“That one only goes to Washington, and won’t live for half an hour,” said Sklar. “Should be one comink in on the other track soon.”
As he spoke there came a click of relays from the other side of the platform, and a purr of motors, and another car crawled into view on the empty track. The nose came closer and closer and did not stop until it was even with the surface of the pillar behind which Sklar and Graham stood.
Sklar made a warning motion. “Wait till the yard motorman lives his cab,” he said. “Then we put these characters in the mail compartment.”
After a few seconds’ wait, Graham heard a door latch click, and the sound of retreating footsteps. Sklar murmured: “All right, now we got about two minutes. Help me!”
When they dragged the first body around the corner of the pillar, Graham fully expected to run into a flock of people: railroad employees and passengers. But the platform was empty. Sklar opened a door in the side of the car, and they lugged the man in. Then they repeated the operation with the other. As this one was showing signs of coming to, he had to be quieted by another tap of the blackjack.
“Graham,” said Sklar, “stand by the door. If you see anybody comink alunk the platform, tell me.” And he fell to work with the expertness of long practice to bind and gag the men with handkerchiefs, shoelaces, and other items of clothing.
“Nobody there?” he whispered. “Good. Hold this guy up so as I can get this mailbag over his head.”
When both men had been stowed in mailbags and shoved into a corner, Sklar dusted his hands and said: “All right, now we go. Your brother will be missink you. Not a word about this, you understand. Will you be alone in your apartment tomorrow afternoon?”
“I—uh—guess so,” said Graham. “Ivor never gets in before eighteen hundred and usually not till late in the evening.”
“Good.” Sklar took a last look at the car in which they had hidden their attackers. An electric truck piled with mailbags was rumbling towards them down the platform, and beyond it Graham could see a few early passengers coming down the escalator to board the car. Sklar said: “We just made it. I wrote ‘Kansas City’ on their tags, so unless some blip gets curious as to what’s in them, they will be in Kansas City in another fourtin hours. I only wish the Line ran on to Los Angeles.”
He led the way back up the circular staircase and into the washroom, where he coolly removed traces of the recent fracas. Graham, watching him with some slight awe, did likewise.
“Hurry, Graham,” said Sklar. “I don’t want your friends askink what you have been up to. Tomorrow at fiftin hundred, yes? Okus-dokus. So lunk. See you.” And he was gone.
II.
“And—er—what d’you think of Earth, Betty?” said Gordon Graham.
“Hey,” said Ivor Graham, “how’d you get your knuckles skinned? Been in a scrap?”
Gordon shook his head and kept looking at Jeru-Bhetiru, who answered: “Fascinating, but so much water! It would give me a complex to know the land is nothing but an island surrounded by water.”
“My Osirian tourists feel the same,” said Ivor. “Not having any oceans, none of ’em knows how to swim; in fact the mere suggestion makes ’em shudder. On the other hand the monkey-rats of Thoth, having nothing but one big ocean with a lot of islands . . .”
“Can swim,” Gordon broke in. “Go on, Betty.”
“And there are so few young ones!”
“With the lengthening of human life the old ones have become relatively more numerous, and we have to control our increase or there’d soon be standing room only. How about our human culture?”
“I was trying to say—” said Ivor.
Jeru-Bhetiru paid him no more attention than did his brother. She said: “It fascinates me too. To us poor backward Krishnans the Earth is a kind of glamorous fairyland. But most of all I am interested in human psychology. That is of course my—line, I think you call it? It is much like yours, but different in some ways. I should like to analyze you, for example.”
“Wh-what?” said Gordon, pinkening. “You mean you’d want me to lie down on a couch and Tell All?”
“Don’t waste your time on him,” said Ivor. “You wouldn’t get anything interesting. Gordon’s heart is pure even if his strength isn’t the strength of ten, but only two-point-seven. Now me—”
Gordon said: “Uh—don’t let him fool you, Betty. Ivor wouldn’t appreciate the purity of your motives. Couches make him think of things other than scientific research.”
“Depends on what you call research,” said Ivor. “If you two will stop gazing into each other’s eyes, I’ve been trying to say it’s time to go to your meeting. I’m going anyway; here’s my half of the check.”
Gordon Graham and Jeru-Bhetiru looked up in some confusion, but pulled themselves together to say good-bye to Ivor. After some further discussion of psychology Gordon Graham said: “Guess he’s right. We’d best be going.”
She took his arm as they walked slowly out, almost wandering through the door before a whistle from the cashier reminded Graham that he had not paid for his dinner. He laughed a silly laugh, let the cashier short change him without noticing, and continued on out. So busy were he and the Krishnan girl with each other that they bumped into two pillars and five pedestrians and got lost three times before they found the exit to the subway.
For Gordon Graham the world was beginning to take on that rosy glow it assumed when he had just met the latest girl of his dreams. His previous resolutions? Fooey. What if his friends would look askance on the idea of his marrying a being of another species? He cared nothing about that; let the morrow take care of itself. He’d found an ornamental companion, a soul mate, and a listener. What else mattered?
They took a Concourse Express to Bedford Park Boulevard and walked east towards where Mosholu Parkway emerges from Bronx Park, with the late June sunset at their backs. Among the apartment houses stood a sprinkling of old one-family houses, some going back centuries.
“Should be somewhere along here,” drawled Graham. “Sa-ay, Betty, what is this Churchillian Society?”
She replied: “The’erhiya told me it tries to prove that a twentieth-century playwright named George Bernard Shaw could not have composed the plays he is supposed to have written, but that, instead, they must have been conceived by a statesman of the time named Winston Churchill.”
“Churchill? Wasn’t he an early British labor-leader who wrote socially conscious novels around 1900?”
“I should not know, Gorodon.” (She always made three syllables of his name, a fault of enunciation he found wholly charming.)
“We can look it up later, but isn’t it funny for an Osirian to be interested in such things? Who’s The’erhiya?”
“My friends in Boonton told me he is a famous speculator. I met him at this party, with his partner, the Thorian Adzik. He carried Adzik around in the crook of his arm—”
“Hey! Are you sure you don’t mean Adzik the Thothian?”
“Why?”
“Thorians are too big to be carried on anybody’s arm. Ostrichmen, we call ’em.”
“You must be right. Thorian, Thothian, I confuse your Earthly names for other planets. Why did they choose two so much alike?”
“Just happened. You see we called the planets of our own system after Roman gods back before space travel, and when we found other planets we named ’em after other mythologies. Your star got Indian gods; Epsilon Eridani, Norse gods; and Procyon, Egyptian gods.”
“Why must you give your own names to other stars and planets? It seems—a little arrogant.”
“Because when we ask the natives of a strange planet what they call it, they give us answers in a hundred different languages, half of which we can’t pronounce and all meaning something like ‘home’ or ‘ground.’ Some don’t even speak, but talk by waving their tentacles. But go on about The’erhiya.”
“Well, he carried the Thothian—is that right?—in the crook of his arm like—like—”
&nb
sp; “Like a teddy bear, I guess you’d say.”
“Teddy bear? Anyway, I do not much like Osirians, even this The’erhiya, who was polite enough. They frighten me with their big sharp teeth and that pseudo-hypnotic power they are said to have.”
“Oh, I dunno,” said Graham generously. “I’ve met some that weren’t bad sorts, in spite of their scales and that weird hissing accent. They’re kind of impulsive and sentimental, but otherwise not so different from Earthmen and Krishnans mentally. What more did The’erhiya tell you?”
“Not much, because he—how do you say it—passed out.”
“Really?”
“Yes. You know they cannot drink out of our kind of cups and glasses, but use a thing like an oilcan. And the first thing we knew, there was The’erhiya the famous speculator sprawled in a corner, with these empty vessels with the long spouts all around him, and the little Thothian making clucking noises to show how unhappy he was about it all.”
Graham tore his attention away from Jeru-Bhetiru long enough to look at a house number. He exclaimed: “Oh, shucks, we walked past our number. Have to go back.”
When they finally turned in at the right address, which proved to be one of the old private houses, a man standing in the shadow inside the doorway said: “Good evening.”
Graham said: “Good evening. Is this where the Churchillian Society meets?”
“Yes indeed. Wait a minute—aren’t you Gordon Graham, the geophysicist?”
“Yeah, that’s me. Why, how did you know?”
“Oh, you’re a better-known man than you think, Mr. Graham. And we’re very glad to see you. Won’t you step in?”
Light chairs were arranged in rows in what had evidently once been a living room. Some people occupied some of these chairs while others stood around talking. The room’s main decoration was a large portrait photograph of Winston Churchill, wearing the necktie and stiff collar of his period.
As Graham led Jeru-Bhetiru to a pair of vacant seats, another man—a stout bald fellow—said: “Good evening, Mr. Graham.”
Graham was sure he had never seen either this man or the man at the door before. Something was going on that he didn’t understand. First the strange encounter with Sklar and the two men who had attacked them; now this. He was sure he had never been here before, either. He didn’t even have that feeling of pseudo-memory the psychologists called déjà vu . . .
The stout bald man, whom somebody referred to as “Mr. Warschauer,” called the meeting to order. There ensued the usual tedious round of discussion of membership, dues, and other topics of no interest to outsiders. (Graham kept whispering to Jeru-Bhetiru, earning disapproving frowns from his neighbors.) Then Mr. Warschauer introduced a Mr. Donaghy, a small white-haired man, as the speaker of the evening.
Mr. Donaghy got up in front and launched into an impassioned oration on his favorite subject: “. . . and what do we know of this George Bernard Shaw, as he called himself? All we have to go on is a few biographies, mostly biased, and which don’t agree with each other in many vital respects; and microfilm records of the notoriously corrupt and unreliable press of the twentieth century.
“Well, who was this so-called Shaw, anyway? From what little trustworthy evidence there is, he would not seem to have been a man of distinguished antecedents, which in those days of class distinction were necessary before a man could rise to intellectual eminence. So far from being a man of noble lineage, or a descendant of distinguished litterateurs, he was the son of a corn merchant! It is known that Shaw, as he is called, never attended school after the age of fourteen. Furthermore, to judge from the eccentric spellings by which he anticipated the modern curse of the so-called reformed orthography, he never paid much attention to learning even when it was offered to him . . .”
Graham, having almost immediately caught the general drift of Donaghy’s argument, paid it no more attention, devoting himself to gazing at Jeru-Bhetiru’s profile.
“. . . five years working in a real-estate office, of all places! How could the author of ‘Pygmalion’ and ‘Candida’ have endured such a stultifying atmosphere? A man of such sensitivity of soul would have gone mad in a week! And when he did at last abandon the sordid career of rent collector to try to earn a literary livelihood, he soon showed himself utterly incapable of doing so. In the first nine years of his new career he earned by his pen just six pounds, or about 28 modern World Federation dollars. The publishers rejected four novels, as they were called, one after the other. In one of these he showed his depraved tastes by setting his scene in the prize-fighting business. Try to imagine, if you can, the author of ‘Saint Joan’ writing about brutal and vulgar pugilists! And associating with them to pick up the necessary background and color . . .”
Graham shook his head vigorously to keep from falling asleep. Donaghy, seeing the motion, said sharply: “Do you have a question, young man?”
“N-no,” said Graham, reddening. “I—ah—I went swimming and got water in my ear.”
“Ahem. To resume: Finally obtaining a toehold on the fringe of the profession of letters, the soi-disant Shaw engaged in the lowest form of the craft: literary criticism. Even so, he showed not enough stability of character to hold any one job for long, but instead drifted from one publication to another . . .”
Graham let his hand steal out on a foraging mission of its own until it found one of Jeru-Bhetiru’s and clasped it. She not only did not try to draw away, but even returned his squeeze. The thumping of his heart all but drowned out what Mr. Donaghy was saying—not that Graham cared a damn what Donaghy said . . .
“Then who did write these plays, if not the so-called Shaw? Ah, who indeed? There was at that time one young man in Britain whose mind was in truth afire with the creative urge, but who could not have openly avowed his ambition in this direction because of the social and political tabus of the time. For such an aristocrat, son of a lord and grandson of a duke, playwriting was not an acceptable occupation in those distant days. Nor were theatrical people welcomed into exclusive circles like his. Moreover the plays he had stirring in his unconscious would gravely have compromised the political career for which he was destined both by his own transcendent ability and by the tradition of his family . . .
“Therefore, we are persuaded—nay, forced—to believe, this great man must have made a deal with the alleged Shaw, to let the plays he wrote but could not sign be published under the name of this seedy hanger-on. Shaw, for his part, was willing enough to have his name used in this fashion, though he himself lacked the talent . . .”
For final proof of his thesis, Mr. Donaghy drew on the blackboard an anagram consisting of the names of 23 of the plays of “the so-called Shaw,” so arranged that one vertical row of letters read “WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL.”
Everybody clapped loudly. Everybody, that is, except Graham and Jeru-Bhetiru, who could not do so without letting go each other’s hands, and who were not enough impressed by Mr. Donaghy to do that.
It all seemed pretty thin to Graham, though he hardly knew enough about the literary history of the Century of Catastrophe to argue the matter. One thing he was sure of: he had evidently confused Winston Churchill with a couple of other fellows. He’d have to look him up in the Encyclopaedia.
Moreover he was surprised to see, on looking at his watch, that two hours had passed since they had sat down.
People were rising to leave. Some had gathered round Donaghy to argue or to praise him. Graham was leading out Jeru-Bhetiru when the fat Warschauer materialized in front of them, saying: “I’m so glad you’ve come at last, Mr. Graham; we’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”
“Really?” said Graham. How the devil could they have been looking forward to meeting him when he had never heard of them before this afternoon, was not at all interested in their screwball literary theories, and had nothing in common with them?
“Yes, really,” said Warschauer. “Will you step back into our board room? The other officers of our little society are
most eager to meet you too.”
“We really must be getting along . . .” said Graham.
“No, really, my dear young people, you simply must step in for a minute. Only for a minute. We have a proposal I think you’ll find interesting, and if you don’t like it you can run right along.”
“Let us see what this nice man wants, Gorodon,” said Jeru-Bhetiru. “I am in no hurry.”
Against his better judgment Graham gave in and preceded Warschauer to the rear of the house. Here he found himself in an ex-dining room facing a couple of other men. Warschauer said: “This is Mr. Lundquist” (indicating a jowly, red-faced, gray-haired man) “and Mr. Edwards” (the small wiry red-haired man who had met Graham at the front door). “Go ahead, Chris.”
“So glad to know you,” said Lundquist. “How you doing?”
“All right,” said Graham. “What’s this proposition Mr. Warschauer was hinting about?”
Lundquist said: “This business conference will bore the young lady. Jim, why don’t you take care of her in the next room?” When Edwards had taken Jeru-Bhetiru out, he continued: “You admit, Dr. Graham, that scientists ain’t paid enough, don’t you?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose you might argue that way. Why?”
“But you’d like to make more, now, wouldn’t you?”
“Who wouldn’t? But what’s all this got to do with Shaw and Churchill?” Graham admitted to himself that these did not seem much like desperate characters; but then, never having known any desperate characters, how could he judge?
Lundquist smiled. “Nothing at all, my friend. We’re thinking of a deal more in line with your scientific work. You know, on that Ganna—Gamanovia Project.”
The Continent Makers and Other Tales of the Viagens Page 21