Thunder and Roses
Page 29
Then it was, with a surge of relief that made his head spin, that his heart eased and he smiled. He knew now how he had changed, how he had grown. He knew, all at once, what to do now and what to do for the rest of his life with Beverly. Up to now he had not been able to ask her if she was the same Beverly he had married. Now, by choice, he never would ask her. Their marriage would be spiced and underscored and made most beautiful by that one mystery between them, each held from the other.
All this in seconds, and he became aware again of the yellow lights in Lois’s long eyes. Quite changing the subject, he used her exact words. “I couldn’t do that,” he whispered.
Lois nodded slowly. She sank back on the pillow and closed her eyes. He thought she trembled. He didn’t know. He didn’t much care. He turned over and filled his lungs, as he had not been able to do for more than an hour because of his leaping heart. “Beverly!” he bellowed.
The book fell on the tiles. There was silence for a moment, and then the door opened.
“Yes, Yance.”
“Get back to bed, idiot. You can read that some other time. You need your sleep.”
“I just—all right, Yance, if you want.”
She switched off the light and came in. A moonbeam swept across her face as she approached. She was looking across him at Lois, her lips trembling. She got into bed. He put his arms around her, gently, humbly. She turned to him and suddenly held him so tight that he almost cried out.
That Low
THERE WAS A “psychic” operating on Vince Street. Fowler went to see her. Not that he had any faith in mumbo-jumbo: far from it. He had been told that this Mrs. Hallowell worked along strictly logical lines. That’s why he went. He liked the sound of that, being what he was. He went to her and asked her about killing himself. She said he couldn’t do it. Not “You won’t,” or “shouldn’t.” She said, “You can’t.”
This Fowler was a failure specialist, in the sense that a man is a carburetor specialist or a drainage specialist or a nerve specialist. You don’t get to be that kind of specialist without spending a lot of time with carburetors or sewers or nerves. You don’t stay nice and objective about it either. You get in it up to the elbows, up to the eyeballs. Fowler was a man who knew all that one man could know about failure. He knew all of the techniques, from the small social failure of letting his language forget what room of the house his mouth was in, through his declaration of war on the clock and the calendar (in all but style he was the latest), to the crowning stupidity of regarding his opinions as right purely because they were his opinions. So he had fallen and floundered through life, never following through, jumping when he should have crept, and lying down at sprintingtime. He could have written a book on the subject of failure, except for the fact that if he had, it might have been a success … and he hated failure. Well, you don’t have to love your specialty to be a specialist. You just have to live with it.
It was understandable, therefore, that he should be impressed by Mrs. Hallowell’s reputation for clarity and logic, for he truly believed that here was a kindred spirit. He brought his large features and his flaccid handshake to her and her office, which were cool. The office was Swedish modern and blond. Mrs. Hallowell was dark, and said, “Sit down.”
“Your name?”
“Maxwell Fowler.”
“Occupation?”
“Engineer.”
She glanced up. She had aluminum eyes. “Not a graduate engineer.” It was not a question.
“I would of been,” said Fowler, “except for a penny-ante political situation in the school. There was a fellow—”
“Yes,” she said. “Married?”
“I was. You know, the kind that’ll kick a man when he’s down. She was a—”
“Now, Mr. Fowler. What was it you wanted here?”
“I hear you can foretell the future.”
“I’m not interested in gossip,” she said, and it was the only cautionary thing she said in the entire interview. “I know about people, that’s all.”
He said, “Ever since I could walk and talk, people have been against me. I can whip one or two or sometimes half a dozen or more, but by and large I’m outnumbered. I’m tired. Sometimes I think I’ll check out.”
“Are you going to ask me if you should?”
“No. If I will. You see, I think about it all the time. Sometimes I—”
“All right,” she said. “As long as you understand that I don’t give advice. I just tell about what’s going to happen.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“Give me a check.”
“What?”
“Give me a check. No—don’t write on it. Just give it to me.”
“But—”
“You wouldn’t pay me afterward.”
“Now look, my word’s as good as—” and then he looked into the eyes. He got out his checkbook. She took a pen and wrote on the check.
She gave it back to him and he looked at it and said, “That’s foolish.”
“You have it, though.”
“Yes, I have, but—”
“Sign it, then,” she said casually, “or go away.”
He signed it. “Well?”
She hesitated. There was something—
“Well?” he rapped again. “What’ll I do? I’m tired of all this persecution.”
“I take it you’re asking me what you shall do—not what you should or will do.”
“Lawyer’s talk, huh.”
“Laws,” she said. “Yes.” She wet her lips. “You shall live a long and unhappy life.” Then she put away the check.
Maxwell looked after it, longingly. “It can’t be unhappier than it is.”
“That may well be.”
“Then I don’t want to live a long life.”
“But you shall.”
“Not if I don’t want to,” he said grimly. “I tell you, I’m tired.”
She shook her head. “It’s gone too far,” she said, not unkindly. “You can’t change it.”
He got up. “I can. Anytime, I can. Then you’ll be wrong, won’t you?”
“I’m not wrong,” said Mrs. Hallowell.
“I’ll kill myself,” said Maxwell, and that was when she told him he couldn’t. He was very angry, but she did not give him back his check. By the time he thought of stopping payment on it, it had cleared the bank. He went on living his life.
The amount of money he had paid Mrs. Hallowell dug quite a hole, but for a surprisingly long time he was able to walk around it. However, he did nothing to fill it up, and inevitably, he had the choice of facing his creditors or killing himself. So he got a piece of rope and made a noose and put it around his neck. He tied the other end to the leg of the radiator and jumped out of the window. He was a big man, but the rope held all right. However, the leg broke off the radiator, and he fell six stories. He hit a canvas marquee, tore through it, and fell heavily to the sidewalk. There was quite a crowd there, after a while, to listen to the noises he made because of what was broken.
Fowler took a while to mend, and spent it in careful thought. He took no comfort from his thoughts, for they were honest ones, and he did not care at all for his conclusions, which drafted a portrait no one would admire and an insight no one would want as a bedfellow. He got through it, though, and put a list of his obligations down on paper and drew up a plan for taking care of things. It was a plan that was within his capabilities and meant chip, chip, chip for a long, long time before he could ever call himself honestly broke again. The first person he tried it out on was the business manager of the hospital, and to his immense surprise it worked: that is, he wouldn’t get sued for the bill, and the hospital would go along with him until it was all straightened out. Nobody had ever given him that much of a break before; but then, he had never tackled a problem this way before.
He got out of the hospital and began chipping.
Mrs. Hallowell had a bad moment over Fowler. She started up out of her sleep one night, t
hinking about him.
“Oh, how awful,” she said. “I made a mistake!”
She phoned in the morning. Fowler was not there. Mrs Hallowell phoned and phoned around until she got someone who could tell her about Fowler. The tenant in the apartment next to Fowler’s had made a mistake about a gas heater, and had a bad cold, and lit a match, and blew the end of the building out. Fowler had been picked up from the wreckage, bleeding. The someone said, “Is there any message I could send to him?”
“No,” said Mrs. Hallowell. “No. Not … now.”
They saved Fowler that time, too. It was a lot of trouble. They had to take this and that off, and the other out. He was put, finally, in a very short bed with a mass of equipment beside him, humming and clicking. It circulated fluids, and another part of it dripped into a tube, and there was a thing that got emptied a couple of times a day without Fowler’s worrying about it.
That was the trouble with Mrs. Hallowell’s talent. It lay in such broad lines. A mistake could cover a lot of territory. Fowler gradually became aware of her mistake. It took him about two months.
People came by and clucked their tongues when they saw him. There was a bright-eyed, dry-faced old lady who put flowers near him every week or so. He didn’t have to go on with that chip, chip, pay, pay any more. Everybody was sorry for him, and everybody always would be, as long as he lived, which would be very nearly as long as the equipment could be kept running. A long time. A long life. Mrs. Hallowell had been right, dead right, about the long life.
Where she made her mistake was in thinking that he would be unhappy.
Memory
JEREMIAH JEDD STOOD in the igneous dust of the spaceport margin, staring into the sky and shading his eyes with his arm. Occasionally he checked the time by his ristkron, shaking it to make sure it was wound, craning back toward the hunched Customs House and the great clock. The sign there announced placidly that the Pinnacle had reported, was overdue and would discharge passengers at Gate Three.
Jeremy shook his head and took the letter from Mars out of his pocket again. Slowly he unfolded it and read, in the manner of a man checking his mnemonics. He was certainly familiar enough with it after so much re-reading. The letter said:
You must have heard by this time that General Export has installed a fabricating plant here, just outside Fort Wargod. It cost them plenty in time and money to get it set up—actually most of it was shipped as hand luggage because of the shipping space situation.
Like a lot of other people, I thought it was a foolish move, because the finished piping they could have shipped in the space is at such a premium on Mars, and because their plant is going to require power—a hard thing to get here. I didn’t worry too much, though. Why should we care what our competitors do with their money?
But here’s the joker. In spite of the fact that the plant is small and comparatively crude, it will fabricate pipe. And the material is plastic, chum, and they can now ship it in sheets! I don’t have to tell you what that means to us. We only got our cargo-space contracts from General Export because the Government okayed our shipping system—nesting the smaller diameters of pipe inside the larger ones. Genex’s own pipe is shipped that way now, too. The idea isn’t patentable.
So unless we find a patentable way to ship pipe in less space, finished, than Genex is taking for their sheet-stock, we’re done, brother—wiped out. Genex means to get everything in the Colonial System—you know that. They have all the ships now, and most of the goods and services. I’m afraid we’re going on the long list of small operators who have tried to buck them.
Jeremy lowered the letter and rubbed his eyes again. They ached. Since he had received it a week ago, he hadn’t slept much. Supplying pipe for the Mars project was work enough without these long nights in the laboratory trying to figure a way out of this spot. Everything he and Hal had in the world was in this deal. They had worked together ever since they left school, right up until the time Hal went up to handle the Mars end.
Fervently he wished it were the other way around. If Hal were here, he’d dope out something. He had always been the real brains of Jedd & Jedd. And as a matter of fact, Hal already had doped out something. What an irony! Whatever his process or system was, he couldn’t write it or wire it. General Export carried the mails too, and if they wanted to find something out, it would be only too easy.
Jeremy looked up again. There was a growing, gleaming dot in the sky. He glanced at the building. Near it, men were manning the heatproof launch. He turned back to the letter, to read the cryptic part about Phyllis Exeter:
I know a way to ship this, bud. I’m not telling you about it in a letter—you know why. I’m hoping and praying that you’ll figure it out yourself. The new hauling contracts are coming up, and priorities for shipping space go to the pipe company that can pack the most in. My process is very simple, really. It’s nothing that Budgie couldn’t have told you. You have three weeks to figure it out after you get this note, and don’t forget it takes ten days to file a patent application.
And in connection with this idea, Phyllis Exeter is due to arrive on the Pinnacle. I’d like you to meet her when the rocket-ship docks. She really has what it takes. I got quite chummy with her while she was out here in Thor City. She’ll probably have a lot to say about it. She’ll have a lot to say, period. She talks more than Budgie. Be good, little man.
Jeremy’s brows matted together as he folded the note and put it away. There was more than met the eye in those last two paragraphs—much more. He got some of it. “Be good, little man.” And the references to Budgie—he wasn’t too sure, but he had the idea they weren’t in there for the purpose of using up ink. And the specific mention of Phyllis Exeter and her arrival. Now that was something.
If Hal wanted to be absolutely positive Phyllis Exeter would see him, he’d sure picked the right way. Just that line in the letter would be enough to have Phyllis hunt him up anywhere on Earth, even if he hid. General Export carried the mails. But why Phyllis? After all, Hal and Phyllis had been—He shrugged. If Hal wanted to throw them together again, all right. He began to get the old, familiar feeling, just thinking about it.
From overhead came the blowtorch susurrus of the Pinnacle’s braking and hovering jets. Down she came on her bed of fire, until she hesitated at five thousand feet. He distinctly heard the sudden shift to cold-jets, and in another minute the dust-cloud was piled up to receive her.
Jeremy stepped into the waiting room of Number Three Gate, just avoiding the sudden angry gusts of dust-laden air. He shouldered past the chattering crowd inside and got to a port, which was covered with a disc of transparent plastic whirling at high speed to afford clear vision through the mucky dust which hurtled so violently about the building. From the spaceport central, the little heatproof drifted toward the grounding liner, waiting its chance to settle on the huge hull and sink its extensible airlock into the monster like an ovipositor.
Fifteen minutes later the heatproof whickered slowly down to the roof of the gate building. The crowd pressed toward the elevators and was shunted back by the pageboys and officials. Jeremy stood on the fringes, trying to look indifferent and doing a very poor job of it.
The first load came down. A heavy-set man with a dark, rocky face. A quick, slender, cold-eyed man. These two stood aside and let a woman with two children and an aged couple pass them. And then Phyllis stepped out.
He wondered again, looking at her, what a man would have to do to ruffle that sleekness, to crumple the brilliant mask she seemed to wear. Throw a kiss or a fist in that face, and there would be little difference. Her hair was soft, and iridescent green, now. She smoked with a long holder and the smoke matched her hair. Her voice was as lustrous, as colorful as ever, when she saw him.
“Jeremy!” she said. “Jeremy Jedd! How are you, darling?”
“Don’t call me darling,” he said.
“Oh, these people won’t think anything of me that they don’t think already,” she said.
“Come on,” he said. “I need a drink. Before, I just wanted one.”
She hung back and pouted. “You seem quite sure I’ll come.”
“You’ve been reading my mail!” he quipped grimly. She stopped hanging back. They moved toward the door and down the short path to the Customs House. Jeremy glanced back. The two men he had noticed at the elevators were following them. He gestured slightly with his head. “Yours?” She shrugged. “Oh, you know how it is.”
“No,” he said, “I don’t. Not altogether. But I’ll learn the rest of it.”
She laughed again, and hugged his elbow close to her body. “Jeremy,” she said cozily, “do you still feel the same way about me?”
He glanced down into her wide gray-green eyes. “Yup. Always will, I guess. Worse luck.”
“Worse luck?”
“It gets in my hair,” he grumbled.” When I think of all the time I’ve spent thinking about you when I could’ve been making pipe—”
“That’s what I like about you,” she flashed. “You make a person feel so—welcome.” She released his arm. “What makes you think you can treat me like that?”
“Several things. They all add up to the fact that you won’t walk away from me until you find out what you think I know about stowing pipe. No matter what I say or do to you, you’ll tag right along.”
“All right,” she said, in quite a new, matter-of-fact voice. “I’d just as soon play that way then. All the cards face up, and such sordidness. It could have been pleasant, too.”
“Not with me. Not with you and me.”
“That’s what I meant.”
Inside the building they turned to the right elevator bank and dropped to the cafeteria two levels below. There was no conversation in the elevator due to the silent presence of the two men who had followed them from the gatehouse. Jeremy glared at them, but the younger man refused to catch his eye and stared at the ceiling, whistling softly. The other man gazed at Phyllis’s feet.