As part of Umbassa's drive for education, they were all pronounced doctors and, after they slept with the President for Life, given Ph.D. degrees. Two of them could count to ten with their fists closed, although one did confess that when she
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was going as high as ten, it helped to visualize her fingers.
Les Pruel did not want coffee, tea, or milk. He didn't want a drink.
"Is there anything you do want?" asked the stewardess.
"I want to like myself again." said Pruel.
And with wisdom that was almost shocking in its clarity, she said, "Then you must stop liking someone else better."
"You're pretty smart," said Les Pruel. "You're very smart."
"Only because you do not know what I know. You seem smart to me because you know things I do not know," said the stewardess.
Les Pruel closed his eyes but had a disturbing dream. He was watching a Punch and Judy puppet show. Punch grabbed a knife. Punch suddenly lunged out at Les Pruel but went right by him into a fire and was consumed. The horror was that Punch had Pruel's face. He was the puppet and he was going to try to kill but be killed in the process.
During a previous fit of depression, he had seen an analyst and learned to work out dreams, which meant finding out what you were trying to tell yourself. But what was he telling himself? Was he a puppet? He woke up screaming.
"Mr. Pruel. Mr. Pruel." It was the stewardess. She was calming him. He said he had had a bad dream. She warned him that when one was high above the earth and traveling, one should take one's dreams very seriously.
"You believe strange things about dreams but we know they tell the future," she said. "Es-
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pecially when you dream on a high place. Beware."
"I'd beware, but there's nothing to beware about," he said, laughing. And then he had a drink and felt good.
He had enough to retire quite comfortably, not luxuriously perhaps, but enough to feed him and his family and any work was better than watching heads roll and selling useless items to illiterate murderers.
He didn't wait for the jet lag to clear. His mind was clear enough without recovering from that mental and physical malady that afflicts international travelers.
It was noon in Washington when the plane landed and it was one o'clock when he walked up the ramp to Sylvester Montrofort's office. The office had hydraulically controlled levels to make the visitor sit at any level Mr. Montrofort wanted. It was not that Mr. Montrofort wanted the visitor to sit beneath him to exert power; it was that Mr. Montrofort wanted the visitor to feel secure and superior when looking down at Montrofort, if the sale proved too easy. Made a tough sell, Mr. Montrofort would sometimes say. Sometimes selling was too easy for the seller, unless he gave the sellee the edge.
Unshaven, striding hard, jaw set, Les Pruel marched into Montrofort's office.
"Mr. Montrofort, I quit," he boomed.
The gnarled ratlike face and dark powerful eyes of Sylvester Montrofort were infused with a sudden joy. He smiled the best smile modern dentistry could sell. He pressed a button on his wheelchair.
Les Pruel watched the wheelchair and Mr.
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Montrofort sink below him, as if the floor was built on quicksand. When Mr. Montrofort's hairless head was level with Pruel's knee, the floor stopped dropping.
"Go to it, boy. I haven't had a tough sell for a damned pine picket's week."
"I don't want to work here anymore, Mr. Montrofort."
"I got a ten-year contract out there with my secretary and it's going to have your name on it by the time you leave this office, Pruel. I like the cut of your timbers, boy. Dammit, you think I'm going to give up on someone who can sell four hundred dollars' worth of old television and victrola parts for more than two million dollars? Boy, you're not getting away from me. I love you. That's L-O-V-E. Love."
"I can spell, Mr. Montrofort. Q-U-I-T. That's quit."
"Well, something is bothering you and it shouldn't. You've got the greatest job and the greatest company and the greatest future in the world. You'll never be happy anywhere else so let's you and me work this out together. You're more than an employee-stockholder with option benefits. You're the life of this company and when you stop breathing with us, we all die a little bit. So what's the problem?"
"Ernie Walgreen. We lost him and we shouldn't have. I'm so damned busy selling that I've forgotten I was trained to protect people. I used to be proud of that. I was proud of what I did. I'm not proud anymore, Mr. Montrofort." Les Pruel felt good saying that. He looked at his hands. He felt the relief of tears come upon him. "When I earned what I would hardly even count
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now, when I worked to protect the President, when I couldn't afford to take my family to a restaurant, I was still proud. I was proud of my job. Even when we lost Kennedy, I felt bad, but I was proud because we had done the best we could. Mr. Montrof ort, I'm not proud anymore."
The bald head came up above the floor level, the dark fiery eyes next, the nose that looked as if it had been put on in pale cracked pieces, and the mouth with the perfect set of teeth, like a mouth transplanted from a twenty-year-old toothpaste model. The tortured humped shoulders rose above Pruel's kneeline. The wheels of Mr. Montrofort's chair appeared. Then his face was level with Pruel's and Montrofort was not smiling.
It was then that Les Pruel realized he had never before dealt with Sylvester Montrofort when the man wasn't smiling or harrumphing or old-boying himself into a sale.
"I've never been proud, Pruel," said Montrofort. A large drop of sweat quivered over his earlobe and then descended like a viscosity convention all voting simultaneously that it was too hard to stay on the side of this man's face anymore. Pruel watched it go.
This was the first time Sylvester Montrofort wasn't selling him something. With great effort, Montrofort lifted a quart bottle of dark liquor out of his lower desk drawer. He lifted out two glasses in one hand and poured two big drinks.
It was not an offered drink, it was an ordered drink.
"Okay, you're through. Drink that. You got some listening to do."
"I know you've had problems, Mr. Montrofort."
"Problems, Pruel? No. More like crucifixions.
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You ever see that extra big smile when someone meets you for the first time and you know it's a be-nice-to-the-gnome kind of grin. He's smiling because he's really repulsed by you. And women? What do you think I have to do to have normal relations with a woman? I am not just your average person like anyone else who happens to have a handicap. That I am gnarled and cannot walk is the most important thing about me. Crippled dwarf. That's what I am. Don't tell me I'm a handicapped person. I am not a person. I am a crippled dwarf and a horror to you people. You're a person. I'm a mutant. If the proper selection process had worked, I would not have been able to reproduce. You see, that's how species survive. Mutants, inferior weaklings like me, do not reproduce."
"But you're not inferior. Not in your mind or your will," said Pruel. Mr. Montrofort looked hunched over his frail body, as if sheltering a painful stomach. He nodded for Pruel to drink.
The liquor tasted very sweet, like syrup. Yet it had a sharpness to it, as if someone had infused a tangy citrus in it, an almost overhwelming grape-fruitiness. It overflowed him with good feeling. He wanted more. He finished his glass and then surprisingly he had Montrofort's glass in his hand and was sipping that.
"Pruel, I am a freak. I have a better mind than yours and a stronger will than yours but I am not you. I am better than you. I am worse than you. And most of all, I am other than you. You've lived a little too well for an ex-cop. That's all you Secret Service men are. Ex-cops."