Now Wait for Last Year

'Just let me come in,' Eric said, and waited. 'Please.'

The door buzzed; he pushed it open and entered the foyer. A moment later by elevator he had ascended to the fifteenth floor and was at her door, ready to knock but finding it ajar in expectation of him.

Wearing a flowered apron, her long dark hair hanging in twin braids down her back, Patricia Garry met him, smiling; she had a sharp face, tapered to a flawless chin, and lips so dark as to appear black. Every feature had been cut cleanly and with such delicate precision as to suggest a new order of perfection in human symmetry and balance. He could see why she had gone into TV; features like that, when ignited even by the ersatz enthusiasm of a mock-up beer-bust on a Californian ocean beach, could impale any viewer. She was not just pretty; she was strikingly, lavishly unique and he had a precognition as he looked at her of a long and vital career ahead, if the war did not catch her up in tragedy.

'Hi,' she said gaily. 'Who are you?'

'Eric Sweetscent. I'm on the Secretary's medical staff.' Or, was, he thought. Up to a little earlier today. 'Could I have a cup of coffee with you and talk? It would mean a lot to me.'

'What a strange come-on,' Patricia Garry said. 'But why not?' She whirled about, her long Mexican skirt spinning out, and bobbed her way down the hall of her conapt, with him following, to the kitchen. 'I have a pot on, in fact. Why did Mr Molinari tell you to look me up? For any special reason?'

Could a girl look like this and not be conscious of what an overriding special reason she constituted? 'Well,' he said, 'I live out here in California, in San Diego.' And he thought, I guess I work in Tijuana. Again. 'I'm an org-trans surgeon, Miss Garry. Or Pat. Okay to call you Pat?' He found a seat at the bench table, clasped his hands before him, resting his elbows against the hard, irregular redwood.

'If you're an org-trans surgeon,' Patricia Garry said as she got the cups from the cupboard over the sink, 'why aren't you at the military satellites or at the front hospitals?'

He felt his world sink from beneath him. 'I don't know,' he said.

There is a war on, you realize.' Her back to him, she said. The boy I was going with, he was mangled when a reeg bomb got his cruiser. He's still in a base hospital.'

'What can I say,' he said, 'except that maybe you've put your finger on the great central weak link of my life. Why it hasn't got the meaning it should have.'

'Well, who do you blame for that? Everyone else?'

'It seemed to me,' he said, 'at the time anyhow, that keeping Gino Molinari alive somehow contributed to the war effort.' But, after all, he had only done that for a short time and had gotten into it not by his own efforts but by Virgil Ackerman's.

'I'm just curious,' Patricia said. 'I just would have thought that a good org-trans surgeon would want to be at the front where the real work is.' She poured coffee into two plastic cups.

'Yes, you'd think so,' he said, and felt futile. She was nineteen years old, roughly half his age, and already she had a better grasp on what was right, what one ought to do. With such directness of vision she had certainly patterned her own career out to the last stitch. 'Do you want me to leave?' he asked her. 'Just say if you do.'

'You just got here; of course I don't want you to go. Mr Molinari wouldn't have sent you here if there hadn't been a good reason.' She eyed him critically as she seated herself across from him. 'I'm Mary Reineke's cousin, did you know that?'

'Yes.' He nodded. And she's quite tough, too, he thought. 'Pat,' he said, 'take my word for it that I have accomplished something today that affects us all, even if it isn't connected with my medical tasks. Can you accept that? If so then we can go on from there.'

'Whatever you say,' she said with nineteen-year-old nonchalance.

'Have you been watching Molinari's TV cast tonight?'

'I had it on a little while earlier. It was interesting; he looked so much bigger.'

'"Bigger."' Yes, he thought; that described it.

'It's good to see him back in his old form. But I have to admit – all that political spouting, you know how he does, sort of lectures in that feverish way, with his eyes flashing; it's too long-winded for me. I put on the record player instead.' She rested her chin in her open palm. 'You know what? It bores the hell out of me.'

The vidphone in the living room rang.

'Excuse me.' Pat Carry rose and skipped from the kitchen. He sat silently, no particular thoughts in his mind, only a little of the old weariness weighing on him, and then suddenly she was back. 'For you. Dr Sweetscent; that's you, isn't it?'

'Who is it?' He labored to get up, his heart strangely leaden.

'The White House in Cheyenne.'

He made his way to the vidphone. 'Hello. This is Sweetscent.'

'Just a moment, please.' The screen blanked out. The next image which formed was that of Gino Molinari.

'Well, doctor,' Molinari said, 'they got your reeg.'

'Jesus,' he said.

'When we got there all we found was a banged-up big dead bug. Somebody, one of them, must have seen you go in. Too bad you didn't take it directly to TF&D. Instead of that hotel.'

'I see that now.'

'Listen,' Molinari said briskly. 'I called to tell you because I knew you would want to know. But don't knock yourself; those 'Starmen are professionals. It could have happened to anyone.' He leaned closer to the screen, speaking with emphasis. 'It's not that important; there're other ways to contact the reegs, three or four – we're looking into how best to exploit it right now.'

'Should this be said on the vidphone?'

Molinari said, 'Freneksy and his party just now took off for Lilistar, shot out of here as fast as they could. Take my word for it, Sweetscent, they know. So our problem is that we have to work fast. We expect to raise a reeg government station within two hours; if necessary we'll do our negotiating on an open broadcast with Lilistar listening in.' He glanced at his wrist watch. 'I have to ring off; I'll keep you posted.' The screen, then, became dark. Busy, in hectic haste, Molinari had gone on to the next task. He could not sit gossiping. And then, all at once, the screen relit; again Molinari faced him. 'Remember, doctor, you did your job; you forced them to honor that will I left, that ten-page document they were passing back and forth when you arrived. I wouldn't be here now except for you; I already told you that and I don't want you to forget it – I haven't got time to keep repeating again and again.' He grinned briefly and then once more the image faded. This time the screen stayed dark.

But to fail is to fail, Eric said to himself. He walked back into Pat Garry's kitchen and reseated himself at his cup of coffee. Neither of them spoke. Because I messed it up, he realized, the 'Starmen will have just that much more time to close in on us, come rushing here to Terra with everything they have. Millions of human lives, perhaps years of occupation – that's the price we'll collectively pay. Because it seemed, earlier today, a good idea to put Deg Dal Il in a room at the Caesar Hotel instead of bringing him directly to TF&D. But then he thought, They have at least one agent at TF&D too; they might even have gotten him there.

Now what? he asked himself.

'Maybe you're right, Pat,' he said. 'Maybe I ought to become a military surgeon and go to a base hospital near the front.'

'Yes, why not?' she said.

'But in a little while,' he said. 'and you don't know this, the front will be on Terra.'

She blanched, tried to smile. 'Why is that?'

'Politics. The tides of war. Unreliability of alliances. The ally of today is the enemy of tomorrow. And the other way around.' He finished his coffee and rose. 'Good luck, Pat, in your television career and in every other aspect of your glowing, just beginning life. I hope the war doesn't touch you too deeply.' The war I helped bring here, he said to himself. 'So long.'