And with Joanne Hastings as well, he discovered the following night, when he kept his dinner engagement with her. He had spent the day in conference with a few of Michael’s creditors, people who had neglected to present bills to Secretary Jansen and who now hastened to offer them to Peter.
There was a matter of four hundred units for piano repairs, and three hundred more for music paper. A liquor and wine merchant had sold Michael five magnums of champagne, imported from Earth, fifty units apiece. And so on and so on. The tab was mounting; Martlett estimated he had paid out nearly five thousand units to the creditors of his late brother in these two days, and he was a long way from finished. He wondered how long it would be before Michael’s estate earned back five thousand units in royalties, not to mention the nine hundred more it had cost him to come out here.
He was in a morbid frame of mind when he reached Joanne Hastings’ ranch, but she soon dispelled his mood. She greeted him dressed in a gay and skimpy plasti-spray outfit that belied her recent loss, and there were cocktails waiting on a tray in the sunken living room.
“You are so much like Michael,” she told him. “You have the same dark eyes, the same untidy hair, the same way of smiling—”
“Thank you,” Martlett said uncertainly. He re: zed such a situation, but he admitted bleakly to himself that he was not Michael, no matter what these strange women seemed to think.
“It’s odd Michael didn’t tell you he was planning to marry,” she said.
“He never confided much in me,” Martlett replied. “Not about such matters, anyway.”
“June eighth, it would have been.” She sighed. “Well, now it’s never to be. Mrs. Michael Martlett—you know, I used to spend hours practicing signing my name that way! But—well—”
A lump was beginning to form in Martlett’s throat. She seemed so poised, so resigned now to Michael’s being dead, and yet behind the outward mask he could plainly see how deeply she felt her loss. He said, “I wish there were something I could do for you, Miss Hastings—”
“Joanne.”
“Joanne. But I can’t bring Michael back, can I?”
“No,” she agreed, after a moment’s solemn thought. “No, you can’t. All that talent lost in a moment! What a waste!”
“Yes,” he said sadly. “What a waste.”
She moved a bit closer to him on the couch, and he decided it would be impolite to edge away. She said, “You’re so much like Michael, dear.”
Dear? he wondered. What next?
He said, “You’re upset, Miss—Joanne. Let me pour you another drink.”
“Yes, do.” She moved closer still. “And pour one for yourself.”
Somehow it was not at all surprising when he discovered she had her arms around him, and was maneuvering toward him in a way that left him no alternative but to kiss her.
In the next few days, Martlett discerned a clear pattern taking shape, and it frightened him. Not a day went by without a call from one or both of Michael’s fiancees, inviting him for dinner. And he was too innately polite to be able to decline their offers.
But, as he spent his days paying Michael’s bills (the figure had mounted to seven thousand five hundred units now, and still the creditors arrived in fresh troops) and his evenings sipping cocktails with Michael’s betrotheds, he realized what was happening. Both girls—each unaware of the other’s presence in the scheme of things—had evidently resolved that if they could not have Michael, they very well were going to have Michael’s brother. Martlett was an acceptable substitute to them. Each was spinning a web for him, hoping to trap him into the matrimony he had successfully avoided for thirty consecutive years.
The thought frightened him.
He had come to Marathon to bury Michael, not to inherit his fiancées. It has been his plan to settle Michael’s financial affairs, not his romantic ones. He fondly expected to return to Earth in a week or two, still a single man. But yet these girls seemed to be pinning their hopes on snaring him. With each passing day they took less care to hide their true intent.
“Do you still insist on going back to Earth when you’ve tidied up Michael’s bills?” Sondra wanted to know.
“My leave was only for two weeks. I—”
“You could tell your employers you weren’t coming back. There must be some advertising agency you could work for on Marathon. And we could live in Michael’s villa—”
“We?”
She reddened. “Sorry, darling. Slip of the tongue. Have another martini, Peter. This Denebian vermouth is delightful.”
Eight hours later he was a thousand miles away, consuming cognac in Joanne Hastings’ marbled atrium. He had put off Sondra’s increasingly more urgent proposals with vague delayers and demurs, but now Joanne was saying, “Peter, dear, you aren’t really going back to Earth, are you?”
“As soon as I’ve finished what I came here to do,” he said as stolidly as he could considering the amount of alcohol he had ingested that day.
“Which was?”
“To tidy up the loose ends of Michael’s fabric of existence, so to speak,” he said.
Her delicate eyebrows lifted a fraction of a millimeter. “But—I’m one of Michael’s loose ends, darling!”
Martlett sighed wearily. “Let’s not talk about it now, Joanne. Play that tape of Michael’s symphony, would you?”
By midday of his ninth day on Marathon, Peter Martlett had at last concluded the job of settling the late Michael Martlett’s affairs. All the bills were paid, including three-thousand-unit mortgage payment on Michael’s villa; the total damage had been just under fourteen thousand units, which had wiped out Martlett’s savings entirely. Michael’s banker had given him the comforting news that he could expect an income of from ten to fifteen thousand units annually from Michael’s musical compositions; the fame of a composer always increased immediately after his death, and in Michael’s case the tragic circumstance was sure to create a Galaxywide demand for his works.
There was merely the matter of Michael’s fiancées to be settled before he left.
Martlett’s ethical soul recoiled at the thought of ducking out and popping back to Earth via the Deserializer without even a good-by, but he knew that was the only possible solution. If he risked calling either or both of them that he was leaving, he could be sure they would artfully ply their wiles and see to it that he remained on Marathon a while longer.
Women, he thought sourly. They bait their hooks with emotion and watch us wriggle when we’re caught.
If he spoke to them, they would surely be able to make him stay. And if he stayed, the question of matrimony would inevitably come up. And—the premise followed in rigorous logical sequence—one or the other of the girls would suffer disappointment, while he himself would undergo the equally grave loss of his freedom.
He saw clearly why Michael had decided to bolt to Thermopylae. Lucky Michael had vanished enroute, though! He had escaped both forever. And, as had happened so often in the past, it was Big Brother who had to stay around to face the music.
He considered the situation a while. The gentlemanly thing to do—well, there was no gentlemanly thing to do. He had both of his brother’s women on his hands, and all he could do under the circumstances was run, and fast. Better to jilt both than one, he thought; that way neither would learn that there had been a rival for her affections all along.