She looked at me thoughtfully and then she shook her head as if she’d never seen anything like me before and never hoped to again. Without another word, she began to get back into her clothes. I had to admire her poise. I mean she was perfectly calm about the whole thing. You’d have thought she was used to taking her clothes off in front of strange men.
Well, for that matter, maybe she was; but it wasn’t any of my business.
Arthur was clacking distractedly, but I didn’t pay any attention to him. I demanded: ‘All right, now what are you and what do you want?’
She pulled up a stocking and said: ‘You couldn’t have asked me that in the first place, could you? I’m Vern Eng -’
‘Cut it out!’
She stared at me. ‘I was only going to say I’m Vern Engdahl’s partner. We’ve got a little business deal cooking and I wanted to talk to you about this proposition.’
Arthur squawked: WHATS ENGDAHL UP TO NOW Q Q SAM IM WARNING YOU I DONT LIKE THE LOOK OF THIS THIS WOMAN AND ENGDAHL ARE PROBABLY DOUBLECROSSING US.
I said: ‘All right, Arthur, relax. I’m taking care of things. Now start over, you. What’s your name?’
She finished putting on her shoe and stood up. ‘Amy.’
‘Last name?’
She shrugged and fished in her purse for a cigarette. ‘What does it matter? Mind if I sit down?’
‘Go ahead,’ I rumbled. ‘But don’t stop talking!’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘we’ve got plenty of time to straighten things out.’ She lit the cigarette and walked over to the chair by the window. On the way, she gave the luggage a good long look.
Arthur’s eyestalk cowered back into the suitcase as she came close. She winked at me, grinned, bent down and peered inside.
‘My,’ she said, ‘he’s a nice shiny one, isn’t he?’
The typewriter began to clatter frantically. I didn’t even bother to look; I told him: ‘Arthur, if you can’t keep quiet, you have to expect people to know you’re there.’
She sat down and crossed her legs. ‘Now then,’ she said. ‘Frankly, he’s what I came to see you about. Vern told me you had a pross. I want to buy it.’
The typewriter thrashed its carriage back and forth furiously.
‘Arthur isn’t for sale.’
‘No?’ She leaned back. ‘Vern’s already sold me his interest, you know. And you don’t really have any choice. You see, I’m in charge of materiel procurement for the Major. If you want to sell your share, fine. If you don’t, why, we requisition it anyhow. Do you follow?’
I was getting irritated - at Vern Engdahl, for whatever the hell he thought he was doing; but at her because she was handy. I shook my head.
‘Fifty thousand dollars? I mean for your interest?’
‘No.’
‘Seventy-five?’
‘No!’
‘Oh, come on now. A hundred thousand?’
It wasn’t going to make any impression on her, but I tried to explain: ‘Arthur’s a friend of mine. He isn’t for sale.’
She shook her head. ‘What’s the matter with you? Engdahl wasn’t like this. He sold his interest for forty thousand and was glad to get it.’
Clatter-clatter-clatter from Arthur. I didn’t blame him for having hurt feelings that time.
Amy said in a discouraged tone: ‘Why can’t people be reasonable? The Major doesn’t like it when people aren’t reasonable.’
I lowered the gun and cleared my throat. ‘He doesn’t?’ I asked, cueing her. I wanted to hear more about this Major, who seemed to have the city pretty well under his thumb.
‘No, he doesn’t.’ She shook her head sorrowfully. She said in an accusing voice: ‘You out-of-towners don’t know what it’s like to try to run a city the size of New York. There are fifteen thousand people here, do you know that? It isn’t one of your hick towns. And it’s worry, worry, worry all the time, trying to keep things going.’
‘I bet,’ I said sympathetically. ‘You’re, uh, pretty close to the Major?’
She said stiffly: ‘I’m not married to him, if that’s what you mean. Though I’ve had my chances ... But you see how it is. Fifteen thousand people to run a place the size of New York! It’s forty men to operate the power station, and twenty-five on the PX, and thirty on the hotel here. And then there are the local groceries, and the Army, and the Coast Guard, and the Air Force - though, really, that’s only two men - and - Well, you get the picture.’
‘I certainly do. Look, what kind of guy is the Major?’
She shrugged. ‘A guy.’
‘I mean what does he like?’
‘Women, mostly,’ she said, her expression clouded. ‘Come on now. What about it?’
I stalled. ‘What do you want Arthur for?’
She gave me a disgusted look. ‘What do you think? To relieve the manpower shortage, naturally. There’s more work than there are men. Now if the Major could just get hold of a couple of prosthetics, like this thing here, why, he could put them in the big installations. This one used to be an engineer or something. Vern said.’
‘Well... like an engineer.’
Amy shrugged. ‘So why couldn’t we connect him up with the power station? It’s been done. The Major knows that - he was in the Pentagon when they switched all the aircraft warning net over from computer to prosthetic control. So why couldn’t we do the same thing with our power station and release forty men for other assignments? This thing could work day, night, Sundays - what’s the difference when you’re just a brain in a sardine can?’
Clatter-rattle-bang.
She looked startled. ‘Oh. I forgot he was listening.’
‘No deal.’ I said.
She said: ‘A hundred and fifty thousand?’
A hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I considered that for a while. Arthur clattered warningly.
‘Well,’ I temporized, ‘I’d have to be sure he was getting into good hands -’
The typewriter thrashed wildly. The sheet of paper fluttered out of the carriage. He’d used it up. Automatically I picked it up - it was covered with imprecations, self-pity and threats - and started to put a new one in.
‘No,’ I said, bending over the typewriter, ‘I guess I couldn’t sell him. It just wouldn’t be right -’
That was my mistake; it was the wrong time for me to say that, because I had taken my eyes off her.
The room bent over and clouted me.
I half turned, not more than a fraction conscious, and I saw this Amy girl, behind me, with the shoe still in her hand, raised to give me another blackjacking on the skull.
The shoe came down, and it must have weighed more than it looked, and even the fractional bit of consciousness went crashing away.
I have to tell you about Vern Engdahl. We were all from the Sea Sprite, of course - me and Vern and even Arthur. The thing about Vern is that he was the lowest-ranking one of us all - only an electricians’ mate third, I mean when anybody paid any attention to things like that - and yet he was pretty much doing the thinking for the rest of us. Coming to New York was his idea - he told us that was the only place we could get what we wanted.
Well, as long as we were carrying Arthur along with us, we pretty much needed Vern, because he was the one who knew how to keep the lash-up going. You’ve got no idea what kind of pumps and plumbing go into a prosthetic tank until you’ve seen one opened up. And, naturally, Arthur didn’t want any breakdowns without somebody around to fix things up.
The Sea Sprite, maybe you know, was one of the old liquid-sodium-reactor subs - too slow for combat duty, but as big as a barn, so they made it a hospital ship. We were cruising deep when the missiles hit, and, of course, when we came up, there wasn’t much for a hospital ship to do. I mean there isn’t any sense fooling around with anybody who’s taken a good deep breath of fallout.