By the time I got to the computer center, I was feeling more depressed than when I had left the apartment. Berkeley seemed a city in the grip of fear. Fear was like a stink in the streets, and I understood why, when Fay got home from work, the first thing she did was to spray the apartment with perfume. I passed two cops with dogs, and one of the robfuzz units, in the course of the rather short walk to the computer center. And yet, short though the distance was, it was long enough for me to see a man attack another with a knife, and hear a woman, apparently several blocks away, screaming for help. Her cries stopped abruptly; I hoped one of the policemen had gone to her aid.
There were guards outside the computer-center doors. I walked between them, feeling intimidated and resentful. I found the information counter. There was a steel mesh curtain between the clerks there and the outside world.
"I'd like to locate a Miss Carol Jennings," I said through the curtain.
"Are you from a law-enforcement agency, sir?"
"No."
"Do you have a court order to see the file you mention?"
"No."
"Then I'm sorry, sir, but I cannot give you the information you ask for." She turned away, smiling politely, and after a moment I turned away, too.
In a phone book I found the name of a detective agency. I had no money for telephoning or bus fares, but the agency was within walking distance. I walked.
The tatty blonde in the ankle-length green dress handed me a card to fill out. I put as much information about Carol as I could remember on the card, and gave it back to the blonde.
"There's a fifty-dollar deposit, nonrefundable, before we undertake an investigation," she said, holding out her hand, "with a minimum charge of fifty dollars more when we come up with the data you want. We take credit cards."
"I'm sorry," I said, swallowing. "I'll be back later."
"O.K." She tossed the card I had filled out into the wastebasket.
When I went back to the apartment, about noon, I told Fay I had a job.
"What doing?" she asked, looking up from the lettuce she was washing.
"Crating books in the UC library. Listen, Fay, as soon as I get my first pay check, I'll pay back what you spent on me. And I'll start looking for a pad for myself today."
"Um." She cleared her throat. "Do you have to move out, Dick? You've got used to my hours"—Fay went to bed about six-thirty and got up a little after two—"and we don't get in each other's way. I feel a lot safer having you around."
I remembered the woman I had heard screaming that morning. "Well—" I answered.
"This isn't a sexual bid," she continued. She pushed her hair away from her face with the back of her hand. "We'd still have separate beds, and so on. Actually we wouldn't see much of each other, since we'd be working different shifts.
"But we'd both save money, and you'd have a nicer place to live than you'd be able to get on your own. The housing situation is terrible now."
It sounded reasonable. Besides I really rather liked Fay, and she'd done a lot for me. "O.K., I'll be glad to stay on here," I said. "We can work out the financial arrangements after I get my first check."
"Fine. And now, please take the garbage out. You didn't do it this morning."
"You saved it for me?" I asked, obeying.
"I saved it for you."
My job at the University of California library was a melancholy one. I must have crated thousands and thousands of books in the two weeks I worked there. They were being boxed for storage in Richmond, where the university had an enormous warehouse full of crated books.
All but two floors of the library were being closed off. Enrollment at Cal had dropped from about 27,000 to slightly under 5,000, mainly students in Physical Education and Criminology. The campus had been denuded of trees—this was true of Berkeley generally—to remove places where potential assailants could lurk. Some of the old beauty was left, but I constantly missed the hills behind the campus. The once-green lawns were patchy and unkempt.
Yet some of the esteem in which the university had once been held still lingered, despite the hatchet job done on the institution by a hostile governor. It displayed itself in an unexpected way.
One morning on my way to work I saw two men struggling on the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph, where the main entrance to the university had been. One had a knife, and the other, a length of tire chain.
Tire chain, who was bigger and stronger, seemed to be winning. The man with the knife broke away and ran, pursued, to Sather Gate, where he took hold of one of the balustrades. The stronger looked at him for a moment and then turned away, disgusted, without making any further attack on him.
The incident puzzled me, and I asked Red, one of the men with whom I worked, about it.
"Yeah, they don't chase one another much beyond Sather Gate. Of course, nobody can stay there all night. But it's a sort of rule that you're safe if you get to the gate."
"Why do they stop at that point?"
"I don't know."
"How did the custom get started, then?" I asked.
"I don't know that, either," he answered with a grin. He was the sort of man who ought to have chewed tobacco.
Most of my first week's check went to settling accounts with Fay. I promised myself that I would devote the next check to starting the hunt for Carol, but at the end of the week the job came to an end. After a brief spell of unemployment, Fay got me on at the computer center, working the same hours as hers.
We were seeing a lot more of each other. I kept putting off calling on the detective agency; I wanted to have plenty of money before putting the agency on her trail. It was reasonable, in a way. But nearly a month had passed since Fay had hung the Id disk around my neck.
Fay and I walked to work together and came back at the same time. Our being together more resulted in a resumption of our snapping at each other. I seemed to get on her nerves acutely, and she, on mine. I thought of looking for other housing, but Fay appeared to value the protection I gave her. She had, after all, been very kind to me. I stayed on.
Our mutual irritability came to a climax one warm September morning. Neither of us had had much sleep the night before; the mosquitoes had been unusually active, and there had been several noisy fights in the street. Fay began to scold me because, in my trip to the market, I had forgotten the butter.
"You're always forgetting things," she said crossly. "Yesterday it was the eggs, and the day before that it was the cream. When I give you a shopping list, you lose the list."
"For God's sake, Fay, stop scolding me! I'll go back after the butter."
"You went back the other days, too. I don't see why you can't get what we need on the first trip."
"You shut up!"
"I won't shut up! I don't have to shut up! You ungrateful, stupid, bumbling son of a bitch!"
"Son of a bitch, am I?" I said. I was getting really sore.
"Yes! You're nothing but a lout! Do you have any idea how much trouble I went to to get that damned stupid identity disk for you? And now you can't even remember the butter! You're a big, dumb slob!"
I didn't see why I should take any more insults. I put my hand over her mouth to try to stop her. Her mouth felt warm and moist and alive against the palm of my hand. An instant later I was kissing her.
We wound up in bed—where, I suppose, we had been headed all along. We had to be careful the first time, since Fay wasn't on the pill. She got a prescription the next day. The scolding stopped. We were happy enough. Fay was a good sexual partner, with a pretty, girlish figure and attractive sexual ways. Her breasts were normally full, but with tiny, almost nonexistent nipples. If this seems an oddly cold-blooded observation for a lover to make, the answer is that we were never really lovers, though we were certainly in a sexual relationship. And yet there was indubitably affection between us, too.
I thought of Carol rarely. When I did, it was with a sense of guilt. I hadn't precisely abandoned the idea of looking for her, but the search had been
indefinitely postponed.
Since Fay and I had begun to share the same bed, there had been a good deal of gnawing and scratching in the walls at night. I thought it was probably mice or, more disturbingly, rats. Berkeley was troubled with small rodents almost as much as it was with mosquitoes. The mosquitoes bred in the brackish pools of the bay fill.
One night in early October, there was so much noise in the wall that it roused me from a fitful sleep. Fay rolled over and sighed, and I thought she was awake, too.
"Sounds like they're having a convention," I said, softly enough that, if she were asleep, I shouldn't waken her.
"Ettins and orcs," she answered drowsily.
"What?"
"Ett—oh, excuse me, Dick, I was talking in my sleep. Let's go back to sleep." She yawned and turned away from me.
I wasn't altogether satisfied with her explanation. It seemed to me I'd been on the edge of an important discovery. But she probably had been talking in her sleep, just as she said. Finally, I drifted off myself, despite the noise in the walls.
The days were shortening. As the nights grew longer, the disturbances in the streets increased. Fay and I had little social life because of our odd working hours. Her friends accepted my presence in the apartment with calmness, despite the governmental campaign against "immorality", I suppose because they felt she was safer living with a man. She and I used to watch TV a good deal, and sometimes we played two-handed games of cards. The quality of TV, both picture and content, had worsened during my stay in Underearth. I felt that the culture in which I was living was spinning more and more wildly, like a washer with an unbalanced load.
We were eating supper about five o'clock one evening in November when I heard a crackling, grinding noise in the hall. It was followed by a mechanized voice saying, "Riot control. Come out quietly, or you will be gassed. Come out quietly, or you will be gassed. You have been warned."
I hesitated. Fay grabbed me by the hand and pulled me behind an armchair (we were eating in the living room). There was a fracturing noise in the hall, followed by a peculiar smell.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Probably a misprogrammed ropig." By her use of the word, instead of the more polite "robfuzz", I knew how annoyed she was. "There's no use in going out in the hall," she went on. "There's no reason for the thing to be here, and if we go out, it will only increase the foul-up. I think it's using a nauseant on us. We're lucky it's not tear gas."
"But—what will it do if we don't go out?"
"Probably nothing except throw more gas cans at our door. I'll call the center and speak to my supervisor."
"Wouldn't it be better to call the police?"
"It would take forever to get any action. Open the window, will you, Dick? It's getting a bit heavy in here."
I obeyed. The smell was really strong now, but I wasn't nauseated. Neither was Fay. She got her supervisor on the line, explained the situation, and was switched by the supervisor to the manager of the police computer center in the basement of the big building.
Once more Fay explained herself. I waited. I heard a good deal of movement in the apartment next door, followed by repeated toilet flushing. I still wasn't sick. The smell of gas in the living room began to thin out. Finally there was a grinding noise as the robfuzz unit rolled away. It had been recalled.
Neither of us was sick, as I said, but we were both getting high. Fay began to giggle. Her eyes were glassy bright, and her jaw hung slack. She drifted about the room, giggling and rearranging objects on the coffee table and talking so fast and so shrilly that I couldn't make out what she was saying.
I felt no inclination to talk, myself, but the things around me seemed exquisitely comic; when Fay absently switched the TV on, I almost split a gut laughing at the feathers in the peacock's tail. After that I got a little nauseated, enough to retch once or twice. I never was sick enough to vomit, and the nausea soon died down, leaving me hungry.
Fay seemed to be hungry, too. We went back to the dining table and finished our interrupted meal, giggling a lot. Fay seemed to be particularly affected by the slices of tomato in the salad; she kept poking at them with her fork and laughing, for almost ten minutes.
Finally, about nine o'clock, we began to come down. "We'd better go to bed right away," Fay said. "We're not going to get very much sleep."
"All right." I yawned and stretched. "I wonder why the gas didn't make us sick," I said. "Wasn't it really a nauseant?"
"Oh, yes. I expect that people of elf des—" She stopped, looking annoyed rather than regretful or dismayed.
"So that's it," I said after a little pause.
"Yes."
"What are ettins and orcs?"
"Elves' animals."
"Listen, Fay, how far back do your elf connections go?"
"Ever since I was a little girl," she answered slowly.
"There was one of the entrances to Underearth in the hill near our house. Dad knew, of course. He used to whip me for playing with them."
"Where was that?"
"In South Carolina. Underearth is a big place."
"How could you play with them?" I asked after a moment. I was remembering the foolish arched eyebrows, the wildness, the violence of the elves I had seen.
"I did, though. There were several little games we used to play—'Bibble-Babble' and 'Dance on Eggs' I remember particularly."
"Did they talk to you?"
"Not very often. But I could see into their minds. Oh, and there was 'Come To Me'. That was a nice game."
"Did you ever eat the atter-corn?"
"Once or twice. Some of the animal transformations were fun. And I liked the bright colors. But when I got older, I tried to forget all about it. Underearth's not—anything one's glad to remember. I couldn't forget it completely, though. That was why I wasn't glad to see you when you came back, Dick. You smelled of Otherworld."
I looked at her. "I suppose that was why we attracted each other," I said.
"Yes. It was our common elf heritage."
There was a silence. I thought of asking her whether she had ever crossed the water barrier, and decided against it. It didn't matter particularly. "Listen," I told her, "I'm going to go hunting Carol. I'm still in love with her."
To another woman, in different circumstances, this might have been a brutal thing to say. Fay did not look up from the patterns she was drawing on the tablecloth with her forefinger. "O.K.," she replied unemotionally.
Chapter Twelve
I was stopped near Chowchilla by a roadblock. Two polite highway patrolmen gave me, my car, and my bag a quick but thorough search, and compared my ID disk with several replicas. I was glad, not for the first time, that Fay had taken pains to provide me with a leakproof identity.
"What were you searching me for?" I asked one of the patrolmen as he opened the gate in the roadblock to let me through.
"Drugs," he answered glumly, and waved me on.
My spirits rose slightly as the rented car began to pick up speed. Hood's "secretary" might or might not be Carol; I found it hard to understand why she, who had always disliked him, should be traveling around with him. But Hood would probably know where she was to be found. Finding him was the first step toward finding her.
I had no real plan for dealing with Hood. I had thought of taking Merlin's sword, and decided against it—the sword hadn't helped me when I had confronted him in Underearth before, and a three-and-a-half-foot length of steel can be an awful embarrassment. I had left it hanging on the wall of Fay's living room.
Fay had watched silently while I packed my bag. When I had started toward the hall door, she had said quickly, "Be careful, Dick. Hood is dangerous."
"I know," I said.
And yet, despite her warning and my own knowledge of Hood's capabilities, I felt that I would be able to handle him. Perhaps this was because I had managed to survive the cold perils of Otherworld and win my way back to the light; the experience had left me with a basic confidence that Hood, armed or
unarmed, was nothing more than a green elf. Of his malice and dangerousness I had already had bitter proof. But I considered him, in the end, a less formidable antagonist than the Gray Dwarf.
I got to Fresno in the late afternoon. The manager of the motel in El Cerrito, which was the latest address the detective agency had been able to give me for Carol Jennings, had said that "Mr. Hood and his secretary" were going to Fresno. She had added that they must be going to stay in a hotel, since Mr. Hood had complained that motels were too close to the ground. Hood did not appear to have made a favorable impression on her.
I started with middle-bracket hotels. My great worry was that Hood would be staying in a hotel with closed-circuit TV between the lobby and the guests' room. I didn't think I'd be able to bluff my way past a TV camera.
I was lucky. The desk clerk in the fourth hotel I tried, a quiet older building with no TV, said, "Yes, I'll ring his room," when I asked to speak to Mr. Carl Hood.
The room telephone appeared to ring for a long time. I waited, feeling the sweat trickling down my back and preparing the story I was going to tell Hood. The lobby smelled dusty and overheated. Finally, the clerk said, "His secretary says he's not in just now. Would you like to speak to her?"
I hesitated. If the secretary wasn't Carol, I didn't want to give her my real name, and if it was Carol, I foresaw an interval of painful, disbelieved explanation over the telephone. Finally, I said, "Tell her Robert Elkins would like to come up. I'm an acquaintance of Mr. Hood's."
"Yes, it's O.K.," the clerk reported after a moment "They're in room 419."
Up in the elevator, dust-smelling, and along the dust-smelling corridor. I rapped. After a minute, a voice—Carol's?—said, "Come in." I opened the door.
The woman who turned to meet me was wearing dark glasses. Was it Carol? This girl was much thinner than I remembered Carol being, and her face had the slight, generalized puffiness I had noticed in the faces of the human exiles in Otherworld. Her hair, darker than the old Carol's, was cut in a "chula crop", a style that left her ears and thin neck exposed.
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