The woman spat her next words at the bald man standing by the window. "Why couldn't you just leave Victor alone? That's all he ever wanted!"
"We couldn't do that, Mrs. Foster." There was real anguish in Lippitt's voice, and it surprised me. "Others knew about him. If I hadn't gone after him, he would have been found by someone else. Apparently, that's what happened. God knows where he's been and what he's been doing for the past five years."
Lippitt seemed sincere. If he was telling the truth, it meant the Americans didn't have Rafferty after all.
Elizabeth Foster wheeled around and spoke to me. "Victor could read minds!" she said in a clear, defiant voice. It was clear that she was punishing Lippitt. Her eyes were smoky now, bursting with memories that had been bottled up and festering for five years. "He could read minds just as easily as the people in this room can read books and newspapers. It destroyed him."
Lippitt shrugged in resignation, clasped his hands behind his back, and stared at the floor.
"My God," Mike Foster whispered. "But I still don't under …" His voice trailed off.
"You don't have to talk about it, Mrs. Foster," Tal said soothingly.
She shook her head defiantly. "I want to talk about it," she said. "I thought it was all over. I thought Victor was dead and it would all be forgotten… by everyone except me. When I… saw that picture of the museum, I knew he was alive. I just knew." She looked at Lippitt with hatred in her eyes. "He was supposed to be dead! You said he was dead!"
"I honestly thought he was, Mrs. Foster!" Lippitt said. "I'm still not convinced he's alive; I don't understand how he can be."
"It was the accident," Elizabeth Foster said, her voice steadily gaining strength, a small tic in her left eye the only evidence of the tremendous emotional strain she was under. "A part of Victor's brain was severely damaged. In most people that would mean death, or life as a vegetable. But with Victor… something else happened. Arthur couldn't explain it. The accident didn't debilitate Victor mentally; it just left him with this terrible, growing power, this terrible … energy."
She started to cry, stifled it. She waved Mike Foster away when he started to move toward her. "God knows he didn't want the gift," she continued. "Victor was not an easy man to understand. His work was his whole life, but I loved him and tried to understand." Now she paused, reached out, and squeezed her husband's hand. He moved closer and put his arm around her shoulders. "I suppose I was never really happy until I married Mike," she said, looking into her husband's eyes. "But I was terribly proud of Victor, and if our marriage took second place to his buildings, I didn't complain. The point is that all Victor ever wanted to do was design his buildings. After the accident"-she gave Lippitt another hate-filled glance-"that became impossible."
She heaved a deep, trembling sigh. She couldn't hold back her feeling; it escaped from her in sighs and shudders like air hissing from a balloon. "I could see the pain in his face," she continued quietly. "Apparently there was a great deal of pain associated with the things he could do. He thought he was going mad. He couldn't stand to be physically close to people; that was when it hurt the most. I didn't understand. I thought he was repelled by me. It wasn't that at all; he just couldn't stand to be… close. When he finally did tell me, it was … too late.
"The pain kept getting worse as his powers increased. He didn't know what to do about it, didn't know whom he could go to." She smiled wryly; it was an ugly, pained grimace. "He knew instinctively that he shouldn't tell anyone, but he finally went to Arthur when he couldn't stand it any longer. Suddenly, everyone seemed to know. I don't understand how Arthur could have betrayed Victor like that."
"I'm not sure he did," I said. "My guess is that he called in a colleague without telling your husband. That person's name is Mary Llewellyn, and she was the source of the first leak." I watched Lippitt stiffen slightly and I knew I was right. "I think Dr. Llewellyn felt it was her patriotic duty to inform someone that there was a man who would make a formidable agent-really an incredible intelligence-gathering machine. Dr. Llewellyn saw the implications from the beginning: Give Rafferty a change of appearance, send him into the diplomatic corps; he goes to a Washington cocktail party, chats with some visiting Russian general, and walks out with more strategic military information than a team of C.I.A. agents could gather in a year. The Ultimate Weapon. The only problem was that there was only one of him, and he couldn't be duplicated."
Elizabeth Foster nodded her head in agreement. "Victor once gave me a demonstration," she said thickly. "He asked me to think of a series of numbers. I did and he… rattled them off as soon as they popped into my head. Then he started on my other thoughts. He wouldn't stop; he kept on and on, telling me everything that I was thinking! You can't imagine how that feels! I had to scream to make him stop. I… oh, God, I called him a monster."
Mary Llewellyn, I recalled, had called him the same thing. She had thought it perfectly reasonable that this monster, Victor Rafferty, give himself up to service in the government for the rest of his life. I was beginning to understand the dimensions and horror of Victor Rafferty's situation: A builder, an architect, Victor Rafferty had suddenly, through a quirk of nature, found himself alone, trapped in a lonely city of the mind, with no one to understand, much less keep him company. He was alone, listening to the baying in the darkness beyond the city's outermost limits.
"I… I hurt him so much," Mrs. Foster continued. "It crushed him when I said that; I'll never forget the look on his face. That was precisely what he'd been so afraid of: He didn't want people to think of him as a… freak."
Or a weapon, I thought.
"Victor never understood," she said, slowly turning to look at all of us. "He never could understand why other people couldn't appreciate what things he might be able to do in medicine, psychiatry… even criminal law." She started to laugh and it came out a wracking sob. "You wouldn't have to ask a person where it hurt; Victor would know. He'd have been able to diagnose symptoms that patients might not have been able to fully articulate. In trials, he would know who was guilty, and-more important- who wasn't. He believed scientists could study him in a laboratory and learn more about mankind; maybe, through him, others could have learned how to do the things he did. But of course, they wouldn't let him do that kind of work."
Lippitt winced, as if he could feel the woman's pointing finger jabbing into him. "It couldn't be helped, Mrs. Foster," Lippitt said softly. "When Dr. Llewellyn contacted us, she used lines of communication that are routinely monitored by foreign agents. They found out about Victor Rafferty virtually the same time as we did. It became a race against time. We wanted your husband to work for us, yes; in fact, it was imperative that he do so. A less free society, if they'd caught him, would have been able to force him to work for them. We couldn't allow that."
I glanced at Tal, who appeared to be deep in thought.
He was sitting in a straight-backed chair, staring at the floor and rolling a pencil between his palms.
"One morning, Mr. Lippitt came to our door," the woman continued in an icy voice. "He wanted to talk to Victor. Victor made me leave, but I know what they talked about. Mr. Lippitt gave Victor an ultimatum: Victor would have to work for the United States Government, and we would have to be relocated. Both Victor and I would have to undergo plastic surgery. No one-not family or friends- would ever see us again. We would be required to live like virtual prisoners for the rest of our lives while Victor did … whatever was expected of him."