Nor did I have any cause to change my mind till I hit the Cross-North Highway. I don’t suppose anyone could call a traffic jam on the Cross-North an act of God, however. The Almighty doesn’t have to take any measures to insure it.
Yet I thought I had calculated it logically. It was the middle day of a three-day weekend. Everyone who had wanted to go somewhere had already gone. Everyone who intended to come back had not yet left. I assumed I was in the eye of the hurricane, so I was perfectly at ease.
The trouble is that there is no time of the day or year when one or two cars don’t manage to stall themselves on the Cross-North. There must be a million motorists who, when at a loss for any source of fun, decide to drive their heaps onto the Cross-North and abandon them there. Once the word streaks out (telepathically, I presume) that the lanes on the Cross-North have narrowed, everyone north of the city funnels into them with wild cries of delight.
That was the beginning of the fatal irritation that filled me that day. I’m not exactly famous for my equanimity, but there’s no law that says I have to be irritated, unless you want to say that there’s a cosmic ukase that states that the Cross-North would irritate anybody.
So I was irritated. I moved along at a slow crawl, seeing a long triple line of cars ahead of me, all moving at a slow crawl, like a heat wave with no relief in sight. I annoyed myself by wondering why I hadn’t taken the Western Parkway instead, and every once in a while I threw myself into an absolute fury by glancing at my wristwatch.
But I made it! I made it!
I managed to get to my apartment, which is only a trifle over a mile from the hotel I was heading for, park the car, wash up a bit, change, grab a taxi, reach the hotel, make my way to the fifth floor, locate the interview room, and walk into it at exactly 4:20 p.m.
Exactly 4:20 p.m.
2 MARTIN WALTERS 4:20 P.M.
If I had arrived twenty minutes earlier, everything would have been different, everything would have been well—and twenty minutes was exactly how much time I had lost on the Cross-North. The nameless idiot who had stalled his car somewhere near the Oak Avenue exit was therefore also a layer of flagstones.
And yet, to be truthful, I was pleased at having arrived at 4:20 on the dot. I was Phileas Fogg making it around the world and back to the club on the second agreed upon. I even breathed hard, as though I had been running, when, except for crossing the crowded lobby at a reasonably brisk walk, engines and motors of various kinds had done all the work.
I waited the usual fifteen seconds for someone to notice me, but nobody did. I wasn’t too surprised. The room was a madhouse, with ABA employees trying to herd the reporters and the reporters clearly wondering, more or less out loud, how they were going to manage to put together any kind of wordage at all.
Besides which, although I have avoided saying so till now, I am exactly 158 centimeters tall. It sounds good, put that way, if you’re not used to the metric system, but pass your hands over the figure and mutter the magic words «2.54 centimeters to the inch» and it becomes five feet two—plus the eyes of blue that go along with that height, and a fat lot of good that ever did me.
Unless people know me, they tend to look straight over me, so after fifteen seconds, I let them know I was there. I’ve got a good loud voice and no compunction whatever about using it.
So I said quite loudly and clearly, «I am Darius Just and I’m taking part in the Martin Walters press conference on the ‘The Peace Negotiators.’»
It didn’t make much impact, since most of the people continued talking as though it affected them not at all whether I was Darius Just, or just Darius, or simply zero—and that didn’t exactly overwhelm me with gratitude.
I was about to repeat myself at a rather higher decibel rating when a woman walked up to me in an irritated fashion, as though I had interrupted her at important work (which, from her standpoint, I suppose, I had done), and said, «The Walters’ press conference?»
I found out later that she was running the interview department for the ABA. Her name was Henrietta Corvass; she was just a little too plump for her clothes; and she had an annoying air of super-efficiency as though she had twenty fingers with which to pull strings.
«Got it first crack out of the box,» I said.
«But you don’t. It’s just finishing.»
I goggled at her for a moment and then a horrible suspicion crossed my mind. «What time is it?» I asked and glared at my watch.
«Four twenty-two,» she said.
My watch was on the minute. «Well, then, four-twenty is the scheduled time—»
At that point, Martin walked out of the next room. There he was, full size (just over six feet), with his pleasant, grinning face, and with his pince-nez glasses of the kind you wouldn’t expect to find outside a museum. Combine that with a tuft of white hair on his chin and a generous growth, equally white, on his upper lip, and he looked like a nineteenth-century literary figure.
He was a gentleman, by which I mean he was someone who never, under any circumstances, alludes to my height.
You’d be surprised how few such individuals there are.
Perhaps because of his constant preoccupation with the past, he also had a remarkable shyness in connection with the greater liberality of language permitted by modern mores.
Or maybe that went along with his gentlemanliness.
For instance, I heard him quote the following limerick which had been constructed by a friend of mine named Asimov, who’ll play his part in these events later. It went as follows:
When he quoted it, he blipped out the sixth word in the last line in a very embarrassed way. He actually said «blip» instead. And mind you, he was addressing an all-male audience (would you believe a stag organization in these libbish times?).
Then, too, he said to me once, with a look of good-humored indignation, «The trouble is that people use vulgarisms as general intensifiers, without any conception of the meaning. Like the woman who stepped off the curb on Park Avenue and said with deep annoyance, ‘Oh, shit! I stepped in some doggie poo-poo!’» But before he uttered the exclamation, he lowered his voice to such a whisper that I almost lost the point.
But now he was just grinning at me a little uneasily and said, «Ah, Darius, it was good of you to show up. You’re a pal.»
«I’m a patsy, you mean,» I said furiously. «You live so fiercely in the past you’re incapable of giving me the correct time, present tense. You said four-twenty and I killed myself over crowded highways» (I didn’t and they weren’t, but I was going to choose moderate phrases at this point) «to get here and you never waited for me.»
At this point, Martin might have broken the chain of circumstances by groveling. I wouldn’t have asked for much.
He might have beaten his head against the wall, or licked my hand, or thrown himself on the ground and asked me to jump up and down on him—any little thing like that.
He didn’t. He decided that what was needed here was a good laugh. So he gave me the old Santa Claus routine, put his arm around my shoulder, went ho-ho-ho, and said, «Here’s what happened, Darius. There’s this woman who was up before us, pushing some feminist book she wrote, and she came down in a practically transparent dress with practically nothing on underneath, if you know what I mean.»