Martlett nodded. Michael’s success here was part of an old story. Michael, no more handsome than he, no taller and no more muscular, had always been the gregarious brother, surrounded by admirers and adored by women. While he, Peter, the older brother and presumably the wiser, was instead regarded as a sort of bumbling foster uncle, not too clever, who needed help in all he undertook. And so it had gone. In a world where a serious composer stood no chance at all against the symphonic computers, Michael had won indelible musical fame at the age of twenty-three. Two years later, he had pocketed a fat fellowship and departed for the pleasant world of Marathou to continue his composing, far from the jarring dissonances of Terran life.
And now, at twenty-seven, he was dead. The older brother, shy, uncertain Peter, had the task of gathering together the reins Michael had abruptly dropped, collecting his belongings, settling his debts.
“Has the concert been cancelled?” Martlett asked.
“Oh, no,” Jansen said. “It’s being done as a memorial. Your brother was to have conducted himself, but we’ve hired someone else. It’s to be given on the fifteenth of May. I do hope you’ll attend.”
“Sorry,” Martlett said brusquely. “I wasn’t planning to stay on Marathon more than a week or two—just long enough to do whatever needs to be done about Michael’s affairs. By the middle of May I’ll be back on Earth, I’m afraid.”
“As you wish, of course.” Jansen shrugged mournfully. “I’ve taken the liberty of assembling a portfolio of bills that your brother left unpaid at the time of his death.”
Martlett took the bulky folder from him and opened it. The uppermost bill was from the Marathon Deserialized Instantaneous Transportation Corporation: 110 units charged for a journey from Marathon to the neighboring world of Thermopylae, ten units down and six months to pay.
“I hardly think this bill needs to be paid,” Martlett said, nudging it across the desk to Jansen.
The secretary looked at it, flushed, and said quickly, “Ah—of course not—an error, Mr. Martlett—”
An error indeed, Martlett thought. That journey had never been completed. Michael had entered the Deserializer on Marathon, and ostensibly was to have arrived on Thermopylae, ninety million miles away, almost at once. But the Deserializer box had been empty when it reached Thermopylae. Somewhere in mid-journey Michael had disappeared, his compressed and deserialized body shunted off irrevocably into some parallel continuum, into that dark bourn from which no traveler returns.
The law in such cases—they were one-in-a-billion occurrences—was plain. The missing party was to be considered legally dead. No one had ever returned who had disappeared in mid-jaunt via Deserializer.
Martlett thumbed through the rest of the bills. They were small ones, but there were plenty of them—a heavy liquor tab, five florists’ bills, an invoice from a men’s clothier and a larger one from a woman’s outfitter, and so on. Evidently Michael had not lost his old touch with the women, Martlett thought.
The total, he computed roughly, was in the vicinity of three thousand units. He could afford the outlay; the royalties from Michael’s music, whose performance rights he had automatically inherited, would reimburse him soon enough.
“Very well,” Martlett said. “I’ll take care of all these matters right away. Now, if there are any other—”
“Yes,” Jansen said gravely. “I believe you should know there was a woman. A—well—ah—your brother’s—fiancée.”
“His what? Why, Michael used to swear day and night he’d never let himself get trapped into marrying!”
“Be that as it may, this woman claims he made a definite promise to her. I think you ought to pay a call on her—ah—in the interests of good form, you know.”
Her name was Sondra Bullard. Martlett went to visit her that evening, after he had finished installing himself in his brother’s palmoid-ringed fourteen-room villa. She lived half a continent away—Marathon was somewhat on the sprawling side—and Martlett found it necessary to charter an aircab to get there.
Sondra Bullard’s dwelling was modest compared to I chael’s—a ranch-type affair that rambled over a few acres of grassy meadow at the foot of a handsome plunging waterfall. A gleaming jetcar jutted from the open garage. Martlett wondered in passing if Michael had bought her these things. He had always been extravagant.
Feeling a little uneasy, Martlett strode up the flagstoned walk and stepped into the green scanner field that glowed round the door. A chime sounded within, calling Miss Bullard’s attention to the fact that she had a visitor; a moment went by, and then a piercing shriek was distinctly audible.
Martlett felt perspiration begin to bead his forehead. Before he could give way completely to alarm and turn to run, the front door opened and Miss Sondra Bullard peered out at him. She was dressed unsurprisingly in black, and her face was astonishingly pale. She was also, Martlett noted, quite lovely. Michael’s taste had always been impeccable.
“You’re—Michael’s—brother?”
“That’s right. Peter Martlett. I called earlier, you remember.”
“Yes. Won’t you come in?” She spoke mechanically, chopping each word off into an individual sentence.
Once he was inside she said, “You—look very much like your brother, you know.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“I was frightened when I saw your image in the scanner field.” She laughed in self-deprecation. “I guess I thought it was Michael at the door. Silly of me, but you two did look so much alike. Were you twins?”
“I was three years the elder.”
“Oh.”
After a few lame moments of silence the girl said, “Drink?”
“Yes, please. Something mild.”
She dialed a filtered rum for him and a stiff highball for herself. While he sipped, Martlett surreptitiously looked around. A lot of cash had been tossed into these furnishings, and it seemed to him he recognized his brother’s fine hand—and money—in the decorating scheme. He felt a momentary current of anger; this girl, he thought, had been milking Michael!
Oh, no, came the immediate inner denial. Michael had been nobody’s fool. He wasn’t susceptible to gold-digging.
Hesitantly Martlett said, “Secretary Jansen was telling me you knew Michael quite well.”
“We were engaged,” she said immediately.
Since he had been warned, Martlett was able to avoid the double take. “Odd, Michael never wrote to me about it. Had you know him long?”
“Six months. We became engaged nine weeks ago. We were supposed to be married the first week in June.” Her lower lip trembled a bit. “And then—I got the phone call—they told me—”
A tear rolled down her lovely cheek, and she dabbed at it. Martlett felt uncomfortable. Why, this was almost like paying a call on a new widow! She was in mourning and all.
He said, “I know how you must feel, Miss—ah—Miss Bullard. Michael was a wonderful person—so dynamic, so full of life—”
“And now he’s gone!” she wailed. “Poof! Vanished off into some other continuum, they told me! Living on some horrible world without air somewhere, maybe!”
“They say it’s a quick and painless way to die,” Martlett ventured. The words did not soothe her.
The single tear became a torrent; her well-equipped bosom heaved with convulsive sobs. Watching her, Martlett’s lips twitched in dismay. Open display of emotion had always been a tribulation for him to witness. He himself felt grief at his brother’s passing, certainly, but he had never given way to—to this—