“It’s a fake,” Hank said. “Worthless.”
“You may be right,” Fred said, “but I don’t agree.”
“The arsenal they’re talking about at Vandenberg is probably the OSI Arsenal.” Hank reached for the phone. To himself, aloud, he said, “Let’s see—who’s the guy at OSI I talked to that time … he was in on Wednesday with some pictures …” Hank shook his head and turned away from the phone to confront Fred. “I’ll wait. It can wait for the prelim spurious report. Fred?”
“What does my medical—”
“They say you’re completely cuckoo.”
Fred (as best he could) shrugged. “Completely?”
Wie kalt ist es in diesem unterirdischen Gewolbe!
“Possibly two brain cells still light up. But that’s about all. Mostly short circuits and sparks.”
Das ist natürlich, es ist ja tief.
“Two, you say,” Fred said. “Out of how many?”
“I don’t know. Brains have a lot of cells, I understand—trillions.”
“More possible connections between them,” Fred said, “than there are stars in the universe.”
“If that’s so, then you’re not batting too good an average right now. About two cells out of—maybe sixty-five trillion?”
“More like sixty-five trillion trillion,” Fred said.
“That’s worse than the old Philadelphia Athletics under Connie Mack. They used to end the season with a percentage—”
“What do I get,” Fred said, “for saying it happened on duty?”
“You get to sit in a waiting room and read a lot of Saturday Evening Posts and Cosmopolitans free.”
“Where’s that?”
“Where would you like?”
Fred said, “Let me think it over.”
“I’ll tell you what I’d do,” Hank said. “I wouldn’t go into a Federal clinic; I’d get about six bottles of good bourbon, I.W. Harper, and go up into the hills, up into the San Bernardino Mountains near one of the lakes, by myself, and just stay there all alone until it’s over. Where no one can find me.”
“But it may never be over,” Fred said.
“Then never come back. Do you know anyone who has a cabin up there?”
“No,” Fred said.
“Can you drive okay?”
“My—” He hesitated, and a dreamlike strength fell over him, relaxing him and mellowing him out. All the spatial relationships in the room shifted; the alteration affected even his awareness of time. “It’s in the …” He yawned.
“You don’t remember.”
“I remember it’s not functioning.”
“We can have somebody drive you up. That would be safer, anyhow.”
Drive me up where? he wondered. Up to what? Up roads, trails, paths, hiking and striding through Jell-O, like a tomcat on a leash who only wants to get back indoors, or get free.
He thought, Em Engel, der Gattin, so gleich, der fuhrt mich zur Freiheit ins himmlische Reich. “Sure,” he said, and smiled. Relief. Pulling forward against the leash, trying and striving to get free, and then to lie down. “What do you think about me now,” he said, “now that I’ve proved out like this—burned out, temporarily, anyhow. Maybe permanently.”
Hank said, “I think you’re a very good person.”
“Thank you,” Fred said.
“Take your gun with you.”
“What?” he said.
“When you go off to the San Bernardino Mountains with the fifths of I.W. Harper. Take your gun.”
“You mean for if I don’t come out of it?”
Hank said, “Either way. Coming down off the amount they say you’re on … Have it there with you.”
“Okay.”
“When you get back,” Hank said, “call me. Let me know.”
“Hell, I won’t have my suit.”
“Call me anyhow. With or without your suit.”
Again he said, “Okay.” Evidently it didn’t matter. Evidently that was over.
“When you go pick up your next payment, there’ll be a different amount. A considerable change this one time.”
Fred said, “I get some sort of bonus for this, for what happened to me?”
“No. Read your penal code. An officer who willingly becomes an addict and does not promptly report it is subject to a misdemeanor change—a fine of three thousand dollars and/or six months. You’ll probably just be fined.”
“Willingly?” he said, marveling.
“Nobody held a gun to your head and shot you up. Nobody dropped something in your soup. You knowingly and willingly took an addictive drug, brain-destructive and disorienting.”
“I had to!”