“The thought doesn’t appeal to me,” she said. “Your next assignment is to go wherever you have to go and do whatever you have to do to keep me out of Hell when the time comes. Two million will take me first-class as long as I’m alive—and with your help I intend to keep going for a long long time—but everything ends sometime. And dull as the prospect is, harp-playing beats roasting a hundred to one.
“But I can’t,” stammered Halbert. “You don’t understand. I—”
“What do you mean, you can’t?” she interrupted. “You love me too much to let anything like that happen to me.”
Halbert stared at the floor and shuffled his hooves in silent misery.
“DON’T YOU?”
He nodded slowly, in spite of himself.
“Then do it! Now!”
“Hearkening and obedience,” said Halbert, and disappeared.
Halbert Fenimore Shirey, Private Warlock 3rd Class (Very Provisional) sat in hunched-over misery in his battered office chair, staring at a cockroach on the floor. The cockroach stared back. There was a familiar mocking something in the bug’s beady eyes that he couldn’t quite place. He raised one foot slowly and began to bring it down.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” the cockroach piped in a throaty but musical voice. Halbert’s leg jerked up as if he had suddenly been given a hot foot.
“Astrobeth!”
The cockroach scuttled to the center of the office and began moving its legs and feelers in a complicated pattern.
There was a sudden moment of expanding darkness, a soft pop, and then a flash of golden breast and thigh before slender fingers could trace a pattern that materialized an abbreviated forest green tunic from thin air.
“Stop staring, stupid,” she said as she wiggled into it and then stood staring critically down at the way the garment molded the long curving lines of her body.
He waited as long as he could and then said in an anxious voice, “Well?”
She shook her head gloomily. “We’ll have to figure out something else. No sale on that one! Though after this nobody can say I wouldn’t go to Hell for you if I had to.”
“What happened? Weren’t you able to get in?”
“It wasn’t that,” she said. “I got in all right, right through the main gate, though I couldn’t have made it if Cerberus had still been guarding the place. He’s been replaced by some sort of new fangled psionic detection gadgets, but I guess they just weren’t tuned to cockroaches.
“I was able to slip into the permanent record section without being noticed. In fact, I was even able to sneak a quick look at that female’s master card. She’s got enough punches in the audit section right now to send her straight down if she doesn’t mend her ways in a hurry.”
Halbert’s face contorted and he began to gnaw already ragged fingernails.
“You never got that upset over me,” said Astrobeth bitterly. “I can’t help it. You know I can’t help it.”
Her voice softened slightly. “I know. But you can’t expect me to be ecstatic about your sitting around mooning over another woman, spell or no spell.” Walking over to him, she tousled his head roughly. “You poor slob.”
She looked at him sadly for a moment and then continued, “But anyway, their records system can’t be gimmicked: it’s too complex. They went over to complete automation right after the first A-bomb was dropped. They managed to grab off a number of first-rate German computer men before the Russians got to them, and put them to work. They’ve got a system down there now that makes a human UNIVAC network look like a ruptured abacus. There wasn’t anything I could do. If I’d tried to tinker with anything there would have been bells ringing all over the place.”
Halbert pulled himself to his feet and tried to square his sagging shoulders. “You might as well break out my gear,” he said sadly. “I’ve got to tell her who I really am.”
“And then what?”
“The only thing I can do to save her. I’ll make a deal with Baal. Humans just don’t have the stamina to take what his boys like to dish out. He’d jump at the chance to give her a blanket exemption in exchange for the fun of spending eternity working me over.”
As he started to walk heavily across to the equipment cabinet, Astrobeth grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him around.
“Listen, you,” she snapped, her eyes blazing with sudden anger. “If you think I’m going to sit by and watch you go to the pits to save some fat bottomed earthling, you’ve got another think coming!”
Halbert couldn’t help himself. Automatically he sprang to Myrtle’s defense. “Her breasts are like unto globed fruit,” he chanted. “Her jeweled thighs are pillars of precious ivory, above which twin alabaster moons swing slowly in languorous orbit.”
Astrobeth snorted viciously. “If I ever get my claws on her, those twin moons are going to achieve individual escape velocity. Now shut off that drooling while I see if I can’t think of some other way out of this mess.”
“Anything yet?”
“Nothing,” said Astrobeth in a strained voice.
Halbert was still slumped in his chair with his feet on the desk. Astrobeth was stretched out wearily on the lumpy couch.
“I could love you oh so much, loved I not Myrtle more,” he said sadly. “And the fact that the logical part of me knows who-what-which-where-and-how doesn’t mean anything. Every idea you’ve come up with would mean hurting her in some way or other, and as long as she has that spell on me I can’t let that happen.”
For once Astrobeth had no answer. She turned to the wall, her fingers clawing into her disheveled hair and her body shaking convulsively as tormented sobs tore their way out of her. As he watched her, Halbert felt the last faint flicker of hope die away. She had always been the brains of the agency, the one who bailed him out when he got things all snarled up. But now he was on his own.
He felt submerged in a hopeless, helpless, bitterness. Love, the corrosive element! The hooks that he had so innocently forged were biting deep and hauling him, jerking, toward his own destruction. He wanted to make the last gesture, to go over to the sobbing girl and try to comfort her, but even that was forbidden by the poisoned paralysis that clutched at his system. He loved her, he knew that now, even if it was artificially walled away where he couldn’t get at it. If he could just tell her about it, it would make things easier for her when he was gone. But he couldn’t.
The problem was love.
The solution? There wasn’t any. Somebody should tell the poets, he thought bitterly, somebody should tell them that love doesn’t conquer all. That no matter how much you loved a person . . . no matter how much you wanted to make her happy . . . when the only answer to her problem was love . . . why then . . . And then the solution slipped calmly and easily into his mind.
But of course . . . love was the answer to his problem too. . . .
“Astrobeth,” he said softly. “Everything is going to be all right. I love her.”
And with that he disappeared.
With Uncle Henry safely stretched out on a slab waiting his turn at Crawley’s Cut-Rate Crematorium, and with a tame and lovesick demon busy scurrying around Hell tucking up loose ends, a female with only twenty-four years under her belt—and under that same belt a waist whose eighteen inches stood in pleasing contrast to the proper thirty-six above and below—and a face to match the two million dollars resting snugly in probate has a legitimate reason to feel somewhat smug about her prospects in life.
Myrtle did.
Especially since, now that the forced austerity of living with Uncle Henry was behind her, she was in a position to satisfy her most pressing needs. The immediate means was due to arrive in five minutes—all six-feet-two of him. She stretched herself lazily, curling her toes in anticipation. When the buzzer sounded she unbuttoned another button and called lazily, “Come in.”
The door opened shyly instead of eagerly, and instead of the bronzed tennis pro from Green Hills bounding in with a Pan-like snorting, i
n with slow and somber steps came Mr. Cousins of Cousins, Cousins, Cousins, and Finch. Behind him with a spastic but determined stride came Uncle Henry.
Myrtle’s toes curled again—but not in anticipation—as he fixed her with one gelatinous eye and croaked, “Changed my mind again. Signed and witnessed. Half to the widows. Half to the orphans.” He slid squishily into a chair as Mr. Cousins, looking somewhat distressed, scuttled over to open the windows. Finishing this, the lawyer gave a hasty but polite bow and left.
Myrtle seemed on the verge of panic. “But you can’t!” she protested. “You said yourself that the spell couldn’t be broken by anyone but me. And I didn’t. You can’t do this horrible thing—not if you love me.”
Uncle Henry wheezed amorously, fell forward out of his chair, and began to crawl toward her on rubbery hands and knees.
“Don’t say that, baby doll,” he gurgled. “You know I can’t stop loving you.” He gave her a slack mouthed leer. “Want to play house?”
Shuddering—the open windows didn’t help much—she retreated to the far side of the room. “The money!” she said. “If you love me you’ve got to give it back!”
His knees buckled and he sagged forward onto his bloated stomach. Manfully he kept wriggling toward her, his head hanging over like a cabbage on a broken stalk.
“I can’t,” he mumbled, gumming each word, “I love you too much. You’d spend your way to perdition. Root of all evil. Camel’s eye. This way you’ll have a fighting chance for salvation.” He let out a gargling sigh and pawed feebly at her ankle. “Chin up, baby, you’ve always got me. We’ll make a fresh start together. You’ll be safe from temptation with me around.”
It was the last pulpy touch that did it. She let out a caterwauling scream and lurched back. Pointing one trembling finger at him she gasped, “NOHCAREV!”
The husk of Uncle Henry did a buck and wing and then flopped loosely to the floor as Halbert, free at last, cast off the old and left Myrtle far behind.
But only temporarily.
Still two months behind on the rent, Halbert Fenimore Shirey lounged lazily on the lumpy old office couch.
“You answer it,” he drawled to Astrobeth, who was sprawled out comfortably beside him. She yawned and, stretching out one arm, switched off the beep blatt of the incantation detector. As Halbert stood up and sauntered over to the desk she gave him a sly grin. “Business or pleasure?”
He made a pass over the crystal ball and looked down into it. Mirrored in its depths he saw a gaunt faced, hollow eyed female kneeling over a chalked pentagram.
“Business,” he said. “It looks as if Myrtle is beginning to repent of her unsinful ways again.”
“In that case,” said Astrobeth, “I guess you’d better dust off Uncle Henry.”
THE MAN WHO KNEW GRODNIK
Most obscure writers seem to acquire fame and fortune after they are dead. Reginald Southern thought it would be nice to return in a hundred years and at least collect the royalties.
“I’m sorry, Reggie,”—there was a note of tired compassion in the agent’s voice—”if you could figure out some way to stick around for the next century or so you might find yourself back on top again. In the meantime, this is all that Stuart was able to line up for you. It’s a killer—thirty-five bucks per and you pay your own expenses—but let’s face it, the market for bosom buddies of famous Greenwich Village characters of the twenties has hit a new low. There’s a whole new generation come up in the women’s clubs that hasn’t even heard of most of the people you talk about, let alone read them.”
The slim man with silver grey hair who sat on the other side of the desk picked up the itinerary, leafed through it quickly, and then gave a convulsive shudder.
“Not Kansas again! Scott, you can’t do this to me!”
“I don’t like it any better than you do, but at least you’ll be eating.”
“Fried chicken and creamed peas with the Malthusian Ladies Guild of East Potlatch, Kansas,” said Reginald gloomily. “You call that eating?”
The agent began to study the nails on his left hand. “Maybe next year something will break. Harrison still hasn’t vetoed the idea of bringing out Red Hot Mama in his American Classics series.” He took a quick look at his watch, stood up, and stretched out his hand.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me, Reggie—I’m really booked up solid today. Drop me a line when you find time. If anything comes of that American Classics deal I’ll shoot you a wire.”
Reginald Southern rose gracefully to his feet, flecked a speck of dust off a frayed cuff, and then gave his agent a jaunty wave.
“See you in a hundred years,” he said. “When the royalties for Red Hot Mama start pouring in again, bank them for me, will you?”
When the long and garbled introduction was finally finished—for some reason or other the toastmistress insisted on confusing him with Rex Stout—Reginald rose to his feet, turned on his after-dinner smile, and beaming down on the perspiring pack of much-corseted females, delivered his opening fine.
“Most of you are much too young to remember the fabulous nineteen twenties, but—” He paused automatically to let an appreciative twitter run through the audience. “But as John Barrymore said to me one evening when . . .”
He switched off conscious control and tried to ignore the sound of his own voice. The Barrymore story did make for a fast opening, but he always squirmed a little bit inside when he told it. Even though he hadn’t written anything for twenty years, he had been a semi-great for a few months, and he had known a number of the real greats of the period, some of them quite well. His only meeting with Barrymore, however, had been a mumbled introduction at a cocktail party and an extremely short conversation.
“Hot, isn’t it?” he’d said.
“Sure is,” the great actor had agreed. “Makes me thirsty. Where’s the bar?”
Reggie had pointed, Barrymore had nodded, and that had been the end of that.
The story he was telling was a true one, but the old friend he had been out with was John Grodnick, a poet nobody remembered anymore. The forgotten were not proper fare for women’s clubs—they wanted speakers who would leave them with a vicarious feeling of having rubbed shoulders with the great—and each year Reggie found he had to switch more and more names around as the number of still living reputations from his period dwindled.
For a while he had been able to salve his own conscience by introducing only those he had had some contact with—at least by correspondence—but for his Ernest Hemingway story he could make no real defence. Aside from a few mutual friends, he had never had any contact with the writer.
He wanted to drop it, but he couldn’t. Hemingway was known. Hemingway was still read. When he launched into the hilarious story about how the two of them had crashed the coming out party of Dorthy Femis—ears always pricked up at this point, Dorthy had just divorced her fourth duke—dragging a protesting and still unknown Thomas Wolfe between them and introducing him as an illegitimate son of Kaiser Wilhelm, his audience always paid him the tribute of leaning forward eagerly. This is what they had paid for.
The passing of a hundred years had changed New York City. For one thing, it was now located in the middle of Pennsylvania. The Big War had altered the coastline enough, however, so that it was still a seaport town.
Reginald Southern drew a few curious looks as he stepped off the local belt at 34th Street—he was the only one in the crowd that was wearing any clothes—but nobody bothered him. New York still preserved its old tolerance for eccentrics.
Scott Akermann, Inc. was still in business. It took Reginald some time to talk his way past the robot secretary, but at last he found himself in the inner sanctum. A sudden wave of nostalgia swept over him as he looked around the office. Somehow the old desk had been salvaged, and the current Akermann bore a close resemblance to his great-grandfather to have been a younger brother.
“Pm afraid the message the secretary sent through was a bit garbled,�
� said the agent politely. “Just who did you say you were again?”
Reginald drew the last of his cigarettes from its crumpled pack, put it in a stained ivory cigarette holder, and lit it with a flourish. Nobody seemed to smoke any longer he had noted with regret, but then his doctor had been after him to quit for years.
“I am,” he said with simple dignity, “Reginald Southern. The Reginald Southern.”
Akermann stared at him blankly.
Reginald gave a quiet little smile. “I dare say this is all going to be a bit of a shock, but it will clear up after you check die files. I am Reginald Southern, the author of Red Hot Mama.”
The agent’s face cleared suddenly and his hand began to creep toward the button that would activate the automatic ejector.
“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Southern,” he said, “but we never read unsolicited manuscripts. If yours hasn’t been returned to you, you might check with the secretary on the way out to see if you enclosed sufficient return postage.”
Reginald chuckled. It was going to be rather embarrassing for the agent when he realized who he was.
“Tell me, young man,” he said. “Is the American Classics series still in existence?”
Akermann looked at him in surprise. “Of course. Why?”
A tremor of uneasiness ran through the writer. “The name Reginald Southern still doesn’t mean anything to you?”
The agent’s hand moved forward again until it hovered over the ejector button again. “Much as I hate to terminate this most interesting discussion,” he said, “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to . . .” He stopped suddenly. “What’s your name got to do with the American Classics series?”
Reginald felt a sudden sinking feeling, but he didn’t let it show. Instead he started to explain.
When, after a long search, the yellowed folder bearing the name SOUTHERN, REGINALD J. had been exhumed from the inactive file, and Reginald had answered the last of the questions on the test sheet smoothly and confidently, Scott Akermann sat rigid in his chair, obviously shaken. He pushed a faded clipping toward Reginald.
Collected Fiction Page 52
