But somehow he had failed.

Unresistingly, she followed Jonas Ackerman. 'I know what you're doing,' she said to him. 'You're using this opportunity, with Eric away and me in this terrible state, to take sexual advantage of me.'

Jonas laughed. 'Well, we'll see.' His laugh, to her, did not sound guilty; it sounded sleekly confident.

'Yes,' she agreed, thinking of the 'Star policeman Corning. 'We'll see how lucky you are in making out with me. Personally I wouldn't bet on it.' She did not bother to remove his big, determined hand from her shoulder; it would only reappear.

'You know,' Jonas said, 'if I didn't know better, I'd say from the way you've been acting that you're on a substance which we call JJ-180.' He added, 'But you couldn't be because there's no way you could get hold of it.'

Staring at him Kathy said, 'What—' She couldn't go on.

'It's a drug,' Jonas said. 'Developed by one of our subsidiaries.'

'It wasn't developed by the reegs?'

'Frohedadrine, or JJ-180, was developed in Detroit, last year, by a firm which TF&D controls called Hazeltine Corporation. It's a major weapon in the war – or will be when it's in production, which will be later this year.'

'Because,' she said numbly, 'it's so addictive?'

'Hell no. Many drugs are addictive, starting with the opium derivatives. Because of the nature of the hallunications it causes its users.' He explained, 'It's hallucinogenic, as LSD was,'

Kathy said. Tell me about the hallucinations.'

'I can't; that's classified military information.'

Laughing sharply, she said, 'Oh God – so the only way I could find out would be to take it.'

'How can you take it? It's not available, and even when it's in production we wouldn't conceivably under any circumstance allow our own population to use it – the stuff's toxic!' He glared at her. 'Don't even talk about using it; every test animal to which it was administered died. Forget I even mentioned it; I thought Eric had probably told you about it – I shouldn't have brought it up, but you have been acting strangely; it made me think of JJ-180 because I'm so scared – we all are – that someone, some way, will get hold of it on the domestic market, one of our own people.'

Kathy said, 'Let's hope that never happens.' She felt like laughing, still; the whole thing was insane. The 'Starmen had obtained the drug on Terra but pretended to have gotten it from the reegs. Poor Terra, she thought. We can't even get credit for this, for this noxious, destructive chemical which destroys the mind – as Jonas says, a potent weapon of war. And who's using it? Our ally. And on whom? On us. The irony is complete; it forms a circle. Certainly cosmic justice that a Terran should be one of the first to become addicted to it.

Frowning, Jonas said, 'You asked if JJ-180 hadn't been developed by the enemy; that suggests you have heard of it. So Eric did mention it to you. It's all right; only knowledge of its properties is classified, not its existence. The reegs know we've been experimenting with drug warfare for decades, back into the twentieth century. It's one of Terra's specialties.' He chuckled.

'Maybe we'll win after all,' Kathy said. That ought to cheer up Gino Molinari. Perhaps he'll be able to stay in office with the assistance of a few new miracle weapons. Is he counting on this? Does he know?'

'Of course Molinari knows; Hazeltine has kept him informed at every stage of development. But for chrissake don't go and—'

'I won't get you in trouble,' Kathy said. I think I'll get you addicted to JJ-180, she said to herself. That's what you deserve; everyone who helped develop it, who knows about it. Stay with me night and day during the next twenty-four hours, she thought. Eat with me, go to bed with me, and by the time it's over you'll be earmarked for death just as I am. And then, she thought, maybe I can get Eric on it. Him most of all.

I'll carry it with me to Cheyenne, Kathy decided. Infect everyone there, the Mole and his entourage. And for a good reason.

They'll be forced to discover a method of breaking the addiction. Their own lives will depend on it, not just mine. And for me alone it wouldn't be worth seeking; even Eric wouldn't have tried, and certainly Corning and his people don't care – no one cares about me, when you get right down to it.

This was probably not at all what Corning and those above him had in mind in sending her to Cheyenne. But that was just too bad; this was what she intended to do.

'It'll go in their water supply,' Jonas was explaining. The reegs – they maintain huge central water sources, as Mars did once. JJ-180 will be introduced there, carried throughout their planet. I admit it sounds desperate on our part, a – you know. A tour de force. But actually it's very rational and reasonable.'

'I'm not criticizing it at all,' Kathy said. 'In fact I think the idea sounds brilliant.'

The elevator arrived; they entered and descended.

'Look what the ordinary citizen of Terra doesn't know,' Kathy said. 'He goes merrily on about his daily life ... it would never occur to him that his government has developed a drug that in one exposure turns you into a – how would you put it, Jonas? Something less than a robant? Certainly less than human. I wonder where you would place it on the evolutionary ladder.'

'I never told you that one exposure to JJ-180 meant addiction,' Jonas said. 'Eric must have told you that.'

'With the lizards of the Jurassic Period,' Kathy decided. Things with tiny brains and immense tails. Creatures with almost no mentalities; just reflex machines acting out the externals of living, going through the motions but not actually there. Right?'

'Well,' Jonas said, 'it's reegs that'll be receiving the drug; I wouldn't waste any tears on reegs.'

'I'd waste a tear on anything,' Kathy said, 'that got hooked by JJ-180. I hate it; I wish—' She broke off. 'Don't mind me; I'm just upset by Eric's leaving. I'll be okay.' To herself she wondered when she would have an opportunity to look for Corning. And get more capsules of the drug. It was clear now that she had become an addict. By now she had to face it.

She felt only resignation.

At noon, in the neat, modern, but excessively small conapt provided him by the mystifying working of the higher governmental authorities at Cheyenne, Dr Eric Sweetscent finished reading the medical charts of his new patient – referred to throughout the enormous body of writings merely as 'Mr Brown.' Mr Brown, he reflected as he locked the folio back in its unbreakable plastic box, is a sick man, but his sickness simply could not be diagnosed, at least in the customary way. Because – and this was the odd thing, for which Teagarden had not prepared him – the patient had shown, over the years, symptoms of major organic diseases, symptoms not associated with psychosomatic disorders. There had been at one time a malignancy in the liver which had metastasized – and yet Mr Brown had not died. And the malignancy had gone away. Anyhow it was not there now; tests during the last two years proved that. An exploratory operation had even been performed, finally, and Mr Brown's liver had not even shown the degeneracy anticipated in a man of his age.

It was the liver of a youth of nineteen or twenty.

And this oddity had been observed in other organs subjected to acute examination. But Mr Brown was failing in his over-all powers; palpably, he was in the process of declining – he looked considerably older than his chronological age, and the aura around him was one of ill health. It was as if his body on a purely physiological level were growing younger while his essence, his total psychobiological Gestalt, aged naturally – in fact failed conspicuously.

Whatever physiological force it was that maintained him organically, Mr Brown was not receiving any benefit therefrom, except of course that he had not died of the malignant tumor in his liver or the earlier one detected in his spleen, or the surely fatal cancer of the prostate gland which had gone undetected during his third decade.

Mr Brown was alive – but just barely so. Throughout, his body was overworked and in a state of deterioration; take his circulatory system, for instance. Brown's blood pressure was 220 – despite vasodilators administered orally; already his eyesight had been materially affected. And yet, Eric reflected, Brown would undoubtedly surmount this as he had every other ailment; one day it would simply go away, even though he refused to stay on the prescribed diet and did not respond to reserpine.

The outstanding fact was simply that Mr Brown had had at one time or another almost every serious disease known, from infarcts in his lungs to hepatitis. He was a perambulating symposium of illness, never well, never functioning properly; at any given time some vital portion of his body was affected. And then—

In some fashion he had cured himself. And without the use of artiforgs. It was as if Brown practiced some folk-style, homeopathic medicine, some idiotic, herbal remedy which he had never disclosed to his attending physicians. And probably never would.

Brown needed to be sick. His hypochondriasis was real; he did not merely have hysterical symptoms – he had true diseases which usually turned the patient into a terminal case. If this was hysteria, a variety of a purely psychological complaint, Eric had never run across it before. And yet, despite this, Eric had the intuition that all these illnesses had existed for a reason; they were engendered from the complexity, the undisclosed depths, of Mr Brown's psyche.

Three times in his life Mr Brown had given himself cancer. But how? And – why?

Perhaps it arose from his death wish. And each time, Mr Brown halted at the brink, pulled himself back. He needed to be sick – but not to die. The suicide wish, then, was spurious.

This was important to know. If it was so, Mr Brown would fight to survive – would fight against the very thing he had hired Eric to bring about.

Therefore Mr Brown would be an exceedingly difficult patient. To say the least. And all this – beyond doubt – functioned at an unconscious level; Mr Brown was certainly unaware of his twin, opposing drives.

The door chimes of the conapt sounded. He went to answer – and found himself facing an official-looking individual in a natty business suit. Producing identification, the man explained, 'Secret Service, Dr Sweetscent. Secretary Molinari needs you; he's in a good deal of pain so we'd better hurry.'

'Of course.' Eric dashed to the closet for his coat; a moment later he and the Secret Service man were hiking toward the parked wheel. 'More abdominal pains?' Eric asked.

'Now the pains seem to have shifted over to his left side,' the Secret Service man said as he piloted the wheel out into traffic. 'In the region of his heart.'

'He didn't describe them as feeling as if a great hand was pressing down on him, did he?'

'No, he's just lying there groaning. And asking for you.' The Secret Service man seemed to take it matter-of-factly; evidently for him this was old and familiar. The Secretary, after all, was always sick.