by William Tenn
“Don’t know nothing about prizes,” the doorman stated, rocking his folding chair back and forth in front of the ballroom entrance. “Anything important, they don’t tell me.” He tilted his cocked hat forward over his eyes and stared bitterly into space, as if reflecting that with just a little more advance information from Paris the day might indeed have gone quite differently on the Plains of Abraham. “Why’n’t you ask around down in the bar? All the big wheels are down in the bar.”
There must, Alfred reflected, be a good many big wheels, as he apologized his way through the crowded room downstairs. The hoop-skirts and rearing, extravagant hairdo’s, the knobby-kneed hose, swinging swords, and powdered wigs jam-packed The February Revolution Was the Only Real Revolution Bar Grill so that the half-dozen or so regular customers in shabby suits and worn windbreakers seemed to be the ones actually in costume, poverty-stricken, resentful anachronisms from the future who had stumbled somehow into imperial Versailles and the swaggering intrigue of the Tuileries.
At the bar, Bushke Horowitz, his iron mask wide open despite the sternest decrees of King and Cardinal, accepted dues money, dispensed opinions on the future of standpipes and stall showers to the mob in heavy brocade and shot silk around him, and periodically threw a handful of largesse to the bartender, a chunky, angry-looking man with a spade beard and a white apron, along with the injunction to “set ’em up again.”
There was no way to get through to him, Alfred realized. He asked several times about “prizes,” was ignored, and gave up. He had to find a wheel of somewhat smaller diameter.
A tug at the sleeve of his clerical gown. He stared down at the rather thinnish Mme. Du Barry sitting in the empty booth. She gave him a smile from underneath her black vizard. “Drinkie?” she suggested. Then, seeing his blank look, she amplified: “Yousie and mesie. Just us twosie.”
Alfred shook his head. “Nosie—I mean, no, thank you. I—uh—some business. Maybe later.”
He started to walk away and found that his sleeve failed to accompany him. Mme. Du Barry continued to hold it between two fingers: she held it winsomely, delicately, archly, but the hold was absolutely unequivocal.
“Aw,” she pouted. “Look at the whizzy-busy businessman. No time for drinkie, no time for mesie, just busy, busy, busy, all the livelong day.”
Despite his irritation, Alfred shrugged. He wasn’t doing himself much good any other way. He came back and sat across the table from her in the booth. Then, and only then, was his sleeve released by the dainty fingers.
The angry-looking man in the spade beard and white apron appeared at their booth. “Nyehh?” he grunted, meaning, quite obviously, “What’ll you have?”
“I’ll have Scotch on the rocks,” she told Alfred. “Scotch on the rocks is absolutely the only ever drink for me.”
“Two scotch on the rocks,” Alfred told the bartender, who replied “Nyehh” signifying, “You order the stuff, I bring it. It’s your funeral.”
“I heard you asking about contests. I won a contest once. Does that make you like me a little better?”
“What kind of contest did you win?” Alfred asked absent-mindedly, studying her. Under that mask she was probably somewhat pretty in a rather bony, highly ordinary sort of way. There was nothing here.
“I was voted The Girl the Junior Plumbers of Cleveland Would Most Like to Wipe a Joint With. It was supposed to be The Girl Whose Joint the Junior Plumbers Would Most Like to Wipe, but some nasty people made a fuss and the judges had to change the title. It was three years ago, but I still have the award certificate, Now, does that help me at all?”
“I’m afraid not. But congratulations anyway on winning the title. It’s not everybody who can—uh, say that.”
The angry-looking man in the spade beard came back and set glasses and coasters in front of them. “Nyehh!” he announced, meaning, “You pay me now. That’s the way we do it in this place.” He took the money, glowered at it, at them, and clumped back to the becustomered bar.
“Well, what kind of contest are you looking for? If you tell me, I might be able to help. I know lots of little things about lots and lots of little things.”
“Oh, contests, prizes, nothing particular.” He glanced at the rear of the booth. There was a framed photograph on the wall of Plekhanov shaking hands with Kerensky. A tough younger version of the chunky, angry-looking man in the spade beard was standing on tiptoe behind Plekhanov, straining hard to get his face into the picture. Alfred realized he was wasting time and swallowed his drink unceremoniously. “I’ll have to be going.”
She cooed dismay. “So soon? When we’ve just met? And when I like you so much?”
“What do you mean you like me so much?” he asked her irritatedly. “When, to quote you, we’ve just met.”
“But I do like you, I do. You’re the cream in my coffee. You’re the top. You do things to me. You’re what makes the world go round. I’m nuts about you. I go for you in a big way, big boy. I’m wild, simply wild over you. I’d climb the highest mountain, swim the deepest river. Body and soul. Roses are red, violets are blue. Drink to me only with thine eyes. Oh, Johnny, oh-h-h! You’re in my heart and my heart’s on my sleeve.” She stopped and drew breath.
“Gah!” Alfred commented, his eyes almost popping. He started to get up. “Thanks, lady, for the pretty talk, but—”
Then he sat down again, his eyes reverting to their previous, pop-like state. The way she’d expressed herself when she’d wanted to make certain she was understood! Like Jane Doe, like Jones—
He’d established rendezvous!
“So that’s how much you like me?” he queried, fighting for time, trying to think out his next step.
“Oh, yes!” she assured him. “I’m carrying the torch, all right. I idolize you. I fancy you. I dote on you. I hold dear, make much of, cherish, prize, cling to—”
“Good!” he almost yelled in the desperation of his attempt to break in on the language of love. “Good, good, good, good! Now, I’d like to go some place where we can have some privacy and discuss your feelings in more detail.” He worked his face for a moment or two, composing it into an enormous leer. “My hotel room, say, or your apartment?”
Mme. Du Barry nodded enthusiastically. “My apartment. It’s closest.”
As she tripped out of the bar beside him, Alfred had to keep reminding himself that this was no human wench, despite the tremulous pressure of her arm around his or the wriggling caress of her hip. This was an intelligent spider operating machinery, no more, no less. But it was also his first key to the puzzle of what the aliens wanted of Earth, his entry into the larger spy organization—and, if he kept his head and enjoyed just a bit of luck, it might well be the means to the saving of his world.
A cab rolled up. They got in, and she called out an address to the driver. Then she turned to Alfred.
“Now let’s kiss passionately,” she said.
They kissed passionately.
“Now let’s snuggle,” she said.
They snuggled.
“Now let’s snuggle a lot harder,” she said.
They snuggled a lot harder.
“That’s enough,” she said. “For now.”
They stopped in front of a large old apartment house that dozed fitfully high above the street, dreaming of its past as it stared down at a flock of run-down brownstones.
Alfred paid the driver and accompanied Mme. Du Barry to the entrance. As he held the elevator door open for her, she batted her eyes at him excitedly and breathed fast in his ear a couple of times.
In the elevator, she pressed the button marked “B.”
“Why the basement?” he asked. “Is your apartment in the basement?”
For answer, she pointed a tiny red cylinder at his stomach. He noticed there was a minute button on top of the cylinder. Her thumb was poised over the button.
“Never you mind what’s in the basement, you lousy Vaklittian sneak. You just stand very still and do exactly what I tell yo
u. And for your information, I know where you are and where your control cubicle is, so don’t entertain any hopes of getting away with nothing more than a damaged uniform.”
Alfred glanced down at the region covered by her weapon and swallowed hard. She was wrong about the location of his control cubicle, of course, but still, face it, how much living would he be able to do without a belly?
“Don’t worry,” he begged her. “I won’t do anything foolish.”
“You’d better not. And no phmpffs out of you either, if you know what’s good for you. One solitary phmpff and I fill you full of holes. I ventilate you, mister, I plug you where you stand. I let daylight through you. I spray your—”
“I get the idea,” Alfred broke in, “No phmpffs. Absolutely. I give you my word of honor.”
“Your word of honor!” she sneered. The elevator stopped and she backed out, gesturing him to follow. He stared at her masked face and resplendent costume, remembering that when Du Barry had been dragged to the guillotine in 1793, she had screamed to the crowds about her tumbril: “Mercy! Mercy for repentance!” He was glad to recall that neither the crowds nor the Revolutionary Tribunal had taken her up on the honest offer.
Not exactly to Alfred’s surprise, there was a man waiting for them in the clammy, whitewashed basement. The Huguenot. He of the American thinking straight-to-the-point.
“Any trouble?”
“No, it was easy,” she told him. “I pulled him in with the Cleveland-contest-three-years-ago routine. He was smooth about it, I’ll say that for him: pretended not to be interested, you know, but he must have bitten hard. I found that out a few seconds later when I told him I loved him and he asked me right off to come up to his apartment.” She chuckled. “The poor, pathetic incompetent! As if any normal American human male would react like that—without so much as a remark about my beautiful eyes and how cute I am and how different I am and how about another drink, baby.”
The Huguenot pulled at his lip dubiously. “And yet the uniform-disguise is a fine one,” he pointed out. “That shows a high degree of competence.”
“So what?” the woman shrugged. “He can design a good uniform, he can think up a splendid disguise, but what good is that if he’s slip-shod about his performance? This one’s barely learned anything about human methods and human manners. Even if I hadn’t known about him before, I’d have spotted him on the basis of his love-making in the cab.”
“Bad, eh?”
“Bad!” She rolled her eyes for maximum emphasis, “Oh, brother! I pity him if he ever pulled that clumsy counterfeit on a real human female. Bad isn’t the word. A cheap fake. A second-rate ad-lib, but from hunger. No conviction, no feeling of reality, nothing!”
Alfred glared at her through the wide-open wounds of his ego. There were holes in her performance, he thought savagely, that would have closed any show the first night. But he decided against giving this critical appraisal aloud. After all, she had the weapon—and he had no idea how ugly a mess that little red cylinder might make.
“All right,” said the Huguenot, “let’s put him in with the other one.”
As the red cylinder prodded into his backbone, Alfred marched up the main basement corridor, turned right at their command, turned right again, and halted before a blank wall. The Huguenot came up beside him and rubbed his hand across the surface several times. A part of the wall swung open as if on hinges, and they stepped inside.
Secret panels, yet! Alfred was thinking morosely. Secret panels, a female siren, a Huguenot master-mind—all the equipment. The only thing that was missing was a reason for the whole damn business. His captors evidently had not discovered that he was a human counterspy, or they would have destroyed him out of hand. They thought he was a—what was it?—a Vaklittian. A Vaklittian sneak, no less? So there were two sets of spies—the Huguenot had said something about putting him in with the other one. But what were these two sets of spies after? Were they both grappling for preinvasion control of Earth? That would make his mission much more complicated. To say nothing about trying to tell the police, if he ever managed to get to the police, about two interplanetary invasions!
And look who’d thought he was the counterspy in the picture…
The room was large and windowless. It was almost empty. In one corner, there was a transparent cube about eight feet on each side. A middle-aged man in a single-breasted brown business suit sat on the floor of the cube watching them curiously and a little hopelessly.
The Huguenot paused as he reached the cube. “You’ve searched him, of course?”
Mme. Du Barry got flustered. “Well—no, not exactly. I intended to—but you were waiting when we got out of the elevator—I hadn’t expected you for a while yet, you know—and then we got into conversation—and I just didn’t—”
Her superior shook his head angrily. “And you talk about competence! Oh, well, if I have to do everything, I guess I just have to do everything!”
He ran his hands over Alfred. He took out Alfred’s fountain pen and his cigarette lighter and examined them very closely. Then he replaced them and looked puzzled. “He’s not carrying a weapon. Does that make sense?”
“I think so. He’s not experienced enough to be trusted with anything dangerous.”
The Huguenot thought about it for a while. “No. He wouldn’t be running around by himself, then. He’d be under supervision.”
“Maybe he is. Maybe that’s the answer. In that case—”
“In that case, you both might have been followed here. Yes, that could be it. Well, we’ll fool them. Contact or no contact, we’ll close the operation here as of tonight. Don’t go out again—in an hour or so, we’ll leave the planet and take off with our prisoners for headquarters.” He rubbed his hands against the cube as he had on the wall outside. An opening appeared in the transparency and widened rapidly. With the cylinder at his back, Alfred was pushed inside.
“Give him a small blast,” he heard the Huguenot whisper. “Not too much—I don’t want him killed before he’s questioned. Just enough to stun him and keep him from talking to the other one.”
There was a tiny click behind him. A rosy glow lit up the cube and the basement room. Alfred felt a bubble of gas form in his belly and rise upward slowly. After a while, he belched.
When he turned around, the opening in the transparency had closed and the Huguenot had whirled angrily on Mme. Du Barry. The lady was examining her weapon with great puzzlement.
“I told you I wanted him stunned, not tickled! Is there anything I can depend on you to do right?”
“I was trying to be careful—I didn’t want to kill him, like you said! I aimed right at the control cubicle and I used the medium-low Vaklittian index. I don’t understand how he—how he—”
The Huguenot flapped both hands at her disgustedly. “Oh, let’s get out of here and start packing! When we get back tonight, I intend to ask headquarters to assign me a new female assistant for the next Earth operation. One without so exact a knowledge of human sexual approaches, perhaps, but who can be counted on to disarm a newly captured prisoner and to tell a Vaklittian index from a hole in her cylinder!”
Mme. Du Barry hung her head and followed him out of the room. The door-wall swung shut behind them.
Alfred touched the transparent wall of the cube gingerly. There was no longer any hint of the opening he had been pushed through. The stuff, while as transparent as glass, was rubbery and slightly sticky, something like newly melted plastic. But a plastic, he found out, incredibly strong. And it gave off a whitish glow which enabled him to see through it, dimly, the featureless walls of the secret basement room.
He turned and surveyed his co-prisoner, a few feet away, on the other side of the cube.
The man was looking at him suspiciously, and yet uncertainly, as if he did not quite know what to make of the situation. There was a peculiarly nondescript, uninteresting and ordinary quality to his features which made them somehow remarkably familiar.
Of course! He looked every bit as average as Jones, as Cohen, as Kelly and—in her own submerged feminine way—as Jane Doe. And so Alfred knew who the man had to be.
“John Smith?” he inquired tentatively. “I mean,” he added, as he recollected one of Jones’ earlier remarks, “Gar-Pitha?”
The middle-aged man rose to his feet and smiled relief. “I couldn’t figure out who you were, but you had to be one of us. Unless you were a decoy they were planting here to make me talk. But if you know my real name…What’s yours, by the way?”
Alfred shook his head coyly. “Command Central—Robinson, I mean—has me on a special mission. I’m not allowed to give my name.”
John Smith nodded heavily. “Then you don’t give it—and that’s that. Robinson knows what he’s doing. You can’t go wrong by following Robinson’s orders to the letter. Special mission, eh? Well, you won’t complete it—now. She trapped me the same way. We’re both in the soup and good.”
“The soup?”
“Sure. Those filthy Lidsgallians—you heard them? They’re leaving tonight and taking us with them. Once they’ve got us on their home planet, they’ll be able to work us over at their leisure. They won’t get anything out of me, and I hope, for the honor of the Academy, they won’t get anything out of you, no matter what they do to us, but we won’t be good for very much by the time they’re through. Oh, those Lidsgallians know their way around a torture chamber, yessiree, Bob!”
“Torture chamber?” Alfred felt sick and knew he looked it.
The older man reached out and squeezed his shoulder. “Steady on, lad,” he said. “Don’t show the white feather before the natives. Keep a stiff upper lip. Bite the bullet. Fight on for old Notre Dame. Never say die. You have nothing to lose but your chains. Let’s keep the old flag flying.”