“Sorry. It hit me all at once.”
“Feel better?”
“Much,” he said. “Did I say anything classified?”
“I doubt it. Except you were wishing the world would end tomorrow.”
“Strictly a mood. Nothing religious about it. Do you mind if I call you Leo?”
“I’d prefer it.”
“Good. Leo, look, I’m sober now, and what I’m saying is the straight orbit. I’ve handed you a lousy job, and I’m sorry about it. If there’s anything I can do to make your life more comfortable while you’re playing nursemaid to this futuristic quack, just ask me. It’s not my money I’ll be spending. I know you like your comforts, and you’ll have them.”
“I appreciate that — ah, Sanford.”
“Sandy.”
“Sandy.”
“For instance, tonight. You came in on short notice, and I don’t suppose you’ve had a chance to contact any friends. Would you like a companion for dinner… and afterward?”
That was thoughtful of him. Ministering to the needs of the aging bachelor scientist. “Thanks,” I said. “but I think I’ll manage by myself tonight. Get caught up with my thoughts, get coordinated to your time-zone—”
“It won’t be any trouble.”
I shrugged the matter aside. We nibbled small algae crackers and listened to the distant hiss of the speakers in the bar’s sound system. Kralick did most of the talking. He mentioned the names of a few of my fellow members of the Vornan committee, among them F. Richard Heyman, the historian, and Helen McIlwain, the anthropologist, and Morton Fields of Chicago, the psychologist. I nodded sagely. I approved.
“We checked everything carefully,” said Kralick. “I mean, we didn’t want to put two people on the committee who had had a feud or something of that sort. So we searched the entire data files to trace the relationships. Believe me, it was a job. We had to reject two good candidates because they’d been involved in, well, rather irregular incidents with one of the other members of the committee, and that was a disappointment.”
“You keep files on fornication among the learned?”
“We try to keep files on everything, Leo. You’d be surprised. But anyway we put a committee together, finally, finding replacements for those who wouldn’t serve, and replacements for those who turned up incompatible with the others on the data check, and arranging and rearranging—”
“Wouldn’t it have been simpler to write Vornan off as a hoax and forget about him?”
Kralick said, “There was an Apocalyptist rally in Santa Barbara last night. Did you hear about it?”
“No.”
“A hundred thousand people gathered on the beach. In the course of getting there they did two million dollars worth of property damage, estimated. After the usual orgies they began to march into the sea like lemurs.”
“Lemmings.”
“Lemmings.” Kralick’s thick fingers hovered over the bar console a moment, then withdrew. “Picture a hundred thousand chanting Apocalyptists from all over California marching stark naked into the Pacific on a January day. We’re still getting the figures on the drownings. Over a hundred, at least, and God knows how much pneumonia, and ten girls were trampled to death. They do things like that in Asia, Leo. Not here. Not here. You see what we’re up against? Vornan will smash this movement. He’ll tell us how it is in 2999, and people will stop believing that The End Is Nigh. The Apocalyptists will collapse. Another rum?”
“I think I ought to get to my hotel.”
“Right.” He uncoiled himself and we went out of the bar. As he walked around the edges of Lafayette Park, Kralick said. “I think I ought to warn you that the information media know you’re in town and will start to bombard you with interview requests and whatnot. We’ll screen you as well as we can, but they’ll probably get through to you. The answer to all questions is—”
“No comment.”
“Precisely. You’re a star. Leo.”
Snow was falling again, somewhat more actively than the melting coils were programmed to handle. Thin crusts of white were forming here and there on the pavement, and it was deeper in the shrubbery. Pools of newly melted water glistened. The snow twinkled like starlight as it drifted down. The stars themselves were hidden; we might have been alone in the universe. I felt a great loneliness. In Arizona now the sun was shining.
As we entered the grand old hotel where I was staying. I turned to Kralick and said, “I think I’ll accept that offer of a dinner companion after all.”
SIX
I sensed the real power of the United States Government for the first time when the girl came to my suite about seven that evening. She was a tall blonde with hair like spun gold. Her eyes were brown, not blue, her lips were full, her posture was superb. In short, she looked astonishingly like Shirley Bryant.
Which meant that they had been keeping tabs on me for a long time, observing and recording the sort of woman I usually chose, and producing one of exactly the right qualifications on a moment’s notice. Did that mean that they thought Shirley was my mistress? Or that they had drawn an abstract profile of all my women, and had come up with a Shirley-like girl because I had (unconsciously!) been picking Shirley-surrogates all along?
This girl’s name was Martha. I said, “You don’t look like a Martha at all. Marthas are short and dark and terribly intense, with long chins. They smell of cigarettes all the time.”
“Actually,” Martha said, “I’m a Sidney. But the government didn’t think you’d go for a girl named Sidney.”
Sidney, or Martha, was an ace, a star. She was too good to be true, and I suspected that she had been created golemlike in a government laboratory to serve my needs. I asked her if that was so, and she said yes. “Later on,” she said, “I’ll show you where I plug in.”
“How often do you need a recharge?”
“Two or three times a night, sometimes. It depends.”
She was in her early twenties, and she reminded me forcibly of the co-eds around the campus. Perhaps she was a robot, perhaps she was a call girl; but she acted like neither — more like a lively, intelligent, mature human being who just happened to be willing to make herself available for duties like this. I didn’t dare ask her if she did things of this sort all the time.
Because of the snow, we ate in the hotel dining room. It was an old-fashioned place with chandeliers and heavy draperies, head waiters in evening clothes and an engraved menu a yard long. I was glad to see it; the novelty of using menu cubes had worn-off by now, and it was graceful to read our choices from a printed card while a live human being took down our wishes with a pad and pencil, just as in bygone times.
The government was paying. We ate well. Fresh caviar, oyster cocktails, turtle soup, Chateaubriand for two, very rare. The oysters were the delicate little Olympias from Puget Sound. They have much to commend them, but I miss the true oysters of my youth. I last ate them in 1976 at the Bicentennial Fair — when they were five dollars a dozen, because of the pollution. I can forgive mankind for destroying the dodo, but not for blotting out bluepoints.
Much satiated, we went back upstairs. The perfection of the evening was marred only by a nasty scene in the lobby when I was set upon by a few of the media boys looking for a story.
“Professor Garfield—”
“ — is it true that—”
“ — words on your theory of—”
“ — Vornan-19—”
“No comment.” “No comment.” “No comment.” “No comment.”
Martha and I escaped into the elevator. I slapped a privacy seal on my door — old-fashioned as this hotel is, it has modern conveniences — and we were safe. She looked at me coquettishly, but her coyness didn’t last long. She was long and smooth, a symphony in pink and gold, and she wasn’t any robot, although I found where she plugged in. In her arms I was able to forget about men from 2999, drowning Apocalyptists, and the dust gathering on my laboratory desk. If there is a heaven for Presidential aides, let Sandy Kralick ascend to it when his time comes.