Brainfire (7 page)

Andreyev took a sip of water. “You will see from the documents that have been prepared that what we have in Mrs. Blum far exceeds the capabilities of any of the subjects we have previously tested under laboratory conditions.”

Koprow had begun to tap a finger impatiently upon the surface of the table. It was a hooklike finger, curled over, skinny. Andreyev was mesmerized by its movements: he had to wrench his eyes away and look back down at his papers.

“I am not going to say that we understand to any degree the nature of this woman's abilities. We've postulated, for the sake, frankly, of convenience, the existence of an
x
—call it what you like—an
x
that represents psi-force. I'm not going to claim that this label is truly helpful, because it isn't. We don't know why she can do what she does, we don't know how she can do it.… Some form of mental wave, some kind of evolutionary throwback, some kind of energy that presently we have no means of measuring and therefore no way of comprehending … there have been any number of theories. You can pick and choose among them as you like. The fact remains that Mrs. Blum has the ability to interfere with the operations of other minds.”

Koprow suddenly closed his folder and laid his hands flat on top of it; his skull gleamed beneath the overhead lights. Impatiently he said, “With respect, Professor Andreyev, we in this room are not exactly enthralled by theories. We are practical men.…” He looked at his various colleagues conspiratorially, searching for and finding a measure of assent. Practical men, Andreyev thought. They are all practical men. The euphemism was appalling. Koprow was smiling, as if he were attuned to Andreyev's discomfort. “As practical men, we are somewhat more interested in functions than in hypotheses. And what we have to ask ourselves is rather simple. What good is this woman to us?”

Andreyev turned his hands over, stared at the damp palms, at how sweat glistened in the lines; the collective tensions in the room unnerved him. He felt unsteady on his feet, weak, something vital draining out of him. He thought: A freak show, a sideshow, trickery. Why in the name of God couldn't it be as simple as that? Why couldn't it be mumbo-jumbo? The whole psychic bag of tricks? Palmistry, messages from the ether, the divine revelations of fake practitioners of trances, phony voices, bells ringing in pitch-black rooms, ectoplasmic materializations—why couldn't it be the simple lunacy of indulging in a conversation with a tomato plant?
Why did it have to be real
?

What good is this woman to us
?

Koprow was still talking and Andreyev realized he hadn't been listening. “… There's the further matter of our control over this woman. Are we doing enough to ensure control? What guarantees do we have?”

Control, Andreyev thought. What control? She could turn on you and blow your mind into oblivion, into death.

Koprow said, “I understand that morphine has been administered to the point of dependency. And that she expects an exit visa for Israel in return for her cooperation. Is that correct?”

Andreyev nodded his head, feeling a tightness in the neck muscles, a dull pain beneath the scalp. Morphine, the perpetual daze of the dream, the languid glide into torpor, a freedom from pain—the promise of a way out, as if such a promise would ever be kept. He watched Koprow, seeing iron determination there, in the way the man held his head, clenched his hands, the firm set of the mouth.

“And all this is enough?” he asked.

Andreyev shrugged.

“Is it enough?” Koprow raised his voice and there was a faint echo in the room.

“I can't honestly answer that.”

Koprow looked at his colleagues with mock exasperation. “Then what
would
you suggest, Professor?”

Andreyev stared at Koprow. “She's only interested in leaving the Soviet Union, Comrade Koprow. That's the only thing she lives for.”

“Then why doesn't she simply spirit herself away?”

There was subdued laughter around the room, the tuning-up of instruments with Koprow as conductor. Andreyev understood: he was being challenged to say that the woman was under total control, that domination was complete.

Koprow was shaking his head. “The importance of control,” he said. “I don't think we should leave any of that to mere chance, do you?”

Andreyev was suddenly meek, seeing himself small and redundant in the room, a nothing whose services might easily be dispensed with; initials on a piece of paper, the passing down of a judgment—how easy it would be for them to remove him. He wanted to say that she was very old, that her heart was tired and strained, that no more control was needed—but he fell into a silence.

“Her family in Israel,” Koprow said. “It would be a simple matter, for instance, to have them … watched. Wouldn't it? Wouldn't it be simple, Professor?”

“Yes,” Andreyev said. The shadow of the gun. Dear God. He had seen her beloved snapshots.

Koprow was silent for a time. He tapped his index finger upon the table and appeared to be gazing at the illustrations on the walls.

“I will recommend further control of the woman by means of her family,” Koprow said. His words came now in short, stabbing sequences. “And I will also recommend—” and here he paused, letting his presence sink through the room, “—the possibility of a further experiment with Mrs. Blum.”

Andreyev looked at Sememko. The Politician was picking his teeth absentmindedly, as if what was being discussed here were an agricultural plan, perhaps the introduction of a new rotation of crops, perhaps the feasibility of an increase in tractor production—but it was all one and the same thing, wasn't it? It was all a part of technology and its functions, material or immaterial; what did it matter in the long term?

He closed his folder, pressed his fingers to his eyes, and let the room dwindle to nothing in his brief self-imposed blindness.

2.

Rayner found something faintly enjoyable in listening to Haffner as he tried, in his circumspect way, to instill some sense of diplomatic etiquette into the Vice President. Lindholm, you could see, had his head inclined as if he were really listening, but some absence of light in his eyes suggested he was elsewhere—planning, calculating, thinking other things. The old prairie dog, Rayner thought. You can't teach him to jump through new hoops at this stage of the game.

They were sitting in the dining room of the hotel. Breakfast had just been eaten—rather tasteless eggs, dark bread, lukewarm coffee; Rayner surveyed the ruins of the meal. Four Secret Service men sat at the next table, eating with a kind of purposeful silence as if they suspected a Communist plot involving cyanide in the water pitcher. It was odd, he thought, how they never seemed to communicate with one another, how strangely introverted they were in their vigilance. Who could tell? Maybe they had developed a sophisticated means of communicating through head movements, gestures, a form of secretive freemasonry.

The dining room was otherwise empty. Lindholm's presence had obliged the management to feed its less illustrious guests elsewhere. There were at least sixty empty tables set for diners who would not show up. Spooky, Rayner thought—all that linen, all those napkins, knives and forks. A banquet for ghosts.

Lindholm was rubbing his jaw, squinting now at Haffner. Rayner knew the expression:
You can't teach your grandmother how to suck eggs, sonny
. Haffner droned somewhat, slipping at times into a kind of silence that suggested his uncertainty, how far he could go in offering a cram course in diplomacy to the Vice President.

“I don't want you to take this all the wrong way, sir,” Haffner said. “I just don't think it advisable to sound off—”

“Sound off?” Lindholm looked at Rayner, half smiling. It was a political expression: he met his hecklers with that same quizzical look. “Was I sounding off, Ricky?”

Ricky, Rayner thought. He didn't much care for the folksy abbreviation. “I think Stewart's trying to tell you that it doesn't do much good to give the Soviets the impression that you and the President are in disagreement over certain policies.”

Lindholm rubbed his eyelids. “You boys are pretty mad at me, huh?”

Rayner looked across the table at Haffner, who, squirming, raised a crumbling piece of dark bread to his mouth and chewed on it absently.

“I been kicking around politics a long time,” Lindholm said. “Local politics. State Senate. The Congress of the United States. You boys know that. Hell. I never expected to be the Vice President.”

What's coming? Rayner wondered. Was there going to be an edited version of the fable? Poor boy makes good? Land of opportunity and you don't need no silver spoon in your mouth?

“When I was offered the slot, hell, I took it.” Lindholm stared at them in turn, as if he expected a response, as if this statement was an accusation: You'd have done the same, wouldn't you? “I kicked around long enough to know that it's a bunch of bull no matter what way you cut it. A Veep is a walking ceremony, that's all. He does nothing and he's expected to do nothing. But it doesn't mean that Mallory's got a goddamn dog collar around my throat and that when he says roll over, Rover, I goddam roll over.”

Rayner listened to the small man's voice rise, surprised a little by the hint of passion in the tone. He saw Lindholm's hand settle momentarily on Haffner's wrist; he saw Haffner look as if he had never had human contact before.

“So you boys get a little hot under the collar. That's nothing. You really think the Russkis give a monkey's turd about what I say? They're being polite. They know I can say what I like and it doesn't change a goddam thing. Because
they
know something you don't seem to know. I'm only the Vice President—which makes me approximately nothing.”

The Vice President, Rayner thought. A heartbeat away.

“I got one thing Mallory needs,” Lindholm said. “I can turn out a couple of million voters for him. And that makes a difference—because these are people that would sooner vote the straight Republican ticket than put their John Hancocks to any Eastern liberal. Are you boys with me?”

Haffner swallowed his dry bread. “I appreciate the frankness, Mr. Vice President. But at the same time, I don't think—”

“At the same time crap,” Lindholm said, and started to rise from the table. “I may have one of the most vacuous jobs in the goddam world, Haffner. But I don't need to bite my tongue when I feel I got something to say. And that's something. That's
really
something.”

The Vice President dropped his napkin on the table and walked away, surrounded at once by the Secret Service men. Rayner watched them sweep out of the dining room, an incongruous vision: the orangutans crowding the small prairie animal.

Haffner sighed. “I tried,” he said.

“I heard you,” said Rayner. He looked at his watch. There was to be a tour of some new automobile plant later—strictly Intourist stuff—and a half-finished letter lay upstairs in his room, a letter to John. He stood up. There was still time to finish it before he had to run the gamut of spot welders and paint sprayers and inspectors—and listen to the standard speeches concerning Soviet greatness. And never a word about Siberia.

3.

Domareski. Something had happened to Domareski. She wasn't sure. A dream? Not a dream? She woke, panicked. A strange room, a hospital room, a slatted blind hanging at the window, flowers in a white china vase. The room was overheated; a dense warmth. Flowers. They would die in this heat, wilt and wither and shake their petals loose.… She sat up. Domareski. Why isn't he here? Why isn't he here with me now? But something had gone wrong, something she didn't want to think about now, an aspect of herself she wanted to relegate to a place where it wouldn't have to be dealt with. But it came back.
There was snow. He had fallen in the snow. No, not fallen
. But he was dead, dead.…

And then she noticed the man, Sememko, who was sitting in a chair at the foot of her bed. Sweating, mopping his forehead with a large handkerchief, Sememko. Then it seemed to her that she lost her hold on things, that all manner of perceptions collided as if there were some terrible accident of awareness, a short circuit of mind, a jumble of unclear images. Sememko mopping his brow, the Physician falling falling falling into the snowbank, Aaron speaking to her—
a witch? Is that what it feels like to be you? Is that what you are
? There was pain now too, coursing upward along the backs of her hands, rising into her arms; and her heart—an insane rhythm of heart as if it might explode in her chest, carry her away, carry her into death, into a place where the snapshots wouldn't matter, where nothing would exist, no family, nothing—

The man, Sememko, was saying something to her. Words, words—she couldn't get them straight. It was like the picture she had in her mind now of the Physician, a cold picture, blurry. But worse—worse was the pain. Domareski knew. He knew how to stop the pain, didn't he? Where is he? Where?

What was this man saying to her?

Words.
The Israelis, well, of course
—

She looked at his face, at the fleshy tip of his nose and the enlarged pores. He is going to lie to me. I cannot believe anything he says to me.

Comrade Koprow himself, the man was saying.

No—she didn't want to hear about Koprow. Go back to what it was before, the Israelis. What was it about the Israelis? He was wiping his forehead again. Tell me, she thought. Tell me about my exit visa. Let me go. Let me leave. Put an end to this nightmare. Why had the Physician been killed?

Confused, she stared at the flowers. The man's voice went on, on and on; but he wasn't telling her what she needed to hear. Lies. Lies. When would they ever end?

Greatly impressed with your cooperation, he was telling her.

She wanted to cry now because of the pain she was feeling. A dryness clinging to the roof of her mouth, her swollen fingers covered with a cold sweat. The beat of her heart. Domareski.
Please
!