Babayaga

But he put this on the table and everyone saw the potential right away. This could be huge. If he’s got what he says he’s got—and it sure the hell looks like he does—then it’s going to be the biggest thing since ol’ Madame Curie discovered radium. But like I say, I don’t know what it is exactly, Bendix is using some mix of ergine, DMT, ibogaine, and other stuff. I don’t ask many questions, the guy spooks me, honestly. The lab boys can sort out the details, all I care about is what we can do with it.”
    “Yes. Very interesting. Really, fascinating,” said Will, only half listening while slathering butter on his toast. He felt entirely at ease; it was nice to be back in the States again, even if it was only in a fantasy. He liked Jake too; the man spoke with a down-to-earth straightforward style that reminded him of home. It made sense to Will that Jake came from good upstate country people. He wasn’t like the other New Yorkers, with their obtuse, long-winded ways. Will wondered how Oliver and Jake had ever become friends when their personalities were so clearly miles apart.
    “It is fascinating,” Jake went on. “Think about how a drug like this could affect the entire topography of war. I could be at one latitude, see, and you could be thousands of miles away, but if we’re dosed at the same time from the same batch, shazam, we’re sharing a single stage together. Like we are now, get it?”
    Will nodded, only vaguely understanding.
    “What this means,” Jake continued, “is that you can fly over one of Ho Chi Minh’s camps in the deepest, thickest jungle and dose them by air, like you’re irrigating crops. At the same time you carefully dose up your own GI force that’s sitting back in, say, West Germany, all gunned up and ready for action. Talk about your goddamn ambush, the Commies will be loony-eyed and drug dreaming, wandering through their ancestral mud-hut homes, when—ka-bam—good ol’ Yankee Joe kicks down the bamboo door and scorches a flamethrower in their faces. Then it’s like ‘Oh, hello’ and ‘Sayonara, buddy!’ all in the same breath.”
    Will shook his head. “Wow, incredible. I never imagined stuff like this was possible.”
    Jake smiled. “Right now Bendix is the only one who can do it, no one else is even close. Mark my word, once the kinks are ironed out and the army labs start cooking up their industrial-sized batches, boy howdy, it is going to be a whole new ball game.”
    “Seems like it works pretty well already. I mean, this bacon tastes really good,” Will said, loading up his fork for his last big bite.
    Jake nodded. “Yeah, well, the clinical tests are almost done. But like I said, we still have some kinks.”
    “Like what?”
    “Well, finding proper dosage levels and looking at the long-term impacts on the subjects; these drugs can put quite a strain on the system. I’m pretty sure that’s what took out Boris, his heart exploded. Then there’s the question of how you’re affected in the real world when you’re hit here. We’ve got more bodies buried in the basement than we have answers. Also, what if the effect isn’t lethal, if it’s only a crippling injury, then what? Then we get weird stuff like Ned’s muttering coma.”
    Will stopped scraping his plate and looked up. “Ned? I thought she was working with the Russians.”
    “Ned was working for Ned; every other loyalty she had died back in Spain when the Fascists shot all her friends. Since then, she’s been working with anyone who paid her. She would have betrayed this operation too if she’d had time to figure it out. I’m pretty sure that’s why Bendix gave her a funny dose. His methods are, well, like I said, the guy spooks me, but this is the new frontier, right? There is so much we don’t know. We need more experiments, you understand. Sorry.”
    Wolfing down his food, taking in the surreal atmosphere (out the window a herd of bleating sheared sheep caught his eye meandering up Larned Street), Will had only been half-listening to Jake’s story. It was fascinating, but so was so much at the moment, his world had become a grand orchestra of overstimulating sensations, with every sensory section—horns, strings, percussion—all going at full tilt. However, Jake’s last point did catch Will’s ear, the way a perfectly chimed triangle can cut through a symphony, and at the word “Sorry,” he looked up to find Jake aiming a pistol directly at his head.
    Without