But the sobbing became contagious. “I loved him,” she moaned. “And he’s gone! Gone!” She groped out blindly, fumbled her way onto his shoulder, and let her emotions go. Martlett felt his eyes growing misty at the thought of this girl who had built her whole life around his undeniably remarkable brother, and who now faced nothing but emptiness. Before he knew it, he was crying too.
They sobbed on each other’s shoulders for a few moments; then, the fit passing, they straightened up and looked at each other. Her gray eyes were red-rimmed.
“You’re so much like him,” she murmured. “So tall, so handsome, so—understanding.”
He felt his face reddening, and nervously moistened his lips. The grief had seemed to fade from her features, and now some other emotion took its place—an emotion Martlett, in thirty years of bachelorhood, had come to recognize with an expert’s skill.
Disengaging himself from her, he rose. “I’ll have to leave you now, Miss Bullard. It’s been a difficult day for me, you understand. But I’ll try to see you again before I return to Earth. We’ve both lost someone very dear to us. Good night, Miss Bullard.”
“Why don’t you call me Sondra.”
He smiled uneasily. “Good night—Sondra.”
“Good night, Peter.”
Martlett slept that night in his brother’s bed, which was a palatial triple-size monstrosity with a pink velvet canopy and a soothing built-in tranquilophone. Martlett found the murmuring wordless sounds of the tranquilophone distracting, but there was no way to shut the thing off, and finally he fell asleep despite it. He dreamed odd dreams and woke feeling unrefreshed in the morning.
Michael’s robot butler had prepared a meal for him, Martlett discovered. He wondered whether the robot was aware that the person in the house was not his master. Probably not; so far as the robot was concerned, the human of the house looked like Mr. Martlett, answered to the name, and therefore was Mr. Martlett. That he was the wrong Mr. Martlett did not seem to matter. Robot brains were not geared to such niceties.
Martlett ate thoughtfully, taking his meal on the veranda overlooking Michael’s private lake. Sweet-smelling morning breezes drifted toward him. Michael had written that “it is springtime all the year round on Marathon,” and he had been telling the truth. Although this was the first time Martlett had visited one of the colony worlds, or indeed had left Earth for any reason at all, he found it hard to imagine a planet more lovely than this one. It would almost be a pity, once he had concluded his business here, to have to return to crowded, untidy Earth once again and go back to the weary business of constructing mindless video jingles.
Better, he thought, to stay here in this eternal springtime—
No.
He shut off the thought promptly. Whatever he did, he did not intend to become a colonist on Marathon. His place was on Earth. Let escapists like Michael flee to this Utopian planet; doubtless laziness and indolence triumphed here, and in a few short generations decadence would be rampant.
The butler came slithering out on the veranda, rolling noiselessly on its treads. “There is a phone call for you, master.”
“For me? Can I take it out here?”
The robot registered confusion for an instant. “Surely you know that there is no pickup connection out here, Mr. Martlett?”
“Of course. Silly of me to forget that!”
He followed the robot inside and, tugging his dressing gown tight around himself, entered the camera field of the vidphone. There was a woman’s face on the screen—a rather attractive face, Martlett observed, blue-eyed and framed in lustrous blonde hair.
“Good morning,” he said, in a flat, noncommittal voice.
“Oh—you look so much like him!”
“Yes. We almost looked like twins,” Martlett said, a trifle edgily. “But I was three years his elder.”
“You must be Peter, then. He told me so much about you!”
“Did he? How kind of him. May I ask who it is that I am—
“Didn’t he send you my photo?”
Martlett frowned. “Not that I recall—and I’m sure that I would recall, if he had. I’m afraid he didn’t.”
“Strange,” the girl said. “He said he was mailing you a tridim of me. I’m Joanne Hastings.”
“Pleased to meet you, Miss Hastings,” Martlett said blankly, wondering who Joanne Hastings might be.
She furrowed her forehead prettily. “I said, Joanne Hastings. You mean Michael didn’t tell you that either? Obviously he didn’t, because you don’t seem to recognize my name at all.”
An ominous premonition clogged Martlett’s throat. In a hushed voice he said, “I’m afraid Michael didn’t tell me anything about you, Miss Hastings.”
“Call me Joanne. I am—was—Michael’s fiancée. We were going to be married in June, you see.”
“Oh. Oh, yes. Yes, I see, Miss Hastings. You and he—were going to get married—in June—”
Martlett closed his eyes briefly, and the image of Sondra Bullard wandered unbidden across the inside of his eyelids. Sondra was a brunette. This girl was a blonde. And Michael had been engaged to both of them.
Suddenly Martlett understood many things he had not been cognizant of before. He realized why Michael had abruptly taken that ill-fated journey to Thermopylae. That it had ended tragically was unfortunate, Martlett reflected—but the Deserializer accident had saved Michael from a devilishly nasty dilemma, anyway. Both Joanne and Sondra seemed the predatory kind. Had Michael reached Thermopylae safely, they no doubt would have pursued him there—and from there to Mycenae, and from Mycenae to Thebes, and from there to any other world to which he might flee. Poor Michael! Some of Martlett’s grief abated. Had Michael lived, he would never have escaped the clutches of the two females to whom he had so inadvisedly pledged his troth.
With tenderness Martlett said, “I understand, Miss Hastings. His death must have been a dreadful blow to you. As it was to all of us, of course; I loved my brother dearly.”
Before he had finished his conversation with Joanne Hastings, he found himself accepting a dinner invitation to her ranch eight hundred miles southward, for the next night. She wanted to talk to him about Michael, and it would have been churlish of him to refuse. He tactfully resolved not to mention to her the matter of Michael’s other fiancée who called in midmorning, while Marlett was busily wading through the backlog of Michael’s unpaid bills and scribbling checks on the veranda. He had dealt with about half of them already; the expenditure so far had been nearly twenty-five hundred units. His rough estimate of three thousand altogether had clearly been inaccurate. But Michael’s symphonies would bring royalties forever, Marlett told himself consolingly, as he crossed the veranda and headed for the nearest vidphone at the robot’s beck.
Sondra was inconsolably lonely, she sobbed to him, and wanted him to visit her for lunch that day. “You remind me so much of Michael,” she confided. “When you were with me last night I almost felt as though he were here!”
Obligingly, Martlett chartered a jetcar once again and flew to her villa for lunch. The visit dragged on until evening, and when Marathon’s single big golden moon had spiraled into the sky she insisted he stay for dinner as well. He began to sense that getting Michael’s bills paid might take longer than he had expected, at this rate.
He succeeded in disentangling himself by midevening, and flew home deep in brooding thought. The girl seemed perfectly willing to accept him as a substitute for Michael. Most remarkable, he thought. True, there was a physical resemblance so great as to be uncanny, considering the difference in their ages, but as far as personality went they were vastly different. Michael had been flamboyant, witty, spectacular and even a trifle sensational; his older brother tended more toward introspection and sobriety, and most of Michael’s women had accordingly shown little interest in Peter’s existence. But things seemed to be different with Sondra Bullard, Martlett reflected.