His own gang was waiting for him in his hotel room. Cohen and Kelly and Jones. And Jane Doe. They looked as if they’d been waiting for a long time. Jane Doe looked as if she’d been crying. Mr. Kelly was sitting on the bed with his open briefcase on his knees.
“So there you are,” said Robinson’s voice from the briefcase. “I hope you have an explanation, Smith. I only hope you have an explanation.”
“For what?” he asked irritably. He’d been looking forward to getting out of his costume, taking a hot shower, and then bed. This late performance of “I spy” was very annoying. Repetitious, too.
“For what?” Robinson roared. “For what? Kelly, tell him for what!”
“Look here, Smith,” Kelly demanded. “Did you or didn’t you ask the desk clerk to find out about a plumbers’ fancy dress ball?”
“I did. Of course, I did. He got all the information I needed.”
There was a howl from the briefcase. “He got all the information I needed! Six years of general studies in espionage at the Academy, a year of post-graduate work in Intensive Secrecy, six months at the Special Service School in Data-Sifting and Location-Tracing—and you have the nerve to stand there with your carapace in your claws and tell me that the only way of tracking down this fancy dress ball you could think of was to ask the desk clerk—an ordinary everyday human desk-clerk—to find out about it for you!”
Alfred noticed that the faces around him were all extremely grave. Despite his weariness and strong feelings of indifference, he made an effort to conciliate. “Well, if he was only an ordinary, everyday human, I fail to see the harm that—”
“He could have been the Garoonish Minister of War for all you knew!” the briefcase blasted. “Not that it made any difference. By the time he’d questioned his various sources and mentioned the matter to his various friends, acquaintances and business associates, every spy organization in the galaxy had been alerted. They knew what we were worrying about, what we were looking for, and where and when we hoped to find it. You accomplished one of the best jobs of interstellar communication ever. Sixty-five years of patient espionage planning gone down the drain. Now what have you to say for yourself?”
Alfred stood up straight and manfully pulled back his shoulders. “Just this. I’m sorry.” He considered for a moment, then added: “Deeply and truly sorry.”
Some kind of electrical storm seemed to go off in the briefcase. It almost rolled off Kelly’s knees.
“I just can’t stand this any more,” Jane Doe said suddenly. “I’ll wait outside.” She walked past Alfred to the door, her eyes swimming in reproachfulness. “Darling, darling, how could you?” she whispered bitterly as she passed him.
The briefcase crackled down to some semblance of control. “I’ll give you one last chance, Smith. Not that I think any conceivable defense you might have would be valid, but I hate to demote a Special Emissary, to push him forever out of the Service, without giving him every chance to be heard. So. Is there any defense you wish to have registered before sentence of demotion is passed upon you?”
Alfred considered. This was evidently a serious business in their eyes, but it was beginning to be slightly meaningless to him. There was too much of it, and it was too complicated. He was tired. And he was Alfred Smith, not John Smith.
He could tell them about the events of the night, about the Lidsgallians and the information he’d received from the captive Smith. It might be valuable and it might throw a weight in the scales in his favor. The trouble was that then the question of John Smith’s real identity would arise—and that might become very embarrassing.
Besides, he was over the fear he’d felt earlier about these creatures; they could do little more to him than a dose of sodium bicarbonate, he’d found out. Their super-weapons were to be discounted, at least on Earth. And when it came to that point, he was not at all sure that he wanted to give them helpful information. Who knew just where Earth’s best interests lay?
He shook his head, feeling the fatigue in his neck muscles. “No defense. I said I’m sorry.”
From the briefcase, Robinson sighed. “Smith, this hurts me more than it hurts you. It’s the principle of the thing, you see. Punishment fit the crime. More in sorrow than in anger. You cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs. All right, Kelly. The sentence.”
Kelly put the briefcase on the bed and got to his feet. Cohen and Jones came to attention. There was evidently to be a ceremony.
“By virtue of the authority vested in me as acting chief of this field group,” Kelly intoned, “and pursuant to Operating Procedure Regulations XCVII, XCVIII and XCIX, I hereby demote and degrade you, Gar-Pitha of Vaklitt, from the rank of Special Emissary, Second Class, to the rank of General Emissary or such other lower rank as Command Central may find fitting and necessary in the best interests of the Service. And I further direct that your disgrace be published throughout every arm and echelon of the Service and that your name be stricken from the roster of graduates of the Academy which you have shamed. And, finally, in the name of this field group and every individual within it, I disown you now and forevermore as a colleague and an equal and a friend.”
It was, Alfred decided, a kind of strong-medicine ceremony. Must be pretty affecting to someone who was really involved in it personally.
Then, from either side, Cohen and Jones moved in swiftly to complete the last, dramatic part of the ceremony.
They were very formal, but very thorough.
They stripped the culprit of his uniform.
Afterword
This is how I wrote this story:
In 1956, I broke up with a woman with whom I had been involved for the better part of a year. But I knew she’d be back (she always came back), and I knew we’d start all over again, as we so many times had. I therefore called all my friends and told them that they had to arrange seven consecutive dates for me; I wanted to see a new woman every day of the coming week—hoping that I’d get deeply committed to at least one of them.
Fruma, as she still likes to remind me, Fruma was Wednesday. Katherine MacLean and the guy she was then living with, Dave Mason, told me they knew somebody I would really like. They came up with Fruma.
After my first date with her on Wednesday night, I told Bob Sheckley—who was recently divorced and who was my closest friend at the time—that I thought I had found the woman of all women who should be my wife. Bob asked when I planned to see her again.
“Saturday night,” I told him.
“See if she has a friend,” he said.
Well, Fruma did, and her friend’s name was Ziva, and Bob and Ziva were married a month after Fruma and me. We all lived in Greenwich Village, not forever after, but most happily, about two or three blocks from each other.
And Bob and I went through a slump. Not a bad long one, but a very annoying one nonetheless, and one more surprising to Bob than to me, because I wrote spasmodically, when some strong idea turned me around, but Bob was a heavy production man.
Bob and I talked to each other very intensively and very worriedly about how to get out of the slump. One of the cures we thought about was to rent a furnished room as a mutual office and add two items of furniture to it—a typewriter table and a heavy wooden chair with shackles permanently attached to the chair. We would both arrive at the office at nine each morning, and one of us would be shackled to the chair by the other. He would not be released, no matter how he pleaded or what the excuse, until one p.m.—or until he typed four pages of good, publishable copy. Then the shackles would be opened and the other would take his place, under the same conditions, until either five p.m. or four typed pages of good copy would bring release. Of course, if the four pages were typed early enough and the writer were still going strong, he could go on and write as much as he wanted to, until his release time.