The Vulcan Disaster

“Ah,” I said. “I think you know the news I have for you. You know it from the fact that I’m here, with the picture. You do, don’t you?” I looked hard into those eyes. They filmed over for a second, then she regained control.

“Y-yes,” she said. “I think I do. Hermann would not have parted with that picture while he was alive.”

“We understand each other,” I said. “I have to talk to you. You may be in grave danger.”

“Yes,” she said. The hands were white-knuckled under their tan. “I... Mr. Carter, I am thinking Can I trust him? Can I...” The eyes bored into mine again. “I mean... you may be one of them...”

“If I am I’m in worse trouble than you seem to be. I killed two of them this evening. That is, if we’re talking about the same people.” Thank God for the funny acoustics, I was thinking. It wouldn’t do to broadcast this conversation. “What’s the matter?” I went on. I touched the back of one of her hands and got that same electric shock again. “Are they after you, too? Have they found out about you, too?”

“I... Mr. Carter, I’m being followed. Someone was behind my cab, all the way here. I’m frightened.”

“Let me do something about that, please.”

“I... oh, if only...” Her hand gripped mine inside the dark sleeve. “Please. Can I trust you?”

I gripped her hand. She’d changed the position of her hand, though, and my grip came down on her in a funny sort of way. It was a kind of variant of the so-called “soul” handshake American blacks borrowed from the Africans. I don’t know why I did it. I hadn’t done that in years.

To my surprise her eyes widened; her mouth opened; her left hand flew to the cape over her heart, pressing it down against her, nicely outlining for me a majestically rounded pair of soft breasts beneath the dark cloth.

And she returned my funny handshake.

And she smiled. And the smile was so much worth waiting for that I wondered what I had done to trigger it. And the soft voice said, “Good, good — now I know. Mr. Carter. Please come to my dressing room immediately after the performance. Please. And thank you, thank you so much.”

She pulled away. I tried to rise again; but she pushed me back gently with that lovely hand. The hand brushed softly against my cheek as she bent low to whisper to me: “Enjoy the show...”

And then she was gone.

The show began by stages. It gave me plenty of time to be confused... and to wonder what the devil she’d meant. “Now I know.” Know what? And from a silly in-joke handshake?

The music came up little by little. And little by little, quiet as the music was, the low murmur of the audience quieted down to let it through. Somehow, the attention of the crowd came, despite all the odds, to focus itself on the strange and unique ambience of the place. Relax and enjoy it, I told myself. I stopped thinking and settled into it.

It was a recording. Of whom I had no idea. And the lights slowly went down, so slowly somebody must have rigged up a mechanical dimmer: no human hand could turn a handle that slowly, that gradually. Dim light... dimmer... a ghostly dusk... darkness...

The bass note went into a crescendo. Not slowly. Quickly. It became deafening. You could barely hear the other sound above it. It approached the pain threshold; throbbed... and then went silent.

It echoed in my head. I’d thought I was relaxed, enjoying things. Now I found my hand gripping the edge of the table like a vise. And, ribs or no, I sat up nice and straight, like everyone else in the place.

The next sound was a single, long, wavering line of music by a single finger picking it out on a synthesizer keyboard. Only in addition to the sound it made there was the bright, cold, laserlike beam of blue light, cutting across the stage. A second line joined it; the Moog had multiple manuals, then. This time a beam of reddish light cut across the stage from another angle, pulsing as the music pulsed, following the vagrant line of the tune its maker played. A third — blinding white, with an icy and compassionless tune to match — joined the two, again from a new angle. I wondered where the lights were coming from...

Then came the real blast of percussion.

The Moog synthesizer can do nearly every sound in the orchestra — except the vibrato of the string section. It can also duplicate anything the rock and roll band can do. And when the lightning-like flashes of pure white light started socking through the rapier-like thrusts of the three colored lights, the decibel count of the synthesizer’s pedal keyboard jacked the odds up, up, and out of sight. The manuals rose to meet it. The room pulsed with an unholy loudness of sound. And the space on the little stage pulsed with it — red, white, blue, and blinding flashes of white. The darkness in between was as violent as the flashes of light had been.

Into this maelstrom of light stepped Tatiana.