“No. Low profile. Jennifer, Borchardt, local American leaders. Jennifer’s best. Pretty. Dramatic. Exciting.”
He made no comment. Liese didn’t appear jealous of Jennifer Caw, but you never knew. He walked on, still talking to the two young guards. “Who’s in security control?”
“Abner’s watching the screens, sir,” Timothy Holm called after him. “Lieutenant Bellman just left to pick up his Marines. Some ruckus in section twenty-two.”
“Serious?”
“No, sir. People just worked up “The rest of Holm’s reply was lost as they turned a comer. No guard stood at the security control-room door, an oversight somebody would have paid for if they weren’t so shorthanded Abner Hand wasn’t inside, either, probably gone with Bellman to see the fun.
Lessing marched straight to the bank of TV screens and found the one covering section twenty-two. It showed two helmeted Marines impassively listening to an angry, glittery-eyed young man in jeans and a cowboy hat The youth was lecturing everybody within earshot on the perils of buying foreign imports. He seemed to have it in for the Japanese.
Lessing watched for a moment. The sight bothered him; he could not have explained why. “Look at that guy!” he began. “Single-minded, fanatic, crazy bastard!” Each word stirred up others, like waking sleeping bats in a cave.
Liese stared at him, puzzled.
“Fanatics! Without them, the world’d be a happier place!”
Liese cocked her head at him and smiled uncertainly. She made a slow circuit of the desks, typewriters, telecom machines, and locked equipment racks. Finally she came back to dump her coat onto a desk and perch upon a tatty, black-cushioned typist’s chair. She smoothed her skirt over one silk-sheathed knee.
Her silence goaded him to say more. “It’s true!” he expostulated. “Everybody’s got an answer… the answer! Do like I say, and the world is roses! I’ve got the handle on politics, history, God, life, death, and the pursuit of happiness! I’m the one! Whether I’m President of the United States, the Pope of Rome, Herman Mulder, or Ignatz Schmerz… it’s me who’s right, and all you other jizmos are gubbing foozy!” He spat out the Banger obscenities as though they tasted bad.
“Ignatz Schmerz?” Liese raised a quizzical eyebrow.
“Yeah, the comic-strip character. You know, the little Yiddish mouse.”
“Oh we… the Party… everybody… wants solutions to problems.” She shut her eyes and tugged at a milky opal earring, unsure of what was bothering him. “Find what works and tell people. Get them to join. To help. That wrong?”
“No, but it’s too easy. Too simple. Too… too black and white. Every issue’s got at least two sides. Most have more. Some have sides that go on forever.” He knew how hard it was for her to speak, but he found he couldn’t quit baiting her.
Liese gulped in air and stared down at the cluttered desk. She swallowed and tried again. “Better one-sided than too-many-sided. Democracy… everybody’s opinion equal… sounds fine. But too many real inequalities. Everybody is not equal. Too much talk, nothing done. We don’t have time; Pacov and Starak have ended time. Tomorrow too late. We fix things now, or else we… the human race… dies. Over. Finished.”
She pointed at a wall rack bristling with riot-control tear-gas guns. The Born-Agains’ revival meetings must’ve been real doozers! “You… Alan. The soldier. Pull the trigger. Bang. Problem solved. Just your side left.”
“That’s not fair! I… people like me… soldiers, the police… are the last resort, the enforcers, the muscle. We don’t make policies. You know what I mean: it’s this talk of our movement, and our Party, and our principles, and our goals that bothers me! You can’t solve human complexities with a cookbook, whether it’s the Communist Manifesto, the Bible, the Qur’an, the Constitution, or Mein Kampf.”
“Books give ideas, philosophies, plans, platforms. Show how to act, to solve, to build.”
“Or how to tear down, to hate, to kill, to destroy!” He was jabbing at her hard. Maybe it was Goddard who was the real cause of the bubbling frustration he felt within himself.
“Goals the same: human happiness, a better world. Methods differ.”
“Even Mein Kampft?” Why couldn’t he stop needling her?
“Especially Mein Kampf. World view: goals, not rules. Not a cookbook, not a manifesto. Way to a happy and prosperous Germany… Europe… the world. A new order. Fix the Weimar depression. Solve awful inflation. Restore Germany after humiliating Treaty of Versailles. End old, decaying society. Make social reforms. Stop Bolsheviks from taking over Western society. Clean up. Build. Mein Kampf says these things.”
“Most people see Hitler’s book only as a hymn of hatred against the Jews.”
She curled her lower lip. “They haven’t read it… only listened to what Jews say about it. Jews only one problem… maybe ten, fifteen pages out of whole book. Emigrate abroad. Leave German society to develop as majority of Germans wanted. No more problem.”
He changed his tack. “Authority, that’s what people want from their books, their holy scriptures: authority they can piously quote to push their own brand of horse apples!”
Her hands were trembling. She clenched them in her lap, crumpling the pleats of her blue dress. He was intimidating her, terrifying her, hurting her. Damn it, why had he started this stupid tirade? He had promised himself never to discuss her peculiar politics with her. Yet, with dull amazement, he heard himself continuing, “How can you be sure you’ve got the truth… that it’s your key that opens the Pearly Gates?”
“Do best we can.” She raised her eyes, shook out her blonde hair, and seemed to pluck eloquence out of the stuffy, muggy, antiseptic-smelling air. “We… the Western ethnos… are the creators, the inventors, the doers. We lead the way! That’s our destiny, our duty, our right. We judge because we are best fitted to judge. We, Alan, the people who made all this…” she made a circular gesture “… the same people who will make the future, too, unless we fritter it away, surrender it to some alien ethnos, or just plain kill the planet!” She glared at him defiantly.
He fought down another smart retort. After a long moment he won the struggle. In a brittle, cheerful tone, he said, “Hey, I forgot. I have to check in with Eighty-Five. That’s why I came over here.”
He let the tension ebb away by unlocking the wall safe and taking out the scrambler modem Wrench had put there. It was a green, metal box about thirty centimeters square and twenty high, with a receptacle for a telephone at one end and a headset of its own at the other. He set one of the office telephones in place, flipped on the room-speaker switch so Liese could hear too, dialed the number, and waited.
Eighty-Five’s sultry voice said, “Four, nine, twenty-seven.”
Today was Sunday. That meant he had to add two to the first number, twelve to the second, and forty -one to the third. There was no mathematical logic to the code; Wrench had picked the additives by flipping through the pages of a book. New additives — or subtrac-lives, multipliers, etc. — had to be memorized at irregular intervals. Charles Hanson Wren was a devious bastard!
Lessing replied, “Six, twenty-one, sixty-eight.”
“Acknowledge.” He heard the scrambler click. “Hello, Mister Lessing.” He had corrected Eighty-Five’s misunderstanding of his name, but it still perversely insisted on calling him “Mister.”
“Scramble to nineteen and file under Oubliette.” That would keep Outram’s people from listening in and also erase the conversation (but not the data) from Eighty-Five’s memory as soon as he hung up. More of Wrench’s cleverness.