"Oui, M'sieu Hemingway, you 'ave seen," the teenager replied with a simper and wriggle. "I am Suzette, au'sor wiz Toulouse La Rimbaud of ze book Lovelives of a French Tweenie. Ze tweenie, she means many s'ings-bo's in ze pantry and in ze bed. But now I mus' order M'sieu ze jus'-so-'ot milk."
Homer watched her little butt wagging under the abbreviated black silk skirt as she hurried toward a service door.
"Gee, Babe," he commented, "doesn't it give you a pang to think of an innocent little doll like that knowing to talk about perversions and all?"
"That little doll," Heloise said flatly, "knew all about perversions and how to use them to make friends and influence people before you posed with your first prop tiller and tropical sunset cyclorama."
Homer shrugged. "Maybe so, Babe," he said softly, "but it doesn't offend me. Tonight I feel sort of mystic, woozy-dreamy you might say, in sympathy with all things." He frowned deeper and deeper as Heloise stared at him incredulously. "F'rinstance, all them heads up there, what are they thinking? Or I wonder about robots. I wonder do robots feel hurt like we do? That one over there that just got the flaming coffee spilt on him-does he feel pain? A guy tells me they can even have sex, they do it by electricity. Pain too? Did that pink robot feel pain when I squirted my flamer at her? It's a sobering thought."
Heloise chortled. "She couldn't have had any happy memories of you judging by the way she soured you with sticky foam this afternoon as if you were a 4-11 fire!"
"Don't laugh, Babe!" Homer protested. "My best sailing suit was ruined. My lucky one."
"You looked so funny covered with all that goo."
"Well, you didn't cut such a fine figure yourself, ducking around behind me and the stooges to keep from getting mucked up. Which reminds me, why the lie to me about why we was going to Rocket House and what was going on there? They wasn't signing up any writers I could see and you didn't ask them a thing about it anyways. First you start to ask them about their secret and then right away you're talking about something I never heard of. Wordmill Avengers and the Noose. What was them things, Babe, anyhow?"
"Oh be quiet! That was just a false trail Gaspard laid for me, the little trickster. I've got to try to sort out the real facts myself now."
"But I want to know all about it, Babe. As long as I can't sleep I'll be woozy-dreamy and thinking about the Green Bay Packers and life and wanting to know all about everything."
"Listen to me think then," Heloise snapped at him. Her features tightened and she began to speak in staccato fashion, softly at first: "Racket House, seemingly asleep, is wide awake. They had a fink planted in the union-Gaspard. They're in touch with the writing robots-Zane Gort-and the government-Miss Blushes. When we burst in on them, they acted like men with something to lose, not men who didn't care. Flaxman jittered like a rabbit with a vault full of lettuce. He'd been doodling pictures of eggs with names under them that sounded like writers, only I couldn't place any of them-I'll bet that means something."
"Eggs?" Homer interrupted. "You mean circles, Babe?"
"No, I mean eggs." She shrugged and continued staccato: "As for Cullingham, he was cool and crafty as a cucumber when I grilled him."
"Hey, what about this Cullingham?" Homer interrupted again, suspiciously. "I thought you was getting sweet on him the way you was slapping him around."
"Shut up! Be no surprise if I was, though-the man seems to be a good cold-blooded thinker, instead of having a sponge mind like Gaspard or a mystic muscle body like you."
"A cold-blooded guy wouldn't be any good in bed, would he?"
"You never can tell till they're tested by an expert. Cullingham's icy and shrewd, but I'll bet if we kidnapped him I could burn the secret of Racket House out of him."
"Babe, if you think I'm going to start kidnapping new boyfriends for you-"
"Shut up!" Heloise was by now fairly excited and thoroughly impatient. Hers was not a gentle voice at the best of times and the loud-hissed injunction to Homer caused a small hiatus in the conversations around them. Unheeding, she went on, "This is business I'm talking, Homer. And here's how it sums up: Racket House has something up its sleeve and they're vulnerable to kidnapping!"
TWENTY-TWO
"Racket House has something up its sleeve and they're vulnerable to kidnapping."
Sharp ears at nearby tables-and directional mikes at further ones-that had up to this point been catching only fragments of Heloise's monologue, heard that one sentence dearly.
Seekers who had come that night to the Word on the hunt for hints and leads in a promising but perplexing commercial crisis decided they had found the clue they wanted.
Trains of action were set in motion. With various figurative groans, dankings and squeals, wheels started to turn.
The chief actors among those reacting constituted a vivid cross-section of the money-obsessed division of Space-Age man.
Winston P. Mears, four-star operative of the Federal Bureau of Justice, memorized the following memorandum to himself: Rocket's sleeves bulge. Eggs? Cucumbers? Lettuce? Contact Miss Blushes. The fantastic aspects of the Wordmills Case did not trouble Mears at all. He was inured to a society in which almost any action of individuals could be construed as a crime, but in which any crime committed by organizations or groups could be justified six ways. Even the wanton destruction of the wordmills seemed nothing out of the ordinary in a world used to maintaining its economy by destroying objects of value. Mears, plump and rubicund, was wearing the cover personality of Good Charley Hogan, a big plankton-and-algae man from Baja, California.
Gil Hart, industrial trouble-blaster, rejoiced that he would now be able to tell Messrs. Zachery and Zobel of Proton Press that their suspicions of their colleagues and closest competitors were fully justified. The private hand blew out his flaming shot and downed the fiery tot of bourbon. A smile creased his blue-shaded cheeks. Kidnapping? He might try a spot of that himself to shake loose Rocket's secret. After all, industrial kidnapping had become a commonplace in a society where two centuries of government savant-snatching and general man-grabbing had set the standards. Be fun if he could arrange to snatch a gal from Rocket. Someone lively and talkative, like this Ibsen bomb, but preferably less robust. Hellions were fine, so long as they didn't pack too hard a punch.
Filippo Fenicchia, interplanetary gangster known as the Garrote, smiled ironically and closed the eyes that provided all the life there was in his long pale face. He was one of the old habituйs of the Word, who came to watch the funny writers, and it amused him that business opportunities-duties, to his way of looking at it-should pursue him even here. The Garrote was a tranquil man, serene in his knowledge that fear is humankind's most basic and enduring emotion and that playing on fear is therefore always the surest means of livelihood, whether in the days of Milo and Clodius, Cesar Borgia, or Al Capone. The earlier mention of eggs stuck in his mind. He decided he must consult the Memory.
Clancy Goldfarb, professional book-hijacker so adroit that his outfit was unofficially recognized as the fourth most powerful book distributor, decided that what most likely bulked Rocket's sleeve was books milled in excess of quota. Lighting a foot-long pencil-thin Venusian cheroot, he began to plan one of his perfect robberies.
Cain Brinks was a robot adventure-author, whose Madam Iridium was the chief fictional rival to Zane Gort's Dr. Tungsten. Currently Madam Iridium and the Acid Beast was outselling Dr. Tungsten Reams a Nut by five to four. On overhearing Heloise's strident whisper, Cain Brinks had almost dropped the tray of Martian martinis he was carrying. To penetrate the Word undetected, Cain Brinks had this afternoon tarnished himself to the point of fine pitting so as to be able to impersonate a robot waiter. Now this piece of masochism had paid off. He knew in a flash what Rocket House had up its sleeve-a Zane Gort determined to become the czar of human fiction-and he began to lay plans to cut in.