"Hunh? Oh! Uh, number four, please, easy over, and tea. And a Danish on the side." He glanced at his watch, tongue between his lips.
"Four over tea'n Danish!"
"Oh, uh, Miss. ." Lou blushed when she turned back on him, then smiled shyly. "Could you make that… two number fours?"
"Double up that four!"
"Say, he certainly has wonderful pastrami!"
"Who'sthat?"
"Mr. Diskin." Lou smiled. Well, anyway he didn't waste his trip. Holly Tibbett himself.
"You know, Lou, I was just thinking, what if we divided up the world into eight clubs, split the wealth more or less among them, and let them, taking turns, choose space teams from all the present available talent—"
"What're you talking about, Henry?"
"The space race. See, I was thinking, if you could just work it out so that statistically it was more exciting — and see, you might make a rule where the teams could buy, sell, and trade personnel, and then for rule infractions, you could bench key scientists and pilots—"
"Henry, are you. .?" Lou leaned forward, studying Henry's face quizzically, as though discovering something horrible there. "Do you feel okay? You look, I don't know… changed."
"Just a little tired, Lou. I didn't get much sleep."
"Oh." Food arrived, several platters of it, erasing some of the anguish on Lou's big round face, and making him wonder: "Say, Henry, are you sure you've had enough to eat?"
"Sure, plenty." Lou eyed the empty muffin plate disdainfully, then stared again at Henry's face, while scooping the eggs in. Well, Henry thought, I have changed. "Don't worry, Lou, it'll be all right." He was very tired, and it was making him restless. He shifted in his chair, took a couple deep breaths. "Anyway, it doesn't matter." It was amazing to watch Lou when he got really attuned to his eating. All clumsiness vanished and his fingers played over the food as upon a musical instrument, his face flushing with pleasure and mild exertion. And yet there was something demonic about it, too, something destructive: as though, if given the chance, his mountainous bulk could consume all there was. "I figure the best thing is just to go tell Ziff I was sick and hope he buys that."
Lou looked up from his eggs in shock. "But" — he dabbed yolk from his mouth with a paper napkin—"why don't you tell him the truth?"
*The truth?"
"The, you know, your… I mean, the relative, the one who, the funeral. ."
"Oh, that!" Inwardly, he smiled. True, he could… "I don't know, I guess I didn't feel that. ."
"Nobody goes to work when there's a death in the family, Henry. I'm sure Mr. Zifferblatt will understand that, he's not inhuman, you know."
"I suppose not."
"Is it that you're, that you don't want to, you know, talk about it?"
"Something like that, I guess."
Lou smiled broadly around a jowlful of half-chewed pastry and pointed at himself. The advocate. "I'll go up first," were his Danish-muffled words of amity.
And true, two's opposition, three's a coalition, for after Lou's preparing of the way, Horace Zifferblatt's welcome on behalf of the firm of Dunkelmann, Zauber & Zifferblatt was perhaps still something less than open-armed, but he twitched his old head in what was no doubt intended as a commiserating nod, and paid his respects to the deceased with an embarrassed grunt and floorward scowl, glancing then at the clock which showed that he recognized Henry had arrived not only on time, but five minutes early; then returned to his glassed-in office to clock the rest of the arrivals.
Of course, Henry, in his condition, had only one available strategy for the day, and that was to bluff with his empty hand. He had nothing left but will power, and was running short of that. He pursued methodically each ritual, the hanging up of his coat and hat, the gathering and sorting of ledgers, the sharpening of pencils and filling of pens, the shuffling of drawers, clearing of throat, opening of books, search for eraser, stroking of jaw, loosening of collar, adjusting of self in chair, inspection of faulty penpoint, replacement thereof: all for a gain of seventeen minutes out of a total day's play of seven-and-a-half hours. You're not going to make it, boy, he advised himself and winced as though trying to read an illegible entry in the book open before him… and it was illegible, he couldn't see a thing.
He opened the drawer to search for his magnifying glass, came upon his horseracing game in a set of manila file folders. When last he'd played it, there'd been a three-year-old named Ramshorn causing a sensation, though the big horses were still Saturday's Exile and Portent. Yes, and there was Muffin and Saddlepoint and Annie Oakley: he flicked hastily through the folders, waking up a little. Jacinto Abril, who'd tried and failed as a UBA ballplayer, was developing into one of the greatest jockeys of all time. Henry glanced around: heads down and working. Well, it was a temptation. But no, not yet. Had to get some work done first. Ziff would be watching him this morning. Save it for the afternoon. Need it more then anyway.
He turned back to the journal he'd opened. Who was it? Meo Roth's Skylight Protection Company: Repairs, Waterproofing, Replacement, and Screening. A sad case, because the firm was dying. Purchases had dwindled to almost nothing; inventory was constant, but through obsolescence, had become a storage liability rather than an asset; gross trading profit had sunk below selling, administrative, and general expenses; and, on top of it all, there were rents, mortgage payments, and taxes to be paid out. Old Meo Roth was reeling toward the ruin level. "Join the company," Henry said, then glanced up guiltily; a head or two turned his way briefly. He cleared his throat and lipped a few numbers to cover what was becoming an incurable and stupid habit.
Exit from competition: true, that was both his prospect and his problem. Roth had a bin full of glass and junk that was only costing him money to keep; Henry had a kitchen full of heroes and history, and after heavy investment, his corporate account had suddenly sunk to zero. Accretion of wasting assets. No flexibility. Roth had blundered in his inventory scheduling: if he could dump that glass and steal a load of plastic or fiberglass skydomes, he still might, with drive and imagination, make it. But what was Henry's solution? There must be a way, he thought — but then he remembered that absurd ball game back on the table that the bad guys were winning, 18-to—1. What did he mean, "bad guys"? Because, damn it, they killed the kid. And it was the kid who'd brought new interest, new value, a sense of profit, to the game. You mean, things were sort of running down before…? Yes, that was probably true: he'd already been slowly buckling under to a kind of long-run market vulnerability, the kind that had killed off complex games of his in the past. What had happened the last four or five league years? Not much. And then Damon had come along to light things up again. And maybe that was it: Casey had put out the light and everybody was playing in the dark. An 18-to-1 ball game, they must be playing in the dark! He watched them down there, playing in the dark, running around, tripping over bases, there in the dark, wallowing around in heaps of paper, spilling off the table edge—
He jerked his head up so fast, he got a crick in his neck. He rubbed it, peeking around at the others, but afraid to look over toward Zifferblatt's office. He took some deep gulps of air, flexed his fingers, stretched his legs under the desk, con-centrated on the figures. The clock on the wall, which somehow in its fat white roundness and hard black numbers always reminded Henry of Horace Zifferblatt himself, told him: thirty minutes down, seven hours to go. He sighed. Don't think about the whole day, that'll kill you, just try to make it to lunch break. One inning at a time. But he was beginning to get pretty nauseous, which the idea of lunch only aggravated. He rubbed his neck, and with extreme concentration, managed to post his first entry of the day. Shaky, but legible. In the right place, too, he was sure of it. He smiled at his victory.