“So that’s it, Ted. It was grand while it lasted, but I knew it couldn’t stay grand much longer, and to spare both of us fifty or sixty years of bitterness, I’ve pulled out. Dave has left the agency, but we have a little money that we’ve both saved. Again, Ted, I’m sorry, sorry for both of us.
“I left the cat with the Camerons, and you can get him back from them when you get back from Ganymede. Nobody but you and Dave and me knows what’s happened. Take care of yourself, Ted. And so long.”
He let the tape run down to the end and shut it off. Then he stood numbly in the middle of the room for a long while, and after that he played the tape over once again from the beginning to end.
Marge. Dave Spalding. And the cat was with the Camerons.
“I didn’t expect that, Marge,” he said quietly. His throat felt very dry. His eyes ached; but he did not cry at all.
15
He poured himself a drink, and even that was not without its painful contingent memories, because Marge had always poured his drinks for him. Then he took off his shoes and listened to the tape a third time, with much the same frame of mind as the man who keeps hitting his head against a brick wall because it feels so good when he stops.
This time around he was able to stop hearing Marge’s words and listen to the way she was saying them: straightforwardly, with little hesitation or emotional quaver. These were words she had stored within her a long time, he realized, and she seemed almost happy to relieve herself of them.
No, he thought, he hadn’t expected Marge to do something like this; and that, perhaps, was why she had done it. She was mercurial, unpredictable. He saw now he had never really known her at all.
Some minutes passed, and the first rough shock ebbed away. He looked at it almost philosophically now. It had been inevitable. She had acted with great strength and wisdom. The Ted Kennedy who had been to Ganymede and had his eyes opened there respected her for it.
But he felt bitterness at the fact that he had returned from Ganymede a changed man, a man who had not only shifted his stand but who had taken positive action in his new allegiance, and Marge was not here to commend him for having seen her point of view at last. His conversion had come too late for that. There was no point chasing after her, finding her, saying, “Look, Marge, I’ve finally repudiated the Corporation and the agency—won’t you come back now?”
No. It was too late to wave his new-found allegiance and expect Marge to forgive all his old blunders. Half the unhappiness people make for each other, he thought, is caused by men and women trying to put back together something that should remain forever smashed.
It hurt, but he forced himself to forget her.
He rose, crossed the room and snapped on the video. He searched for a newscast and finally found one on Channel Seventy-two, the Bridgeport UHF channel. He listened patiently through the usual guff about the miserable late-July weather, hot and humid despite the best efforts of the Bureau of Weather Adjustment, and to an analysis of the new cabinet crisis in Yugoslavia. Then the newscaster paused, as if turning over a sheet of script, and said, “Spacefield Seven in New Jersey was the scene several hours ago of the arrival from Ganymede of Captain Louis Hills’ space ferry, which had made its last trip to Ganymede three weeks ago laden with supplies for the colony there. Captain Hills reported all well on the tiny world. In an afternoon baseball game, the Red Sox defeated the—”
Kennedy moved to shut the set off. They had decided to suppress all news of him, then—and they were still rigorously maintaining the fiction that Ganymede was populated by brave men and women from Earth. Well, that was no surprise. There would be an intensive man hunt for him as soon as the Corporation could mobilize its forces. Perhaps it was already under way.
Kennedy started to form his plans. Today was July 30. The Corporation planned to go before the United Nations and ask for armed intervention on October 11. He had until then to secure evidence that would puncture the fabric of lies he had helped erect.
But he would have to move warily. The Corporation would be looking for him, anxious to shut him up before he could damage the project. And before long they would have the U.N. Security Police on his trail too, on the hoked-up grounds that he had given arms to the Ganymedeans and murdered Engel. He would have to run, run fast, and hide well. With both Corporation goons and official world police on his trail, he would need to be agile.
The phone rang. He had no idea who it might be. Marge, maybe. It didn’t matter. If he answered, he might be putting the Corporation on his trail. He forced himself to let it ring, and after a while it stopped. He stared at the chocolate-colored receiver, wondering who might have called.
Well, it didn’t matter.
He knew what he had to do: get incriminating data on the Ganymede hoax from the agency files, and turn it over to the U.N. But it wasn’t as simple as that. Probably the instant he set foot in the agency building he’d be grabbed and turned over to the authorities, and from then on he’d never get a chance to speak up.
Of course, maybe the agency didn’t know about his changed beliefs yet. Perhaps the Corporation had not seen fit to let Gunther’s report get into agency hands yet; maybe Bullard and his cohorts intended to make a full loyalty investigation of the agency they had employed before letting Dinoli know that one of his hand-picked men had turned renegade on Ganymede.
But he couldn’t take that risk. He would have to get the material out of the agency files by stealth, and somehow get it to a U.N. representative.
He would have to drop out of sight for a while. There was no hurry about the exposure; he had more than two months. If he hid somewhere for those two months and raided the agency when they least expected it—
He knew where he could hide. At his brother’s place in Wisconsin.
Cautiously, he depolarized the windows and peered out of each, one by one, to make sure no one lurked outside. Then he opaqued them all again. He packed a single suitcase, taking with him just one change of clothes and a few toilet articles; this was no time to be burdened by personal property. He left everything else as it was—the bar, the kitchen, the living room with Marge’s picture in it. He hoped the cat would be safe with the Camerons. He had had the cat for many years; he would miss it.
The phone rang again. He ignored it.
It stopped eventually. He waited just a moment, gathering his strength, and took a last quick look at the house he and Marge had picked together eight years before, and which he might never see again.
He was leaving the past behind. Marge, the cat, his bar, his collection of records, his books. All the things he had treasured. The solid, secure life for which he had long been smugly thankful, gone overnight. Ted Kennedy, fugitive. All his thirty-two years had been building toward this, and it seemed strange to him that such a destiny should have been at the end of the string of years that had unrolled for him thus far.
Good-bye, agency. Good-bye, books and records and drinks and wife, and sleepy old cat and exclusive Connecticut township. Addio. He had few regrets. His brief contact with the Gannys had taught him to put less value on material things than he once had; he was calmer, more purposeful, since learning from them. Which was why he was giving up everything in an attempt to save the Ganymedeans.
He saw that their culture had to be preserved—and that he alone could save them.
There was a gun in his night-table drawer, a snub-nosed .38 Marge had made him buy three years before, when a night prowler had terrified the females of the area. He had never used it. Fully loaded, it had rested in the drawer.