THE SNOWMEN
TANDY said, “Not tonight, Howard. Why, I’m practically in bed already, see?” And she flipped the vision switch just for a second; long enough so I could get a glimpse of a sheer negligee and feathered slippers and, well, naturally, I couldn’t quite believe that she really wanted me to stay away. Nobody made her flip that switch.
I said, “Just for a minute, Tandy. One drink. A little music, perhaps a dance-”
“Howard, you’re terrible.”
“No, dearest,” I said, fast and soft and close to the phone, “I’m not terrible, I’m only very much in love. Don’t say no. Don’t say a word. Just close your eyes and in ten minutes I’ll be there, and-”
And then, confound them, they had to start that yapping. Bleepbleep on the phone, and then: “Attention all citizens! Stand by for orders! Your world federal government has proclaimed a state of unlimited emergency. All heatpump power generators in excess of eight horsepower per-”
I slammed down the phone in disgust. Leave it to them! Yack-yack on the phone lines at all hours of the day and night, no consideration for anybody. I was disgusted, and then, when I got to thinking, not so disgusted. Why not go right over? She hadn’t said no; she hadn’t had a chance.
So I got the Bug out, locked the doors and set the thermostats, and I set out.
It isn’t two miles to Tandy’s place. Five years ago, even I could make it in three or four minutes: now it takes ten. I call it a damned shame, though no one else seems to care. But I’ve always been more adventurous than most, and more social-minded. Jeffrey Otis wouldn’t care about things like that. Ittel du Bois wouldn’t even know-his idea is to bury his nose in a drama-tape when he goes out of the house, and let the Bug drive itself. But not me. I like to drive, even if you can’t see anything and the autopilot is perfectly reliable. Life is for living, I say. Live it.
I don’t pretend to understand this scientific stuff either-leave science to the people who like it, is another thing I say. But you know how when you’re in your Bug and you’ve set the direction-finder for somebody’s place, there’s this beepbeepbeepbeep when you’re going right and a beepsQuAwK or a SQUAWKbeep when you go off the track? It has something to do with radio, only not radio-that’s out of the question now, they say-but with sort of telephoned messages through the magma of the Earth’s core. Well, that’s what it says in the manual, and I know because one day I glanced through it. Anyway. Excuse me for getting technical. But I was going along toward Tandy’s place, my mind full of warm pleasures and anticipating, and suddenly the beepbeepbeep stopped, and there was a sort of crystal chime and then a voice: “Attention! Operation of private vehicles is forbidden! Return to your home and listen to telephoned orders every hour on the hour!” And then the beepbeepbeep again. Why, they’d even learned how to jam the direction-finder with their confounded yapping! It was very annoying, and angrily I snapped the DF off. Daring? Yes, but I have to say that I’m an excellent driver, wonderful sense of direction, hardly need the direction-finder in the first place. And anyway we were close; the thermal pointers in the nose had already picked up Tandy’s temperature gradient.
Tandy opened the locks herself. “Howard,” she said in soft surprise, clutching the black film of negligee. “You really came. Oh, naughty Howard!”
“My darling!” I breathed, reaching out for her. But she dodged.
“No, Howard,” she said severely, “you mustn’t do that. Sit down for a moment. Have one little drink. And then I’m going to have to be terribly stubborn and send you right home, dear.”
“Of course,” I said, because that was, after all, the rules of the game. “Just one drink, certainly.” But, damn it, she seemed to mean it! She wasn’t a bit hospitable-I mean, not really hospitable. She seemed friendly enough and she talked sweetly enough, but... Well, for example, she sat in the positively-not chair. I can tell you a lot about the way Tandy furnished her place. There’s the wing chair by the fire, and that’s a bad sign because the arms are slippery and there’s only room for one actually sitting in it. There’s the love seat- speaks for itself, doesn’t it? And there’s the big sofa and, best of all, the bearskin rug. But way at the other end of the scale is this perfectly straight, armless cane-bottomed thing, with a Ming vase on one side of it and a shrub of some kind or other rooted in a bowl on the other, and that’s where she sat.
I grumbled, “I shouldn’t have come at all.”
“What, Howard?”
“I said, uh, I couldn’t come any, uh, faster. I mean, I came as fast as I could.”
“I know you did, you brute,” she said roguishly, and stopped the Martini-mixer. It poured us each a drink. “Now don’t dawdle,” she said primly. “I’ve got to get some sleep.”
“To love,” I said, and sipped the top off the Martini.
“Don’t do that,” she warned. I got up from the floor at her feet and went back to another chair. “You,” she said, “are a hard man to handle, Howard, dear.” But she giggled.
Well, you can’t win them all. I finished my drink and, I don’t know, I think I would have hung around about five minutes just to show who was boss and then got back in the Bug and gone home. Frankly, I was a little sleepy. It had been a wearing day, hours and hours with the orchids and then listening to all nine Beethoven symphonies in a row while I played solitaire.
But I heard the annunciator bell tinkle.
I stared at Tandy.
“My,” she said prettily, “I wonder who that can be?”
“Tandy!”
“Probably someone dull,” she shrugged. “I won’t answer. Now, do be a good boy and-”
“Tandy! How could you?” My mind raced; there was only one conclusion. “Tandy, do you have Ittel du Bois coming here tonight? Don’t lie to me!”
“Howard, what a terrible thing to say. Ittel was last year.”
“Tell me the truth!”
“I do not!” And she was angry. I’d hurt her, no doubt of it.
“Then it must be Jeffrey. I won’t stand for it. I won the toss fair and square. Why can’t we wait until next year? It isn’t decent. I-”
She stood up, her blue eyes smoldering. “Howard McGuiness, you’d better go before you say something I won’t be able to forgive.”
I stood my ground. “Then who is it?”
“Oh, darn it,” she said, and kicked viciously at the shrub by her left foot, “see for yourself. Answer the door.”
So I did.
Now, I know Ittel du Bois’s Bug-it’s a Buick-and I know Jeff Otis’s. It wasn’t either one of them. The vehicle outside Tandy’s door parked next to mine was a very strange looking Bug indeed. For one thing, it was only about eight feet long.
A bank of infrared lamps glowed on, bathing it in heat; the caked ice that forms in the dead spots along the hull, behind the treads and so on, melted, plopped off, turned into water and ran into the drain grille. You know how a Bug will crack and twang when it’s being warmed up? They all do.
This one didn’t.
It didn’t make a sound. It was so silent that I could hear the snipsnip of Tandy’s automatic load adjuster, throwing another heatpump into circuit to meet the drain of the infrared lamps. But no sound from the Bug outside. Also it didn’t have caterpillar treads. Also it had-well, you can believe this or not-it had windows.