He also attended several concerts, two ballets, and one play-all arranged for the benefit of visitors in this Centennial year, and all unavoidable without the exercise of more diplomatic illness, or sheer bad manners, than Duncan felt able to muster. The music, though doubtless magnificent, bored him; his tastes were oldfashioned, and he enjoyed little written after the twenty-first century. The ballet was also a disappointment; to anyone who had spent all his life at a fifth
of a gravity, the most remarkable of Terran grands jet6s was unimpressve-and also nerveracking, for Duncan could never quite get over the fear that the dancers would injure themselves. He watched them with envy, but he had no wish to imitate them. It was enough that he could now walk and stand without conscious effort. This achievement was a matter of modest pride, for there had been a time when he would not have believed it possible.
But the play delighted him. He had heard vaguely of George Bernard Shaw, now undergoing one of his periodic revivals, and The Devil’s Disciple was perfect for the occasion. Though George Washington muttered from time to time in Duncan’s ear such comments as “General Burgoyne wasn’t the least like that,” he felt that he at last understood the American Revolution in human terms. It was no longer a shadowy affair of two-dimensional puppets, five hundred years in the past, but a life-and-death struggle involving real people, whose hopes and fears and loves he could share.
Though love, with a capital L, was not a complication that Duncan would welcome during his stay on Earth. He could not imagine anyone ever replacing Marissa, and to have a really serious affair with a Terran would be the stuff of tragedy, since separation would be inevitable when he returned to Titan. He wanted no part of that; he had been through it once before, with Calindy.
Or so it had seemed at the time. Now he realized that the calf love of a sixteen-year-old boy, though it had once dominated all his waking hours, was indeed shallow and transient. Yet its aftereflects still lingered, shaping all his later passions and desires. Although he was annoyed and disappointed with Calindy, that was unchanged; her deliberate avoidance had, if anything, added fuel to his emotions and contributed to some notably fevered dreams.
Bernie Patras, of course, was happy to relieve his symptoms, and had arranged several enjoyable encounters. One cuddlesome and talented young lady, he swore, was his own girl friend, “who only does this with people she really wants to meet.” She did, indeed, show a genuine interest in
Titan and its problems; but when Bernie, as an interested party, wanted to join in the festivities,
Duncan selfishly threw him out.
That was shortly before Ivor Mandel’stahm-this time in the Penn-Mass auto jitney-totally demolished his peace of mind. They had just left the
Dupont Circle Interchange when he told Duncan: “I’ve some interesting news for you, but I don’t know what it means. You may be able to explain it.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“I think I can claim, without much exaggeration or conceit, that I can get to anyone on Earth in one jump. But sometimes discretion suggests doing it in two, and that’s how I proceeded with Miss Ellerman. I’ve never had any dealings with her personally-or so I thought, until you advised me otherwise-but we have mutual friends. So I got one, whom I can trust without question, to give her a call…. Tell me, have you tried to contact her recently?”
“Not for—oh, at least a week. I thought it better to keep out of the way.”
Duncan did not add, to this perfectly good excuse, the fact that he had felt ashamed to face Calindy.
“She answered my friend’s call, but there’s something very odd. She wouldn’t switch on her viddy.”
That certainly was peculiar; as a matter of common good manners, one never overrode the vision circuit unless there was a very good excuse indeed. Of course, this could sometimes cause acute embarrassment-a fact exploited to the utmost in countless comedies. But whatever the real reason, social protocol demanded some explanation. To say that the viddy was out of order was to invite total disbelief, even on those rare occasions when it was true.
“What was her excuse?” asked Duncan.
“A plausible one. She explained that she’d had a bad fall, and apologized for not showing her face.”
“I hope she wasn’t badly hurt.”
“Apparently not, though she sounded rather unhappy. Anyway, my friend had a brief conversation with her and raised the subject of Titan—quite legitimately, and in a way that couldn’t possibly arouse suspicion. He knew that she’d been there, and asked if she could put, him in touch with any
Titanians she 226 happened to know on Earth. Actually, he said he had an export order in mind.”
“Not a very good story. All business is handled through the Embassy Trade
Division, and he could have contacted them.”
“If I may say so, Mr. Makenzie, you still have a lot to learn. I can think of half a dozen reasons for not going to the Embassy-at least for the first approach. My friend knows that, and you can be sure that Miss Ellerman does.”
“If you say so-I don’t doubt that you’re right. What was her reaction?”
“I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. She said that she did have a good Titanian friend who might be able to help, that he’d just arrived for the celebrations, and he was in Washington….”
Duncan began to laugh; the anticlimax was so ridiculous…. “So your friend wasted his time. We’re right back where we started.”
“Along this line, yes. I thought you’d be amused. But there’s rather more to come.”
“Go on,” said Duncan, his confidence in Mandel’stahm now somewhat diminished by this debacle.
“I tried several other lines of inquiry, but they all came to nothing. I even thought of calling Miss Ellerman myself and saying outright that I knew she was the principal behind the titanite negotiations without accusing her of anything, of course.” -“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“Oh, it would have been a perfectly reasonable thing to do-she wouldn’t be surprised if I found out sooner or later. But as it happened, I had a better idea-one I should have tried in the first place. I checked on her visitors for the last month.”
“How,” Duncan asked in astonishment, “could you do that?”
“It’s the oldest trick in the world. Have you never seen one of those twentieth-century French detective films? No. I suppose not. I simply asked the concierge
“The what?” “You don’t have them on Titan?”
“I don’t even know what they are.”
“Perhaps you’re lucky. On Earth, they’re an indispensable nuisance. Miss
Ellerman, as I assume you know, lives in a very luxurious Deep Ten just south of Mount Rockefeller. In f act, she has the basement penthouse-a hankering I’ve never understood; the farther down I go, the more claustrophobic I get. Well, any large complex has a doorkeeper at the entrance to tell visitors who’s in and who’s out, take messages, accept deliveries-and authorize the right people to go to the right apartments.