No. Joining Helgerson was impossible.
But the alternative was having word of my Rehab status spread all over the place. Maybe Ellen would stick with me after she knew, maybe not; but either way I could never be happy on Palmyra again. The rumor would spread, and I couldn’t deny it, which would confirm it. And suddenly I would find myself persona non grata at a lot of places where I was welcomed right now.
I chewed it all out inside myself and saw the only thing I could do, under the circumstances. I couldn’t let Ellen find out about me from Helgerson. I would have to tell her myself. I had been meaning to tell her for months, but kept putting it off, postponing it, being afraid of her reaction. The time had come to let her know.
I activated the autosec and told it to phone Ellen. The time was past three in the morning, but I didn’t care.
Her head and shoulders appeared on the screen, blinking, sleepfogged, lovely. “What is it, Paul?”
“I’ve got to see you, Ellen. Got to talk to you.”
“Right now.”
“Right now,” I said.
I braced myself for the deluge, but it didn’t come. She shrugged, smiled, said, “You must have a good reason for it, darling. I’ll have coffee ready when you get here.”
The trip took me twenty minutes. I was jittery and tense, and words rolled around crazily in my mind, ways of explaining, ways to tell what I had to tell. Ellen kissed me warmly as I came in. She was wearing a filmy sort of gown and she was still squint-eyed from sleep.
She put a cup of coffee in my hand and I sat down facing her and I said, “Ellen, what I’m going to tell you is something you should have known from the start. I want you to hear me out from beginning to end without interrupting.”
I told her the whole thing: how Nat Hamlin had thrived for thirteen years as a top interstellar jewel smuggler, how he had been wanted by half the worlds of the galaxy, how he had finally been caught and Rehabbed into me. I explained why I had taken the Palmyra option, how I had rebuilt my life, how I had begun with a fresh slate. I also told her how much I loved and needed her.
Then I went into the Helgerson episode, and his threat. “That’s why I came here, Ellen. To tell you before he had the chance to. But everything’s ruined for me here anyway. I can’t stop him from exposing me. I’ll leave Palmyra tomorrow, go back to Earth, tell them I’ve changed my mind and want a refacing job done. That way none of Hamlin’s old pals can pop up this way again. And I’ll find some other world somewhere and start over a second time. That’s all, Ellen.”
Her expression hadn’t changed during the whole long narration. Now that she saw I was finished she said, “I wish you could find some way of avoiding the refacing, Paul. I like your face the way it is.”
The implications of what she had said didn’t register for a moment. Then I gaped foolishly and gasped, “You—you’ll come with me?”
“Of course, silly. You should have told me before—but it doesn’t make any difference. I love Paul Macy. Nat Hamlin’s dead, so far as I’m concerned.”
A floodtide of warmth and happiness swept over me. She trusted me! She—loved me! I had been an idiot not to see the depth of that love, to know that I could have told her the truth all along. “You—aren’t like the others, Ellen. The fact that I’m a Rehab doesn’t matter to you.”
There was an odd expression on her face as she said, “Of course it doesn’t matter.”
She got up and took her purse from a dresser drawer. She fumbled through the purse, found something, brought it over and handed it to me. “You’re not the only one with a past, darling.”
I was holding a yellow identity card in my hand. It told me that the girl who was known as Ellen Bryce had been born Joan Gardner, until her sentence two years ago. The card didn’t tell me what the sentence had been for, and I didn’t want to know. But it did tell me that Ellen was a Rehab too.
The last barriers of mutual mistrust were down between us. Ellen cried, and maybe I cried a little too, and then we laughed at how silly we had both been to keep our big secrets from each other. I figure half the pain in this universe is brought about by people who hide things unnecessarily and then brood over what they’ve hidden. But we didn’t have any more secrets from each other. Dan Helgerson couldn’t hurt us now.
He couldn’t do anything to what we had between us. If Rehabs don’t trust each other, how can they expect the rest of the world to trust them? I didn’t care what Joan Gardner had done in her twenty-two years of life. Maybe she had chopped her parents into hamburger; maybe she had been the most active call-girl in the galaxy. What did that matter? Joan Gardner was dead, and Ellen Bryce was the girl I held in my arms that night.
It was ridiculous for me to go home that night, and I stayed till dawn and Ellen made breakfast for us. We talked and planned and wondered, and between us we not only set the date but figured out what I was going to do about Helgerson and his threat.
When Helgerson called the next day to find out my answer, I said, “You win. I’ll come in with you at a million a year.”
“I knew you’d smarten up, Nat. We need you and you need us. It’s a good deal. You always had an eye for a good deal.”
“When do I begin?”
“Right away. Suppose you come on over here for lunch and a drink, and I’ll give you a month’s advance as a binder.” He quoted an address on Palmyra City’s swank South Side. “You won’t regret doing this, Nat. We’ll keep it quiet and the Rehab boys won’t ever find out you’re breaking your conditioning.”
“Sure. I’ll be right over.”
I hung up and reeled dizzily against the wall while the shock of the conversation left me. Rehab conditioning is no joke. Not only do they erase the neuroses that led you to become a criminal in the first place, but they stick in a few mental blocks that make it tough to go back to your old ways. I was fighting those blocks now. Waves of pain rolled through me. It was double-edged pain, too—for not only was I fighting the Rehab conditioning, I was also going against an older, still-active block I had about turning stoolpigeon. Nat Hamlin had been vividly expressive on the subject of stoolies. Paul Macy still found the idea repugnant. But I didn’t have any choice. And Helgerson was going to be in for a surprise.
When the pain spasms were gone, I picked up the phone again and asked for the Rehab desk of the local Crime Commission office. The face of Commissioner Blair, the man who had placed me on Palmyra, appeared on the screen: relaxed, pink-cheeked, smiling.
“Hello, there, Paul. What’s up?”
“You know Dan Helgerson, Commissioner?”
His brows furrowed. “The name doesn’t register.”
I said, “You can check him against your master lists later. He’s wanted for jewel swindles on fifty worlds or so. He was one of Nat Hamlin’s old buddies.”
“And what about him, Paul?”
I winced at the inner pain. I said, “Helgerson’s on Palmyra, Commissioner. He’s been in touch with me and he’s trying to blackmail me into setting up a jewel-smuggling ring here. He says if I don’t come across, he’ll spread the word that I’m a Rehab.” I saw the alarm and anger appear on Blair’s face. “I told him I agreed to his terms, and he’s expecting me for lunch today. But of course—I can’t really go back into partnership with him—”
“Naturally not. Give me the address of the place where he’s expecting you, and we’ll pick him up. If he’s wanted as you say, we can book him on that charge—and even if he isn’t, we can grab him on Invasion of Privacy. A Rehab’s entitled to live in peace. You don’t have to wear the mark of Cain on your forehead for the things Nat Hamlin did.”