The Vulcan Disaster

“No, no. No, I’m afraid there’s no Alka-Seltzer that will wash this stuff away. It just seems to be something I have to live with.” He cocked his head at Tatiana, still busy behind him, ignoring the two of us. “I try not to let her see more of it than she has to. It upsets her so.” His smile was suddenly an old man’s smile; the youthful pixie was gone for now. “Anyhow, there’s that group, and there’s somebody else that you may not know about. Meyer had more than one offer, it appears. He told Tatiana something or other about one of them. Not much, you know, just a word or two in passing, but enough to pique one’s curiosity. Something Middle Eastern. Something... well, I was wondering whether Meyer may have been killed to keep this other deal from going through.”

“That’s a new one on me,” I said. “But that still leaves a lot of it wide open and unexplained. Meyer was carrying something when he was killed — something he’d just purchased from a man I came out here to get. Whoever killed him — and I’d pick Zvy and Shimon, the Israelis, I think, in spite of it all — took the item. And the item... well, I don’t think it had anything at all to do with this arms shipment of the General’s.”

“Oh?” he said. “That’s interesting. What was it?”

“Reel of microfilm. And don’t ask me what was on it. I haven’t the foggiest notion.”

“Hmmmm... yes. And these people either killed Meyer in order to get it, or killed him to keep the deal from going through, and, in the course of rifling his papers, found it and took it with them. Which of these is correct we have no way of knowing. Yes. Most puzzling. And then, of course, there’s the third, and in some ways the most obvious, contender in our little arms race to consider.”

“Who’s that?”

“Why, Ko...” The pain hit him again. His face convulsed; his hands clawed at his temples. “I... Ko... Komaroff, of course, we...” Then the big one struck, as forceful as an earthquake tremor and just as devastating in its effect on Will Lockwood. The serene face underwent a series of uncontrollable spasms, quick and violent, that pulled his face out of shape the way a spastic’s face is distorted by his illness. The hands, shaking wildly, tore at his head; the eyes rolled; and out of the mouth, smiling and composed only a moment before, came a low animal wail of excruciating pain. The eyes blinked twice at me; then all the humanity and capacity for reason died in their blue depths. “Oh God oh God oh g-g-g...” he said; then it all turned to groans. The nimbly competent hands turned into clumsy paws. The tongue lolled. The gaze fixed on me again, registering only pain — hopeless suffering, beyond all help. Then he pitched forward and lay still, scattering stone bottle and earthenware cups before him.

Chapter Twelve

I scuttled around the low table as fast as I could; quick as I was, though, Tatiana was faster. She pulled him back, laid him out on the tatamis, checked his pulse, and — before I could stop her — pulled a pin out of her purse, felt in his mouth for his tongue, pulled it out, and pinned it to his cheek. I winced a little at that, but on second thought I let her work. She obviously knew what she was doing, and it was one sure way of keeping him from choking to death on his own tongue, helpless as he was.

“Watch him,” she said, and skipped away into another room. She returned testing a syringe, the little needle squirting a clear liquid into the air. I held his arm as she expertly gave him a shot of something; then we watched as the pain left his face and he fell into an increasingly more peaceful sleep.

We sat there for a moment, knees touching on the mats, sitting back on our stocking feet, looking at him. Then I let out all that held breath in a big sigh. “What was that? The only thing I ever saw that was even remotely like it was a grand mal seizure and that wasn’t...”

“No,” she said. “That was something else. Nick, in the prison hospital they did something to his mind, to his brain — some experimental surgery. Anyway, it’s been getting worse, these last few years. He’ll be going along as you’ve seen him — brilliant, masterful — and then all of a sudden this thing reduces him to...” She waved a helpless hand, looking up at me; her eyes were full of tears.

“Can’t anybody do anything?” I said.

“Without the records of the operation, nothing. Nobody seems to know precisely what it was that they did to him. And the gradual deterioration has begun to accelerate, little by little. Attacks that once came months apart now come weeks apart, even days sometimes. He’s in the middle of a particularly terrible swing of these things right now. This is the third this week. That was one of the reasons I asked you to help me tonight, Nick. Ordinarily he’s quite adequate to protect me, all by himself. You saw what it was like. But now, oh Nick, fighting those men — he could have had one of these things in the middle of the fight. They would have butchered him — and me.”