I could think of things I’d much rather do than have dinner with Flower. A short swim in boiling oil, for example. I looked up at his anxious face. Oh, hell. “I’d love to,” I said. “Around eight?”
“Fine! Gee,” he said, like a school kid. “Gee, thanks.” He shuffled, not knowing whether to go right away or not. “Hey,” he said suddenly. “You sent out a call for me. What’s this project you wanted me for?”
“Nothing, Jud,” I said tiredly. “I’ve … changed my mind. See you later, son.”
The dinner was something special. Steaks. Jud had broiled them himself. I got the idea that he’d selected them, too, and set the table. It was Flower, though, who got me something to sit on. She looked me over, slowly and without concealing it, went to the table, pulled the light formed-aluminum chair away, and dragged over a massive relaxer. She then smiled straight at me. A little unnecessary, I thought; I’m bulky, but those aluminum chairs have always held up under me so far.
I won’t give it to you round by round. The meal passed with Flower either in a sullen silence or manufacturing small brittle whips of conversation. When she was quiet, Jud tried to goad her into talking. When she talked, he tried to turn the conversation away from me. The occasion, I think, was a complete success—for Flower. For Jud it must have been hell. For me—well, it was interesting.
Item: Flower poked and prodded at her steak, and when she got a lull in the labored talk Jud and I were squeezing out, she began to cut meticulously around the edges of the steak. “If there is anything I can’t stand the sight or the smell of,” she said clearly, “it’s fat.”
Item: She said, “Oh, Lord” this and “Lord sakes” that in a drawl that made it come out “Lard” every time.
Item: I sneezed once. She whipped a tissue over to me swiftly and politely enough, and then said “Render unto sneezers …” which stood as a cute quip until she nudged her husband and said, “Render!” at which point things got real hushed.
Item: When she had finished, she leaned back and sighed. “If I ate like that all the time, I’d be a big as—” She looked straight at me and stopped. Jud, flushing miserably, tried to kick her under the table; I know, because it was me he kicked. Flower finished, “—as big as a lifeboat.” But she kept looking at me, easily and insultingly.
Item—You get the idea. All I can say for myself is that I got through it all. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of driving me out until I’d had all she could give me. I wouldn’t be overtly angry, because if I did, she’d present me to Jud ever after as the man who hated her. If Jud ever had wit enough, this evening could be remembered as the time she was insufferably insulting, and that was all I wanted.
It was over at last, and I made my excuses as late as I possibly could without staying overnight. As I left, she took Jud’s arm and held it tight until I was out of sight, thereby removing the one chance he had to come along a little way and apologize to me.
He didn’t get close enough to speak to me for four days, and when he did, I had the impression that he had lied to be there, that Flower thought he was somewhere else. He said rapidly, “About the other night, you mustn’t think that—”
And I cut him off as gently and firmly as I could: “I understand it perfectly, Jud. Think a minute and you’ll know that.”
“Look, Flower was just out of sorts. I’ll work on her. Next time you come there’ll be a real difference. You’ll see.”
“I’m sure I will, Jud. But drop it, will you? There’s no harm done.” And I thought, next time I come will be six months after the Outbounders get back. That gives me sixty centuries or so to get case-hardened.
About a week after Jud’s wedding, I was in the Upper Central corridor where it ramps into the Gate passageway. Now whether it was some sixth sense, or whether I actually did smell something, I don’t know. I got a powerful, sourceless impression of methyl-caffeine in the air, and at the same time I looked down the passage and saw the Gate just closing.
I got down there altogether too fast to do my leaky valves any good. I palmed the doors open and sprinted across the court. When anything my size and shape gets to sprinting, it’s harder to stop it than let it keep going. One of the ship ports was open and I was heading for it. It started to swing closed. I lost all thought of trying to slow down and put what little energy I could find into pumping my old legs faster.
With a horrible slow-motion feeling of disaster, I felt one toe tip my other heel, and my center of gravity began to move forward faster than I was traveling. I was in mid-air for an age—long enough to chew and swallow a tongue—and then I hit on my stomach, rocked forward on my receding chest and two of my chins, and slid. I had my hands out in front of me. My left hit the bulkhead and buckled. My right shot through what was left of the opening of the door, which crunched shut on my forearm. Then my forehead hit the sill and I blacked out.
When the lights dimmed on again, I was spread out on a ship’s bunk, apparently alone. My left arm hurt more than I could bear, and my right arm hurt worse, and both of them together couldn’t match what was going on in my head.
A man appeared from the service cubicle when I let out a groan. He had a bowl of warm water and the ship’s B first-aid kit in his hands. He crossed quickly to me, and began to stanch the blood from between some of my chins. It wasn’t until then that my blurring sight made out who he was.
“Clinton, you hub-forted son of a bastich!” I roared at him. “Leave the chin alone and get some plexicaine into these arms!”
He had the gall to laugh at me. “One thing at a time, old man. You are bleeding. Let’s try to be a patient, not an impatient.”
“Impatient, out-patient,” I yelped, “get that plex into me! I am just not the strong, silent type!”
“Okay, okay.” He got the needle out of the kit, squirted it upward, and plunged it deftly into my arms. A good boy. He hit the biceps on one, the forearm on the other, and got just the right ganglia. The pain vanished. That left my head, but he fed me an analgesic and that cataclysmic ache began to recede.
“I’m afraid the left is broken,” he said. “As for the right—well, if I hadn’t seen that hand come crawling in over the sill like a pet puppy, and reversed the door control, I’d have cut your fingernails clear up to the elbow. What in time did you think you were doing?”
“I can’t remember; maybe I’ve got a concussion. For some reason or other it seemed I had to look inside the ship. Can you splint this arm?”
“Let’s call the medic.”
“You can do just as well.”
He went for the C kit and got a traction splint out. He whipped the prepared cushioning around the swelling arm, clamped the ends of the splint at the wrist and elbow, and played an infra-red lamp on it. In a few seconds the splint began to lengthen. When the broken forearm was a few millimeters longer than the other, he shut off the heat and the thermoplastic splint automatically set and snugged into the cushioning. Clinton threw off the clamps. “That’s good enough for now. All right, are you ready to tell me what made you get in my way?”
“No.”
“Stop trying to look like an innocent babe! Your stubble gives you away. You knew I was going to solo, didn’t you?”
“No one said anything to me.”
“No one ever has to,” he said in irritation, and then chuckled. “Man, I wish I could stay mad at you. All right—what next?”
“You’re not going to take off?”
“With you in here? Don’t be foolish. The station’d lose too much and I wouldn’t be gaining a thing. Damn you! I’d worked up the most glamorous drunk on methyl-caffeine, and you had to get me all anxious and drive away the fumes … Well, go ahead. I’ll play it your way. What do we do?”
“Stop trying to make a Machiavelli out of me,” I growled. “Give me a hand back to my quarters and I’ll let you go do whatever you want.”
“It’s never that simple with you,” he half-grinned. “Okay. Let’s go.”
When I
got to my feet—with more of his help than I like to admit—my heart began to pound. He must have felt it, because he said nothing while we stood there and waited for it to behave itself. Clinton was a good lad.
We negotiated the court and the Gate all right, but slowly. When we got to the foot of my ramp, I shook my head. “Not that,” I wheezed. “Couldn’t make it. Down this way.”
We went down the lateral corridor to 412. The door slid back for me.
“Hi!” I called. “Company.”
“What? Who is it?” came the crystal voice. Tween appeared. “Oh—oh! I didn’t want to see anyone just—why, what’s happened?”
My eyelids flickered. I moaned. Clinton said, “I think we better get him spread out. He’s not doing so well.”
Tween ran to us and took my arm gently above the splint. They got me to a couch and I collapsed on it.
“Damn him,” said Clinton good-humoredly. “He seems to be working full time to keep me from going Out.”
There was such a long silence that I opened one eye to look at them. Tween was staring at him as if she had never seen him before—as, actually, she hadn’t, with her eyes so full of Wold.
“Do you really want to go Out?” she asked softly.
“More than …” He looked at her hair, her lovely face. “I don’t think I’ve seen you around much. You’re—Tween, aren’t you?”
She nodded and they stopped talking. I snapped my eyes shut because they were sure to look at me just for something to do.
“Is he all right?” she asked.
“I think he’s—yes, he’s asleep. Don’t wonder. He’s been through a lot.”
“Let’s go in the other room where we can talk together without disturbing him.”
They closed the door. I could barely hear them. It went on for a long time, with occasional silences. Finally I heard what I’d been listening for: “If it hadn’t been for him, I’d be gone now. I was just about to solo.”
“No! Oh, I’m glad … I’m glad you didn’t.”
One of those silences. Then, “So am I, Tween. Tween …” in a whisper of astonishment.
I got up off the couch and silently let myself out. I went back to my quarters, even managing to climb the ramp. I felt real fine.
I heard an ugly rumor.
I’d seen a lot and I’d done a lot, and I regarded myself as pretty shockproof, but this one jolted me to the core. I took refuge in the old ointment, “It can’t be, it just can’t be,” but in my heart I knew it could.
I got hold of Judson. He was hollow-eyed and much quieter than usual. I asked him what he was going these days, though I knew.
“Boning up on the fine points of astrogation,” he told me. “I’ve never hit anything so fascinating. It’s one thing to have the stuff shoveled into your head when you’re asleep, and something else again to experience it all, note by note, like music.”
“But you’re spending an awful lot of time in the archives, son.”
“It takes a lot of time.”
“Can’t you study at home?”
I think he only just then realized what I was driving at. “Look,” he said quietly, “I have my troubles. I have things wrong with me. But I’m not blind. I’m not stupid. You wouldn’t tell me to my face that I couldn’t handle problems that are strictly my own, would you?”
“I would if I were sure,” I said. “Damn it, I’m not. And I’m not going to pry for details.”
“I’m glad of that,” he said soberly. “Now we don’t have to talk about it at all, do we?”
In spite of myself, I laughed aloud.
“What’s funny?”
“I am, Jud, boy. I been—handled.”
He saw the point, and smiled a little with me. “Hell, I know what you’ve been hinting at. But you’re not close enough to the situation to know all the angles. I am. When the time comes, I’ll take care of it. Until then, it’s no one’s problem but my own.”
He picked up his star-chart reels and I knew that one single word more would be one too many. I squeezed his arm and let him go.
Five people, I thought: Wold, Judson, Tween, Clinton, Flower. Take away two and that leaves three. Three’s a crowd—in this case, a very explosive kind of crowd.
Nothing, nothing justifies infidelity in a modern marriage. But the ugly rumors kept trickling in.
“I want my certificate,” Wold said.
I looked up at him and a bushel of conjecture flipped through my mind. So you want your certificate? Why? And why just now, of all times? What can a man do with a certificate that he can’t do without one—aside from going Out? Because, damn you, you’ll never go Out. Not of your own accord, you won’t.
All this, but none of it slipped out. I said, “All right. That’s what I’m here for, Wold.” And we got to work.
He worked hard, and smoothly and easily, the way he talked, the way he moved. I am constantly astonished at how small accomplished people can make themselves at times.
He was certified easy as breathing. And can you believe it, I worked with him, saw how hard he was working, helped him through, and never realized what it was he was after?
After going through the routines of certification for him, I wasn’t happy. There was something wrong somewhere … something missing. This was a puzzle that ought to fall together easily, and it wouldn’t. I wish—Lord, how I wish I could have thought a little faster.
I let a day go by after Wold was certified. I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t eat, and I couldn’t analyze what it was that was bothering me. So I began to cruise, to see if I could find out.
I went to the archives. “Where’s Judson?”
The girl told me he hadn’t been there for forty-eight hours.
I looked in the Recreation Sector, in the libraries, in the stereo and observation rooms. Some kind of rock-bottom good sense kept me from sending out a general call for him. But it began to be obvious that he just wasn’t around. Of course, there were hundreds of rooms and corridors in Curbstone that were unused—they wouldn’t be used until the interplanetary project was completed and the matter transmitters started working. But Jud wasn’t the kind to hide from anything.
I squared my shoulders and realized that I was doing a lot of speculation to delay looking in the obvious place. I think, more than anything else, I was afraid that he would not be there.…
I passed my hand over the door announcer. In a moment she answered; she had apparently come in from the sun-field and hadn’t bothered to see who it was. She was warm brown from head to toe, all spring-steel and velvet. Her long eyes were sleepy and her mouth was pouty. But when she recognized me, she stood squarely in the doorway.
I think that in the back of every human mind is a machine that works out all the answers and never makes mistakes. I think mine had had enough data to figure out what was happening, what was going to happen, for a long while now. Only I hadn’t been able to read the answer until now. Seeing Flower, in that split second, opened more than one door for me …
“You want something?” she asked. The emphasis was hard and very insulting.
I went in. It was completely up to her whether she moved aside or was walked down. She moved aside. The door swung shut.
“Where’s Jud?”
“I don’t know.”
I looked into those long secret eyes and raised my hand. I think I was going to hit her. Instead I put my hand on her chest and shoved. She fell, unhurt but terrified, across a relaxer. “What do you th—”
“You won’t see him again,” I said, and my voice bounced harshly off the acoust-absorbing walls. “He’s gone. They’re gone.”
“They?” Her face went pasty under the deep tan.
“You ought to be killed,” I said. “But I think it’s better if you live with it. You couldn’t hold either of them, or anyone else.”
I went out.
My head was buzzing and my knitting arm throbbed. I moved with utter certainty; never once did it occur to me to ask myself
: “Why did I say that?” All the ugly pieces made sense.
I found Wold in the Recreation Sector. He was tanked. I decided against speaking to him, went straight to the launching court and tried the row of ship ports. There was no one there, no one in any of them. My eye must have photographed something in the third ship, because I felt compelled to go back there and look again.
I stared hard at the deep-flocked floor. The soft pile of it looked right and yet not-right. I went to the control panel and untracked an emergency torch, turned it to needle-focus and put it, lit, on the floor. A horizontal beam will tell you things no other light knows about.
I turned the light on the door and slowly swung the sharp streak across the carpet. The monotone, amorphous surface took on streaks and ridges, shadows and shadings. A curved scuff inside. Two parallel ones, long, where something had been dragged. A blurred sector where something heavy had lain long enough to press the springy fibers down for a while, over by the left-hand bunk.
I looked at the bunk. It was unruffled, which meant nothing; the resilient surface was meant to leave no impressions. But at the edge was a single rubbed spot, as if something had spilled there and been wiped hard.
I went to the service cubicle. Everything seemed in order, except one of the cabinet doors, which wouldn’t quite close. I looked inside.
It was a food locker. The food was there all right, each container socketed in place in the prepared shelves. But on, between, and among them were micro-reels for the book projector.
I frowned and looked further. Reels were packed into the disposal lock, the towel dispenser, the spare-parts chest for the air exchanger.
Something was where the book-reels belonged, and the reels had been hidden by someone who could not leave them in sight or carry them off.
And where did the reels belong?
I went back to the central chamber and the left-hand bunk. I touched the stud that should have rolled the bunk outward, opening the top, so that the storage space under it could be reached. The bunk didn’t move.
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