'Thanks,' Sal Heim said, accepting the drink.
'This is Walt,' the common head said to him. 'We know that if Jim Briskin is elected he'll instruct his Attorney General to find ways to shut the satellite down. Isn't that a fact ?' The two eyes, together now, fixed themselves on him in an intense, astute gaze.
'I don't know where you heard that,' Sal said, evasively.
"This is Walt,' the head said. "There's a leak in your organization; that's where we heard it. You realize what this means. We'll have to throw our support behind Schwarz. And you know how many transmissions we make to Earth in a single day.'
Sal sighed. The Golden Door kept a perpetual stream of junk, honky-tonk stag-type shows, pouring down over a variety of channels, available to and widely watched by almost everyone in the country. The shows - especially the climactic orgy in which Thisbe herself, with her famous display of expanding and contracting muscles working in twenty directions simultaneously and in four colors, appeared - were a come-on for the activity of the satellite. But it would be duck soup to work in an anti-Briskin bias; the satellite's announcers were slick prose.
Downing his drink he rose and started toward the door. 'Go ahead and stick your stag shows on
Jim; we'll win the election anyhow and then you can be sure he'll shut you. In fact, I personally guarantee it right now.'
The head looked uneasy. 'Dirty p-pool,' it stammered.
Sal shrugged. 'I'm just protecting the interests of my client; you've been making threats toward him. You started it, both of you.'
'This is George,' the head said rapidly. 'Here's what I think we ought to have. Listen to this, Walt.
We want Jim Briskin to come up here to the Golden Door and be photographed publicly.' It added, in applause for itself, 'Good idea. Get it, Sal ? Briskin arrives here, covered by all the media, and visits one of the girls; it'll be good for his image because it'll show he's a normal guy -
and not some creep. So you benefit from this. And, while he's here, Briskin compliments us.' It added, 'A good final touch but optional. For instance, he says the national interest has - '
'He'll never do it,' Sal said. 'He'll lose the election first.'
The head said, plaintively, 'We'll give him any girl he wants; my lord, we have five thousand to choose from!'
'No luck,' Sal Heim said. 'Now if you were to make that offer to me I'd take you up on it in a second. But not Jim. He's - old-fashioned.' That was as good a way to put it as any. 'He's a
Puritan. You can call him a remnant of the twentieth century, if you want.'
'Or nineteenth,' the head said, venomously.
'Say anything you want,' Sal said, nodding. 'Jim won't care. He knows what he believes in; he thinks the satellite is undignified. The way it's all handled up here, boom, boom, boom -
mechanically, with no personal touch, no meeting of humans on a human basis. You run an autofac; I don't object and most people don't object, because it saves times. But Jim does, because he's sentimental.'
Two right arms gestured at Sal menacingly as the head said loudly, 'The hell with that! We're as sentimental up here as you can get! We play background music in every room - the girls always learn the customer's first name and they're required to call him by that and nothing else! How sentimental can you get, for chrissakes ? 'What do you want ?' In a higher-pitched voice it roared on, 'A marriage ceremony before and then a divorce procedure afterward, so it constitutes a legal marriage, is that it ? Or do you want us to teach the girls to sew mother hubbards and bloomers, and you pay to see their ankles, and that's it ? Listen, Sal.' Its voice dropped a tone, became ominous and deadly 'Listen, Sal Heim,' it repeated. 'We know our business; don't tell us our business and we won't tell you yours. Starting tonight our TV announcers are going to insert a plug for Schwarz in every telecast to Earth, right in the middle of the glorious chef-d'oeuvre youknow-
what where the girls... well, you know. Yes, I mean that part. And we're going to make a campaign out of this, really put it over. We're going to insure Bill Schwarz' reelection.' It added,
'And insure that Col fink's thorough, total defeat.'
Sal said nothing. The great carpeted office was silent.
'No response from you, Sal ? You're going to sit idly by ?'
'I came up here to visit a girl I like,' Sal said. 'Sparky Rivers, her name is. I'd like to see her now.'
He felt weary. 'She's different from all the others ... at least, all I've tried.' Rubbing his forehead he murmured, 'No, I'm too tired, now. I've changed my mind. I'll just leave.'
'If she's as good as you say,' the head said, 'it won't require any energy from you.' It laughed in appreciation of its wit. 'Send a fray named Sparky Rivers down here,' it instructed, pressing a button on its desk.
Sal Heim nodded dully. There was something to that. And after all, this was what he had come here for, this ancient, appreciated remedy.
'You're working too hard,' the head said acutely. 'What's the matter, Sal ? Are you losing ?
Obviously, you need our help. Very badly, in fact.'
'Help, schmelp,' Sal said. 'What I need is a six-week rest, and not up here. I ought to take an 'ab to Africa and hunt spiders or whatever the craze is right now.' With all his problems, he had lost touch.
Those big trench-digging spiders are out, now,' the head informed him. 'Now it's nocturnal moths, again.' Walt's right arm pointed at the wall and Sal saw, behind glass, three enormous iridescent cadavers, displayed under an ultraviolet lamp which brought out all their many colors.
'Caught them myself,' the head said, and then chided itself. 'No, you didn't; I did, You saw them but I popped them into the killing jar.'
Sal Heim sat silently waiting for Sparky Rivers, as the two inhabitants of the head argued with each other as to which of them had brought back the African moths.
The top-notch and expensive - and dark-skinned - private investigator, Tito Cravelli, operating out of N'York, handed the woman seated across from him the findings which his Altac 3-60
computer had derived from the data provided it. It was a good machine.
'Forty hospitals,' Tito said. 'Forty transplant operations within last year. Statistically, it's unlikely that the UN Vital Organ Fund Reserve would have had that many organs available in so limited a time, but it is possible. In other words, we've got nothing."
Mrs. Myra Sands smoothed her skirt thoughtfully, then lit a cigarette. 'We'll select at random from among the forty; I want you to follow at least five or six up. How long will it take for you to do that ?'
Tito calculated silently. 'Say two days. If I have to go there and see people. Of course, if I can do some of it on the phone-' He liked to work through the Vidphone Corporation of America's product; it meant he could stick near the Altac 3-60. And, when anything came up, he could feed the data on the spot, get an opinion without delay. He respected the 3-60; it had set him back a great deal, a year ago when he had purchased it. And he did not intend to permit it to lie idle, not if he could help it. But sometimes -
This was a difficult situation. Myra Sands was; not the sort who could endure uncertainty; for her things had to be either this or that, either A or not-A - Myra made use of Aristotle's Law of the
Excluded Middle like no one else he knew. He admired her. Myra was a handsome, extremely well-educated woman, light-haired, in her middle forties; across from him she sat erect and trim in her yellow Lunar squeak-frog suit, her legs long and without defect. Her sharp chin alone let on - to Tito at least - the grimness, the no-nonsense aspect, of her personality. Myra was a businesswoman first, before anything else; as one of the nation's foremost authorities in the field of therapeutic abortions, she was highly paid and highly honored... and she was well aware of this. After all, she had been at it for years. And Tito respected anyone who lived as an independent business person; after all, he, too, was his own boss, beholden to no one, to no subsidizing organization or economic entity. He and Myra had something in common. Although, of course, Myra would have denied it, Myra Sands was a terrible goddam snob; to her, Tito