Day After Tomorrow

by Mack Reynolds

  She said, smiling up at him, the warm smile that was LaVerne Polk when she wasn’t in one of her needling moods, “Right. The Boss told me to get in touch with Secret Service and let them know that we’re pulling out. What happened to Susan Self?”

  Larry looked at her quizzically. “How do you know about Susan Self?”

  Her tone was deprecating. “Don’t you remember? You had me cut some tapes on you and that hulking Steve Hackett grilling the poor kid.”

  Larry snorted. “Poor kid, yet. With her tastes for living it up, and that father she has, she’ll probably spend the rest of her life getting in Steve’s hair as a counterfeit pusher.”

  LaVerne didn’t like it. She said, “What are they going to do with her? She’s just a child.”

  The agent shrugged. “I feel sorry for her, too, LaVerne. Steve’s got her over in one of our suites at the Greater Washington Hilton, until things are cleared up. They don’t want the newspapers to get wind of this until they’ve got that inventor father of hers and whatever he’s cooked up to turn out perfect reproductions of Uncle Sam’s money. Look, I won’t be leaving until tomorrow. What’d you say we get out on the town tonight?”

  “Why, Larry Woolford,” she gushed. “How nice of you to ask me. What did you have in mind for a weird type like myself? I understand that Mort Lenny’s at one of the night clubs.”

  Larry winced. “You know what he’s been saying about the administration. That so called stand-up comedian is one of the biggest weirds in town.” She smiled sweetly at him.

  Larry said, “Look, we could take in the Brahms concert, then we could—”

  Still sweetly, she said, “Do you like Brahms? I go for popular music myself. Preferably the sort of thing they wrote back in the 1930s. Something you can dance to; something you know the words to. Corny, they used to call it. Remember ‘Sunny Side of the Street,’ and ‘Just the Way You Look Tonight’?”

  Larry winced again. He said, “Look, I admit, I don’t go for concerts either but it doesn’t hurt you to—”

  “I know,” she said sweetly. “It doesn’t for a bright young bureaucrat to be seen at concerts.”

  “How about Dixieland?” he said. “It’s rapidly becoming all the thing now.”

  “I like corn. Besides, my wardrobe is all out of style. Paris, London and Rome just got in a huddle a couple of months ago and antiquated everything I own. You wouldn’t want to be seen with a girl a few weeks out of date, would you?”

  “Oh, now, LaVerne, get off my back.” He thought about it. “Look, you must have something you could wear.”

  “Get out of here, you vacant-minded conformist! I like Mort Lenny, he makes me laugh. I hate vodka martinis, they give me a sour stomach. I don’t like the current women’s styles, they look ridiculous and are uncomfortable. And I don’t like the men’s styles either; they’re too boyish.” LaVerne spun back to her auto-typer and began to dictate into it.

  Larry glared down at her. “All right, okay. What do you like?”

  She snapped back irrationally, “I like what I like.”

  He laughed at her in ridicule.

  This time it was she who glared at him. “That makes more sense than you’re capable of assimilating, Mr. Walking Status Symbol. My likes and dislikes aren’t dictated by someone else. If I like corny music, I’ll listen to it and the devil with Brahms or Dixieland or anything else that somebody else tells me is all the thing!”

  He turned on his heel angrily. “Okay, okay, it takes all sorts to make a world, weirds and all.”

  “One more label to hang on people,” she snarled after him. “Everything’s labels. Be sure and never come to any judgements of your own!”

  What a woman! He wondered why he had ever bothered to ask her for a date. There were so many women in this town you waded through them. And most were happy and anxious to be laid. And here he was exposing himself to be seen in public with a girl that everybody in the department knew was as weird as they came. It didn’t do your standing any good to be seen around with the type. He wondered all over again why the boss tolerated her as his receptionist-secretary.

  Well, he wouldn’t have minded screwing her. LaVerne Polk had one of the pertist bodies he’d ever admired.

  He got his car from the parking lot and drove home on a high level. Ordinarily, the distance being what it was, he drove in the lower and slower traffic levels but now his frustration demanded some expression.

  VIII

  Back at his suburban auto-bungalow, he threw all except the high priority switch and went on down into his small cellar den. He didn’t really feel like a night on the town anyway. A few vodka martinis under his belt and he’d sleep late and he wanted to get up in time for an early start for Astor, Florida and his bass fishing. Besides, in that respect he agreed with that irritating wench, LaVerne Polk. Vermouth was never meant to mix with Polish vodka. He wished that Sidecars would come back into popularity.

  In his den, he shucked off his tweed jacket, kicked off his shoes and shuffled into Moroccan slippers. He went over to his reading rack and scowled at the paperbacks there. His status books were upstairs where they could be seen. He pulled out a suspense yarn, tossed it over to the cocktail table that sat next to his favorite chair, and then went over to the bar.

  Up above in his living room, he had one of the new auto-bars. You could dial any of more than thirty drinks. Auto-bars were all the rage. The Boss had one that gave a selection of a hundred different drinks, running from Absinth Coolers to Zombis. But what difference did it make when nobody but eccentric old-timers of flighty blondes drank anything except vodka martinis? He didn’t like auto-bars anyway. A well mixed drink is a personal thing, a work of competence, instinct and art, not something measured to the drop, iced to the degree, shaked or stirred to a mathematical formula.

  Out of the tiny refrigerator he brought a four-ounce cube of frozen pineapple juice, touched the edge with his thumbnail and let the ultra thin plastic peel away. He tossed the cube into his mixer, took up a bottle of light rum and poured in about two ounces. He brought an egg from the refrigerator and added that. An ounce of whole milk followed and a teaspoon of powdered sugar. He flicked the switch and let the conglomeration froth together.

  He poured it into a king-size highball glass and took it over to his chair. Vodka martinis be damned, he liked a slightly sweet long drink.

  He sat down in the chair, picked up the suspense novel and scowled at the cover. He ought to be reading that Florentine history of Machiavelli’s, especially if the Boss had gotten to the point where he was quoting from the guy. But the hell with it, he was on vacation. He didn’t think much of the Italian diplomat anyway.

  He couldn’t get beyond the first page or two.

  And when you can’t concentrate on a suspense yarn, you just can’t concentrate.

  He finished his drink, went over to his phone and dialed Department of Records and then Information. When the bright young thing answered, he said, “I’d like the brief on an Ernest Self who lives on Elwood Avenue, Baltimore section of Greater Washington. I don’t know his code number.”

  She did things with switches and buttons for a moment and then brought forth a sheet from a delivery chute. “Do you want me to read it to you, sir?”

  “No, I’ll scan it,” Larry said.

  Her face faded to be replaced by the brief on Ernest Self.

  It was astonishingly short. Records seemed to have slipped up on this occasion. A rare occurence. He considered requesting the full dossier, then changed his mind. Instead, he dialed the number of the Sun-Post and asked for its science columnist.

  Sam Sokolski’s puffy face eventually faded it.

  Larry said to him sourly, “You drink too much. You can begin to see veins breaking in your nose.”

  Sam looked at him patiently.

  Larry said, “How’d you like to come over and toss back a few tonight?”

  “I’m working. I thought you were going on a vacation down to Florida, or
someplace.”

  Larry sighed. “I am,” he said. “Okay, so you can’t take a night off and lift a few with an old buddy.”

  “That’s right, I can’t,” the columnist told him. “Anything else, Larry?”

  “Yes. Look, have you ever heard of an inventor named Ernest Self?”

  The other nodded. “Sure I’ve heard of him. I covered a hassle he got into some years ago. A nice guy.”

  “I’ll bet,” Larry said. “What does he invent, something to do with printing presses, or something?”

  “Printing presses?” Sokolski’s expression was blank. “Don’t you remember the story about him?”

  “Brief me,” Larry said.

  “Well—briefly does it. It got out a couple of years back that some of our rocketeers had bought a solid fuel formula from an Italian research outfit for the star probe project. Paid them a big hunk of Uncle’s change for it. So Ernest Self sued.”

  Larry said, “You’re being too brief. What do you mean, he sued. Why?”

  “Because he claimed he’d submitted the same formula to the same agency a full eighteen months earlier and they’d turned him down.”

  “Had he?”

  “Probably.”

  Larry didn’t get it. “Then why’d they turn him down?”

  Sam said, “Oh, the government boys had a good alibi. Crackpots turn up all over the place and you have to brush them off. Every cellar scientist who comes along and says he’s got a new super-fuel developed from old coffee grounds can’t be given the welcome mat. Something was wrong with Self’s math or something and they didn’t pay much attention to him. They wouldn’t even let him demonstrate it. But it was the same formula, all right.”

  Larry Woolford was scowling. Science wasn’t his cup of tea. He said, “Something wrong with his math? What kind of a degree does he have?”

  Sam grinned in memory. “I got a good quote on that. He doesn’t have any degree. He said he learned to read by the time he’d reached high school and since then he figured spending time in classrooms was a matter of interfering with his education.”

  “No wonder they turned him down. He sounds like a weird to me. No degree at all. You can’t get anywhere in science like that.”

  Sam said, “The courts rejected his suit but he got a certain amount of support here and there. Peter Voss, over at the university, claims he’s one of the great intuitive scientists, whatever that is, of our generation.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Professor Voss. Not that it makes a great deal of difference what he says. Another crackpot. A weird if there ever was one.”

  Larry wound it up. “Okay. Thanks, Sam. Take care. You worry me with all the boozing you do.”

  Sam snorted. After his less than handsome face was gone from the phone screen, Larry walked back to the bar with his empty glass and stared at the mixer for several minutes. He began to build himself another flip, but cut it short in the middle, put down the ingredients and went back to the phone to dial Records again.

  He went through first the brief and then the full dossier on Professor Peter Luther Voss. Aside from his academic accomplishments, particularly in the fields of political economy and international law, and the dozen or so books accredited to him, there wasn’t anything particularly noteworthy. A bachelor in his fifties. No criminal record of any kind, of course, and no military career. No known political affiliations. Evidently a strong predilection for Thorsten Veblen’s theories. And he’d been a friend of Henry Mencken in his youth, back when that old nonconformist was tearing down contemporary society seemingly largely for the fun involved in the tearing.

  On the face of it, the man was no radical, and the term “crackpot” which Sam had applied was hardly called for.

  Larry Woolford went back to the bar and resumed the job of building his own version of a rum flip.

  But his heart wasn’t in it. The Professor, Susan had said.

  IX

  Ilya Simonov entered the United States quite openly. He landed at the International Supersonic Airport, built in the ocean ten miles off the coast of New York. He was dressed in mufti and his passport was completely correct, up too and including both photograph and fingerprints, save that he used his second name, Alex, rather than Ilya.

  It was a diplomatic passport, which, of course, was immediately noticed by the Immigrations inspector who said, “Welcome to the United States, Mr. Simonov. In what capacity are you assigned to your Embassy?”

  “Military attach e,” Ilya Simonov said easily. “I shall clear my position, of course, as soon as I arrive in Greater Washington and complete my accreditation.”

  “Of course.” The other stamped the Soviet Complex passport and returned it to its owner. “I hope you enjoy America, sir,” he said politely.

  Simonov nodded his thanks. “Certainly. I have been here before, you know.” He didn’t bother to add that the last time he had spent some months in jail as a Russian spy.

  He took the regular shuttle jet-helio to Long Island and then a jet plane to Greater Washington, without bothering to go into New York City, a place he loathed. The supersonic planes which crossed the Atlantic were not allowed over the mainland of the United States, the sonic bomb aspects of the craft having never been licked. It seemed a bit complicated, but it still saved time. One flew to England, took a ferry plane or hoverboat out to the supersonic airport anchored half way between England and France off Brighton. There one took the supersonic to the airport anchored off Long Island, and from there the jet-helio to New York, or, if one was going elsewhere than New York, to the airport. In spite of all the switching about, one still saved considerable time over the old transatlantic jet planes.

  Ilya was mildly amused and a bit proud of the fact that the supersonic planes were Russian in origin. The United States had never caught up in the race for ultra-speed. But, for that matter, it hadn’t particularly tried.

  At the airport of Greater Washington, he hired a hover-car and drove out to the Soviet Complex Embassy to the southwest of town, an area that accommodated most of the larger embassies. There was no difficulty anywhere along the way.

  At the embassy entrance he received no more than a quick passing scrutiny on the part of the two American plainclothesmen stationed there. Such was fame, he thought wryly. Here he was, supposedly the most notorious operative of the Chrezvychainija Komissiya, penetrating the capital city of his nation’s most powerful rival as easily as if he had been a tourist. He wondered if it was equally as easy for an American agent of, say, the C.I.A. to penetrate Moscow.

  At the reception desk in the large and overly ornate entrada, Ilya Simonov identified himself and asked to see the ambassador as soon as possible. Evidently, the clerk had heard of the famous hatchetman of Minister Blagonravov. He made quick motions with his hands and spoke into a phone screen.

  He said, “Just a moment, Comrade Colonel.”

  “Of course,” Simonov said patiently.

  A nattily dressed embassy official came hurrying out. He introduced himself and said, “We received word of your arrival, Comrade Simonov, on the scrambler. You’ve been assigned an apartment on the third floor. Your bags…?”

  “Bag,” Ilya Simonov said. “It’s out in the car.”

  “I’ll send a man for it immediately. Would you like me to show you up to your quarters? I assume you’d like to freshen up?”

  “I cleaned up in the aircraft,” Simonov said. “I’d like to see the ambassador immediately. I haven’t the slightest idea of how long I’ll be able to be here before my cover is blown, and I wish to get to work.”

  “Of course, Comrade Colonel Simonov. Would you come this way? I’ve already notified the ambassador of your arrival.”

  Simonov followed him down a hall for a short distance, to a heavy wooden door which the other rapped upon. It opened and Ilya Simonov strode through into the large office. The ambassador was behind a king-sized antique desk which looked as though it had probably been shipped over from Russ
ia and probably went back to Czarist days. He came to his feet on the entrance of the secret police agent and came around the desk to shake hands energetically.

  He was, Ilya Simonov had found out, Leonid Mikoyan, son of one of the few Old Bolsheviks who hadn’t been purged by Stalin. Leonid Mikoyan owed his position, which he reputedly was incompetent to hold down, to the fact that being the son of an Old Bolshevik in the Soviet Complex was a status symbol unrivaled. At the age of nine he had become a Young Pioneer, another status symbol in Russia; you were a nobody if, as a child, you had not been a Young Pioneer. At the age of fourteen he became a member of the Young Communist League, attaining more merit in the eyes of the elite. And at the age of twenty-six he was made a full fledged party member. One attains little in the way of position in the Soviet Complex, no matter how competent, unless he is a member of the Party. The Soviet Complex was not free of the worship of status symbols, though her system differed from that of the Americans.

  Ilya Simonov was contemptuous of the man.

  He shook hands and then looked suggestively at his guide.

  Leonid Mikoyan said hurriedly, “Vyacheslav, if you’ll just leave us now…”

  The younger man bowed out, closing the door softly behind him.

  The ambassador hurriedly saw his caller to a chair. Ilya Simonov was inwardly amused. He realized that the other was somewhat afraid of him.

  Undoubtedly, Moscow hadn’t mentioned, in the scrambler message, the purpose of his visit to Greater Washington. Even a scrambler beam could possibly be tapped. Mikoyan didn’t know why he was here and thought it might be something personal. Blagonravov’s top field man wasn’t sent on missions of small import.

  To put the man at his ease, Simonov came directly to the point. And drew a blank.

  Ambassador Leonid Mikoyan hadn’t the vaguest idea of what he was talking about.

  “You do read the American papers and other publications, don’t you?” the operative said testily.