“Are you going to help us, Ivo?” she inquired, the implied intimacy of her use of his first name sending another irrational thrill through him. He felt adolescent.
“What did Brad tell you about me?” he countered. Her perfume, this close, was the delicate breath of a single opening rose.
She guided him to the elevator, now returned from Brad’s hasty use. “Not very much, I must admit. Just that you were a friend from one of the projects, and he needed you to get in touch with another friend from another project. Shane.”
He had not realized before how small these elevators were. She had to stand very close to him, so that her right breast nudged his arm. It’s only cloth touching cloth, he thought, but couldn’t believe it. “That’s Schön, with the umlaut over the O. The German word for—”
“Why of course!” she exclaimed, delighted. Her intake of breath delighted him, too, but for an irrelevant reason. “That never occurred to me — and I have spoken German since I was a girl.”
She was still a girl, as he was acutely aware. He felt the need to keep the conversation going. “Do you speak any other languages?” Adolescent? Infantile!
“Oh, yes, of course. Mostly the Indo-European family — Russian, Spanish, French, Persian — but I’m working on Arabic and Chinese, the written form of the latter for now, since it covers so many spoken forms. The Chinese symbols are based on meaning rather than phonetics, you know, and that presents a different set of problems. I feel so parochial when Brad teases me with Melanesian or Basque or an Algonquin dialect. I hope you’re not another of those fluent linguists—”
“I flunked Latin in high school.”
She laughed.
Ivo tried to untangle the physical reaction he experienced from the intellectual content of their conversation, afraid of a Freudian slip. “No, I mean it. ‘Schön’ is the only foreign word I know.”
She studied him with perplexed concern. “Is it a — a mental block? You’re good at some things, but not at—”
The elevator ride finally ended, and she disengaged her torso from his. They climbed into a cart. Now it was her thigh that distracted him, wedged against his. Could she be unaware of the havoc she wrought along his nerve connections — his synapses? “I guess Brad didn’t tell you about that. I’m no genius. I am pretty good at certain types of reasoning, the way some feeble-minded people can do complex mathematical tricks in their heads or play championship chess — but apart from that I’m a pretty ordinary guy with ordinary values. I guess you thought I was like Brad, huh?” Fat chance!
She had the grace to blush. “I guess I did, Ivo. I’m sorry. I heard so much about Schön; then you came—”
“What did he tell you about Schön?”
“That would fill a small manual by itself. How did you come to meet him, Ivo?”
“Schön? I never did meet him, really.”
“But—”
“You know about the projects? The one he—”
She looked away, and the loose ponytail flung out momentarily to brush his cheek. Is she a conscious flirt? No, she was being natural; he was the one, reacting. “Yes,” she said, “Brad told me about that too. How Schön was in the — free-love community. Only—”
“So you see, I did not actually share lodging with him.”
“Yes, I was aware of that. But why are you the only one who knows where to find him?”
“I’m not. Brad knows. Other members of the project know, though they never talk about it.”
This time her flush was frustration, and he felt the angry flexure in the muscle of her leg. She doesn’t like to be balked.
“Brad told me you were the only one who could summon him!”
“It’s an — arrangement we have.”
“Brad knows where Schön is, but won’t go for him himself? That doesn’t sound like—”
The journey by rail was over, no tunnel of love. “Brad can’t go for him himself. I guess you could call me an intermediary, or maybe a personal secretary. An answering service: that’s closest Schön simply won’t come out for anyone unless I handle it. He doesn’t involve himself with anything that isn’t sufficiently challenging.”
“An alien destroyer that has our whole exploratory thrust stymied — isn’t that enough?”
So she knew what Brad had told him. “I’m not sure. Schön is a genius, you see.”
“So Brad has informed me, many times. An IQ that can’t be measured, and completely amoral. But surely this is cause!”
“That’s what I’m here to decide.”
They arrived at the common room: a large compartment of almost standard Earth-gravity, with easy chairs and several games tables. Ivo wondered what billiards or table-tennis would be like in partial gravity. Beside the entrance were several hanging frameworks: games ladders with removable panels. On each panel was a printed name.
“Who’s Blank?” he asked, reading the top entry of the first.
“That’s a real name,” she said. “Fred Blank, one of the maintenance men. He’s the table-tennis champion. I don’t really think they should — I mean, this room is for the scientists, the PhD’s. To relax in.”
“The maintenance men aren’t supposed to relax?”
She looked a little flustered. “There’s Fred now, reading that magazine.”
It was a Negro in overalls and unkempt hair. Beside him sat a Caucasian scientist, portly and cheerful. Both looked hot; evidently they had just finished playing a game. It seemed to Ivo that Afra was the only one disturbed, and that told him something about both her and the other personnel of this station. The scientists respected skill wherever they found it; Afra had other definitions. The portly white for the moment probably envied Blank his facility with the paddle, without being concerned with such irrelevancies as education.
In the center of the room stood a pedestal bearing a shining statuette mounted at eye level. Ivo paused next to contemplate this honored edifice. It was a toy steam-shovel, of storybook design, with a handsome little scoop. The cab was shingled like the top of a country cottage, with a delicately sagging peaked roof and a bright half-moon on the door. Within the jawed shovel was a ball like a marble, and so fine was its artistry that he could see the accurate outline of the continent of North America etched upon the surface of that little globe.
The pedestal bore the ornate letters S D P S. “What does it mean?”
Afra looked embarrassed again. “Brad calls it the ‘Platinum Plated Privy,’ ” she murmured, quiet though no one else was close. “It really is. Platinum plated, I mean. He — designed it, and the shop produced it. The men seem to appreciate it.”
“But those letters. S D P S. They can’t stand for—”
She colored slightly, and he liked her for that, sensing a common conservatism though their viewpoints in other respects differed strongly. “You’ll have to ask him.” Then she shifted ground. “Here we are talking about unimportant things and ignoring you. Where do you come from, Ivo? That is, where did you settle after you left your project?”
“I’ve been walking around the state of Georgia, mostly. All of us who participated in the project were provided with a guaranteed income, at least until we got established. It isn’t much, but I don’t need much.”
“That’s very interesting. I was born in Macon, you know. Georgia is my home state.”
Macon! “I didn’t know.” But somehow he had known.