Narabedla Ltd

by Frederik Pohl

  CHAPTER

  22

  The trouble with you,” Shipperton declared, steering me into the go-box, “is you don’t fucking appreciate everything we’re doing for you. Hurry up, get in!”

  I got in, still seething. “And what are you doing for Norah Platt?” I sneered, though by then I had lost a lot of steam because I pretty well knew what he was going to say.

  “Jump station,” he said to the box. Then, as the door closed, he said what I had been expecting: “Dr. Boddadukti is fixing her up, that’s what we’re doing for her. Of course he takes her apart to fix her up, what do you think? How do you think you looked a couple of hours ago? Get out!”

  I got out, as ordered, feeling a shiver of cold along my back. The pieces of my body fit together real well. They always had. I didn’t like the idea that they had recently been disassembled and then stuck back together again. “I’ve got a sore throat,” I complained, feeling my neck to see if the soreness was still there.

  “Of course you do. That’s because Mr. Davidson-Jones needs you, so I got you woke up a little early,” Shipperton explained. “In here—move it, will you?”

  “In here” was another go-box, bigger than the last. The door shooshed open. I started in, only half paying attention, because my fingers had felt something odd on my neck, but Shipperton grabbed my arm. “Hold it,” he ordered. “Let them get out, will you?”

  The new go-box wasn’t empty. It was even bigger than I’d thought, almost the size of a one-car garage. It needed to be because it contained a couple of the little Mnimn, like Meretekabinnda (only Binnda wasn’t one of them), and four of those big fourteen-foot praying-mantis-looking aliens, the Ptrreek, crouched over to keep their heads from going through the ceiling. They sputtered at me. The language was their own, but I understood what they meant: it was, “Get out of the way.” I felt my neck while the aliens shoved past and the two Kekkety servants muscled a couple of crates out of the box. One of the bedbuggy Eyes of the Mother followed them as far as the door. It paused there, gazing up at Shipperton. Shipperton said something I couldn’t hear. The bedbug hesitated, sniffing at his ankle, then it trotted back inside. Shipperton pushed me in after it and the door sqwuffed shut behind us.

  “Leave your dressings alone, will you, Nolly?” Shipperton ordered.

  “It feels like there’s something stuck on my neck,” I complained.

  “Well, sure there’s something stuck on it,” he said disgustedly. “Didn’t you ever hear of bandages? I don’t think you could pull them off, but don’t try. You’ll be sorry if you do. They’ll just get absorbed by themselves in a couple of days if you leave them alone.”

  It wasn’t easy to leave them alone. What I felt when I touched them was soft, slippery raised ribbons. They went in geometric patterns around my throat, all the way to the back of my neck, and they were warm to the touch, as though something unusual were going on under the ribbons. I swallowed, because I had a mental image of Dr. Boddadukti’s razor-sharp claws slicing through my tender and undefended skin while I was unconscious. “Are you trying to tell me he isn’t a murderer?” _I demanded.

  “Will you knock that off, for God’s sake? Boddadukti is a volunteer. He doesn’t have to fix us up, you know. He only does it because of his interest in exotic biologies.”

  “I know all about his interest in exotic biologies!”

  “Just shut up,” Shipperton ordered; and then, as the big door opened again, he snapped, “Out.”

  There was a Kekkety standing at the door. Shipperton nodded toward me and said, “He stays here. Stennis? Just wait a minute until I see if Jonesy’s ready for you.” He started to turn away, then stopped himself. He looked back at me. “One thing. Who’s Wiktor”—that was the way he pronounced it, with a “W” “—who’s Wiktor Ordukowsky?”

  I straightened up with a jolt. “What? What about him?”

  “Just that now you’ve got somebody else in the deep stuff, Stennis,” he growled. “Christ! I knew we just should’ve dumped you into slow time in the first place.”

  If there was one person I didn’t want to add to the list of people who were likely candidates for trouble, it was Vic Ordukowsky. He was a homely fat man, but he had been just about the best friend I’d ever had.

  When I had the mumps I thought I was going to die. When I was over the mumps, having left some important parts of my self-image in the hospital bed, I didn’t think I was going to die anymore, I just thought that it no longer mattered. Singing and making love weren’t just pleasures for me. They were, basically, the things my life was all about, and they were gone.

  I knew I was supposed to construct some sort of new life for myself, but it didn’t seem I had enough raw materials left to build it out of.

  That was when Vic Ordukowsky saved my life. I ran into him by chance in Grand Central Station. We had a drink in Charley O’s, and then a couple of pan roasts in the Oyster Bar, and when I was walking him to his three-hour-later-than-usual train he said, “Look, Nolly. You know what the trouble with good advice is? Good advice is what you’ve always known all along anyhow.”

  “So?” I said—not hostile, just getting ready to hear the same thing I’d heard a thousand times already.

  “So this is the advice: Find something else to be good at. Then get good at it.” And then, sort of offhandedly, “If you want to set up as an accountant, there’s a woman named Marian Lambert—have you ever heard of her?”

  “Sure. The contralto.”

  “She’s a friend of my wife. Mary-Ellen says she’s looking for somebody new to do her taxes. I’d go after it myself, but I’m not supposed to take on outside work. Anyway, what do I know about opera singers?”

  So Vic had given me my first client. He also steered my second, third, and about half a dozen more to me over the next year or two, and if that hadn’t saved my life I don’t know what had.

  I should never, never, I told myself, have involved Vic Ordukowsky in the Narabedla situation. Sure, I hadn’t meant to do him any harm. I had had no reason to think it would mean any serious trouble for him. But he wasn’t just vulnerable, he worked for Henry Davidson-Jones. That meant that the biggest part of his life was lived in the center of Narabedla’s web. It would be no trouble at all to make him disappear.

  And I was responsible.

  When Shipperton came to get me I had made up my mind what to do about it. I was in full possession of my faculties. I nodded briskly to Davidson-Jones as I entered his office. He was sitting at his desk, a desk very like the one he had in the World Trade Center, though the office he was in now was a lot smaller. It had the same kind of never-mind-the-cost furnishings, but the ceiling was no higher than the one in the corridor, and it lacked that wonderful starry sky. It was just a ceiling. The walls were hung with drapes, and Davidson-Jones himself looked a lot more tired than the last time I had seen him.

  I didn’t waste time. I said, “I’ll be glad to write Vic Ordukowsky any letter you want me to.”

  Davidson-Jones looked at me curiously.’ “You’re not going to argue about it?”

  “No. Give me a pen and some paper.”

  “Why,” he said, nodding, “I’m glad to see you cooperative, Nolly. It won’t have to be a letter. A card is good enough, and I have one here.”

  He tossed it to me; it wasn’t from Scotland this time, it was from Copenhagen, and the picture was of the Little Mermaid in the harbor. “I guess I do a lot of traveling around,” I said. “What do you want me to say?”

  “Be creative,” he told me. I picked up the pen and wrote quickly:

  Dear Vic:

  Having wonderful time with the girl of my dreams. If you see your boss thank him for me, because without him I never would have met her.

  He read it over carefully, and put it in his desk drawer. “Thank you,” he said.

  “Is that all?” I said, getting up. “Because I might as well be getting back—”

  He sighed and rubbed his forehead. “Nolly,” he sa
id, “I’m afraid it’s not all. I want you to listen to something. You might as well sit down.”

  I did, stiffly; and he turned the switch on a tape recorder on his desk, and a voice began to come out.

  It was Marlene’s voice.

  “My name,” it said crossly, “is Marlene Abramson, I live at 308 West 75th Street in New York City, my age is none of your business, and now can I tell you what I came here to say?”

  “What the hell!” I snapped, but Davidson-Jones waved me to silence.

  “Listen,” he ordered.

  An unidentified man was saying, “Go right ahead, Mrs. Abramson. Tell it in your own words, what you said on the phone.”

  Marlene: “Well, Nolly began—what? Oh, all right. My associate, Mr. L. Knollwood Stennis, do you want his address, too? Anyway, Nolly began acting funny, I guess some time in April, it was. We have this client, Woody Calderon, and he came in and—oh, God, now what?”

  Male voice: “Just to save time, we have all that preliminary material in your file already, Mrs. Abramson. Would you just tell us what occurred when you came here to Miami last Thursday?”

  Marlene: “Wednesday. I got here Wednesday, not Thursday. I registered at the Fontainebleau.” She pronounced it the way she always had, “Fountain-Blue.”

  “They comp me there, because I used to do their tax records, but I have to pay my own bar bills and phone. Anyway, I called you people at the office here, but I couldn’t get you off your duffs. FBI! Lordy, lordy, what do you people do with your time? A taxpayer comes and wants to report a kidnapping, and—” Male voice: “Yes, Mrs. Abramson, you’ve said that.” Marlene: “I’m going to say it a lot more, you hear what I’m telling you? I pay taxes! I told you Davidson-Jones’s yacht was right here, and you wouldn’t do a thing. So I checked it out myself.”

  Male voice: “Mrs. Abramson, did you ever stop to think that if these allegations have substance you could be in a lot of serious trouble?”

  Marlene: “Jesus, did I not! But Nolly’s a nice kid, you know? Even if he’s got a goyische kopf. Anyway”—she laughed a little; it was a pretty small, sad laugh—“I figured if I told you where I was going, and then if I got snatched, too, you wouldn’t be able to sweep it under the rug anymore.”

  Male voice: “I see.” Pause. “Then, after your failure to meet with Interpol, you decided to investigate yourself here in Miami.”

  “That’s right. My God, Miami In the summer! But that other guy in the FBI in New York, Matson? Watson? Whatever his name was. He let it out that the yacht was here. So first thing Thursday morning, after I couldn’t get you people to move, I rented a car from Avis and I went off to watch the yacht. Nothing was happening. All I ever saw was some of those Chinese people he has working there up on the deck sometimes, and I got hungry, and besides I had to go to the bathroom. So there was an I-Hop down the road—what? It’s International House of Pancakes, haven’t you ever seen one? And I ate, and when I came back to the yacht there was this silver-gray Bentley just pulling away, and I could see Davidson-Jones in it. So I followed it.”

  Male voice: “To the Shady Cypress Memorial Lawn, I think you said.”

  Marlene, “Right, the cemetery. And I pulled in after them, and I saw Davidson-Jones get out. He put flowers on a grave. Then he got back in the car and I ran back to my own.” Male voice: “And that was when you lost him?” Marlene: “I didn’t lose him, I just had a little trouble. Well, I hit a gravestone when I was turning around. And then this rent-a-cop comes out and gives me an argument, and by that time Davidson-Jones is long gone.”

  Male voice: “So you went back and looked at the grave the suspect placed flowers on.”

  Marlene: “Right. And it said, ‘Henry Davidson-Jones, 1931-1933, beloved son.’ So this other guy is a fake, and what are you going to do about it?”

  The fake Henry Davidson-Jones sighed, reached out, and clicked off the recorder. “It’s really surprising,” he said, in a tone of wonder, “how much trouble your Mrs. Abramson can make.”

  I had to clear my throat before I could speak. It might have been just the effects of Dr. Boddadukti’s fooling around with my vocal cords. Or it might have been the way I felt after hearing Marlene’s flat, lovingly worried voice coming out of that machine.

  “How did you get that?” I demanded.

  He looked surprised. “I didn’t have to get it. A man named William Matteson of the New York office of the FBI brought it to me. He came to my office and played it and asked me to explain.” He grimaced. “Fortunately,” he said, “I already had contingency plans for any question about my actual identity. But it’s getting tiresome, Nolly. Mrs. Abramson’s been busy. It’s not just Ordukowsky and the FBI, she’s been making a career out of talking to people. She has to be stopped.”

  “Lots of luck,” I snapped. It was empty bluff, of course. He knew it as well as I did, and went on as though I hadn’t even spoken.

  “So what you have to do,” he said, putting his hand on a telephone on his desk, “is call her and tell her that everything is really all right.”

  “Not a chance,” I said positively.

  Davidson-Jones sighed. He passed a hand before his face. Then he took the cassette out of the machine and replaced it with another. “Sorry,” he said, with his hand on the button. “I put that wrong. I should have explained to you that we don’t need your help. It would just be more convenient. For instance, at this moment Mrs. Abramson is back in your office in New York. There are some men nearby who can meet her when she leaves and dispose of her.”

  “You bastard!” I flared.

  He said mildly, “I don’t want to do that. Among other reasons, it would cause a lot of talk. However, I think the talk would die down once it became clear Mrs. Abramson was out of her mind. Listen to this.”

  He pressed the lever, and out of the new cassette came Marlene’s voice again, but this time it was saying, “Hello, FBI? Listen, I didn’t tell you the whole story last time. This Henry Davidson-Jones, I want you to know who he really is. He’s Adolf Hitler. He’s been hiding out with the saucer people, and he’s going to kill the president and take over the White House.”

  The voice stopped. Davidson-Jones pressed the stop button and said, “That one’s a phone call to the FBI. There’s more. A call to the mayor of New York, to The New York Times, a whole bunch of them to your clients.”

  “Marlene never said anything like that!” I cried.

  “No, she didn’t,” Davidson-Jones agreed. “But it’s her voice all right, isn’t it? Of course, it’s not really hers. It’s your friend Purry simulating her voice, but, actually, Purry is extremely good at that.”

  “No one will believe it’s Marlene!”

  “I think they will, Nolly, because the next thing they could find, if that’s the way you want it, is Mrs. Abramson, dead of an overdose of LSD. Then they’d check her medicine cabinet, and they’d be sure to find six sugar cubes left in a box of twenty-four, and all of them laced with acid.”

  “You’d murder her?”

  “I’d do what I had to do to save the project, Nolly,” he agreed, “but murdering’s something I haven’t had to do yet. Do you really want to push us that far, Nolly? You can clear the whole thing up.”

  “But how—” I began. And then stopped, appalled, because I was beginning to sound as though I would cooperate.

  “All you have to do,” said Davidson-Jones gently, “is pick up this phone. Call her. Tell her to call off her dogs. Tell her you’re all right, but you’ve got something going and you’ll be out of touch for a while.”

  I snapped angrily, “Can’t Purry do my voice too?”

  He said patiently, “We want to make sure she believes you, Nolly. You’re the only one who can do that. Convince her. Make sure the next thing she does is call the FBI and tell them it was all a mistake; or do I tell the people in New York to pick her up?”

  “But there’s still that tombstone.”

  “Oh, yes,” he sighed. “There are
a lot of loose ends to straighten out. We’ll take care of that part. You do yours.” He looked at me searchingly for a moment, then picked up the phone and dialed a number. I recognized it: it was my office in New York, complete with area code.

  What wonderful technology they had, I thought bitterly as it began to ring.

  “You’re on,” said Davidson-Jones, handing the phone to me.

  “Stennis Associates,” our receptionist said in my ear.

  I closed my eyes. I took a deep breath. “Hello, Sally. This is the boss calling—yes, I’m all right, just real busy. Let me talk to Marlene, please.”

  CHAPTER

  23

  When it was over I sat for a minute, trying not to shake. I didn’t pride myself on what I’d done. Marlene had actually been crying on the phone.

  I lied to her, copiously and imaginatively, just as Henry Davidson-Jones wished. I told her a long line of hogwash about how I’d been feeling as though I had a nervous breakdown coming on. I just needed to get away for a while, I said. My crazy ideas about Henry Davidson-Jones were just part of being overstrained and mixed up, I said. Everything would positively be all right, I said, and I promised I’d keep in touch every now and then. And I filled it all in with chitchat about whether Henry Stanley’s New Jersey state forms had been filed, and how Terry Morgenstern’s CDs needed to be rolled over—the kind of day-to-day stuff that only I would know about, so she would be sure this person on the phone was no impostor.

  Toward the end of the conversation she stopped crying and began to get mad. That didn’t make it any better, and I was glad when it was over.

  Of course, I had to do that. For her sake.

  But I couldn’t make myself believe that. Not at that moment, not at all that day, and not for a good many of the days that followed.

  Shipperton escorted me back to his office. We didn’t speak. When we got there he poured me a drink and I took it.