Mario moved on. As at 5600 Exmoor, he found a room drenched with amber-white light, golden, crisp as celery, where the broad-leafed plants grew as ardently as in their native humus. The herbarium was empty, the plants suspired numbing perfume for their own delectation.
Mario passed on. He looked into a room bare and undecorated, a workshop, a processing plant. A number of rubber-wheeled tables were docked against a wall, each with its frock of white cloth. A balcony across the room supported an intricate mesh of machinery, black curving arms, shiny metal, glass. Below hung a pair of translucent balls, the pallid blue color of Roquefort cheese. Mario looked closely. These were the golasma cellules.
No one occupied the chamber except a still form on one of the stretchers. The face was partly visible. Mario, suddenly attentive, shifted his vantage point. He saw a heavy blond head, rugged blunt features. He moved to another cell. He was right. It was Janniver, already drugged, ready for the transposition.
Mario gave a long heavy suspiration that shook Ebery's paunch. Ditmar had made it. Zaer, Mario, Breaugh, and now Janniver, lured into this room like sheep the Judas-goat conducts to the abbatoir. Mario bared his teeth in a grimace that was not a smile. A tide of dark rage rose in his mind.
He calmed himself. The grimace softened into the normal loose lines of Ebery's face. Who was blameless, after all? Thane Paren? No. She served Mervyn Alien, the soul in her brother's body. He himself, Roland Mario? He might have killed Mervyn Alien, he might have halted the work of the Chateau d'lf by crying loudly enough to the right authorities. He had refrained, from fear of losing his body. Pete Zaer? He might have kept to the spirit of his bargain, warned his friends on the Oxonian Terrace.
All the other victims, who had similarly restrained their rage and sense of obligation to their fellow-men? No, Ditmar was simply a human being, as weak and selfish as any other, and his sins were those of commission rather than those of omission, which characterized the others.
Mario wandered on, peering in apartment, chamber and hall. A blonde girl, young and sweet as an Appalachian gilly-flower, swam nude in Alien's long green-glass pool, then sat on the edge amid a cloud of silver bubbles. Mario cursed the lascivious responses of Ebery's body, passed on. Nowhere did he see Thane Paren.
He returned to the reception hall. The party was breaking up, with Mervyn Alien bowing his guests out, men and women flushed with his food and drink, all cordial, all promising themselves to renew the acquaintance on a later, less conspicuous occasion.
Mario watched till the last had left-the last but one, this an incredibly tall, thin old man, dressed like a fop in pearl-gray and white. His wrists were like corn-stalks, his head was all skull. He leaned across Mervyn Alien's shoulder, a roguish perfumed old dandy, waxed, rouged, pomaded.
Now Alien made a polite inquiry, and the old man nodded, beamed. Alien ushered him into a small side room, an office painted dark gray and green.
The old man sat down, wrote a check. Alien dropped it into the telescreen slot, and the two waited, making small talk. The old man seemed to be pressing for information, while Alien gracefully brushed him aside. The television flickered, flashed an acknowledgment from the bank. Alien rose to his feet. The old man arose. Alien took a deep breath; they stepped into the herbarium. The old man took three steps, tottered. Alien caught him deftly, laid him on a concealed rubber-tired couch, wheeled him forward, out into the laboratory where Janniver lay aready.
Now Mario watched with the most careful of eyes, and into a socket in his goggles he plugged another cord leading to a camera in his pouch. Everything he saw would be recorded permanently.
There was little to see. Alien wheeled Janniver under one of the whey-colored golasma cellules, the old man under another. He turned a dial, kicked at a pedal, flicked a switch, stood back. The entire balcony lowered. The cellules engulfed the two heads, pulsed, changed shape. There was motion on the balcony, wheels turning, the glow of luminescence. The operation appeared self-contained, automatic.
Alien seated himself, lit a cigarette, yawned. Five minutes passed. The balcony rose, the golasma cellules swung on an axis, the balcony lowered. Another five minutes passed. The balcony raised. Alien stepped forward, threw off the switches.
Alien gave each body an injection from the same hypodermic, rolled the couches into an adjoining room, departed without a backward glance.
Toward the swimming pool, thought Mario. Let him go!
At nine o'clock in Tanagra Square, a cab dropped off a feeble lackluster old man, tall and thin as a slat, who immediately sought a bench.
Mario waited till the old man showed signs of awareness, watched the dawning alarm, the frenzied examination of emaciated hands, the realization of fifty stolen years. Mario approached, led the old man to a cab, took him to his apartment. The morning was a terrible one.
Janniver was asleep, exhausted from terror, grief, hate for his creaking old body. Mario called the Brannan agency, asked for Murris Slade. The short heavy man with the narrow head appeared on the screen, gazed through the layers of ground glass at Mario.
"Hello, Slade," said Mario. "There's a job I want done tonight."
Slade looked at him with a steady wary eye. "Does it get me in trouble?"
"No."
"What's the job?"
"This man you've been watching for me, Roland Mario, do you know where to find him?"
"He's at the Persian Terrace having breakfast with the girl he spent the night with. Her name is Laura Lingtza; she's a dancer at the Vedanta Epic Theater."
"Never mind about that. Get a piece of paper, copy what I'm going to dictate."
"Go ahead, I'm ready."
"Meet me at eleven p.m. at the Cambodian Pillar, lobby of Paradise Inn, Level Six Hundred, Empyrean Tower. Important. Come by yourself. Please be on time, as I can spare only a few minutes. Mervyn Alien, Chateau d'lf."
Mario waited a moment till Slade looked up from his writing. "Type that out," he said. "Hand it to Roland Mario at about nine-thirty tonight"
CHAPTER X
New Bodies for Old
Restlessly Mario paced the floor, pudgy hands clasped behind his back. Tonight would see the fruit of a year's racking toil with brain and imagination. Tonight, with luck, he would shed the hateful identity of Ralston Ebery. He thought of Louis Correaos. Poor Louis, and Mario shook his head. What would happen to Louis' Airfarer? And Letya Arnold? Would he go back out into Tanagra Square to lurk and hiss as Ralston Ebery sauntered pompously past?
He called the Aetherian Block, got put through to Louis Correaos. "How's everything, Louis?"
"Going great We're all tooled up, be producing next week **
"How's Arnold?"
Correaos screwed up his face. "Ebery, you'll think I'm as crazy as Arnold. But he can fly faster than light," "What?"
"Last Thursday night he wandered into the office. He acted mysterious, told me to follow him. I went. He took me up to his observatory-just a window at the sky where he's got a little proton magniscope. He focused it, told me to look. I looked, saw a disk-a dull dark disk about as large as a full moon. 'Pluto,' said Arnold. 'In about ten minutes, there'll be a little white flash on the left-hand side.'
"How do you know?"
"I set off a flare a little over six hours ago. The light should be reaching there about now."
"I gave him a queer look, but I kept my eye glued on the image, and sure enough-there it was, a little spatter of white light "Now watch,' he says, 'there'll be a red one.' And he's right. There's a red light." Correaos shook his big sandy head. "Ebery, I'm convinced. He's got me believing him."
Mario said in a toneless voice, "Put him on, Louis, if you can find him."
After a minute or so Letya Arnold's peaked face peered out of the screen. Mario said leadenly, "Is this true, Arnold? That you're flying faster than light?"