A movement beside Sneezy shook him out of the staring trance the broadcast had caused. He looked around. Oniko had got out of her chair and was hobbling out the door.
“Excuse me,” Sneezy muttered, and followed. Outside, Oniko was leaning against the wall, sobbing.
“What’s the matter?” he demanded in alarm. “It’s-well, certainly it’s scary, but it could be just some technical error, or a practical joker, or—”
“Oh, Sneezy,” the girl wailed. “Don’t you see?”
He opened his mouth to answer, but she rushed on: “That message, do you know what it was? It was part of my diary!”
10
IN DEEP TIME
Cassata was doing his dreamy, draggy two-step with his eyes closed and the little Oriental woman’s head on his shoulder. Incredible! She looked exactly like a normal human being with any human’s common sense, and yet she was actually cuddling up to the man! I snarled, “Cassata, what the hell is going on?”
He gave me a peculiar look. I don’t know how else to describe it. It wasn’t apologetic, it wasn’t arrogant. What it seemed to be was-I don’t know-maybe the word is “doomed.” To be sure, he was. What was waiting for him when he got back to his meat-time original was termination, but he’d known that for a long time and he hadn’t looked that way. He seemed to be waiting for an ax to fall.
He courteously released his partner, kissed her forehead, and turned to me. “You want to talk to me,” he said.
“Damn-eye right I—”
He headed me off. “I suppose we might as well,” he sighed, “but not here. Not your ship, either. Something nice. Something I can enjoy.”
I opened my mouth to tell him how little I cared what he enjoyed, but Albert was ahead of me. “The Rue de la Paix, perhaps, General Cassata? A little open-air cafe along the Left Bank?”
“Something like that would be fine,” Cassata agreed . . . and there we were, seated around a metal table on a sunny boulevard, under a striped umbrella that advertised an aperitif, while a white-aproned waiter was taking our orders.
“Nice choice, Albert,” Cassata said appreciatively, but I was having none of that.
“Cut the crap,” I barked. “Why’ve you blacked out all Earthside radio?”
Cassata picked a Campari-soda off the waiter’s tray and sniffed at it thoughtfully. “I don’t know,” he said, and added, “yet.”
“But you know why you embargoed my ship!”
“Oh, yes, Robin. It was an order.”
“And embargoing ship from core?” Essie put in, not waiting her turn-I was nowhere near through with Cassata. He shrugged. That was all Essie needed. She gave him a killing look, then turned one on me. “You believe this? Even Heechee Ancient Ancestors must report first to JAWS! Then will see if rest of us are grown-up enough to hear before releasing data!”
Cassata repeated, “Orders.” Then he took a better look at Essie and said placatingly, “It’s only a technicality, Mrs. Broadhead.”
“Stupid technicality! Robin? Send order off to Institute; these uncultured clowns don’t deserve cooperation.”
“Well, now, wait a minute,” he said hastily, doing his best to be agreeable. “This is just an emergency measure. Later on, I’m sure that if you and Robinette want to access any of the information there’s not going to be any difficulty-I mean, real difficulty; but they have to be debriefed by the Joint Assassin Watch Service before any public disclosure, of course.”
“Not ‘of course’! No ‘of course’ involved!” She turned to me, eyes blazing. “Robin, tell this soldier man is not a question of personal favor for you and me, is information which belongs to all.”
I said, “It’s information which belongs to everybody, Cassata.”
Essie wasn’t letting it go at that. “Tell him, Robin!” she snapped, so fiercely that the passersby on the Rue de la Paix glanced at us curiously. They weren’t real, of course, just part of the surround, but when Essie programs surrounds, she goes all the way. One pretty little dark woman seemed fascinated by us-more so than you would have expected from mere stage dressing. I took a second look, and it was the woman Cassata had been dancing with; evidently Cassata had left a trail of bread crumbs so she could sneak into our new surround.
I stepped up the voltage. I told him, “You don’t have a choice. Look, Cassata, this isn’t a question of classifying material so an enemy won’t get it. There aren’t any enemies on this matter except the Foe themselves. Do you think we’re spying for them?”
“No, of course not,” he said unhappily, trying to please. “But these are high-level orders.”
“We’re high-level people!”
He gave me one of those I-just-work-here shrugs. “Of course you are, only—” He paused, having caught a glimpse of the young woman in the fringe of the crowd. He shook his head at her; she grinned, blew him a kiss, and ducked away.
“Sorry,” he said. “Friend of mine; I told her this was a private meeting. What were you saying?”
I snarled, “You know damn well what I was saying!” And I would have gone on, but Cassata’s expression suddenly changed.
He wasn’t listening to me anymore. His face froze. His eyes were vacant, as though hearing something none of the rest of us could hear.
And indeed he was, for I recognized the look. It was the way someone in machine storage looks when he is being told something on a private band. I even had a pretty good idea of what he was going to say. He frowned, shook himself, looked around vacantly for a moment, and then said it.
“Oh, still,” said General Julio Cassata.
I felt Essie’s hand slip into mine. She knew something bad was coming, too. “Tell us!” I demanded.
He sighed a deep sigh. “I’ve got to get back to JAWS,” he said. “Give me a lift, will you?”
That time he surprised me. The first thing I said was only a reflexive, “What?” And then I got better organized. “You change your mind pretty fast, Cassata! First you tell me to stay away entirely, then you freeze my ship—”
“Forget that,” he said impatiently. “It’s a new ball game. I have to get there right away, and you’ve got the fastest ship. Will you take me?”
“Well—Maybe, but—But what—”
He said, “I just got word. The blackout isn’t an exercise. It’s real. I think the Foe have a base on Earth.”
To give a machine-stored intelligence like General Cassata (or, for that matter, me) a lift somewhere doesn’t take much space. All you have to do is take the storage chip, fan, tape, or cube and put it in the ship, and away you go. Cassata was in a hurry. He had a workthing moving it even as he asked me for permission, and as it reached the hatch we buttoned down and went.
Total elapsed time for the transfer, less than three minutes.
Long enough.
I didn’t waste the three minutes. While we were waiting the long, long time for the workthing to get from one bay to another, I was paying my last respects to a lost love.
It didn’t take long. The word of the blackout had reached even the meat people by now, and those stone-statue folks were drifting toward the PV plate, where a news program was telling the asteroid that all radio communciation had been cut off.
My doppel was standing well back from the others, looking unhappy. I saw why at once. There was Klara, and there was her-her husband—and they were holding each other tighter than ever.
I wished .
I wished mostly (or at least, most reasonably) that I had had a chance to know Harbin Eskladar better. Strange that Klara should have married a former terrorist! Strange that she should ever have married anyone but me, I thought—And then I thought, Robin, old sod, you’d better get out of this. And I zapped myself back to the True Love and zipped myself in, and we were gone.