They assumed the extraterrestrials had some obscure cosmic reason for protecting Warren Belch.
On the day when Justin Case got tired wondering about Joe Malik's mysterious Last Communication and tried (unsuccessfully) to find out what it meant, Clem Cotex got tired wondering about the Invisible Hand Society. He marched down the hall, opened their door, and walked into a tiny but tastefully decorated reception room.
The wall to the right was adorned with a large gold dollar sign: $, emblazoned with the initials T.A.N.S.T.A.G.I. The wall to the left had a giant reproduction of the famous Steinberg cartoon of a little fish about to be eaten by a slightly bigger fish, which in turn, was about to be eaten by a still bigger fish, which also was about to be eaten by an even bigger fish, and so on, to the border of the cartoon and evidently, beyond that, to infinity.
There was nobody in the room.
Clem looked around, a bit uncertainly.
SDATE YOUR BIZNIZ PLEEZ, said a compiiteroid voice, evidently out of the ceiling.
"Uh I'd like to see the head man or ah the head woman as the case may be," Clem stammered.
THAD WOULD BE DOKTOR RAUSS ELYSIUM, the computer said. HE IZ NOT IN THE OFFIZ TODAY.
"Oh ah tell him Clem Cotex called," Clem said, edging toward the door.
He suddenly didn't want to investigate the Invisible Hand any further, while he was alone. Some other time, he thought, when I have some friends with me.
YOUR MEZZAGE HAS BEEN RECORDED, the voice droned behind him as he fled the scene.
FALLING GIRDERS
The apprehension of the Real can only be compared to a radiance or illumination because it is a revelation of part of the coherence of the Divine Act of Creation.
–pope stephen, Integritas, Consonantia, Claritas
Mary Margaret Wildeblood, Manhattan's bitchiest literary critic, was getting just a tiny bit spiflicated. She was working on her fifth martini, in fact.
"Mailer can't write," she said argumentatively. "None of them can write. We haven't seen a real writer since Raymond Chandler."
"Um," said her companion noncommittally. He was Blake Williams.
"What do you mean, 'um'?" Mary Margaret demanded truculently. "I was talking nonsense just to see if you were listening."
They were in the Three Lions bar on U.N. Plaza.
"Well, in fact, I was listening," Dr. Williams said urbanely. "You were comparing Mailer to Chandler, to the disadvantage of Mailer. However, I admit my attention was also wandering a bit. I was thinking about the Hollan-daise Sauce enigma." He was on his fifth martini too.
"What's that?" Mary Margaret asked. Yet the martinis must have been getting to her, because she did not wait for his answer and announced, in the voice of Discovery, "The best short story ever written is by John O'Hara."
"It was a case of food poisoning," Dr. Williams said. "A bunch of people got poisoned by some contaminated Hol-landaise Sauce." Yet he looped back courteously and asked, "What short story?"
The robot who used the name "Frank Sullivan" came in and took a table near them. He was accompanied by Peter Jackson, the Black associate editor of Confrontation magazine.
"I forget the title," Mary Margaret said. "It was about a car salesman who has a very good day, makes some really top-notch sales, and stops at a bar to celebrate before going home. He has one drink after another and doesn't get home until after midnight, and then get this and then he goes and gets his rifle from the den and…"
"Oh I read that," Dr. Williams said. "It isn't a short story, it's a novel. Called um ah er Appointment in Samara. And he doesn't use a rifle. He gasses himself in his car."
"Damnedest case I ever heard of," pseudo-Sullivan said. "The Ambassador has been on morphine ever since."
"No," Mary Margaret said impatiently. "That was what the character in Appointment in Samara did, yes, everybody knows that one, but I'm talking about a short story O'Hara wrote much later, maybe thirty years later. In the short story, dammit what is the title, in the short story…"
"Wigged?" pseudo-Sullivan cried. "We thought we'd have to put him in a straitjacket."
"In the short story," Mary Margaret plowed on, noting that Williams was listening to the robot, "the salesman takes the rifle and goes to his bedroom and puts the rifle to his head…" She paused.
It worked. "And?" Williams asked, still wondering a bit about the Hollandaise Sauce mystery and why the Ambassador wigged.
"And his wife wakes up," Mary Margaret concluded, "and she says, 'Don't.' And he doesn't."
"He was hopping all around the room like a chicken on acid and making gargling and choking noises," the "man" called "Frank Sullivan" went on.
"He doesn't?" Williams cried.
"That's the point," Mary Margaret said. "You see, like the character in the Samara novel, this man goes right to the edge, he looks over the abyss, and then he pulls back at the last moment. Because his wife speaks to him."
"So it's a love story," Williams said. "Very sneaky and indirect, typical of O'Hara, but still a love story. He decides to continue carrying his burden, whatever it is, for the sake of the woman he loves."
"Well, how much will Confrontation pay for this?" pseudo-Sullivan demanded.
"No, it's more complicated than that," Mary Margaret argued. "The motive for the attempted suicide is never explained. Just like the motive for the real suicide in the Samara novel is never explained."
"Does it need to be explained?" Williams drawled, waving at the waiter for another martini. "If I were trapped into selling cars for a living, I'd think about blowing my head off occasionally."
"Yes, but," Mary Margaret said. "Most people never see the emptiness of their lives the way these two characters of O'Hara's do. That's the Turn of the Screw. It's like the parable Sam Spade tells Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. How he was hired to find a real estate salesman who'd disappeared…"
"A salesman again," Williams noted. "We are toying with synchronicity. When does Arthur Miller come on the scene?"
"Wait," Mary Margaret said. "It gets weirder. This salesman, in Spade's story, just went out to lunch one day and never returned. No evidence of foul play, no suicide note, nada. Years pass, and his wife wants to marry again, so she hires Spade to prove the salesman is really dead. Spade digs around and finds the salesman alive in another town, with a new name and a new family. He explains to Spade what happened when he went out to lunch that day and simply disappeared. A girder fell from a building under construction-you want to talk about synchronicity? -and almost killed him. It missed him only a few feet. It was like a Satori experience."
"A WHAT???" Peter Jackson, the Black editor, cried in astonishment at the next table.
Mary Margaret and Blake were both hooked; they looked deep, deep into their martini glasses as they strained not to miss pseudo-Sullivan's answer. "A Rehnquist," the humanoid said. "Jumpin' Jesus on a rubber crutch," Peter Jackson said. "You're not putting me on? You mean right in the middle of the staircase…"
"Where the Ambassador had to see it when he came down to the reception," pseudo-Sullivan said. "A great big one, like Harry Reems's, or what's-his-name's in the porn movies. With a pink ribbon around it. The Company," he stressed the word slightly, avoiding the initials, "thinks the KGB did it. Believe me, the Ambassador hasn't been the same man since."
"Good Lord," Blake Williams said. "It's like your falling-girder story. Except in this case it's a falling Rehnquist… from the Fourth Dimension, maybe." He was thinking that this was too wild to be a KGB project and might involve the paranormal.