Asimov's Mysteries

But the innocent ones would remember afterward.

I sighed. If I tried it, I would get the criminal all right, but later I would be the nearest thing to chopped liver any man had ever been. There would be a shakeup in the Service, a big stink the width of the Galaxy, and in the excitement and disorganization, the secret of altered Spaceoline would get out anyway and so what the hell.

Of course, the one I wanted might be the first one I touched. One chance out of three. I'd have one out and only God can make a three.

Damn it, something had started them going while I was muttering to myself and Spaceoline is contagioust a gigolo my, oh-- I stared desperately at my watch and my line of sight focused on nine-fifteen. Where the devil was the time going to?

Oh, my; oh, nuts; oh, Flora! 

I had no choice. I made my way to the booth for another quick call to Flora. Just a quick one, you understand, to keep things alive, assuming they weren't dead already.

I kept saying to myself: She won't answer.

I tried to prepare myself for that. There were other girls, there were other-- Hell, there were no other girls.

If Hilda had been in Marsport, I would never have had Flora on my mind in the first place and it wouldn't have mattered. But I was in Marsport without Hilda and I had made a date with Flora; Flora and a body that had been made up out of heaping handfuls of all that was soft and fragrant and firm; Flora and a low-gravity room and a way about her that made it seem like free fall through a warm, breathable ocean of champagne-flavored meringue--The signal was signaling and signaling and I didn't dare break off. Answer! Answer!

She answered. She said, 'It's you!'

'Of course, sweetheart, who else would it be?'

'Lots of people. Someone who would come.'

'There's just this little detail of business, honey.'

'What business? Plastons for who?'

I almost corrected her grammar, but I was wondering what this plastons kick was.

Then I remembered. I told her once I was a plaston salesman. That was the time! brought her a plaston nightgown that was honey. Just thinking of it made me ache where I needed no more ache.

I said, 'Look, just give me another half-hour…'

Her eyes grew moist. 'I'm sitting here all by myself.'

'I'll make it up to you.' To show you how desperate I was getting, I was definitely beginning to think along paths that could lead only to jewelry, even though a sizable dent in the bankbook would show up to Hilda's piercing eye like the Horsehead Nebula interrupting the Milky Way. She said, 'I had a perfectly good date and I broke it off.'

I protested, 'You said it was a quibbling little arrangement.' That was a mistake. I knew it the minute I said it.

She shrieked. 'Quibbling little arrangement!' It was what she had said. But having the truth on your side just makes it worse in arguing with a woman. Don't I know? 'You call a man who's promised me an estate on Earth-'

She went on and on about that estate on Earth. There wasn't a gal in Marsport who wasn't wangling for an estate on Earth and you could count the number who got one on the sixth finger of either hand. But hope springs eternal in the human breast, and Flora had plenty of room for it to spring in.

I tried to stop her. I threw in honeys and babies until you would have thought that every bee on the planet Earth was pregnant. 

No use.

She finally said, 'And here I am all alone, with nobody, and what do you think that will do to my reputation?' and broke off contact.

Well, she was right. I felt like the lowest heel in the Galaxy. If the word did get around that she had been stood up, the word would also get around that she was standuppable, that she was losing the old touch.

A thing like that can ruin a girl.

I went back into the reception room. A flunky outside the door saluted me in.

I stared at the three industrialists and speculated on the order in which I would slowly choke each to death if I could but receive choking orders. Harponaster first, maybe. He had a thin, stringy neck that the fingers could go around neatly and a sharp Adam's apple against which the thumbs could find purchase.

It cheered me up infinitesimally, to the point where I muttered, 'Boy!' just out of sheer longing.

It started them off at once. Ferrucci said, 'Boyl the watern the spout you go in the. snow to sneeze-' Harponaster of the scrawny neck added, 'Nies and nephew don't like orporalley cat.'

Lipsky said, 'Cattle for shipmentering the home stretchings are good bait and drank drunk.'

'Drunkle aunterior passageway! a while.'

'While beasts oh pray.'

'Rayls to Chicago.'

'Go way.'

'Waiter.'

'Terble.'

'Ble.'

Then nothing.

They stared at me. I stared at them. They were empty of emotion-or two were-and I was empty of ideas. And time passed.

I stared at them some more and thought about Flora. It occurred to me that I had nothing to lose that I had not already lost. I might as well talk about her.

I said, 'Gentlemen, there is a girl in this town whose name I will not mention for fear of compromising her. Let me describe her to you, gentlemen.'

And I did. If I say so myself, the last two hours had honed me to such a fine force-field edge that the description of Flora took on a kind of poetry that seemed to be coining from some wellspring of masculine force deep in the sub-basement of my unconscious.

And they sat frozen, almost as though they were listening, and hardly ever interrupting. People under Spaceoline have a kind of politeness about them. They won't speak when someone else is speaking. That's why they take turns. 

Occasionally, of course, I paused a bit because the poignancy of the subject matter made me want to linger and then one of them might put in a few words before I could gather myself together and continue.

'Pinknic of champagnes and aches and bittern of the century box.'

'Round that and/or thisandy beaches.'

'Assault and peppert girlieping leopard.'

I drowned them out and kept talking. This young lady, gentlemen,' I said, 'has an apartment fitted out for low gravity. Now you might ask of what use is low gravity? I intend to tell you, gentlemen, for if you have never had occasion to spend a quiet evening with a Marsport prima donna in privacy, you cannot imagine-'

But I tried to make it unnecessary for them to imagine- the way I told it they were there. They would remember all this afterward but I doubted mightily that either of the two innocents would object to it in hindsight. Chances were they would look me up to ask a phone number.

I kept it up, with loving, careful detail and a kind of heartfelt sadness in my voice, until the loudspeaker announced the arrival of the Space Eater. That was that. I said in a loud voice, 'Rise, gentlemen.'

They got up in unison, faced the door, started walking, and as Ferrucci passed me, I tapped him on the shoulder and said, 'Not you, you murdering louse,' and my magnetic coil was on his wrist before he could breathe twice.

Ferrucci fought like a demon. He was under no Spaceoline influence. They found the altered Spaceoline in thin flesh-colored plastic pads hugging the inner surface of his thighs, with hairs affixed to it in the normal pattern. You couldn't see it at all; you could only feel it, and even then it took a knife to make sure.

Afterward, Rog Crinton, grinning and half-insane with relief, held me by the lapel with a death grip. 'How did you do it? What gave it away?'