As usual, when I asked myself a series of questions such as these, I had no answer.
I was entering the lobby of the hotel when I heard the cry that I suppose I had been dreading, subconsciously, ever since lunch.
«Dari-i-ius, I’ve been looking for you all da-a-a-ay.»
I don’t think she had, but it was the nice thing to say.
«Hello, Shirley,» I said dully. «I’m sorry. I’ve had a terrible day.»
«I kno-o-ow. Everyone is talking about it. How awful! And you had to be the one to find it. I suppose that was the reason you never came to my booth when I was signing.» She picked that moment to light a cigarette. She knows I hate it and I decided that despite her claim to understanding she was getting back at me for standing her up.
I said defensively, «I was spending the time with the cops, and it was no fun.»
«Poor baby,» she purred.
It was odd how remote and immune I felt. I said, «I feel pretty sick about it and I guess I’ll go home and give myself a chance to recover.» I backed away a little.
She looked surprised and a little annoyed. «Home?»
One minute before, I had had no intention of leaving just yet, but now it seemed the thing to do. I could think of no other way of avoiding another night with Shirley, and I had to avoid it. Perhaps after a while I could go back to her, but not that night, not while I was so aware that if it hadn’t been for the night before, I wouldn’t have been the one to discover Giles’s body. If I think about it now, I don’t see much sense in my attitude, but at the time it was different. It made more sense to me than anything else that had happened the entire day.
«I better do that, Shirley. I’m worn out with the afternoon I’ve had.» I managed a yawn, and suddenly found it wasn’t difficult. «Will you be here tomorrow?»
She looked indifferent. «I don’t know.»
«I’ll be here. Maybe I’ll see you.» And I about-faced and walked out of the hotel. Ten hours earlier, I would have been willing to bet a hundred to eight—more—that I would spend another night with Shirley, but even very short odds win on occasion.
Now I made a bet at the same odds—a hundred to eight—that she’d never speak to me again. I won’t lie to you. I was sorry about that; damned sorry.
I walked home. It was a healthy walk to the park and then along its long side, but I wasn’t in a hurry to try to make it to bed. I kept thinking, with my mind going around in the same circles and ending nowhere.
When I found myself in my apartment with the door locks clicked shut behind me (all three of them) and with my typewriter gazing reproachfully at me through the door to the bedroom (as it always seems to do when it is neatly covered and has been unused for longer than two days), I couldn’t remember the walk from the hotel at all. It was a more-than-a-mile walk and I couldn’t remember a step of it.
My passage from hotel to apartment might have been by instantaneous mass transference, like something out of Asimov’s silly science fiction stories.
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As I recall, I merely thought of science fiction stories generally at this point. You can depend on Asimov to put himself in here as though he were the only writer of science fiction stories the world has ever seen.
Darius Just
One of my better stories, «It’s Such a Beautiful Day,» which you’ll find in my book Nightfall and Other Stories, has a plot involving mass transference. Since Darius, after some tedious cross-examination, admitted he had read that story, I maintain that my interpretation here is as close to the truth as need be.
Isaac Asimov
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It was only about 10:30, too early to go to bed, really, and yet I did not want to stay awake. I went through the preparations for bed, washing my teeth and all the rest of it, half in the hope that it would wake me, but it didn’t.
Of course, it was possible that, going to bed early, I might wake up at 3 a.m. with all my sleep done. I thought of Henrietta taking a sleeping pill, and while I disapprove of that, I would have taken one if there had been such a thing in the house.
I put out the light, got into bed, and left the window open so I could hear the hypnotic sounds of traffic and city life seeping upward from twelve floors below. (It’s hypnotic to those bred in the city, that is.)
Just before I went to sleep, there was one last thought I had. Isaac Asimov had been the second author at the autographing session. He might have seen Giles come in with somebody. What’s more, Asimov was slated to be on some panel the next morning—11 A.M., I thought—I’d look it up in the morning—it was something I had thought—might be interesting—anyway—
And I slept.
Part Three
TUESDAY MAY 27, 1975
1 DARIUS JUST 6:00 A.M.
But I didn’t sleep really well. I had bad dreams of which I don’t remember the details. Though I didn’t wake up at three, I did flip my eyes open at six and found I had a rotten taste in my mouth and that my head was resting on a pillow damp with perspiration.
I stared at the ceiling for a while, sorting out the nightmares my imagination had constructed from the nightmare of yesterday’s realities, and decided I wasn’t going to be able to sleep any more that morning. So I pushed out of bed, took care of my day’s assurance that I would require no laxatives, showered, shaved, and then had to make the decision about breakfast.
The contrast with the breakfast of the morning before was too extreme, and I decided not to fool with the eggs or the English muffins or the coffee. I didn’t even want to be alone.
It was a bright morning, the temperature was 59 and that would mean comfortable walking in a jacket, so I walked to the hotel.
Actually, I jogged partway since I was feeling guilty over having stayed out of the gym for the length of the convention.
The coffee shop at the hotel was respectably full even though I was there by 7:30 a.m., and after I had ordered my pancakes and ham (no use getting something I could make for myself at home—and I never made pancakes) I listened to the conversation about me.
Muhammad Ali, it seems, was the big hit of the convention. He had been big and brash, and I suspect there is something exciting to the audience in seeing a man who could flatten you into a grease spot with one blow if he wanted to exert himself—something like being in the same room with a tame lion and with no bars in between.
I also heard comments on Joe Namath’s mother. She had made a hit, too, pushing the biography she had written of her son.
A bookseller (I caught just enough of his badge to see he was from Dallas) complained that no editor or publisher ever came to his store, so how could they know the problems of the bookseller? And the salesmen, he said, just wanted to unload books and didn’t care if the store went broke.
I took a circuitous route on my way out after I had finished, deliberately attempting to overhear conversations.
There were complaints about the discounts on textbooks (not high enough), on the nature of the packages the books came in (not easy enough to open), on the quality of the books that came in (not undamaged enough), and loud bitching about the Postal Service (not anything enough).