by Ian Wallace
Just about that time I hit an avenue that was not interrupted: it ran straightaway left and right, and only a few blocks to my left I could see what had to be a bridge from its superstructure.
Well, why not contemplate the river? it gave me an excuse…I hailed a cab and told the driver in Gaulois to take me to the bridge; en route, I asked him whether cabs could be hailed to go to the falls, and how late, and how long, and how much. He laconized: “Toute heure, pas loin, pas beaucoup—oops! nous sommes ici, M’sieu’—attention la tête!” and he swooped to the curb and stopped instantaneously.
When my head, catapulted over the top of his front seat and stopped only by my chest, found itself staring up into his hatchet face, I remembered that I had no Nordian money. When one is in that kind of trouble, one has to settle for second-best ethics: I shot him a shot of love, happiness, and personal appreciation; I descended; he waved and departed, his face a beatitude.
I stood on a sidewalk, facing the bridge and the river.
A mighty barge rode statelily by, inching up against the heavy current. For minutes I contemplated inch after inch of her black radiant-portholed length. When ultimately her tail sneered goodbye at me, I saw beneath her tail what had to be a two-prop water-churning. And that said a great deal about the power of Scandia Falls.
Beyond the bridge, it seemed, there was little to explore: the town fell away into outskirt squalor.
What kept coming over me was: how utterly realistic this town, where a town could not in this era possibly dwell!
That was when, as I watched the water, most of it patterned.
Part of the pattern was the way she played bridge.
Standing at mid-bridge, gripping the north rail, I diffused my visual concentration among the faraway invisible falls and the swift underneath water and the large and small craft that labored northward or scudded southward. And now I was not scrupling to put out sensors.
First I searched the city for the two Moskovians and the bus driver. They were nowhere in the city. Distance did not dull my sensors, although time did: I extended them to sweep a thirty-mile radius full circle, a radius extending far beyond the falls: within this radius, at least, simply they were nowhere.
I didn’t bother to hunt mentally for Althea: intuitive logic located her. She wouldn’t be in my hotel, but she would be high and grand. Now, here right beside the river lofted the splendid building that I had assayed as second only to mine in stature, the one I had hopped to and hopped back from: an elegant hotel with a Norman tower and much lower Norman wings…
I slapped the bridge and grinned. Suicide could wait! One more adventure first…
Entering the hotel lobby, I went to the desk and asked for Miss Candless. Up went the clerk’s brows: “Inconnue ici, Monsieur—” I leaned toward him confidentially: “Precisely what I understand. What is her incognito?” Hard down came the brows: “Je ne comprends pas—”
“Never mind,” I told him. “Where are the room phones?” He chilly-pointed. I went to one, bypassed the computer, got a person, shot her with a meaning. A moment later, Althea lifted her phone and queried: “Oui?” “Oui,” I assured her. “Sagittarius here. Have you dined, or are you ready for dinner? either way, shall I come up?”
The momentary silence was touching. She said presently, low: “Shall I come as I am?”
“Evading speculation, I will only mention that I have in mind the dining room here.”
Was that a low chuckle? Then: “How are you, Pan?”
“Very well, thank you.”
“I mean, fool, what are you wearing?”
“What I have been wearing. What else is there?”
“Good. I will meet you at the dining room in a quarter-hour. Wearing what I have been wearing.”
I went to the dining room, shot the maître d’ with love and happiness and appreciation, nailed down a bay-window table by the river.
Althea joined me. She was dressed just as all day—but somehow now it was fresh and evening piquant.
The dining room was dark-opulent, the table was broad, we sat side by side on a deep-cushioned wall bench with our backs to the center window of the bay: at her right was the southern river, at my left the northern river. Silently we martini’d; silently we mused over chilled vichyssoise and lettuce with roquefort and cold whitefish and Chablis and hot Chateaubriand and chateauneuf-du-pape. Together, still silently, we contemplated the diversified flame colors that interflashed above the crepes suzette; even these emaciated pancakes we wolfed in silence until all was gone. Whereafter we meditated armagnac in deep goblets.
Althea broke silence, but low: “It is nearly eleven, Pan.” With her right elbow on the table, she was letting her nostrils gently savor the brandy.
My brother, you know that I do not talk about women; but this is confidential between us, this you must know about. In what follows, never mind me: watch Althea.
I said low: “Where shall we talk philosophy?”
“I thought you might prefer to talk conspiracy. It seems to me that we established this afternoon a zero hour of two thirty this morning. That is a little over three and a half hours from now.”
“Such a conversation, Althea, would be empty: when the time draws near, we will go there and foil it. More fruitful now would be philosophy—of one sort or another.” And quietly I laid my right hand on the crest of her left thigh. And I became young, but I held my hand steady.
Her eyes never left mine, her brandy did not tremble. She told me: “lam here for business. You are here for business.”
“For business, we must get to the falls. Do you know how long it takes?”
“I have a helicopter waiting. Fifteen minutes to the falls—and another half hour to the underground place where the business is.”
“Good. Forty-five minutes. And I think you mentioned that it is only eleven—”
Now I felt her cool hand on my hand on her thigh. She told her brandy: “The only purpose of my hand there, Pan, is to control your hand. I rather hoped that you might be subtler.”
“Subtlety is for leisure. We have under three hours. This fact your pleasant hand on my hand appears to be recognizing.”
“You are direct. Or—is it indirect?”
“It is direct. Where do we talk one or another sort of ’ philosophy?”
“My suite will do. Are we ready?”
“Yes—but first there is a concern with our waiter. I can make him happy with my mind—but can you perhaps make him happier with expense-account cash?”
Behind me, she closed the door to her suite; I waited there in the vestibule, there was a night-light glow; I turned to her, she looked up at me; her shoulders were forward and I clasped them.
She kicked off her shoes, thus dropping her eyes two inches below mine. She waited, looking up at me. It was the first time that her mouth had been small.
I told her honestly: “I love you. And there is time.”
“I trust you, for some reason. And there is time.”
“A man distrusts an avowal of trust. You trust me for what, Althea?”
“To be honest—and totally discreet. I am glad that you made this honest approach, Pan. Here I am—but there is no absolutely overwhelming hurry. Do you want a drink now?”
“Eventually. Not now. Do you?”
“No.”
Gently I kissed the right side of her throat just where it flared above the clavicle; she quivered but said nothing. I told her: “Quite likely I shall some day report this to my brother. But no one else. And him you can trust—we have no other brothers.”
“To know this is alarmingly arousing, it makes it in assort of way two for one. Is he like you?”
“Exactly like me in body, almost exactly in mind.”
“I think you’d better start kissing me now, on the lips. Take it slow, Pan: let our lips get to know each other, a little, then rather well. Wait until the time is right for both of us, before you let go. Can you do that, Pan? already I am noticing a certain pr
eliminary turgescence—”
“Once I do let go, Althea—are there any ground rules?”
“Here I am not a minister of state, Pan—I am a woman. Improvise your own ground rules. Cancel your own ground rules. I believe that you love me a little, and I love you a little, and I trust you a lot—”
She clutched me around the torso, pressing her head against my chest. “Make love to me selfishly, and I will make love to you generously. Pan, Pan, my need is so great—”
My brother, how long has it been since you were in bed with a passion-hungry goddess throwing herself away for you?
We lay bare there. The night light was long gone.
Her face came slowly to mine: her lips were wan in window-filtered moonlight. “Excuse me for being punctilious at this juncture, but I do have a sense of time. Pan, it is nearly one thirty, the run will take forty-five minutes, we must dress and go now; already we may be too late to intercept, we can only remediate—” Her hand was on my chest, she was insisting: “Pan, we must go!”
My left hand caressed her left shoulder; my head was pillowed on my right arm, I was studying invisible ceiling. “How can it matter, Althea—since you have already murdered them?” Slowly she rigidified. “Murdered them? murdered whom?” “The two Moskovians and the bus driver.”
“Are you wild?”
“They are nowhere within thirty miles of Scandia. So they are dead. So the Moskovians cannot plant the device. So why must we go?”
Her hand slid off my chest; she lay now on her back, lightly pressing five fingertips against five fingertips, examining her hands, peering at them through her ravine de la poitrine. Frowning, she asked her hands: “Now why would I murder them?”
“They know too much about you.”
“Such as?”
“That they are not your persecutors but your stooges. That you are the one who has the device and will place it. That the Honorable Althea Candless is high on the Moskovian payroll. That you somehow brought me here because you were remorsefully ambivalent, hoping for a God-judgment: either I would perceptively find out and stop you, or I would not find out and you would have to go through with it despite all you had done to get yourself stopped.”
“That was very good thinking, Pan, since clearly you have not been spying on my mind.”
“How do you know that I have not?”
“Because you think I murdered them.”
“Not because my major guess is wrong?”
“It is wrong only in a peculiar way. How will you stop me?”
“I will not stop you.”
“Then—I am to go through with it?”
“If you can.” I ran a fingertip across the flatness of her belly.
Quivering, she clutched my hand with both hands, immobilizing it there; her face turned to my face; she looked down at me, then up at me, her expression terrible; she made a noise in her throat, and swung to me, and sprang upon me.
Clinging, she told my ear: “You have won, Pan. Already it is a quarter to three. They will kill me, but perhaps it will be quick.”
“Can you leave the bed now, Althea?”
“I think—yes, now. In another half hour, no. Why?”
“Then you are free to place the device. And so they will not kill you, instead they will pay you.”
She sat, gripping my shoulders at arms’ length. “I told you, Pan, the device inactivates in half an hour—”
“How long to install it?”
“Ten minutes, once we reach the underground locus—”
“How long to dress?”
“Two minutes—”
“If you choose to dress, I will dress and take you there instantaneously.”
“You are playing with me! After all this, you will not prevent—you will help?”
“What is your will, Althea?”
Leaning back against the bed head, she ran a hand back through her long hair, considering. Her body was appetizing-rangy; at the far ends of her long legs, the prows of her feet were naïvely crossed…
She leaped from the bed and went for her clothes. I went for mine.
Dressed, holding her bulky purse, she turned to me, and her eyes were secretive. “I thank you for some things, Pan. But not for others.”
I took her in my arms, telling her: “We should be in close contact for this; and I must now read your mind a little, to get the locus right, but only for that. Think of the locus. Think first intellectually: the topography, the entrance, the approach, the underground coordinates…Good. Now, visualize all of it—” Her free hand clutched my shoulder. “Malgre tout, je t’aime quand même.”
Instantly we were in a bright-lighted underground place filled in a hushed way with dynamo-susurrus: a vast clean, ultra-sanitary hollow, tiered with aluminum catwalks and reamed by thick varicolored pipe-type cables at a spiderwebbing of levels. No sign of inspectors or guards. I put out sensors (but carefully staying out of her mind): all humans within this catacomb were distant, mostly in one direction above; I surmised that this Minister of Power had advised them of an unescorted inspection between one and three o’clock this morning; they were all up waiting for her by the gate.
Much closer to us, my sensors were picking up something else…
I checked my watch. “Better move, Althea. You have fifteen minutes.”
She nodded slowly, three or four times. Lethargically she released me. She turned to the wall, ran both hands sensitively over a bare area, touched an invisible spring. A panel sank inward and slid aside, revealing, within a square-yard aperture, an intricate intermeshing of switches. Opening her purse, she produced a small pair of electrician’s pliers and went delicately to work on eight minuscule connections at the two ends of a zinc box perhaps six inches by two by two. She was moving with leisurely smoothness; in three minutes she had removed the box and dropped it into her purse. She took half a minute to breathe heavily. Then she removed from her purse an identical box and began to wire it in. The leads from both boxes had jack-tips: splicing-and-soldering was obviated…
I had watched her silently. I said now: “If you finish, you blow Nordia. If you don’t finish, you die. Althea, this is fascinating.
She stopped and listened without turning while I spoke. When I finished, she went back at it. She completed the eight connections, checked each methodically with a tiny tap of the pliers, nodded, touched a spring, closed the panel: it was a blank wall again.
She checked her wristwatch, nodded, said, “Seven after three: made it,” dropped pliers in purse, closed purse, folded hands on purse, looked up at me.
“No watchmen,” I remarked.
“They are probably all up at the gate, waiting for me. I was expected between one and three o’clock for an unescorted inspection. Can you arrange now to take me straight to the exterior and let me now enter by the normal entrance and plead tardy?”
“I can. Now?”
“Pan, I find you a bit inexplicable. You understood me well enough to tip my wavering in the—shall we say, the virtuous direction? by a method that in your case I could not resist, and you could have kept it going, and you didn’t have to tell me that you could make instantaneous delivery, and you didn’t have to deliver me; and even so, at any time during the past quarter hour you could have stopped me by force or projective hypnosis or any old thing. But here I am, and I’ve done it.”
“So I noticed, Althea.”
“The device was connected in time, it is functional. Kebec will blow.”
“Presumably.”
“Pan, you share my responsibility.”
“I don’t think so, Althea. Morally I could not stop you. What I could do, what I tried to do, was to slow you down, to please your mood, to break your compulsive reverberating action circuit, even to bring you to the point where you were convinced that by your own choice it was already too late. But I could not morally deprive you of the final opportunity-confrontation. So I brought you here, but I left you no time to slip back into the reverberating circ
uit: you had to make what amounted to a fresh decision all anew, and act, practically on intuition. And so you did. It was your action, it was your will: you are responsible for the evil—or for the good.”
Tilted slightly backward, she stared into my eyes. “How do you mean—or for the good?”
Gathering her into my arms, I teleported us to the exterior. We stood on a windy bare rock above the falls: the moon was full, the altitude high, the water incandescent silver.
“Sorry, Althea; I could not answer you right there, because your Moskovian chums had stationed spy cameras there to document whether you did switch the boxes—and some of them may be fairly good at lip reading.”
My arm was about her shoulders, hers about my waist; we were gazing down into dark thundering depths. She uttered: “Cameras?”
“They have established that you did make the switch. You will not be killed, you will be paid—even if, through Moskovian technological stupidity, the device doesn’t work.”
“Technological stupidity?”
“Since their cameras have established that you did your part, they will have to blame their own technology if Kebec does not blow. And in truth, they were guilty of one small stupidity. They should have put a long scratch on the front of the new box—to match the long scratch on the front of the old box.”
There was silence then. Abruptly her arm and hand tightened on my waist. “Are you suggesting that I may have committed a Freudian error?”