Well, Lars thought, so that explains Lilo's android sketches.
General Nitz, who had been sitting silently across from them, said, "The person who operates this maze—if I understand this right, he assumes an emotional identity with that thing." He pointed at the tiny inhabitant, now inert because the switch was off. "That creature, there. What is that creature?" He peered intently, revealing for the first time to Lars that he was slightly nearsighted. "Looks like a bear. Or a Venusian wub; you know, those roly-poly animals that the kids love... there's a phenotypal enclave of them here at the Washington zoo. God, the kids never get tired of watching that colony of wubs."
Lars said, "That's because the Venusian wub possesses a limited telepathic faculty."
"That's so," General Nitz agreed. "As does the Terran porpoise, as they finally found out; it's not unique. Incidentally, that was why people keep feeling the porpoise was intelligent. Without knowing why. It was—"
Lars moved the switch to on, and in the maze the roly-poly wub-like, bear-like furry, loveable creature began to move. "Look at it go," Lars said, half to himself.
Pete chuckled as the roly-poly creature bounced rubber-ballwise from a barrier which unexpectedly interceded itself in its path.
"Funny," Lars said.
"What's the matter?" Pete asked him, puzzled at his tone, realizing that something was wrong.
Lars said, "Hell, it's amusing. Look at it struggle to get out. Now look at this." Studying the brochure, he ran his hands along both sides of the frame of the maze until, he located the studs. "The control on the left increases the difficulty of the maze. And the perplexity, therefore, of its victim. The control on the right decreases—"
"I made it," Pete pointed out, "I know that."
"Lars," General Nitz said, "you're a sensitive man. That's why we call you 'difficult.' And that's what made you a weapons fashion medium."
"A prima donna," Lars said. He did not take his eyes from the wub-like, bear-like, roly-poly victim within the altering barriers that constituted the utterly defeating configuration of the maze.
Lars said, "Pete. Isn't there a telepathic element built into this toy? With the effect of hooking the operator?"
"Yeah, to a certain extent. It's a low-output circuit. All it creates is a mild sense of identification between the child who's operating the maze with the creature trapped." To General Nitz he explained, "See, the psychiatric theory is that this toy teaches the child to care about other living organisms. It fosters the empathic tendencies inherent in him; he wants to help the creature, and that stud on the right permits him to do so."
"However," Lars said, "there is the other stud. On the left."
"Well," Pete said condescendingly, "that's technically necessary because if you just had a decrease-factor the creature would get right out. The game would be over."
"So toward the end," Lars said, "to keep the game going, you stop pressing the decrease stud and activate the increase, and the maze-circuitry responds by stepping up the difficulty which the trapped creature faces. So, instead of fostering sympathetic tendencies in the child, it could foster sadistic tendencies."
"No!" Pete said instantly.
"Why not?" Lars said.
"Because of the telepathic empathy-circuit. Don't you get it, you nut? The kid running the maze identifies with the victim. He's it. It's him in the maze; that's what empathy means—you know that. Hell, the kid would no more make it tough for that little critter than he'd—stab himself."
"I wonder," Lars said, "what would happen if the telepathic empathy-circuit's output were stepped up."
Pete said, "The kid would be hooked deeper. The distinction, on an emotional level, between himself and the victim there in that maze—" He paused, licked his lip.
"And suppose," Lars continued, "the controls were also altered, so that both studs tended, but in a diffuse manner, only to augment the difficulty which the maze-victim is experiencing. Could that be done, technically-speaking?"
After a while Pete said, "Sure."
"And run off autofac-wise? In high-production quantity?"
"Why not?"
Lars said, "This roly-poly Venusian wub creature. It's non-Terran, an organism to us. And yet because of the telepathic faculty it possesses it creates an empathic relationship with us. Would such a circuit, as represented here in this toy, tend to affect any highly-evolved sentient life form the same way?"
"It's possible." Pete nodded. "Why not? Any life form that was intelligent enough to receive the emanations would be affected."
"Even a chitinous semi-reflex machine life form?" Lars said. "Evolved from exoskeleton pregenitors? Not mammals? Not warm-blooded?"
Pete stared at General Nitz. "He wants to step up the output," he said excitedly, stammering in anger, "and rewire the manual controls so that the operator is hooked deep enough not to break away when he wants to, and can't ease the severity of the barriers inhibiting the goddam maze-victim—and the result—"
"It could induce," Lars said, "a rapid, thorough mental disintegration."
"And you want Lanferman Associates to reconstruct this thing and run it off in quantity on our auto-fac system. And distribute it to them." Pete jerked his thumb upward. "Okay. But we can't distribute it to the aliens from Sirius or whatever they are; that's beyond our control."
General Nitz said, "But we can. There is one way. Quantities of these can be available in population centers that the aliens acquire. So when they get us they get these, too."
"Yeah," Pete agreed.
General Nitz said to him, "Get on it! Get building."
Glumly, Pete stared at the floor, his jaw working. "It's reaching them where they have a decent streak. This—" he gestured furiously at the maze-toy on the table—"wouldn't work on them otherwise. Whoever dreamed this up is getting at living creatures through their good side. And that's what I don't like."
Reading the brochure which had accompanied the maze-toy, General Nitz said, " 'This toy is psychologically sophisticated, in that it teaches the child to love and respect, to cherish, other living creatures, not for what they can do for him, but for themselves.' " He folded up the brochure, tossed it back to Lars, asked Pete, "by when?"
"Twelve, thirteen days."
"Make it eight."
"Okay. Eight." Pete reflected, licked his parched lower lip, swallowed and said, "It's like booby-trapping a crucifix."
"Cheers," Lars said. And, manipulating the two studs, one on either side of the maze he confronted the appealing, roly-poly wub-like victim with a declining difficulty. He made it easier and easier until it seemed the victim was about to reach the exit.
And then, at that moment, Lars touched the stud on the left. The circuitry of the maze inaudibly shifted—and a last and totally unexpected barrier dropped in the victim's path, halting him just as he perceived freedom.
Lars, the operator, linked by the weak telepathic signal emanating from the toy, felt the suffering—not acutely, but enough to make him wish he had not touched the left-handed stud. Too late now, though; the victim of the maze was once again openly entangled.
No doubt about it, Lars realized. This does, as the brochure says, teach sympathy and kindness.
But now, he thought, it is our turn to work on it. We cogs, we who are the rulers of this society; we who hold literally in our hands the responsibility of protecting our race. Four billion human beings who are looking to us. And—we do not manufacture toys.
30
After the alien slavers from Sirius had withdrawn their satellites—at the end there had been eight satellites orbiting the sky of earth—the life of Lars Powderdry began to sink back into normalcy.
He felt glad.
But very tired, he realized one morning as he woke slowly up in his bed in his New York apartment, and saw beside him the tumble of dark hair which was Lilo Topchev's. Although he was pleased—he liked her, loved her, was happy in a life commingled with hers—he remembered Maren.
And then he was not so pleased.
Sliding from bed he walked from the bedroom and into the kitchen. He poured himself a cup of the perpetually hot and fresh coffee maintained by one small plowshared gadget wired onto the otherwise ordinary stove.
Seated at the table, alone, he drank the coffee and gazed out the window at the high-rise conapt buildings to the north.
It would be interesting, he mused, to know what Maren would have said about our weapon in the Big War, the way in which we caused them to lay off. We made ourselves, unvaluable. Presumably the chitinous citizens of Sirius' planets are still slavers, still posting satellites in other peoples' skies.
But not here.
And UN-W Natsec, plus the cogs of Peep-East in all their finery, were still considering the utility of introducing The Weapon into the Sirius system itself...
I think, he thought, Maren would have been amused.
Sleepily, blinking in perplexity, Lilo, in her pink nightgown, appeared at the kitchen door. "No coffee for me?"
"Sure," he said, rising to get a cup and saucer for her. "Do you know what the English word 'to care' comes from?" he said, as he poured her coffee for her from the obedient gadget wired to the stove.
"No." She seated herself at the table, looked gravely at the ashtray with its moribund remains of yesterday's discarded cigars and winced.
"The Latin word caritas. Which means love or esteem." '
"Well."
"St. Jerome," he said, "used it as a translation of the Greek world agape which means even more."
Lilo drank her coffee, silently.
"Agape," Lars said, standing at the window and looking out at the conapts of New York, "means reverence for life; something on that order. There's no English word. But we still possess the quality."
"Hmm."
"And," he said, "so did the aliens. And that was the handle by which we grabbed and destroyed them."
"Fix an egg."
"Okay." He punched buttons on the stove.
"Can an egg," Lilo said pausing in her coffee-drinking, "think?"
"No."
"Can it feel what you said? Agape?"
"Of course not."
"Then," Lilo said, as she accepted the warm, steaming, sunny-side-up egg from the stove, plate included, "if we're invaded by sentient eggs we'll lose."
"Damn you," he said.
"But you love me. I mean, you don't mind; in the sense that I can be what I am and you don't approve but you let me anyhow. Bacon?"
He punched more buttons, for her bacon and for his own toast, applesauce, tomato juice, jam, hot cereal.
"So," Lilo decided, as the stove gave forth its steady procession of food as instructed, "you don't feel agape for me. If, like you said, agape means caritas and cantos means to care. You wouldn't care, for instance, if I—" She considered. "Suppose," she said, "I decided to go back to Peep-East, instead of running your Paris branch, as you want me to. As you keep urging me to." She added, thoughtfully, "So I'd even more fully replace her."
"That's not why I want you to head the Paris branch."
"Well..." She ate, drank, pondered at length. "Perhaps not, but just now, when I came in here, you were looking out the window and thinking. What if she was still alive. Right?"
He nodded.
"I hope to God," Lilo said, "that you don't blame me for her doing that."
"I don't blame you," he said, his mouth full of hot cereal. "I just don't understand where the past goes when it goes. What happened to Maren Faine? I don't mean what happened that day on the up-ramp when she killed herself with that—" he eradicated a few words which came, savagely, to mind—"that Beretta. I mean. Where is she? Where's she gone?"
"You're not completely awake this morning. Did you wash your face with cold water?"
"I did everything that I'm going to do. I just don't understand it; one day there was a Maren Faine and then there wasn't. And I was in Seattle, walking along. I never saw it happen."
Lilo said, "Part of you saw it. But even if you didn't see it, the fact remains that now there is no Maren Faine."
He put down his cereal spoon. "What do I care? I love you! And I thank God—I find it incredible—that it wasn't you who were killed by that pelfrag cartridge, as I first thought."
"If she had lived, could you have had us both?"
"Sure!"
"No. Impossible. How?"
Lars said, "I would have worked it somehow."
"Her by day, me at night? Or her on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, me on—"
"The human mind," he said, "couldn't possibly be defeated by that situation, if it had the chance. A reasonable chance, without that Beretta and what it did. You know something that old Vincent Klug showed me, when he came back as the old war veteran, so-called, that Ricardo Hastings? It's impossible to go back." He nodded.
"But not yet," Lilo said. "Fifty years from now, maybe."
"I don't care," he said. "I just want to see her."
"And then what?" Lilo asked.
"Then I'd return to my own time."
"And you're going to idle away your life, for fifty years or however long it is, waiting for them to invent that Time Warpage Generator."
"I've had KACH look into it. Somebody's undoubtedly already doing basic research on it. Now that they know it exists. It won't be long."
"Why," Lilo said, "don't you join her?"
At that he glanced up, startled. "I am not kidding," Lilo said. "Don't wait fifty years—"
"More like forty, I calculate."
"That's too long. Good God, you'll be over seventy years old!"
"Okay," he admitted.
"My drug," Lilo said quietly. "You remember; it's lethal to your brain metabolism or some damn thing—anyhow three tablets of it and your vagus nerve would cease and you'd die."
After a pause he said, "That's very true."
"I'm not trying to be cruel. Or vengeful. But—I think it would be smarter, saner, the better choice, to do that, take three tablets of Formophane than to wait forty to fifty years, drag out a life that means absolutely nothing—"
"Let me think it over. Give me a couple of days."
"You see," Lilo said, "not only would you be joining her immediately, without waiting more years than you've lived already, but—you'd be solving your problems the way she solved hers. So you'd have that bond with her, too." She smiled, grimly. Hatingly.
"I'll give you three tablets of Formophane right now," she said, and disappeared into the other room.
He sat at the kitchen table, staring down at his bowl of cooling cereal and then all at once she was back. Holding out something to him.
He reached up, took the tablets from her, dropped them into the shirt-pocket of his pajamas.
"Good," Lilo said. "So that's decided. Now I can go get dressed and ready for the day. I think I'll talk to the Soviet Embassy. What's that man's name? Kerensky?"
"Kaminsky. He's top-dog at the embassy."
"I'll inquire through him if they'll take me back. They have some idiots they're using in Bulganingrad as mediums, but they're no good—according to KACH."
She paused. "But of course it's not the same as it was. It'll never be like that again."