The couple turned, Cayle with the measured unhurriedness of a young man who has gone a long way on the road to steellike nerves; the girl was quicker, but withal dignified.
Fara had a vague, terrified feeling that his anger was too great, self-destroying, but the very violence of his emotions ended that thought even as it came. He said thickly, “Cayle, get home — at once.”
Fara was aware of the girl looking at him curiously from strange, gray-green eyes. No shame, he thought, and his rage mounted several degrees, driving away the alarm that came at the sight of the flush that crept into Cayle’s cheeks.
The flush faded into a pale, tight-lipped anger, Cayle half-turned to the girl, said, “This is the childish old fool I’ve got to put up with. Fortunately, we seldom see each other; we don’t even eat together. What do you think of him?”
The girl smiled impersonally. “Oh, we know Fara Clark; he’s the backbone of the empress in Glay.”
“Yes,” the boy sneered. “You ought to hear him. He thinks we’re living in heaven; and the empress is the divine power. The worst part of it is that there’s no chance of his ever getting that stuffy look wiped off his face.”
They walked off; and Fara stood there. The very extent of what had happened had drained anger from him as if it had never been. There was the realization that he had made a mistake so great that—
He couldn’t grasp it. For long, long now, since Cayle had refused to work in his shop, he had felt this building up to a climax. Suddenly, his own uncontrollable ferocity stood revealed as a partial product of that — deeper — problem.
Only, now that the smash was here, he didn’t want to face it—
All through the day in his shop, he kept pushing it out of his mind, kept thinking, would this go on now, as before, Cayle and he living in the same house, not even looking at each other when they met, going to bed at different times, getting up, Fara at 6:30, Cayle at noon? Would that go on through all the days and years to come?
When he arrived home, Creel was waiting for him. She said, “Fara, he wants you to loan him five hundred credits, so that he can go to Imperial City.”
Fara nodded wordlessly. He brought the money back to the house the next morning, and gave it to Creel, who took it into the bedroom.
She came out a minute later. “He says to tell you goodbye.”
When Fara came home that evening, Cayle was gone. He wondered whether he ought to feel relieved or — what?
The days passed. Fara worked. He had nothing else to do, and the gray thought was often in his mind that now he would be doing it till the day he died. Except—
Fool that he was — he told himself a thousand times how big a fool — he kept hoping that Cayle would walk into the shop and say, “Father, I’ve learned my lesson. If you can ever forgive me, teach me the business, and then you retire to a well-earned rest.”
It was exactly a month to a day after Cayle’s departure that the telestat clicked on just after Fara had finished lunch. “Money call,” it sighed, “money call.”
Fara and Creel looked at each other. “Eh,” said Fara finally, “money call for us.”
He could see from the gray look in Creel’s face the thought that was in her mind. He said under his breath: “Damn that boy!”
But he felt relieved. Amazingly relieved! Cayle was beginning to appreciate the value of parents and—
He switched on the viewer. “Come and collect,” he said.
The face that came on the screen was heavy-jowled, beetle-browed — and strange. The man said, “This is Clerk Pearton of the Fifth Bank of Ferd. We have received a sight draft on you for ten thousand credits. With carrying charges and government tax, the sum required will be twelve thousand one hundred credits. Will you pay it now or will you come in this afternoon and pay it?”
“B-but… b-but—” said Fara. “W-who—”
He stopped, conscious of the stupidity of the question, dimly conscious of the heavy-faced man saying something about the money having been paid out to one Cayle Clark that morning in Imperial City. At last, Fara found his voice:
“But the bank had no right,” he expostulated, “to pay out the money without my authority. I—”
The voice cut him off coldly: “Are we then to inform our central that the money was obtained under false pretenses? Naturally, an order will be issued immediately for the arrest of your son.”
“Wait… wait—” Fara spoke blindly. He was aware of Creel beside him, shaking her head at him. She was as white as a sheet, and her voice was a sick, stricken thing, as she said, “Fara, let him go. He’s through with us. We must be as hard — let him go.”
The words rang senselessly in Fara’s ears. They didn’t fit into any normal pattern. He was saying:
“I… I haven’t got—How about my paying… installments? I—”
“If you wish a loan,” said Clerk Pearton, “naturally we will be happy to go into the matter. I might say that when the draft arrived, we checked up on your status, and we are prepared to loan you eleven thousand credits on indefinite call with your shop as security. I have the form here, and if you are agreeable, we will switch this call through the registered circuit, and you can sign at once.”
“Fara, no.”
The clerk went on: “The other eleven hundred credits will have to be paid in cash. Is that agreeable?”
“Yes, yes, of course, I’ve got twenty-five hund—” He stopped his chattering tongue with a gulp; then: “Yes, that’s satisfactory.”
The deal completed, Fara whirled on his wife. Out of the depths of his hurt and bewilderment, he raged: “What do you mean, standing there and talking about not paying it? You said several times that I was responsible for his being what he is. Besides, we don’t know why he needed the money. He—”
Creel said in a low, dead tone: “In one hour, he’s stripped us of our life work. He did it deliberately, thinking of us as two old fools, who wouldn’t know any better than to pay it.”
Before he could speak, she went on, “Oh, I know I blamed you, but in the final issue, I knew it was he. He was always cold and calculating, but I was weak, and I was sure that if you handled him in a different… and besides I didn’t want to see his faults for a long time. He—”
“All I see,” Fara interrupted doggedly, “is that I have saved our name from disgrace.”
His high sense of duty rightly done lasted until midafternoon, when the bailiff from Ferd came to take over the shop.
“But what—” Fara began.
The bailiff said, “The Automatic Atomic Repair Shops, Limited, took over your loan from the bank, and are foreclosing. Have you anything to say?”
“It’s unfair,” said Fara. “I’ll take it to court. I’ll—”
He was thinking dazedly: If the empress ever learned of this, she’d… she’d—
The courthouse was a big, gray building; and Fara felt emptier and colder every second, as he walked along the gray corridors. In Glay, his decision not to give himself into the hands of a blood-sucker of a lawyer had seemed a wise act. Here, in these enormous halls and palatial rooms, it seemed the sheerest folly.
He managed, nevertheless, to give an articulate acount of the criminal act of the bank in first giving Cayle the money, then turning over the note to his chief competitor, apparently within minutes of his signing it. He finished with: “I’m sure, sir, the empress would not approve of such goings-on against honest citizens. I—”
“How dare you,” said the cold-voiced creature on the bench, “use the name of her holy majesty in support of your own gross self-interest?”
Fara shivered. The sense of being intimately a member of the empress’ great human family yielded to a sudden chill and a vast mind-picture of the ten million icy courts like this, and the myriad malevolent and heartless men — like this — who stood between the empress and her loyal subject, Fara.