At last they traveled together to Europe. Shen Hui had it in mind to relieve some of the largest art galleries on the continent of some of their smaller and most prized possessions: miniature paintings, small sculpture, carved objects. They went to Zurich first.
The first night Julie excused herself in the lobby of the Grand Basle Hotel, went to the ladies’ room, and never returned.
She had planned well. From the powder room, with a small fortune and a forged passport secreted on her person, she made her way to the airport, and then to Madrid, Lisbon, and London. She made the trail difficult for Shen Hui to follow. And she prepared something else.
He came after her, as she had known he would. He wasn’t going to let her get away that easily. He had invested a lot of money in her, and besides, his feelings were hurt. He had thought she loved him. He had forgotten his own advice—never trust a slave. His love was replaced by hatred, all the more powerful because it was based on his own guilt and ignorance in being duped by the illusion he had created and named Julie.
They met up almost a year later. He came upon her in one of the public squares in Paris, near the Seine. Julie was wearing a black sealskin coat and a chinchilla hat. Shen Hui noted sardonically that it hadn’t taken her long to outfit herself. He added that she had been silly to expose herself to him in this way.
“What do you mean?” she’d asked.
“I mean if you had any brains, you wouldn’t have let me catch up with you. Do you realize how easily I could kill you? And you could do nothing about it, not even with all the skills I taught you.”
“I know that,” Julie said. “And I wasn’t careless. I chose to let you find me.”
“What are you up to?”
“I don’t choose to spend my life running,” Julie said. “I am extremely grateful to you, Shen Hui. You have taught me respect for the deeper law that underlies appearances. I appeal to that law now. Although you legally own me, your investment has been repaid many times and it is time that I went free. I served you well and you know it. I would like to shake hands and have us part friends.”
Shen Hui stared at her. His skin had aged incredibly, with a yellow cast to it like parchment that has been dried too long in the sun. She had never seen him looking so old. Even his thin mustache, which dropped down on either side of his face, seemed lifeless. And his eyes were brown and opaque.
She wasn’t sure what he would say. She knew that her life hung in the balance. Old as he was, and apparently unarmed, she had no doubt he could kill her anytime he chose.
“You are my greatest creation,” he said at last. “How could I kill you? Who would I have left to hate?”
Her life had really begun at that point. She spent several years on her own, accomplishing unbelievable feats of thievery in Europe and America. She made money easily, and spent it easily. Her life was rich and pleasurable, but she began to sense a loss of purpose, a slackness that was beginning to alarm her. It was a question of motivation. Shen Hui had taught her too well for her to be content with mediocre motives. Why was she doing what she was doing? What was she living for?
The only thing she could think to do with her life was to get rich. It wasn’t enough, she knew, but it was a start. After she accomplished that, she’d take the next step.
For the present she was here with Stan, and Stan was as good as hooked, if she had any knowledge of men.
* * *
For dinner that night Stan had ordered a special Moroccan feast catered by a North African couple he knew. Although it was short notice, he had told them to go all out, and he served the meal himself using his best china and silverware. There were game birds roasted on spits, half a sheep braised in many exotic spices and served with rough tasty Arab bread, platters of fruits and vegetables, several different wines. The Moroccan couple followed instructions, delivering the feast and then leaving. Stan paid for it with almost the last of the cash he had on hand. One way or another, no matter what decision he made tonight, it was going to be a new life for him tomorrow.
Stan hadn’t thought about what he was going to say. He didn’t need to. He was suffused with a knowledge that he couldn’t articulate yet. That would have to come later. For now it was enough to sit across the table from Julie while the strains of a Monteverdi madrigal tinkled in the background.
Julie had found an old ballroom dress upstairs, one of his grandmother’s, neatly folded in a fragrant cedar drawer. It fit perfectly, and she had worn it down to dinner with a set of large pearl earrings that had once belonged to Stan’s mother.
Stan, noting her preparations, had taken out the tuxedo he had worn to his recent college reunion. He put in the cat’s-eye opal cuff links and the diamond pin in the buttonhole. He felt tall and graceful in this outfit, and a little ironic. It was playacting, of course, and he knew that; but it was also in some strange sense real. And Stan knew that there were many costumes he could have worn that night. He wouldn’t have felt out of place in the golden mantle of Alexander the Great. Because just like the famous Macedonian, he was on the verge of new worlds to conquer. He was also up against a sea of trouble and pain, and he suspected he was doomed to die gloriously and young as well.
At dinner that evening Julie was radiant in the antique gown, Stan looking handsome in his tuxedo. He had saved a bottle of wine for a long time, waiting for an occasion like this. The bottle had been handed down to him by his parents—a rare St-Emilion, the great vintage of thirty-seven years earlier. Stan had taken good care of the bottle, storing it on its side in the temperature-controlled basement, making sure the cork was properly intact. He brought it up now and opened it with care, pouring a little into a fluted glass and tasting it.
“Just on the verge of turning,” he said. “But still superb. We’ve caught the St-Emilion at its peak, Julie. This is probably the last bottle of this stuff in the world.”
She tasted the ruby-red liquid he had poured for her. “It’s marvelous, Stan. But what are we celebrating?”
“Need you ask?”
“I think not,” she said, “but I would like to hear it anyhow.”
“And hear it you shall.” Stan smiled. Never had he felt so at peace with himself. He didn’t know where this course of action was going to take him, but he was satisfied to follow it.
“We’re going to go with your plan, Julie. And we’re going to follow it all the way. We both know the risks. We discussed them yesterday. We both know the odds are against us. But no more talk about that. I’ve decided, and I know that you have, too. We’ll start in the morning.”
She reached across the snowy tablecloth and held his hand tightly. “Why tomorrow morning?”
“Because that’s when my bank opens,” Stan said. “I’m ready for whatever we have to do.”
“I’m ready, too, Stan.”
“Well,” he said, half as a joke and half seriously, “I guess we’ve taken care of everything except what to name our alien.”
“What would you suggest?”
“What about Norbert, after the great Norbert Wiener, father of cybernetics, the science that gave it birth?”
“Sounds good to me,” Julie said. “I guess that just about covers it, Stan. Except for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
She leaned close to him. He felt dizzy with her face so close to his. She bent closer. Her lips were partially open. He was fascinated by her teeth, all perfect except one small one to the left, an eyetooth. It was a little crooked.
And then he stopped thinking as she kissed him, and Ari the cybernetic ant stood in his box on the mantel and watched, and the flames of the fire lifted and died away, and Stan watched Ari watching and watched himself kissing Julie, not knowing that Ari was watching, and all this from within his frozen moment in time and all of it stained in the blue light of the royal jelly of memory.
4
Next morning he had a chance to show Julie around his house. She admired the fine old silverware he had inherited from his grandpar
ents, and looked with something approaching awe at the portraits of his ancestors that hung on the great staircase that led to the upper rooms. There were dozens of somber oil paintings in ornate gilt frames, showing stern-faced men—some with side-whiskers and some clean-shaven—and proper-looking ladies in starched black bombazine and stiff Dutch lace. Stan had been lucky that this stuff still remained after the great destruction.
“It’s wonderful, Stan,” Julie said. “I never knew who my parents were. They sold me before I knew them.”
“I’ve got more than enough relatives,” Stan said. “You can have some of mine.”
“Can I? I’d like that. I’ll take that fat one with the smile for my mother.”
“That’s Aunt Emilia. You’ve picked well. She was the best of the bunch.”
There were other treasures upstairs. Eiderdowns whose cases were heavy with intricate embroidery; gaudy antique jewelry; massive furniture cut from gigantic tropical trees whose species had become extinct.
“This is such beautiful stuff,” Julie said. “I could look at it forever. How do you ever pull yourself away?”
“You know, it’s funny,” Stan said. “I never liked any of this before. But since you’ve come here… Well, it looks pretty nice to me now.”
* * *
The next day Stan was pleased when it was the time for action. He felt like his life was just beginning. He was very pleased with this notion, although he also dreaded it, because if his life was beginning, it was also drawing to a close. Which would come first, he wondered, victory or death? Or would they arrive simultaneously?
He refused to think about it. What was important was that he and Julie were in this together. He was no longer alone.
He dressed with special care that morning, humming to himself as he shaved. He selected an Italian silk suit and a colorful Brazilian imported shirt made of a light cotton. He wore his tasseled loafers, even going so far as to buff them up to a high polish. He usually laughed at people who took pains over their dress and appearance, but for this morning, at least, he was one of them. It was a way of reminding himself that he was making a fresh start.
He had been thinking a lot about fate and chance, and how they were influenced by the human will. He had come to the conclusion that what he wanted very badly was going to happen, as long as he willed it hard enough. It seemed to him that he was allied to a universal spirit that determined the course of things. As long as he wanted what the universal spirit wanted for him, he couldn’t go wrong.
Although these were exhilarating thoughts, Stan also had some doubts. He wondered if the fire caused by the Xeno-Zip might be affecting his mind. Was he getting a little… grandiose? Did he really think he had found a way to cheat death?
Sometimes it seemed obvious to him that death was what was really happening to him. This was the real meaning of the disease rotting out his insides. There were too many details of his everyday life to remind him; the spitting and spewing into basins; the many pills he was continually taking, and their many strange effects.
He knew he was a very sick man. But he thought it represented some ultimate courage in himself that he was refusing to face the facts. He decided that if people really faced the facts, they’d all be licked before they could start.
He was determined to go on. It was not yet time to give up and let go. That would come later, when he found his doom; for Stan sensed a horrible fate awaiting him, one that was presently without a name or a face. Then he shook his head angrily and put those thoughts out of his mind.
He found a fresh daisy from the garden for his buttonhole. It was a bright crisp day outside, a day that seemed filled with infinite promise. He could hear Julie humming from the kitchen. She had come down after her shower and was making breakfast. He went in. She was wearing his long fluffy bathrobe. Her hair was tied up in a Donald Duck towel. Her face sparkled, and she looked very young, ingenuous. It was a nice thing to see, though he knew it was an illusion, and only a temporary one at that.
They had bacon and eggs over easy, toast, coffee. A simple breaking of the fast. And now they were ready to discuss plans.
“The first thing we need,” Stan said, “is operating capital. I’ve got a lot of ideas for how to get this project of ours going. But it’s going to take some money. Have you any thoughts on how we could acquire a cash flow?”
“I do,” Julie said. “Raising money at short notice is what a thief does best, Stan. And I’m the best thief that ever was. How much do we need?”
Stan made some calculations. “A hundred thousand, anyway.”
“And how much money do you have right now?”
“I don’t know,” Stan said. “A couple hundred, I suppose, maybe a thousand in savings.”
“That’s not enough, is it?” Julie asked.
“Nowhere near. We need fifty thousand anyway.”
“As much as that?” Julie said. “Are you sure we need so much?”
“I’m afraid so,” Stan said. “We’ll have a lot of expenses to set up what we need in order to get a ship, put Norbert into final working shape, get the equipment we need, and get on with our plan.”
“All right, Stan,” Julie said. “I think I can be of some use here. Give me what you’ve got. I’ll double it.”
“How will you do that?”
“Watch and see.”
“Will you use your skills as a thief?”
“Not immediately,” Julie said. “There’s an intermediate step I need to take.”
“Could you be a little clearer?”
“I’m talking about gambling.”
“I didn’t know you were a gambler as well as a thief,” Stan said.
“My real profession is thief, but I’m a gambler also because everyone needs a second line of work. The fact is, I’m lucky at certain games. Like Whorgle. I’ve been told that I’ve got latent psychokinetic abilities. I can affect the fall of dice sometimes. But they don’t play dice at Callahan’s, only card games. Well, Whorgle is a new game that depends on hand-eye coordination. I’ve got that, and I’ve also got something else. A certain X-factor that sometimes does the trick.”
“Well, I guess you know what you’re doing,” Stan said. “Although I’ve been wanting to see some of this thieving of yours in action.”
“Being a good thief costs money, Stan.”
“That’s a funny thing to say. I thought you were supposed to make money that way.”
“That’s the result, of course. But when you work in the upper echelon of crime, you don’t go in and hold up a candy store. And you don’t knock off a bank, either. Those are not what I was trained for. You never asked what kind of thief I was, Stan. Well, I’m telling you now. I’m a high-society jewelry thief. I knock off only the best people. I work at political conventions, movie openings, awards ceremonies, great sports events, things that bring together crowds of people with lots of money. But that requires a setup. Otherwise I’d have to spend too long just trying to dope out how to do it. I buy a ready-made plan from an expert in the field. It comes high. But it’s guaranteed to bring me to large amounts of money and jewelry.”
“How much does a plan like that cost?”
“If you buy one from an expert like Gibberman, it can cost plenty. I’m going to use your money to win more money so I can pay Gibberman to give me one of his great plans. It may sound like a roundabout way to you, but name me any other profession where you can go from a thousand dollars to around a million in less than three days.”
“Sounds interesting,” said Stan. “Can I come along?”
“Well, of course you can, at least for some of it, but you have to be real cool. You mustn’t even act like you’re with me. You see, gambling is hard work. I’m going to have to give it all my attention. Then, assuming I win, there’s the next part of the operation, which calls for even more attention.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“That’s walking out of the gambling place with your money, Stan.”
5
At first Stan didn’t want to show his robot alien to Julie. On the one hand, he thought it was the best piece of work he had ever done. But would she realize that? What would her reaction be?
It didn’t matter what she thought, of course, Stan told himself logically. Yet all the time he knew it did matter, very much. He realized he wanted Julie to think well of him. He had been alone too long, and he had hidden from everyone, including himself, just how lonely and desperate he had been. It would have been too much to have realized that earlier. But now that Julie had come into his life, he could no longer bear being without her. He wanted to make sure that never happened.
He didn’t know what was going to happen. He was scared. But he was also strangely happy. Over the last few days the individual moments of his life felt better than they had for a long time. Maybe he’d never felt so good.
He was thinking about this while he showered and put on clothes fresh from the dry cleaners. He shaved with special care, and he laughed at himself for doing all this, but that didn’t stop him. He saw Julie over breakfast. She was looking radiant, her hair sparkling in the sunshine.
After breakfast, Stan showed her his lab.
After that, it was time to show off his robot alien.
He kept it in a special temperature-controlled room behind a locked door. The door was to keep people out, not to keep the robot in, he told Julie. It stood perfectly immobile, since it was not presently activated. Its black, heavily muscled body seemed ready to lunge. Yet Julie did not hesitate when Stan took her hand and peeled back the robot’s lips to show its gleaming rows of needle-sharp fangs.
“Your pet looks like evil incarnate,” Julie said.
“As a matter of fact, he’s surprisingly gentle. I hope I haven’t made a mistake in the circuitry. He may need to be trained to fight.”
“I can be of some help there,” Julie said.
The Complete Aliens Omnibus Page 24