“Faith? Running all over the country like fugitives, financed by those damned diamonds, nosing into this and into that, and then running off to Russia, all alone. With what you’d learned, Fred?”
I shook my head, resentment stirring in me.
“Remember when we met? In Santa Monica—right there, next to the beach. You didn’t have a thing but the clothes on your back and a bagful of diamonds. Was it a sub that brought you that far, Fred?”
“No,” I said, “and you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me, and see,” she said. She was rigid, and near hysteria.
“All right. I came there in a space sphere from Venus.”
She started to sob, a wild, lonely sound and I moved forward to take her in my arms.
Her fingers clawed my face, her high heel smashed my instep. “Get out,” she screamed, “get out, get out, get out—”
I got out. I went to the first floor washroom and cleaned up my bloody face, and then went into the bar. This was one habit I’d picked up on the planet.
When I came up to the suite, later, I didn’t even check to see if she was in the washroom. I flopped down on the davenport and didn’t know anything for the next twelve hours.
She was gone, when I came to. She’d checked out before I’d come back to the room, the night before.
I missed the plane she took from France. I missed her by a day in New York. I went back to the big house with the high pillars on Sunset Boulevard.
And she wasn’t there.
She’d come back to it, I knew. I moved in, to wait. I wasn’t going home without her; I wasn’t even sure I was going home with her. I was involved, now, in this planet, almost as crazy as the rest of them.
I sat. I did some drinking, but mostly I sat, going back over all our days, reading nothing, enjoying nothing, just remembering.
The Korean business started and the headlines grew uglier, and the jackals screamed and the people grew more confused.
One day, the maid told me I had a visitor. I was in the library and I told her to send him back.
When he came in, he closed the door behind him. I’d never seen him, before, but he said, “We’ve been looking for three weeks.”
“We?”
“Thirty of us,” he said. “What happened? Jars sent me.”
“Oh,” I said. “I can’t come, now. I’m—married—”
He smiled. “If you knew what a mess it’s been. We’ve got men all over the planet. Does your wife—know?”
“She thinks I’m crazy,” I said. “Look, I—”
“I’m not going to argue,” he said. “Just make your report, and I’ll pick it up, tonight.”
Five minutes after he was gone, I was packing. I knew he wasn’t coming back for any report. He was coming back for me, and it didn’t much matter to him if I wanted to come, or not. I was coming, or staying here—dead.
What I didn’t realize is that they wanted me to run, to get out where I could be taken with a minimum of interference.
They got me the other side of Blythe, in the middle of nowhere. A clear night in the desert, and headlights coming up from behind and then the big, black car crowding me off the flat road, into the sand…. And darkness.
Deering sighed and shook his head. “Corruption, Werig? Was it the corruption, or the girl?”
“I’ve made my report,” I said. “Don’t worry about them. They’ve got enough to worry about without worrying about us.”
“Another war, it looks like,” Deering said. “It could be the last one, you know. What was the girl—your wife like, Fred? Was she pretty?”
“Beautiful,” I said.
“And the people—fear, is it fear?”
“I don’t know. Their vice is fear, but they have some virtues.”
Deering’s voice was quiet. “Jars wanted me to ask you—about your wife. Where is she? Is she coming with you? It was forbidden.”
“I don’t know where she is, she’s not coming with me, and I know it was forbidden. But where is Jars? He has been avoiding me, hasn’t he? Why?”
“He has been pleading for you, before the assembly.” Deering rose, and went to the window, to look out. “Who will win this war that’s shaping up among the huddlers, Fred?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure I give a damn.”
Deering continued to look out the window. “The gray nation, the mixed nation, this America; they have some promise of the light, have they not?”
“Some.”
“But this black nation, this nation of robots, there is no chance of of light there?”
“Not under their present leaders. If they should win the war the planet would be set back five hundred years.”
Deering shook his head, and turned to face me sadly. “It would be worse than that. If they should win this war shaping up, there would be no planet for them to rule.”
I stared at him, not believing, still so bound up in my trip I couldn’t believe his words. Love,—faith, fear, Jean—were running through my mind. And Jean…?
Deering answered everything for me. “We can’t take the chance,” he said. “We will abolish the planet. The assembly so decided this morning.”
NEW HIRE
By Dave Dryfoos
Illustrated by Balbalis
Very admirable rule: Never do tomorrow what you can put off until after the age of forty!
One thing about an electronic awakener: no matter how elaborate its hookup, melodious its music, and important its announced reminders, when it goes on in the morning you can always turn it off again. Boswell W. Budge always did exactly that.
But there’s no turning off one’s kids, and thus, on the most important morning of his life, February 30, 2054, Bozzy arose, much against his will, promptly at 0800.
His Sophie, eight and ladylike, merely shook the bed with a disdainful gesture. But Howard, six, masculine, and athletic, climbed right up and sat on Bozzy’s stomach. Baby Ralph, of the golden smile, gave Bozzy a big kiss, and Bozzy thus shared the gold, which was egg.
“Did your mother send you in here?” Bozzy demanded, gazing suspiciously around with one eye open.
“We came because we love you,” Sophie answered.
That opened Bozzy’s other eye. “Thank you, dear,” he said. “You’re very sweet or very clever. Now if you’ll coax Howard off my stomach—”
“I don’t have to be coaxed,” Howard announced, sliding to the floor with all the covers. “From now on, you just order me, Daddy. Because you’ll be a Senior Citizen tomorrow.”
Bozzy didn’t want to think of that just then. “Tell your mother I’m up,” he said. “And get out so I can bathe and dress.”
Sophie minced, Howard ran, Ralph toddled.
Bozzy rose, a pudgy man slightly under average height at six feet two, with blue eyes and thinning brown hair. He was exactly thirty-nine years, eleven months, and twenty-nine days old.
And that was the point. At forty, he would have to go to work. This was his day for job-taking.
He dreaded it.
He put the coming ceremonies out of his mind and concentrated on his supersonic bath, the depilatory cream, the color of his outer clothing. It took time to achieve the right shade of purple in the bathroom plastic-dispenser, but no time at all to pour, solidify, and cut the sheet-like robe required for the occasion.
In it, he was the sensation of the breakfast room, handsome as a male bird in spring plumage. Kate, his slender wife, who had been up and at work for an hour, looked moth-eaten by comparison, as if their nest had been lined with her plucked-out down.
“You look very attractive this morning, Kate,” Bozzy told her. He gave her an extra-warm kiss.