"Madison," I said in a deadly voice.
"Oh, all right, all right. I'll refresh your memory if you can't make it on your own. At 3:00 A. M. Teenie came tearing down to my cabin, scared me half out of my wits: I thought the Mafia had boarded us. But she said you were demanding to know who I wanted to research next and I told her and she went back to tell you, and so here we go."
"Here we go where?" I said.
"Oh, dear, you don't even remember when I've jogged your brain. All right. El Cid. Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, eleventh century. The national hero."
"Of what country?" I said.
"Spain," he said.
"Spain is a big country," I said. "WHAT PORT?"
"Oh, you want to know what PORT we're going to. Well, why didn't you say so? Although, for the life of me, I can't see how you forgot ordering it. Teenie was all over the ship at an ungodly hour telling everyone you were absolutely disgusted with Casablanca and wouldn't spend another hour in the place. Frightful row, leaving so quickly. So we're sailing to investigate Charlton Heston– I mean El Cid."
"In...?" I said.
"Valencia, Spain," he said, exasperated. "Don't you ever go to the movies? Listen, when all this blows over and we go home, I'm going to introduce you to my analyst. You need help, Smith."
The sports director was there, dragging me away. "You don't look too good," he said. "That's strange, because the steward said you didn't hit the pot last night. You need a few laps."
"That's what I seem to be suffering from," I said. But I jogged anyway. It really bothered me. True, I hadn't liked Casablanca. But, Gods, I had sure better be careful of that hashish!
Had I only looked, I would have seen Fate jogging along beside me, and had I then really inspected the apparition, I would have seen that it had begun to bare its fangs.
We went through the narrow and heavily trafficked Straits of Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean Sea. The water got bluer, the sun brighter and the clouds whiter. We turned northeasterly and began to draw a creaming wake along the Costa del Sol of Spain.
Suffering from too much exercise after too much hash and seeking to avoid too much sun, I went below to my salon in the late afternoon.
I got the viewers out of a cabinet and set them up.
Suddenly I realized my time was all askew. It was only late morning in New York.
The Countess Krak was sitting in a chair facing the Whiz Kid double. Thank Gods he didn't know me or of me, for he had on a hypnohelmet. Beyond him, through a window could be seen the yellowish landscape of lower Manhattan so she must be in the Empire State Building.
Numerous texts had been spread out and one was stamped, as I could see in Krak's peripheral vision, Massachusetts Institute of Wrectology.
I was startled. She must be using a hypnohelmet for its designed purpose: speed training.
She clicked it off and lifted the helmet from the head of the double. She snapped her fingers and the young man woke up.
"Now do you think you can pass your final exams?" she said.
"I don't know," he said. "I lost so much time fooling around on that job. I'll have to get real high marks to overcome the lack of classroom work."
"What do you think you'll do when you graduate?" she said.
"Oh, I'm sure about that," he said. "Twoey has to have new designs for pig troughs and every night he's pushing me to get through with school so I can begin useful work on his farm. He's also rooting around for ideas on how to raise the standard of living of pigs. I'll be busy all right. I never dreamed there was so much civil engineering connected with pigs. Opened a whole new world for me."
"What are you going to do if the media hits you when you go back to school for your exams?"
"Duck," said the double. "But if Jettero ever needs me for public appearances or anything, all he has to do is say the word. I'm not forgetting how he rescued me from that crazy psychiatrist! One minute there I was about to be turned into a vegetable and the next there I was in a van looking at Jettero. And Jesus, was I ashamed of myself right then for ever daring to think I could pose as him. And I know darned well you didn't tell me to think that when I had the helmet on."
"No, I don't have to do that," said the Countess Krak. "Jettero can stand on his own."
"He certainly can," said the double. "What a guy!"
I suddenly seethed. All that (bleeped) adulation for Heller! Couldn't people see what a sneaky, rotten (bleep) he really was? Him and his Royal officer ways. It made me feel nauseated.
"Well, all right," said the Countess Krak. "I've got to go tell my class of microwave engineers to go to lunch and I suggest you do the same."
"I'm real grateful to you," said the double. "If there's anything I can do for you or Jettero my whole life, you only got to say the word."
I gritted my teeth. The two-way-response radio was lying there. Wasn't there some kind of an order I could give Raht? Something that would make these people suffer for all the horrible things they had done to me?
I couldn't think of anything.
The "dress for dinner" gong went. The steward got me into a white evening jacket and black tie. He was all chattery.
"Clothes in Spain," he said, "are very good and very inexpensive. And while Valencia isn't Madrid, I think we can find some proper yachting togs all the same. So when we get in, what say you and I go ashore in the morning and outfit you more fittingly."
"And I won't have to exercise?" I said.
"I have influence with the sports director," he said.
And so it was that after a rather professorial dinner where I got told all about El Cid and a very harrowing night wherein Arabs danced with camels on the head of a pin, I found myself, the following day, walking the busy streets of Valencia, Spain, stopping in at shops and getting rigged out to look more the part of a yacht owner.
I suspected that the steward was probably getting a commission, but shopkeepers were so insistent that I looked magnifico and terrifico and fantastico in this or that and were so impressed that I owned el yate grandisimo newly arrived, I couldn't refuse very much. The cost was not that great and I landed back aboard with a taxicab full of boxes.
I wanted to show Teenie that she wasn't the only one who could run off and come back with clothes, but she and Madison weren't there. They had gone off to a library.
That evening, right after dinner, we were suddenly inundated with a flamenco troupe. The Chief Steward explained to us that while this was not Andalusia in southwest Spain, the flamenco was very good and, indeed, as I sat in the yacht's music salon, the stamping heels, swirling skirts, castanets and guitars soon got me shouting and clapping with them. The girls were black-eyed and pretty and although the men certainly looked like they carried knives, they didn't object when the ship's officers and Madison were forced into the dance. Teenie had a stamping contest with a young Spanish dancer and seemed to win or so they said. I got into it at last.
Later, I was exhausted in my bedchamber but Teenie was all fired up. She kept cavorting around the room. "Oh," she said, "I've got to get me a mantilla and a comb and some castanets and some of those skirts with flounces! When you whirl, you can show everything clean up to your neck!"
"You're an exhibitionist," I said.