"Well, thank God for that, anyway. Rufus, go below and have Alice fix you some food. And don't think your heroism and self-sacrifice have gone unnoticed. Spencer, escort him there, if you would, and then come back here."
Spencer led Thomas downstairs to the greenroom, where Alice, Pat and Lambert were playing some cards.
"Alice," Spencer said, "see what Rufus wants and make it for him, will you? He's a casualty."
"Hey, have you been shot again?" Alice exclaimed. "You want some food or something?"
"Some soup," Thomas said slowly, "would be nice. Thanks, Alice." He sat down as Alice scampered away. Pat, he noticed, was looking at him with an expression of near hostility.
"What happened to you?" she asked.
"I got…"He was suddenly very tired, and enunciating each syllable was a real effort. "I got my finger"—he waved his bandaged hand—"shot off in a gunfight with some androids. And then Spencer and I had to sing Christmas carols—" With no warning he found that he was crying. Almost as soon as he noticed it he was able to stop.
"For God's sake," Pat said, abruptly standing, "talk to me when you've managed to pull yourself together." She walked out of the room.
"Wow," said Lambert softly. "Anybody ever accuse you of masochism, Rufus?"
As far ass Thomas could recall, this was the first time Lambert had called him by his first name. He grinned weakly. "It's only these last few days they'd have had any cause to," he answered.
"I mean," Lambert went on, "I've pursued some cold ladies in my time, but this one of yours is a whole new category. Do you always go for women like that?"
Thomas shrugged. "She's the first girl I ever… went for."
"Honest?" Lambert shook his head. "God knows where you'll go from here."
Alice returned with a pot of steaming clam chowder and a tall mug of beer. "I ran into Spencer in the hall," she said. "He tells me Gladhand has advanced our opening night to Wednesday the twentieth."
"Wow," said Lambert uneasily. "Less than a week away."
"Yeah," Alice agreed. "Apparently he's going to step up the pace of the rehearsals, to compensate."
"Is that a code or something?" Thomas asked. "Does 'opening night' mean the day we spring our coup on city hall?"
"No, it really is opening night," Lambert said. "Gladhand made it clear, didn't he, that the play is no shuck? Of course, there may be a clue here; he could be planning to mount the attack sooner than he originally meant to, so he might move the opening-night date ahead so the two won't interfere with each other. Who knows? He might even be planning to overthrow city hall before the play opens. He'd never let on, in any case."
Thomas's hand hurt, causing him to toss and turn feverishly. When he finally did drift off he was plagued with the sky-fishing dream again. He reeled the resentful flier closer and closer, again saw the great white face and knew for one awful moment whose it was; then it changed into the face of the stone head beside Thomas's couch, which in turn became the face he'd glimpsed on the creatures in the vats at the android brewery. He awoke at dawn and lay there for an hour, tired, sick and disgusted with his subconscious mind.
He finally, made an effort to get up and found, as his vision cleared, that he had fallen on the floor beside his couch.
"What was that?" came a familiar voice. "Rufus? Are you all right?"
Thomas rose to his knees and shook his head to clear it. "Yeah," he said clearly. "I'm okay. That you, Pat?" He forced himself to forget the horrible white-cheese face of his dream.
"Yes." She was standing beside him now and helped him to his feet. His hand, he noticed, had bled during the night, and his sheets were spotted with brown.
"Do you love me, Pat?" he asked dizzily.
She thought about it. "Yes," she said at last, "I guess I do."
He nodded. "I love you, too," he said. "Let's have some breakfast."
"Right," she said. "Better not waste any time," she added. "Rehearsal's at eight."
"Eight?" he echoed. "Instead of noon?"
"As well as noon. Opening night's been rescheduled. Didn't you hear?"
"Oh yeah. I remember now. Wednesday."
"Right. Hurry up. Everybody's probably gobbling up our share."
But when they got to the dining room, they found that breakfast had been held up until they arrived. As he and Pat sat down, Spencer and Jeff trooped in with platters of scrambled eggs and sausages and bacon, followed by Skooney, who carried a huge jug of orange juice in both hands. Amid the usual babble of conversation, no mention was made of the events of the previous evening. Thomas noticed, though, that the trace of condescension was no longer present in people's voices when they spoke to him. I'm a full-fledged member at last, he thought. And all it cost me was a finger. He looked around for Negri but didn't see him.
He barely managed to swallow a mouthful of egg before having to sneeze violently into his napkin. "Does the damned paper have any idea when this Santa Ana wind will quit?" he asked.
"Yeah, as a matter of fact," Spencer answered from across the table. "A big tide of cold air is sliding south down the San Joaquin Valley. It ought to cancel this heat a bit."
"Won't that cause tornadoes?" Alice asked. "I read somewhere that causes tornadoes."
"It might, up around San Gabriel or San Fernando," Jeff said. "Not here, though."
The hall doors swung open, and Gladhand propelled his wheelchair into the dining room. "Where's Negri?" he asked.
"Haven't seen him all morning," Alice answered. Everyone else shrugged or shook their heads in agreement.
"He might be buying breakfast somewhere," Spencer said. "He does, sometimes."
"I don't think he is today," Gladhand said grimly. "The idiot tacked this note on my door last night."
Listen: 'Sir—the killing of individual androids, while doubtless praiseworthy in its own small-scale fashion, can at best—' oh hell, I won't read the whole murky thing. The upshot is"—he looked around helplessly— "he says he's gone off, singlehanded, to kill Police Chief Tabasco."
Thomas happened to glance at Pat as Gladhand finished; she had turned pale. He was surprised and felt a twinge of reflexive jealousy; would she, he wondered, be that concerned if it was me out risking my life? Was she last night, when it way me?
"Oh no," Spencer said, getting to his feet and flinging down his napkin. "How long's he been gone?"
"Possibly as long as… eight hours," Gladhand said.
"God help us," Spencer muttered. "Rufus—no, never mind. Jeff, you and Lambert run to the basement, quick, and drag as many of the bomb and gun crates into the deep cellar as will fit. Hide the rest of them, or camouflage 'em; throw old costumes on top of the incriminating stuff." Jeff and Lambert hurried out.
"Right," Gladhand said. "If any of you own personal guns, fetch them and give them to Jeff. Then get back here; rehearsal begins at eight—that's… nine minutes from now—as planned. Everybody is to be there, no excuses. Rufus, you'll read the Orlando part as well as your own."
"What's all this?" spoke up a pigtailed girl whose name Thomas didn't know. "Can't we help Negri somehow? He's risking his life for us."
"He's risking our lives for the sake of his outsize pride," Gladhand shouted. "You all know my rules about individual, unauthorized sallies against the enemy. And Negri was reminded of them only last week. What if he's caught? They'll torture him, or shoot him up with scopolamine or sodium pentothal, and he'll tell them everything he knows. I'm praying he's been killed and that the police are unable to identify him. Otherwise they'll be knocking on our front door five minutes later—or, more likely, kicking it down."
All the actors pushed away from the table and left the room. "Rufus." Gladhand said, "go to the lobby and keep an eye out for cops. If none appear in the next five minutes, be on stage for rehearsal."