Narabedla Ltd

by Frederik Pohl

  She was shaking her head. “I had that body cremated,” she pointed out.

  “They can’t all have been cremated. There’s a whole list that’ve come to Narabedla in the last twenty or thirty years; there’s bound to be at least one they can check.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “Say, that’s true,” she said. “Maybe it is. Well, then, if all that works out, we go to Davidson-Jones and we tell him that if he doesn’t leave us alone all that stuff comes out. So why do we have to blow the whistle on him now?”

  “Why— Because— After all, Irene, they’re prisoners up there! Even your own cousin.”

  She said, “But Tricia doesn’t want to come back to the Earth. I asked her.”

  “She doesn’t?” I blinked at her. “At least Tricia should have the right, shouldn’t she? And she’s not the only one. Conjur Kowalski definitely wants to come back. So does Ephard Joyce. So do a batch of others—I bet nearly every one of the people we saw in slow time is there because they tried to escape.”

  “Nolly,” she said patiently, “when I found myself in that slow-time place I thought I’d gone crazy. When Tricia got me out and took me to her place I was positive of it. I’m talking culture shock, you know? Even now, the only way I can handle it is by making believe it was some kind of a dream.”

  “It’s very disorienting, yes,” I agreed.

  “And what would happen to the whole world if they suddenly got exposed to it?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. They’d just have to face up to the fact that we’re not the only ones in the universe, or even the smartest.”

  “And do you think they can? I mean, without going nuts?” She got up and stood before me, peering down seriously at me. “You’re talking about two different things, Nolly. One is taking out insurance; that’s fine. The other is pulling the trigger. Maybe that’s right, maybe it isn’t. All I’m saying is I think we should give that a lot of careful consideration before we do it. It scares me, Nolly.”

  “But why? What do you think will happen?”

  “Nolly, what scares me is I don’t know what will happen. So, please, let’s think it over before we do something we can’t undo.”

  By then the room-service waiter was knocking on the door. I let him in, and tipped him, and escorted him out again, thinking hard.

  It was possible Irene Madigan was right. By the time I had escorted the bedbug back to our dinner I had decided, at least, to hold off on anything irreversible for a while.

  The bedbug ate its dinner sulkily. It not only wasn’t very good, it wasn’t anywhere near enough, it complained. Irene fished a few of the shrimp out of her salad, and it ate a few of them distastefully. Also it was fretfully anxious to carry out the Mother’s orders. The TV set had kept it busy in the other room for a time, flicking the remote-controller from channel to channel, but that was not enough. “It is a very stupid system,” it complained. “It is not even interactive. Can we go out now? I want to ride the subway.”

  I told it, “Pets aren’t allowed in the public transportation systems unless they’re in a pet carrier.”

  “What’s a pet?” it wanted to know. And when I explained that that was its temporary status with us, as far as the rest of the planet Earth was to know, it seized on the idea of a carrier. “One with temperature control,” it specified.

  “But there aren’t any of those, and you’re too heavy to carry very much, anyway,” Irene pointed out. “I’ll tell you what we can do. We can get you a little doggy overcoat, and maybe even booties.”

  The bedbug demanded suspiciously, “What is an ‘overcoat’? You mean there is something else I have to carry around? On only four legs? In this gravity?”

  “It can’t be helped,” Irene offered, stroking its chitinous back.

  The bedbug accepted the inevitable. “Then let us get this ‘overcoat’ for me,” it said. “Although you may go on grooming me for a bit first.”

  Irene said obligingly, “All right. I suppose we ought to do some shopping anyway. I need a coat for myself, not to mention boots and maybe some other clothes, and I suppose you do too, Nolly.”

  I definitely did. The slacks and jacket I’d scrounged on Davidson-Jones’s yacht were tight in the pants and loose in the jacket, and not really warm enough for a New York winter to begin with. “Also,” I said, “we’re going to need a Polaroid camera, and some film. And writing paper, and pens. And envelopes. And stamps.”

  “Hold it while I make a list,” Irene said, searching the drawers for hotel stationery. “Are you sure about wanting pens? To write these things out with? I’m sure the hotel could rent us a typewriter.”

  I thought for a minute. “No, it’s better if they’re in our own handwriting,” I decided. “Put down a bottle or two of liquor, while you’re at it, and some instant coffee. I wonder what time the stores close? What time is it, anyway?”

  And when I called down to the desk to ask they told me it was a quarter after eleven. I didn’t have to ask whether it was a.m. or p.m., because I could see out the window that it was night.

  I hadn’t thought of the time at all. “Well,” I said, “maybe we ought to get some sleep first, anyway, and make a good start in the morning. Irene, would you like to keep this room? The bedbug and I will bunk in next door.”

  “I do not require to sleep,” the bedbug piped up.

  “All right,” I said. “You can stay in the living room and watch television all night.”

  “But it is not my assignment to watch television! I must carry out the Mother’s instructions!”

  “Well, you will. Tomorrow. Probably. Meanwhile there are all-night news programs, movies—I think there’s even a porno channel, if that interests you.”

  It chittered severely, “That is not the same thing at all. The Mother wants the firsthand experience from me. The sights, the smells, the tastes.”

  I tried to reason with him. “Yes, but you don’t have to do it all yourself, do you? When you go back you’ll just tell her all this. Why couldn’t one of us just have told her?” He reared up on his hind legs to gaze at me. “Tell her? What would be the use of telling her? No, Mr. Stennis, when I go back she will engorge me, and then all my memories will be hers.”

  I goggled at the thing. “You mean she’s going to eat you?”

  “It is the happiest thing I have to look forward to,” he chittered with pride.

  CHAPTER

  42

  It was a good thing we had a suite, because the bedbug was up all night with the television while 1 was trying to sleep in the bedroom next door.

  I didn’t sleep long enough. The bedbug woke me early, scratching at the covers over me and whimpering, “I have nothing here to eat, Mr. Stennis. My metabolism is not like yours. I must eat.”

  Room service wasn’t open yet. If it had been, they probably wouldn’t have had any raw fish on the breakfast menu; so there wasn’t any help for it. I struggled into my clothes, cursing, and went out into the barely dawning morning outside.

  If I had not been so cold and so sleepy, I would have been pretty happy. I was home! This was my own turf. My old apartment was only a few blocks away. There was my favorite sushi bar, next to it the neighborhood’s best pie bakery. I had a quick cup of coffee in my regular coffee shop on Second Avenue, and found that the Korean open-all-night fish store was still there where I had last seen it, with the same busy, quick little Korean couple running it and the same display of Sun Myung Moon’s ginseng elixir stacked on the counter next to the cash register. They didn’t seem to recognize me. But then, they never had.

  It was a homecoming. When I got back to the hotel room my shoes and socks were soaked from the melting snow, but I had a shopping bag full of seafood for the bedbug, a huge jar of instant coffee for myself, and about a hundred sheets of hotel stationery from the drowsing bell captain in the lobby.

  I knocked on Irene’s door to invite her to join us before letting myself into my own room. By the time I had finished laying out my p
urchases on the bathroom floor for the bedbug’s examination, with its claws scratching excitedly on the tiles, she came in, yawning and looking rumpled. “I have to have some clothes,” she said drowsily.

  The bedbug chittered in consternation over the fish. “It’s all dead,” it exclaimed.

  “We don’t usually eat our breakfasts here until they’re dead,” I informed it. Glumly it pawed over the slimy things. It nibbled at a filet of redfish, sniffed a cardboard dish of smelts, and finally, reluctantly, devoured three little squid and a dozen bay scallops, while I fixed Irene and myself some instant coffee out of the hot-water tap.

  “That’s a step in the right direction,” she said, swallowing, “but I’m going to need more than that.”

  I nodded. I pulled the stolen dispatch case from under the bed, unsnapped it, and counted out a thousand dollars for her. “Get some breakfast for yourself,” I instructed, “and then see if you can find any stores that open early on Twenty-third Street. Have you got that shopping list?”

  She nodded, but protested, “I can’t carry everything on the list! I don’t know your sizes, anyway.”

  “Just get what you need. Then, when you come back, you can stay here with the bedbug and I’ll go out.”

  “No,” said the bedbug forcefully, appearing between us with half a squid in its foreclaws. “You cannot leave me confined in this place when it is my duty to observe and experience. Take me with you!”

  Irene scowled at him. “Later, okay? I’ll take you anywhere you want—well, more or less—but I’m not really awake yet.”

  “Now,” the bedbug said firmly. “Where is my costume? And, oh, yes, what is the excretory custom on this planet for ‘pets’?”

  “Maybe you’d better take a little more money,” I offered, grinning. “You might have to buy a pooper-scooper.”

  She glared at me, then turned it onto the bedbug. “You,” she commanded, “are to excrete into the toilet in the bathroom, and then flush it; that’s a law, and do it before we go out. And close the door behind you,” she called after the bedbug as it meekly turned to obey. Then she looked at me. “I’ll take that extra money., though,” she said. “It seems to me I’m going to deserve it.”

  They were gone for nearly four hours.

  It wasn’t really enough time for what I had to do. I was busy writing out my story on the hotel stationery. I started with the very first conversation with Woody Calderon, told of his “death,” then of hearing from Irene, of having lunch with Vic Ordukowsky, bearding Davidson-Jones in his den, meeting Irene in southern France … I had filled twenty-five pages by the time Irene and the bedbug got back, and had only reached the point where I saw Norah Platt’s dismembered body in Dr. Boddadukti’s tub.

  When they came in I quickly hid my notes under the desk blotter, because they weren’t alone. Two bellboys followed them, laden with packages. Irene was not only carrying some bags of her own, she was wearing some of her purchases: red leather boots, calf high; a leather overcoat, with a fur Cossack hat on her head; and when she took the coat off I saw she was wearing a brand-new pants suit in a pale gray fabric. The bedbug, too, had a handsome new plaid wool overcoat buckled over his fleecy disguise.

  “You both look very nice,” I told Irene.

  “Thank you, but will you tip the bellmen, please, Nolly? I don’t think I have any money left,” she said. While I was doing that she went into the bathroom and began running water into the tub. The bedbug scurried excitedly after her.

  As soon as the bellmen were gone it began shedding overcoat and dog suit, chittering, “The fish! Please, put the fish in!”

  “I’m doing it as fast as I can,” Irene assured it, returning to the living room for a transparent plastic sack filled with water, in which three live ten-inch trout were agitatedly writhing and waving their fins. She untied it, dumped them into the filling tub, turned off the water, and left the bedbug in there. She closed the door, but we could hear the splashing and scratching noises anyway as it happily devoured its first decent meal on Earth.

  “It’s your turn to go out now if you want to,” she told me.

  “All right,” I said. I showed her what I’d been doing. “You can start making your own report. We’ll get them all Xeroxed and mailed out this afternoon. And remember, don’t let anybody see the bedbug without his dog disguise. Above all, don’t let him talk. When the maid comes to clean the room, tell her to do the other one first, then you and the bedbug can go in there while she cleans up here, and be sure you take the money with you.”

  “Nolly,” she said, sounding exasperated, “I’m really a grown woman. I can take care of myself. Just go.”

  And I went, feeling a little good-naturedly embarrassed at her reproof, but also feeling pretty good because things were going so well. It was even colder out than it had been earlier that morning, but I didn’t head first for a men’s clothing store to get a coat. I turned up my collar and walked briskly to the street telephone in front of the post office, because there was a call I had wanted to make all along and hadn’t dared risk from the hotel room.

  The street phone was still there. Remarkably, no one was using it; even more remarkably, it worked. I dialed the familiar telephone number for L. Knollwood Stennis & Associates, and waited for the ring, rehearsing the way in which I would disguise my voice in case of listeners and speak to Marlene in words she alone would be able to understand… .

  The phone didn’t ring.

  Instead, there was a sort of clashing sound of ill-tuned chimes, and a mechanical voice told me, sounding like a more musical version of Barak’s gaspy delivery, “The number you have called … is no longer in service … please consult your directory.”

  But I did, and the number wasn’t there. The firm of L. Knollwood Stennis & Associates was no longer listed in the telephone book.

  Almost anything could have happened in the best part of two years, I told myself.

  But something certainly had, and none of the possible explanations I could think of were encouraging. I hesitated, then tried her home number.

  That was a little better. I didn’t get her, but I got her recorded voice, saying that although she couldn’t come to the phone at that moment I should leave my name and telephone number, and the day and time I was calling.

  I hung up. I was beginning to shiver violently in the open phone cubicle, anyway.

  So I went down the block to a men’s clothing store and bought a fleece-lined jacket and a hat; I needed more than that, but nothing as desperately. I stopped in the stationery store across from the post office for large envelopes. I picked up some more live fish for the bedbug, made sure the Xerox place was still there … and then dialed Marlene’s home number again.

  I got the same recorded announcement from her machine, but this time I was ready. “This,” I said, “is Harrison Cham, Sylvia’s husband.” Sylvia Cham was an old client, which Marlene would remember, and she would not fail to remember that her husband, Harrison, had died five years earlier, because we’d gone together to the funeral. “It is important that I speak to you, but I must be in and out all day. Please call me at this number at three, six, or nine p.m.” And I gave the number of the phone booth.

  At three o’clock I was there. So was a small teenage girl, on tiptoes to reach the phone, having a long conversation in Spanish with, it sounded like, her mother. Three o’clock came and went and she was still on the phone. At five after she finally hung up, gave me a hostile glance, and departed. I took over, pretending I was talking with my finger on the hook.

  But by twenty after there was still no ring. I took the statements Irene and I had written to the Xerox place and left them there as I went back to the hotel.

  We spent the next hour or so taking Polaroid pictures of us with the bedbug. It didn’t mind. It seemed to enjoy posing, and even climbed up in my lap so that Irene could snap us together a dozen times.

  The photos looked pretty convincing to me. I suppose any Hollywood special-effects wi
zard could have created even better pictures with trick photography, but I couldn’t think of any way of making them better.

  At five-thirty I went out again. This time the bedbug insisted on coming along, and Irene decided she didn’t particularly want to be left in the hotel by herself. All three of us picked up the Xerox copies, the bedbug obediently slinking under a table when I commanded, “Sit!” Irene and I stuffed the copies in the addressed envelopes, twelve copies going to twelve different people, and I left her waiting in line at the post office for stamps while the bedbug and I made the six o’clock check on the phone.

  It didn’t ring.

  There was no particular reason for us to go right back to the hotel, and we were getting used to being out in the cold. Even the bedbug was contentedly doing his job for the Mother, sniffing at the tires of parked cars, rearing up to gaze into windows, pausing to investigate the aromas that came from pretzel vendors and hot-dog salesmen, and out of bars and restaurants. We strolled aimlessly down Third Avenue toward Union Square, and although people stared at the beast we had on a leash, and the hurrying crowds divided to let us through, no one offered any unwelcome questions.

  “I guess I don’t really have to talk to Marlene,” I said, after a while.

  “I suppose not,” Irene agreed.

  “But I wish I could! I’m worried about her. She wouldn’t close down the office unless she absolutely had to.”

  “Well,” she said practically, “what’s our next step?”

  Fortunately I didn’t have to answer that just then. I frowned and shook my head, pointing down at the bedbug.

  Which was whining up at us. I looked around. No one was very near. I bent down to listen, and it whimpered, “How does one manage with only four legs, Mr. Stennis? I’m getting tired, and this solid-phase water is very cold.”