Now Wait for Last Year (25 page)

'I understand,' Eric said.

'In Arizona, at POW Camp 29, there's a reeg major from the reegian intelligence service. Del Dal Il is his code name; you can contact him through that, since it's Terra's code not theirs. The camp authorities have got him studying insurance claims filed against the government in order to detect frauds, if you can believe that. So he's still busy at work piping data back to his superiors, even through our POW. It's he who'll be the link between Molinari and the reegs.'

'What do I do with him? Take him to Cheyenne?'

'To Tijuana. To TF&D's central offices. You buy him from the camp authorities; it's slave labor. You didn't know that, did you, that large Terran industrial constellations could acquire free labor from the POW camps. Well, when you show up at Camp 29 and tell them you're from TF&D and you want a clever reeg, they'll understand.'

'You learn something new every day of the week,' Eric said.

'But your main problem lies with Molinari. It's up to you to persuade him to visit Tijuana to confer with Deg Dal Il and hence establish the first link in the chain of circumstances that's going to get Terra pried loose from Lilistar and over to the reegs without everyone being killed in the process. I'll tell you why it'll be difficult. Molinari has a scheme. He's been involved in a personal struggle, man to man, against Freneksy; it's his masculinity that he feels is at stake. For him it's not abstract, it's immediate and physical. And you saw the virile Molinari strutting on the video tape. That's his secret weapon, his V-2. He's starting to throw in the healthy duplicates of himself from the rank of parallel worlds, and as he knows he's got quite a supply of them to draw on. His whole psychology, his point of orientation, is to dabble with death and yet somehow surmount it. Now's the time for him to demonstrate his way. In confrontation with Minister Freneksy – whom he fears – he can die a thousand times and still spring back. The deteriorating process, the encroachment of his psychosomatic illness process, will cease as soon as he throws the first healthy Molinari in. And when you get back to Cheyenne you'll just be in time to witness it; the video tapes go on all the TV networks that night. At prime viewing time.'

Eric said musingly, 'So he's as sick right now as it will be necessary for him ever to be.'

'And that's exceedingly sick, doctor.'

'Yes, doctor.' Eric eyed his 2056 self. 'We agree in our diagnoses.'

'Late tonight, by your time, not mine, Minister Freneksy will demand – and get – another face-to-face conference with Molinari. And the healthy, virile substitute will be the one there in that room ... while the sick one, our one, recovers in his upstairs private quarters, guarded by his Secret Service, watching the video tapes on TV and thinking grand thoughts to himself as to how easily he has found a way of evading Minister Freneksy and his burgeoning, excessive demands.'

'I assume the virile Molinari from the other Terra has involved himself willingly.'

'Delighted to. All of them are. All of them see the penultimate in life as a successful grudge-battle waged above and below the belt against Freneksy. Molinari is a politician and he lives for this – lives for it while at the same time it kills him. The healthy one, after his conference with Freneksy, will suffer his first attack of pyloric spasms; the attrition will start to eat away at him, too. And so on down the rank, until at last Freneksy is dead, as someday he has to be, and hopefully before Molinari.'

'Beating Molinari to it will take some doing,' Eric said.

'But this isn't morbid; this is straight out of the Middle Ages, the clash of armed knights. Molinari is Arthur with the spear wound in his side; guess who Freneksy is. And the interesting thing, to me, is that since Lilistar has no period of chivalry, Freneksy has no comprehension of this. He simply sees it in terms of a struggle for economic domination; who runs whose factories and can sequester whose labor force.'

'No romance,' Eric said. 'How. about the reegs? Will they understand the Mole? Have they a period of knighthood in their past?'

'With four arms and a chitinous shell,' his 2056 counterpart said, 'it would have been something to see one of them in action. I don't know, because neither you nor I nor any other Terran that I ever met bothered to learn as much about reeg civilization as we should have. You have the name of the reeg intelligence major?'

'Deg something.'

'Deg. Dal. Il. Think to yourself: the dog dallied and it made him ill.'

'Mary Reineke.'

'Christ,' Eric said.

'I nauseate you, don't I? Well, you nauseate me, too; you strike me as flabby and blubbery and your posture is terrible. No wonder you're stuck with a wife like Kathy; you got what you deserved. During the next year why don't you show some guts? Why don't you pull yourself together and go find another woman so by the time it gets to me, in 2056, things aren't quite so goddam fouled up? You owe it to me; I saved your life, got you away from Lilistar's police.' His 2056 self glowered at him.

'What woman do you suggest?' Eric said guardedly.

'You're out of your mind.'

'Listen; Mary and Molinari have a quarrel about a month from now, your time. You could exploit it. I didn't but that can be changed; you can set up a slightly different future, everything the same except for the marital situation. Divorce Kathy and marry Mary Reineke or someone – anyone.' There was desperation, all at once, in his counterpart's voice. 'My God, I see this ahead, this having to institutionalize her, and for the rest of her life – I don't want to do that; I want out.'

'With or without us—'

'I know. She'll wind up there anyhow. But do I have to be the one? Together you and I ought to be able to reinforce ourselves. It'll be hard; Kathy'll fight a divorce action like a crazed thing. But bring the action in Tijuana; Mexican divorce law is looser than in the States. Get a good lawyer. I've picked one; he's in Ensenada. Jesus Guadarala. Can you remember that? I couldn't quite make it there to start litigation through him, but dammit, you can.' He eyed Eric hopefully.

'I'll try,' Eric said presently.

'Now I have to let you out. The medication you took will start to work on you in a few minutes and I don't care to have you drop five miles to the surface of the planet.' The ship began to descend. 'I'll let you off in Salt Lake City; it's a big place, you won't be noticed. And when you're back in 2055 you can catch a cab to Arizona.'

'I don't have any 2055 money,' Eric remembered. 'Or do I?' He was confused; too much had happened. He groped for his wallet. 'I got into a panic after that attempt on my part to buy the antidote from Hazeltine with wartime—'

'Don't ruminate over the details. I know them already.'

They completed the flight to Earth's surface in silence, each inhibited by his gloomy contempt for the other. It was, Eric decided, a graphic demonstration of the necessity for having respect for one's own self. And this gave him for the first time an insight into his fatalistic quasi-suicidal inclinations ... they were undoubtedly based on this same flaw. To survive he would have to learn to view himself and his accomplishments differently.

'You're wasting your time,' his counterpart said after the ship had landed in an irrigated pasture outside Salt Lake City. 'You're not going to change.'

As he stepped from the ship onto the spongy, moist alfalfa Eric said, 'According to you, anyhow. But we'll see.'

Without a further word his 2056 self slammed the hatch and took off; the ship shot up into the sky and disappeared.

Eric trudged toward the nearby paved road.

In Salt Lake City proper he snared a cab. It did not ask for his travel permit and he realized that imperceptibly, probably as he was walking toward town along the road, he had slipped a year back and was now in his own time. Nevertheless he decided to make sure.

'Give me the date,' he instructed the cab.

'June 15, sir,' the cab said as it buzzed south over green mountains and valleys.

'What year?'

The cab said, 'Are you Mr Rip Van Winkle or something, sir? It's 2055. And I hope it satisfies you.' The cab was old and somewhat seedy, needing repairs; its irritability showed in the activity of its autonomic circuitry.

'It does,' Eric said.

By use of the cab's vidphone he learned from the information center at Phoenix the location of the prisoner of war camp; this was not classified information. Presently the cab flew above flat desert lands and monotonous hills of rock and empty basins which in former times had been lakes. And then, in the midst of this barren, unexploited wilderness, the cab set him down; he had arrived at POW Camp 29, and it was just where he had expected it to be: in the most uninhabitable spot conceivable. To him the great desert lands of Nevada and Arizona were like a dismal alien planet, not Earth at all; frankly he preferred the parts of Mars which he had seen near Wash-35.

'Lots of luck, sir,' the cab said. He paid it and it zoomed noisily off, its plate shuddering.

'Thanks,' Eric said. He walked to the guardhouse at the entrance of the camp; to the soldier within he explained that he had been sent by Tijuana Fur & Dye to buy a POW for clerical work that had to be processed with absolute accuracy.

'Just one?' the soldier asked him as he led the way to his superior's office. 'We can give you fifty reegs. Two hundred. We're overrun with them right now. From that last battle we nailed six of their transports.'

In the colonel's office he filled out forms, signed for TF&D. Payment, he explained, would be forwarded through normal channels at the end of the month in response to presentation of a formal statement.

'Take your pick,' the colonel, bored to death, told him. 'Look around; you can have any one of them – they're all alike, though.'

Eric said, 'I see a reeg filing forms there in the next room. He – or it – looks efficient.'

'That's old Deg,' the colonel said. 'Deg's a fixture around here; captured in the first week of the war. Even built himself one of those translating boxes so he could be of more use to us. I wish all of them were as co-operative as Deg.'

'I'll take him,' Eric said.

'We'll have to affix a considerable additional fee,' the colonel said slyly. 'Because of the amount of training he's received here from us.' He made a note of that. 'And a service charge for the translating box.'

'You said he built it.'

'We supplied the materials.'

At last they agreed on a price and then Eric walked into the next room and up to the reeg, busy with his four multi-jointed arms at the insurance claim files. 'You belong to TF&D now,' Eric informed him. 'So come along.' To the colonel he said, 'Will he try to escape or fight me?'

'They never do,' the colonel said, lighting a cigar and leaning against the wall of his office with dreary ennui. They don't have the mentality for it; they're just bugs. Huge, shiny bugs.'

Presently he was back outside in the hot sun, waiting for a cab from nearby Phoenix. If I had known it would take such a short time, he said to himself, I would have held onto the cranky, elderly cab. He felt uncomfortable, standing with the silent reeg; this was, after all, their formal enemy. Reegs battled with and killed Terrans, and this one had been and still was a commissioned officer.

Like a fly the reeg cleaned himself, combing his wings, his sensory antennae, then his lower set of extremities. He carried his translating box under one brittle arm, never letting go of it.

'Are you glad to get out of that PO W camp?' Eric asked.

Words, pale in the strong desert sun, appeared on the box.

NOT PARTICULARLY

The cab arrived and Eric, along with Deg Dal Il, entered it. Soon they were in the air, turning in the direction of Tijuana.

Eric said, 'I know you're an officer in reeg intelligence. That's why I bought you.'

The box remained blank. But the reeg trembled. His opaque, compound eyes became even more filmed-over and the false ones gaped emptily.

'I'll take the risk of telling you this right now,' Eric said. 'I'm an intermediary acting to bring you together with someone high in UN circles. It's in your interest, yours and your people's, to co-operate with me. You will be dropped off at my firm—'

The box came to life.

RETURN ME TO CAMP

'All right,' Eric said. 'I know you have to act out the pose you've maintained for so long now. Even though it's no longer necessary I'm aware that you're still in contact with your government. That's why you can be useful to the personage you're to meet in Tijuana. Through you he can establish relations with your government—' He hesitated, then plunged in. 'Without the 'Starmen knowing.' That was saying a lot; he had mightily presumed on what, for his part, was a very small role.

After a pause the box relit.

I HAVE ALWAYS CO-OPERATED

'But this is different.' And he dropped the subject then and there. For the remainder of the trip he did not try to communicate with Deg Dal Il; it was obviously the wrong thing to do. Deg Dal Il knew it and he knew it. The rest was up to someone else, not him.

When they reached Tijuana Eric rented a room at the Caesar Hotel on the main street of town; the desk clerk, a Mexican, stared at the reeg but asked no questions. This was Tijuana, Eric reflected as he and Deg ascended to their floor. Everyone minded his own business; it had always been like this here, and even now, in wartime, Tijuana remained unchanged. You could obtain anything, do anything, you wanted. As long as it was not done blatantly on the public street. And most especially if it was consummated at night. Because at night Tijuana became a transformed city in which everything, even unimaginable things, was possible. Once it had been abortions, narcotics, women, and gambling. Now it was concourse with the enemy.

In the hotel room he handed over a copy of the ownership papers to Deg Dal Il; in case trouble arose during his absence the papers would prove that the reeg had not escaped from a POW camp, nor was he a spy. In addition Eric provided him with money. And instructed him to contact TF&D if any difficulty – especially the appearance of 'Star intelligence agents – supervened. The reeg was to remain in the hotel room at all times, eating his meals there, watching the TV if he wished, admitting no one if he could avoid it, and if somehow 'Star agents got through to him, he was to reveal nothing. Even if this brought about his death.