Hawks said: "Mr. Connington—" He looked directly back at the man. "I'm not convinced. This individual I requested would have to be a very rare type. Are you sure you can instantly give him to me? Do you mean to say your having him ready, as you say, isn't a piece of conspicuous forethought? I think perhaps you may have had some other motive, and that you're seizing on a piece of lucky coincidence."
Connington lolled back, chuckled, and lit a green-leaved cigar from the tooled leather case in his breast pocket. He puffed, and let the smoke drift out between his large, well-spaced teeth.
"Let's keep polite, Doctor Hawks," he said. "Let's look at it in the light of reason. Continental Electronics pays you to head up Research, and you're the best there is." Connington leaned forward just a little, shifted the cigar just a little in his fingers. "Continental Electronics pays me to run Personnel."
Hawks thought for a minute and then said: "Very well. How soon can I see this man?"
Connington lolled back and took a satisfied puff on the cigar. "Right now. He lives right nearby, on the coast—up on the cliffs, there. If you've got an hour or so, what say we run on down there now?"
"I have nothing else to do if he turns out not to be the right man."
Connington stretched and stood up. His belt slipped below the bulge of his stomach, and he stopped to hitch up his trousers. "Use your phone," he muttered perfunctorily around the cigar, reaching across Hawks' desk. He called an outside number and spoke to someone briefly and, for a moment, sourly, saying they were coming out. Then he called the company garage and ordered his car brought around to the building's main entrance. When he hung up the phone, he was chuckling again. "Well, time we get downstairs, the car'll be there."
Hawks nodded and stood up.
Connington grinned at him. "I like it when somebody gives me enough rope. I like people who stay suspicious when I'm offerin' them what they want." He was still laughing over the secret joke. "The more rope I get, the more operating room it gives me. You don't figure that way. You see someone who may give you trouble, and you close up. You get into a shell, and you stay there, because you're afraid it may be trouble you can't handle. Most people do. That's why, one of these days, I'm goin' to be president of this corporation, and you'll still be head of the Research Division."
Hawks smiled. "How will you like it, then, going to the Board of Directors, telling them my salary has to be higher than yours?"
"Yeah," Connington said reflectively. "Yeah, there'd be that." He cocked an eye at Hawks. "You mean it, too."
He tapped his cigar ash off into the middle of Hawks' desk blotter. "Get hot, sometimes, inside your insulated suit, does it?"
Hawks looked expressionlessly down at the ash and up at Con-nington's face. "Your car is waiting for us."
They drove along the coastal highway in Connington's new Cadillac, until the highway veered inland away from the cliffs facing into the ocean. Then, at a spot where a small general store with two gasoline pumps stood alone, Connington turned the car into a narrow sand road that ran along between palmetto scrub and pine stands toward the water. From there the car swayed down to a narrow gravel strip of road that ran along the foot of the rock cliffs only a few feet above the high water mark. The car murmured forward with one fender overhanging the water side, and the other perhaps a foot from the cliffs. They moved along in this manner for a few minutes, Connington humming to himself in a tenor drone and Hawks sitting erect.
The road changed into an incline blasted out of the cliff face, with the insecure rock overhanging it in most places, and crossed a narrow, weatherworn timber bridge three car-lengths long across the face of a gut wider than most. The wedge-shaped split in the cliff was about a hundred feet deep. The ocean came directly into it, under the bridge, with no intervening beach, and even now at low tide, solid water came pouring into the base of the cleft and broke up into fountaining spray. It wet the car's windshield. The timber bridge angled up from fifty feet above water level, about a third of the way up the face of the cliffs, and its bottom dripped.
The road went on past the bridge, but Connington stopped the car with the wheels turned toward a galvanized iron mailbox set on a post. It stood beside an even narrower driveway that climbed steeply up into the side of the cleft and went out of sight around a sharp break in its wall.
"That's him," Connington grunted, pointing toward the mailbox with his cigar. "Barker. Al Barker." He peered slyly sideward. "Ever hear the name?"
Hawks frowned and then said: "No."
"Don't read the sports pages?" Connington backed the car a few inches until he could aim the wheels up the driveway, put the transmission selector in Lo, and hunched forward over the wheel, cautiously depressing the accelerator. The car began forging slowly up the sharp slope, its inside fender barely clearing the dynamited rock, and its left side flecked with fresh spray from the upsurge in the cleft.
"Barker's quite a fellow," Connington muttered with the soggy butt of his cigar clenched between his teeth. "Parachutist in World War II. Transferred to the O.S.S. in 1944. Specialized in assassination. Now he's a soldier of fortune—the real thing, not the tramp adventurer—and he used to be an Olympic ski-jumper. Bobsled crewman. National Small Arms Champion, 1950. Holds a skin-diving depth record. Used to mountain climb. Cracked an outboard hydroplane into the shore at Lake Meade, couple of years ago. 'S where I met him, time I was out there on vacation. Right now, he's built a car and entered it in Grand Prix competition. Plannin' to do his own driving."
Hawks' eyebrows drew together and then relaxed.
Connington grinned crookedly without taking his eyes completely off the road. "Begin to sound like I knew what I was doin'?"
Before Hawks could answer, Connington stopped the car. They were at the break in the cleft wall. A second, shallower notch turned into the cliff here, forming a dogleg that was invisible from the road over the bridge below. The driveway angled around it so acutely that Connington's car could not make the turn. The point of the angle had been blasted out to make the driveway perhaps eighty inches wide at the bend of the dogleg, but there were no guard rails; the road dropped off sheer into the cleft, and either leg was a chute pointing to the water below.
"You're gonna have to help me here," Connington said. "Get out and tell me when my wheels look like they're gonna go over."
Hawks looked at him, pursed his lips, and got out of the car.
"O.K., now," Connington said, "I'm gonna have to saw around this turn. You tell me how much room I've got."
Hawks nodded. Connington swung the car as far around the dogleg as he could, backed, stopped at Hawks' signal and moved forward again. He continued to repeat the maneuver, grinding his front tires from side to side over the road, until the car was pointed up the other leg of the driveway. Then he waited while Hawks got back in.
"We should have parked at the bottom and walked up," Hawks said.
Connington started them up the remaining incline and pointed to his feet. "Not in these boots," he grunted. He paused, then said: "Barker takes that turn at fifty miles an hour." He looked sidelong at Hawks.
"You see, Doc? You've got to learn to trust me, even if you don't like or understand me. I do my job. I've got your man for you. That's what counts." And his eyes sparkled with the hidden joke, the secret knowledge that he still kept to himself.
At the top of the incline, the driveway curved over the face of the cliff and became an asphalt strip running beside a thick, clipped, dark green lawn. Automatic sprinklers kept the grass sparkling with moisture. Cactus and palmetto grew in immaculate beds, shaded by towering cypress. A low, cedar-planked house faced the wide lawn, its glassed nearer wall looking out over the cliff at the long blue ocean. A breeze stirred the cypress.
There was a swimming pool in the middle of the lawn. A thin blonde woman with extremely long legs, who was deeply sun-tanned and wearing a yellow two-piece suit, was lying face-down on a beach towel, listening to music from a portable radio. An empty glass wi
th an ice cube melting in its bottom sat on the grass beside a thermos jug. The woman raised her head, looked at the car, and drooped forward again.
Connington lowered a hand half-raised in greeting. "Claire Pack," he said to Hawks, guiding the car around to the side of the house and stopping on a concrete apron in front of the double doors of a sunken garage.
"She lives here?" Hawks asked.
Connington's face had lost all trace of pleasure. "Yeah. Come on."
They walked up a flight of flagstone steps to the lawn, and across the lawn toward the swimming pool. There was a man swimming under the blue-green water, raising his head to take an occasional quick breath and immediately pushing it under again. Beneath the rippling, sun-dappled surface, he was a vaguely man-shaped, flesh-colored creature thrashing from one end of the pool to the other. An artificial leg, wrapped in transparent plastic sheeting, lay between Claire Pack and the pool, near a chromeplated ladder going down into the water. The radio played Glenn Miller.
"Claire?" Connington asked tentatively.
She hadn't moved in response to the approaching footsteps. She had been humming softly to the music, and tapping softly on the towel with the red-lacquered tips of two long fingers. She turned over slowly and looked at Connington upside down.
"Oh," she said flatly. Her eyes shifted to Hawks' face. They were clear green, flecked with yellow-brown, and the pupils were contracted in the sunlight.
"This is Doctor Hawks, Claire," Connington told her patiently. "He's vice-president in charge of the Research Division, out at the main plant. I called and told you. What's the good of the act? We'd like to talk to Al."
She waved a hand. "Sit down. He'll be out of the pool in a little while."
Connington lowered himself awkwardly down on the grass. Hawks, after a moment, dropped precisely into a tailor-fashion seat on the edge of the towel. Claire Pack sat up, drew her knees under her chin, and looked at Hawks. "What kind of a job have you got for Al?"
Connington said shortly: "The kind he likes." As Claire smiled, he looked at Hawks and said: "You know, I forget. Every time. I look forward to coming here, and then when I see her I remember how she is."
Claire Pack paid him no attention. She was looking at Hawks, her mouth quirked up in an expression of intrigued curiosity. "The kind of work Al likes? You don't look like a man involved with violence, Doctor. What's your first name?" She threw a glance over her shoulder at Connington. "Give me a cigarette."
"Edward," Hawks said softly. He was watching Connington fumble in an inside breast pocket, take out a new package of cigarettes, open it, tap one loose, and extend it to her.
Without looking at Connington, she said softly: "Light it." A dark, arched eyebrow went up at Hawks. Her wide mouth smiled. "I'll call you Ed." Her eyes remained flat calm.
Connington, behind her, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, closed them tightly on the filtered tip, and lit the cigarette with his ruby-studded lighter. The tip of the cigarette was bound in red-glazed paper, to conceal lipstick marks. He puffed on it, put it between her two upraised fingers, and returned the remainder of the pack to his inside breast pocket.
"You may," Hawks said to Claire Pack with a faint upward lift of his lips. "I'll call you Claire."
She raised one eyebrow again, puffing on the cigarette. "All right."
Connington looked over Claire's shoulder. His eyes were almost tearfully bitter. But there was something else in them as well. There was something almost like amusement in the way he said: "Nothing but movers today, Doctor. And all going in different directions. Fast company. Keep your dukes up."
Hawks said: "I'll do my best."
"I don't think Ed looks like a soft touch, Connie," Claire said.
Hawks said nothing. The man in the pool had stopped and was treading water with his hands. Only his head was above the surface, with short sandy hair streaming down from the top of his small, round skull. His cheek-bones were prominent. His nose was thin-bladed, and he had a clipped moustache. His eyes were unreadable at the distance, with the reflected sunlight rippling over his face.
"That's the way his life's arranged," Connington was mumbling to Claire Pack spitefully, not seeing Barker watching them. "Nice and scientific. Everything balances. Nothing gets wasted. Nobody steals a march on Doctor Hawks."
Hawks said: "Mr. Connington met me personally for the first time this morning."
Claire Pack laughed with a bright metallic ripple. "Do people offer you drinks, Ed?"
"I don't think that'll work either, Claire," Connington growled.
"Shut up," she said. "Well, Ed?" She lightly held up the thermos jug, which seemed to be nearly empty. "Scotch and water?"
"Thank you, yes. Would Mr. Barker feel more comfortable about getting out of the pool, if I were to turn my back while he was fastening his leg?"
Connington said: "She's never this blatant after she's made her first impression. Watch out for her."
She laughed again, throwing her head back. "He'll come out when he's good and ready. He might even like it if I sold tickets to the performance. Don't you worry about Al, Ed." She unscrewed the top of the jug, pulled the cork, and poured a drink into the plastic top. "No spare glasses or ice out here, Ed. It's pretty cold, anyhow. All right?"
"Perfectly, Claire," Hawks said. He took the cup and sipped at it. "Very good." He held the cup in his hands and waited for her to fill her glass.
"How about me?" Connington said. He was watching the hair stir at the nape of Claire Pack's neck, and his eyes were shadowed.
"Go get a glass from the house," she said. Leaning forward, she touched the side of her glass to Hawks' cup. "Here's to a well-balanced life."
Hawks smiled fleetingly and drank. She reached out and put her hand on his ankle. "Do you live near here, Ed?"
Connington said: "She'll chew you up and spit you out, Hawks.
Give her half a chance, and she will. She's the biggest bitch on two continents. But you've got to figure Barker would have somebody like her around."
Claire turned her head and shoulders and looked squarely at Con-nington for the first time. "Are you trying to start something, Connie?" she asked in a mild voice.
Something flickered in Connington's face. But then he said: "Doctor Hawks is here on business, Claire."
Hawks looked up at Connington curiously over the rim of his cup. His black eyes were intent for a moment, then shifted to Claire Pack, brooding.
Claire said to Connington: "Everybody's everywhere on some kind of business. Everybody who's worth a damn. Everybody has something he wants. Something more important than anything else. Isn't that right, Connie? Now, go tend to your business, and 111 manage mine." Her look came back to Hawks, catching him off guard. Her eyes held his momentarily. Then they widened and wavered away before she brought them determinedly back. "I'm sure Ed can take care of his own," she said.
Connington flushed, twisted his mouth to say something, turned sharply, and marched away across the grass. In a flash of brief expression, Claire Pack smiled enigmatically to herself.
Hawks sipped his drink. "He's not watching any longer. You can take your hand away from my ankle."
She smiled sleepily. "Connie? I tease him to oblige him. He's forever coming up here, since he met Al and myself. The thing is—he can't come up alone, you understand? Because of the bend in the driveway. He could do it if he gave up driving those big cars, or he could bring a woman along to help him make it. But he never brings a woman, and he won't give up either that car or those boots. He brings a new man almost every time." She smiled. "He asks for it, don't you see? He wants it."
"These men he brings up," Hawks asked. "Do you chew them up and spit them out?"
Claire threw her head back and laughed. "There are all kinds of men. The only kind that're worth anyone's time are the ones I can't mangle the first time out."
"But there are other times after the first time? It never stops? I didn't mean Connington was watching us. I meant B
arker. He's pulling himself out of the pool. Did you deliberately place his artificial leg so he'd have to strain to reach it? Simply because you knew another new man was coming and would need to be shown how fierce you were?"
For a moment, the skin around her lips seemed crumpled and spongy. Then she said: "Are you curious to find out how much of it is bluff?" She was in complete control of herself again.
Hawks said nothing to this for a moment. "Are you a long-time friend of Mr. Barker's?" he asked at last.
Claire Pack nodded. She smiled challengingly.
Hawks nodded, checking off the point. "Connington was right, I think."
Barker had long arms and a flat, hairy stomach, and was wearing knitted navy blue swimming trunks without an athletic supporter. He was a spare, wiry man with a tight, clipped voice, saying "How d'you do?" as he strode briskly across the grass. He snatched up the thermos and drank from it, throwing his head back and holding the jug upraised. He gasped with great pleasure, thumped the jug down beside Claire Pack, wiped his mouth, and sat down. "Now, then!" he exclaimed. "What's all this?"
"Al, this is Doctor Hawks," Claire said evenly. "Not an M.D. He's from Continental Electronics. He wants to talk to you. Connie brought him."
"Delighted to meet you," Barker said, heartily extending a hand. There were burn scars on the mottled flesh. One side of his face had the subtle evenness of plastic surgery. "Can't say I've ever heard of your work, I'm afraid."
Hawks took the hand and shook it. "I've never met an Englishman who'd call himself Al."
Barker laughed in a brittle voice. His face changed subtly. "Matter of fact, I'm nearly as English as Paddy's pig. Amerind's the nationality."
"Al's grandparents were Mimbreno Apaches," Claire said with some sort of special intonation. "His grandfather was the most dangerous man alive on the North American continent. His father found a silver lode that assayed as high as any deposit ever known. Does it still hold that record, darling?" She drawled the question. Without waiting for an answer, she said: "And Al has an Ivy League education."
The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B Page 12
