“It fits what I already know,” I said. I found that my body was trembling, as if I were cold. “Can I have the waitress bring me a drink?” I asked Sadassa.
“Of course. If you have enough money, I’d like another. A margarita.”
I ordered two margaritas.
“Well,” I said as we sat sipping our drinks, “it’s a lot easier for me now. I don’t have to convince you.”
“I already have the material written out,” Sadassa said.
“What material?” I said, and then I understood. To be inserted as subliminal information on the record album. “Oh,” I said, startled. “Can I see it?”
“I don’t have it with me. I’ll give it to you during the next few days. It’s to go in an album you expect to sell well; you can have anyone record it, preferably one of your most popular artists. It should be, if at all possible, a hit record. This project has been building for years, Nick. For ten or twelve years. It must not misfire.”
“What is the message like?” I asked.
“You’ll see it. In time.” She smiled. “It reads like nothing at all.”
“But do you know what’s really in it?”
“No,” Sadassa said. “Not completely. It’s a song about ‘party time.’ It goes something like, ‘Come to the party.’ It sounds of course like a fun party; you know. Then later the vocal line goes, ‘Join the party.’ The singer says, ‘Everybody join the party.’ And a subtrack goes, ‘Is everybody at the party? Is everybody present at the party?’ Only if you listen carefully, they’re saying, ‘Is everybody president at the party?’ and the singer is singing something about ‘joining the party’ at the same time the word ‘president’ is said—repeated, in fact, by an ensemble answer: ‘President, president, president, join—joined—the party,’ and so forth. I could make out that part. But the rest I couldn’t.”
“Wow,” I said. It terrified me; I could see how the sound-on-sound would be dubbed in as voice override.
“But this record,” Sadassa said, “which you at Progressive will create and release, contains only half the information. There is another record in production; I don’t know who by or where, but Valis will synchronize its release with yours, and together the information bits on the two records will add up to the total message. For instance, a song on the other record might begin, ‘In nineteen hundred and forty-one,’ which was the year Fremont teamed up with the Communist Party. Alone, that figure means nothing; but the DJs will be playing a track on first the Progressive disc and then the other one, and eventually people will be hearing all the information run together as a single total message. Random chance will join the two halves together on station after station.”
“We will wind up with people walking along humming, ‘The president joined the Party in 1941?’ ” I said.
“Something like that, yes.”
“Anything more?”
“ ‘What a grand chick,’ ” Sadassa said.
“Beg pardon?”
“ ‘What a grand chick.’ Shortened in the song to ‘Grand chick’ or ‘A grand chick.’ Except that the backup vocals will occasionally change it from ‘A grand chick’ to ‘Aramchek.’ Consciously, people listening will continue to construe the words as ‘A grand chick,’ but on an unconscious level they will absorb the altered information. It goes back to the famous—”
“I know what it goes back to,” I said. “The famous LP track still selling in the millions with the ‘Smoke dope, smoke dope, everybody smoke dope’ backup vocal subtrack.”
She laughed her throaty laugh. “Right.”
“Ferris Fremont knows about the satellite, does he?” I asked.
“They’ve guessed. Guessed right. They’ve been searching for it, and now of course Georgi Moyashka has located it, in cooperation with our own stations. Between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., Aramchek—the satellite—has been pinpointed. The satellite that Moyashka is sending up is of course armed. It will ‘accidentally’ explode, taking the Aramchek satellite with it.”
“Can another satellite be dispatched?” I asked. “From Albemuth?”
Sadassa said, “It takes thousands of years.”
Stunned, I sat simply gazing at her. “And they haven’t started one—”
“One is coming. It will arrive long after every human alive today on this planet is dead. The Aramchek satellite presently in our sky has been there since the time of the great Egyptian Empire, since the time of Moses. Remember the burning bush?”
I nodded. I knew the sensation of phosphene activity, blinding my vision: the manifestation of unending fire. We had been helped in our fight against slavery for a long time. But now the days of the satellite were numbered. The Russians could get a satellite up in—suddenly I realized: they’ve probably had one on the launch pad, waiting. As the final stage of a rocket, all in place. All they have to do is program its route.
“Liftoff,” Sadassa said, as if reading my thoughts, “will be at the end of this week. And then the satellite dies. The help and information cease.”
“How can you be so calm about it?” I said.
“I’m always calm,” Sadassa said. “I taught myself to be calm. We’ve known it for months, that this was coming. We have the information we need—we have all we’re going to get. It should be enough; the Aramchek satellite lasted until its work was done. There are enough of the plasmatic life forms here on Earth to—”
“I don’t think we’re going to be able to do it,” I said.
“But we will make the record.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “We can start tomorrow. Tonight, if you want. I have a couple of ideas who we can get to record it. Releases we were planning anyhow, good ones. Major ones we intended to promote.”
“Fine,” Sadassa said.
“Why did the satellite pick the Jews back in ancient times,” I asked, “to speak to?”
“They were shepherds, out under the stars, not city dwellers cut off from the sky. There were two kingdoms, Israel and Judah; it was to Judah, the farmers and shepherds, that Valis spoke. Haven’t you noticed that you hear the AI operator better when the wind is blowing in from the desert?”
“I
