by Various
"I've always heard that politics makes strange bedfellows," said Lindsay casually.
It was obvious that he had committed a faux pas. Maria's blush returned and her expression froze. Lindsay cursed himself for a fool. With the development of all sorts of pneumatic resting devices the word bed had become not only obsolete but definitely distasteful in well-bred Tellurian circles. Its use was as decried as was that of the word bloody in Victorian England.
She said angrily, "I assure you, Mr. Lindsay, that Senator Anderson and I have never...." Voice and anger faded alike as she apparently realized that Lindsay had not intended insult.
He let her mix a second drink for both of them. Then, standing close to her and noting the smooth perfection of her creamy white skin, "I wonder if your father knows that he is nourishing a subversive in his family."
She said with a trace of impatience, "Oh, poor papa never sees the trees for the forest."
"You're a damned unhappy girl, aren't you?" he asked her. He didn't need an answer, but realized she wanted to talk about it.
She said, her eyes shining suspiciously, "You're right, of course, I'm very unhappy--constricted in behavior by my father's position, unable to say aloud what I really think, how I really feel. Sometimes I think I must be living in some Gothic poet's dream of loneliness."
"Contrary to the beliefs of most psychiatrists," said Lindsay, half-touched, half-appalled by Maria's intensity, "we are all of us alone."
"Somehow I knew you'd understand!" she exclaimed, without taking her dark eyes from his. "I'm not allowed to date gladiators, of course. You're the only man I've ever been with who was not afraid to look as he is."
"You'd better come to Mars," he suggested, shying away a little from the high voltage the Secretary General's daughter seemed to be generating. "I can assure you you'd have a chance to reveal the charms nature gave you without shame."
She laughed with a sudden change of spirits. "It's at least a half hour since dinner. Let's take a dip." She tossed back her lustrous dark hair with a shake of her head and her hands went to the clasp of her halter, a moment later to that of her shorts. "Come on," she called, extending her arms to expose her exciting young body before him. "The water will cool us off."
It didn't work out that way, of course. Lindsay was barely in the tub-pool before Maria's arms were about his neck, her body close against his, her lips thrusting upward toward his own. For a moment he felt panic, said, "Hey! What if somebody comes? Your father--"
"Silly! Nobody will," she replied, laughing softly.
His last rational thought for quite awhile was, Oh well--I'm hardly in a position to get the Secretary General's daughter angry.
* * * * *
False dawn was spreading its dim fanlight over the eastern horizon as he coptered back to his official quarters in the city. Trying to restore some order to thoughts and emotions thoroughly disrupted by the unexpected events of the evening, he wondered a little just what he had got himself into.
Mars, of course, was scarcely a Puritan planet, populated as it was by the hardiest and most adventurous members of the human race, of all races. But there had been something almost psychopathic about Maria's passion. It had been far too intense to have been generated solely through regard for him.
The girl had made love to him simply to relieve her own inner tensions, he thought wryly. Lacking a man she could love, walled in by the high officialdom of her father's lofty position, she had turned to him in the same way she turned to the anti-computer movement--as a way of feeling less lonely for a while. Still, it had been sweet--if a little frightening in retrospect.
And it had been a little decadent too.
With the copter on autopilot he lit a cigarette and forced his thoughts away from the girl. He wondered if the Governors of Mars were sufficiently in key with the current feelings of Earthfolk to understand fully how deep the repercussions from his speech might go. He wondered if they had considered fully the possibility of interplanetary war.
True, Mars was undoubtedly better equipped to defend itself against such attack than was Earth. Like the mother planet it had its share of robot rockets capable of launching a counterattack. And thanks to the comparative sparseness and decentralization of its population it was far less vulnerable to attack.
But war between the planets would be destructive of far more than cities and the people that lived in them. It would mean inevitably a breakdown of the entire fabric of civilized humanity--a tenuous fabric, true, but all that existed to maintain man.
And an isolated Mars, even if self-sufficient, would be a sorry substitute for a red planet that was part of the United Worlds. It would mean a setback of generations, perhaps centuries.
He began to feel a new understanding of the importance of his mission. With understanding came something akin to fear lest he should not be able to accomplish it without disaster. It was going to be his job to inaugurate some sort of therapy for Earth's illness. It was, in effect, one man against a planet.
Considering the men and women with whom he had talked that day he was unable to take the assassination threat too seriously. Somehow these neurotics and warped zealots, with their allergies and distortion kits, seemed unlikely to undertake or carry through any such drastic action. Their very inhibitions would forbid it.
Not that Maria had been exactly inhibited. Damn! The girl refused to stay out of his thoughts. He recalled what she had told him of her conspiracy against the computers, of its aims and methods. And again he smiled wryly to himself.
They were like spoiled children, he thought. A little group of over-intense young men and women, neurotic, excitable, unstable, meeting in one another's houses or in expensive cafes, plotting little coups that never quite came off.
From certain unguarded phrases Maria had dropped during the less frenetic periods of their evening together, he gathered that their current aim was actual physical sabotage of Giac, the mightiest of all computers about to be unveiled, before it went into work.
They didn't even realize, he thought, that sabotage would avail them nothing in the long run--or the short either. Destruction of the computers would not cure Earth. It might easily increase the reliance of Earthfolk upon their cybernetic monsters. What was needed to effect a cure was destruction of human confidence in and reliance upon these machines.
And how in hell, he wondered, was he going to manage that?
* * * * *
To a man from level, water-starved Mars the sight of New Orleans still ablaze with lights at five o'clock in the morning was something of a miracle. Mars had its share of atomic power-plants, of course, but such sources had proved almost prohibitively costly as providers of cheap power.
That was true on Earth too, of course, but Earth had its rivers, its waterfalls, its ocean tides to help out. More important, it averaged some fifty million miles closer to the Sun, thus giving it immense storage supplies of solar heat for power. Without these resources the thousand-square-mile expanse of intricately criss-crossed artificial lighting that was the United Worlds capital would have been impossible.
Lindsay wondered how any people possessed of a planet so rich could be afflicted with such poverty of soul. Or was this very opulence the cause? His own planet was comparatively poor--yet nervous breakdowns were few and far between. There the ugly strove for beauty, instead of the reverse.
He parked the copter on the garage-plat, pressed the button, and watched it sink slowly out of sight to its concealed hangar. Like all Martian natives to leave for Earth, he had been warned about the intense heat and humidity that assailed most of the mother planet, especially in the UW capital. Yet the night breeze felt pleasantly cool against his face and its thickness was like the brush of invisible velvet against his skin. Perhaps, he thought, he was more of an Earthling than three generations of Martian heredity made likely.
He did miss the incredible brilliance of the Martian night skies. Here on Earth the stars shone as puny things through the heavy atmosphe
re.
But, he thought guiltily, he did not have as severe a pang of homesickness as he ought.
In a state of self-bemusement he rode the elevator down to his suite on the ninety-first story. And was utterly unprepared for the assault which all but bore him to the floor as he stepped out into his own foyer.
Since the attack came from behind and his assailant's first move was to toss a bag over his head, Lindsay had no idea of what the would-be assassin looked like. For a moment he could only struggle blindly to retain his balance, expecting every instant to feel the quick searing heat of a blaster burn through his back.
But no heat came, nor did the chill of a dagger. Instead he felt his attacker's strong hands encircle his neck in a judo grip.
This was something Lindsay understood. He thrust both his own hands up and backward, getting inside the assassin's grip and breaking it. His thumbnails dug into nerve centers and he bent an arm sharply. There was a gasp of agony and he felt a large body crumple under the pressure.
* * * * *
Lindsay's first impulse was to summon the constabulary. His second, after examining the face of his would-be slayer, was to drag the man into the shelter of his apartment, revive him and seek to learn what he could about the attempt.
To his astonishment he discovered that he knew the man. His assigned murderer was long, red-headed Pat O'Ryan rated as a top gladiator, a tennis and squash champion whose reputation was almost as widespread among sporting fans on Mars as on Earth. Lindsay had remodeled his own backhand, just the year before, upon that of the man sent to kill him.
He got some whiskey from the serving bar beside the vidar screen, poured a little of it between the unconscious killer's lips. O'Ryan sputtered and sat up slowly, blinking. He said, "Get me some gin, will you?"
Lindsay returned the whiskey to its place, got the requested liquor, offered some neat to the tennis player in a glass. O'Ryan downed it, shuddered, looked at Lindsay curiously. He said, "What went wrong? You're supposed to be dead."
Lindsay shrugged and said, "I know some judo too. You weren't quite fast enough, Pat."
O'Ryan moaned again, reached for the bottle. Then he said, "I remember now. Thank God you got my right arm--I'm left-handed."
"I know," Lindsay told him laconically.
The would-be assassin looked frightened. He said, "How do you know?"
"I play a little tennis myself," Lindsay told him. "How come they sent a man like you on such a mission?"
"Top gladiator--top assignment," said the athlete. "We're supposed to do something besides play games for our keep."
"That's a wrinkle in the social setup I didn't know about," said Lindsay. "Mind telling me who sent you?"
"Not at all. It was my sponsors, the New Hibernian A.C." He frowned. "According to the computers I was in. There's going to be hell to pay over my muffing it."
"How do you feel about that?" the Martian asked him.
O'Ryan shrugged. "It's okay by me," he said. "They can hardly degrade me for fouling up this kind of a job. I'll simply tell them their information was incomplete. No one knew you knew judo." He eyed the gin, added, "A good thing you didn't feed me whiskey. I'm allergic to all grain products--even in alcohol. Comes from being fed too much McCann's Irish oatmeal when I was a kid."
"Interesting," said Lindsay, wondering how the conversation had taken this turn. "What does whiskey do to you?"
The gladiator shuddered. "It usually hits me about twenty-four hours afterward. Makes my eyes water so I can't see much. I've got a match at the Colosseum tomorrow night. I hope you'll be there."
"So do I," said Lindsay dryly. "You wouldn't know who gave you this little chore on me, would you?"
"Not likely," said the gladiator. "When we report at the club every evening we find our assignments stuck in our boxes. Usually we get orders to meet a dame. This was something different."
"I see what you mean," Lindsay told him.
O'Ryan got up, said, "Well, I might as well be running along. I'll give them hell for fouling up the computer-prophecy. Look me up after the match tomorrow. And thanks for not having me pinched. I might have had to spend the night in a cell. That's bad for conditioning."
"You're quite welcome," said Lindsay, feeling like a character in a semi-nightmare. "Will I be seeing you again--this way?"
"Unlikely," the gladiator told him. "They'll have to run a lot of checks on you after this before they try again. See you tomorrow."
Lindsay looked after his visitor with amazement. Then it occurred to him that computers were substituting not only for human judgment but for human conscience as well. And this, he felt certain, was important.
Turning in on his contour couch, Lindsay recalled that he had given whiskey to the allergic athlete. He decided then and there that he would be in attendance at the match in the Colosseum that evening.
* * * * *
He got to his office about eleven o'clock. His desk was stacked high with messages, written and taped, and all sorts of folk wished to talk with him on the vidarphone. Nina, looking more slovenly than ever, had arranged them neatly, according to their nature and importance in separate little piles.
"Next time you tear up the pea-patch," she informed him resentfully, "I'm going to get in some help." She eyed him with somber speculation, added, "I hear the Sec-Gen turned in early last night."
"You've got big ears," said Lindsay.
"I get around," she said. "I'm supposed to keep tabs on you, boss."
"Then you must know someone tried to kill me early this morning when I came back from Natchez."
Nina's eyes narrowed alarmingly under the glasses that covered them. She said, "Why didn't you report it?" She sounded like a commander-in-chief questioning a junior aide for faulty judgment.
"I won," Lindsay said simply. "There was no danger."
"Who was it?" she asked. And, when he hesitated, "I'm not going to shout it from the housetops, boss."
"It was Pat O'Ryan."
"You handled Pat?" she asked, apparently astonished. Something in her tone told him Nina knew his would-be assassin.
"Why not?" he countered. "It wasn't much of a brawl."
"But Pat...." she began, and hesitated. Then, all business again, "We'd better get at some of this. You have a date to be psyched by Dr. Craven at two o'clock."
"What for?" he asked, startled.
"Routine," she told him. "Everyone connected with UW has to go through it. But cheer up, boss, it doesn't hurt--much."
"Okay," he said resignedly. "Let's get to work."
While he dictated Lindsay found himself wondering just who was paying Nina's real salary. If she were a spy for the same group that had sent O'Ryan to kill him, his position was delicate, to put it mildly. But for some reason he doubted it. There were too many groups working at once to make any such simple solution probable.
When she departed briefly to superintend a minor matter out of the office, he found himself staring at the wastebasket by his tilt-chair. A heart-shaped jewel-box of transparent crystoplastic lay within it. Curious, Lindsay plucked it out. It had evidently held some sort of necklace and bore the mark of Zoffany's, the Capital's costliest jeweler. Within it was a note that read: For Nina, who lost last night--as ever.... The signature was an indecipherable scrawl.
Lindsay stuck the card in his wallet, returned the box to the wastebasket. Who in hell, he wondered, would be sending this sort of gift to his slatternly thick-bodied secretary. The answer seemed obvious. The sender was her real boss, paying her off in a personal way that would obviate suspicion. Lindsay wondered exactly what Nina had lost.
He was not surprised when she said she would come along to the psychiatrist's with him after an office lunch of veal pralines, soya buns and coffee. He suggested she might be tired, might want the day off.
She said, "Night soil, boss! Between the Sec-Gen's daughter and things like Pat O'Ryan I'm going to keep an eye on you."
As if on signal the vidar-screen lit up an
d Maria's face appeared on it. She had not donned harmopan or glasses and looked quite as lovely as she had the night before. She said, "Zalen, I've got to see you tonight. Something has come up."
Lindsay nodded. He figured out his schedule, suggested, "I'm going to the match in the Colosseum. Why not take it in with me?"
She shook her head, told him, "I'm tangled up at a banquet for the Egypto-Ethiopian delegation. I can meet you afterward though. How about the Pelican?"
"That's not very private," he protested.
"All the more reason," she announced. "This is important!"
"And seeing me in private isn't?" Despite himself a trace of wounded male entered his tone.
Maria laughed softly, her dark eyes dancing. "Perhaps later," she said softly. "You'll understand when I talk to you." She clicked off and the screen was empty.
"Damned cat!" said Nina through a haze of cigarette-smoke. "Watch out for her, boss--she's a cannibal."
"And I'm a bit tough and stringy," he told her.
Nina said, "Night soil!" again under her breath and led the way out of the office. Lindsay wondered if she were jealous.
* * * * *
Dr. Craven received them in a comfortable chamber, the north wall of which was all glass brick, the south wall a solid bank of screens and dials. He was a soft-faced man who wore lozenge-shaped light blue spectacles and seemed afflicted with a slight chin rash. He caught Lindsay's regard, rubbed his chin in mild embarrassment, said, "I've a mild allergy to paranoids."
Lindsay looked at Nina distrustfully but she nodded and said, "Go ahead--he won't break your arm. I'll wait outside."
The psychiatrist closed his office door. After settling him in a comfortable contour couch, Dr. Craven opened up with, "I don't want you to have any worries about this test, Ambassador. If anybody's crazy here it's me. According to very sound current theory all psychiatrists are insane. If we weren't we wouldn't be so concerned with sanity in others."
Lindsay asked, "Why in hell am I being tested anyway?"
