I said, "I'll get over it. I'm just a little shook-up tonight. Somebody held up a mirror, and I didn't like the looks of the fellow inside the frame. As for that guy Caselius-"
He said, "You had better get over it. You are going to have to restrain your vengeful impulses."
"What do you mean?"
He was reaching in his coat pocket. He said, "This is ironical, Eric. It is really very ironical."
"Maybe," I said. "I can see that it's a lot of things, but I haven't spotted much irony yet."
He said, "I had another reason for coming, a direct cornmunication from the master of ceremonies himself."
"The master of-"
He laughed. "MC," he said. "Mac. It is a joke."
"I'm not up on all the jokes yet," I said.
"This is no joke, however," he said. He gave me a folded sheet of paper. "Read it and you will see the irony, too. I could tell you the gist of it, but I will let you decipher it yourself so as not to miss the full flavor of Mac's prose."
I looked at him, and at the paper; and I took the paper to the little writing table by the wall and went to work on it. Presently I had it lying before me in plain language. It had my code number and the usual transmission signals. The station of origin was Washington, D.C. The text read:
Representations from female agent Stockholm have led to serious case of cold feet locally. Temporarily, we hope, your orders are changed as follows: you are to make firm identification of subject if possible but do not, repeat do not, carry out remainder of original instructions. Find him, keep him in sight, but don't hurt a hair of his cute little head. Realize difficulty of assignment, sympathize. Working hard to stiffen local backbones. Be ready for go-ahead signal, but under no circumstances take action unless you receive. Repeat, under no circumstances. This is an order. This is an order. Don't get independent, damn you, or we're all cooked. Love, Mac.
Chapter Ten
Lou TAYLOR was waiting impatiently when I arrived at the field in a taxi, having slept too long, after my session with Vance, to catch the official airport bus.
"I was beginning to think you weren't going to make it," she said, and gave me a second look. "My God, what happened to you?"
My cut lip didn't show up too badly, although it felt very conspicuous, and I'd hoped my sunglasses hid the shiner, but apparently not. "You won't believe it," I said, "but I ran into the closet door in the dark."
She laughed. "You were right the first time. I don't believe it."
I grinned. "All right, I'll tell you the truth. I couldn't sleep last night, so I took a walk around town, and three big bruisers came out of an alley and attacked me for no good reason. Of course, being a right-living American boy, I beat hell out of all three of them, but one got through with a lucky punch."
"A likely story!" she said. "Well, you'd better get this paraphernalia checked in; there's not much time left before takeoff. Here, I'll give you a hand."
"Take it easy with that camera bag," I said. "Drop that and we're out of business."
They don't let you take pictures from an airplane over Sweden, so I guess all the security nuts in the world don't live in New Mexico, although sometimes when I'm home it seems that way. I took the seat by the window, nevertheless; Lou said it didn't matter to her. All scenery looks just about the same from a plane, she said, and she'd already seen it twice getting the dope for her story, going and coming.
Presently the stewardess announced in Swedish and English that we were flying at nine hundred meters and would reach Luleв-pronounced Lulie-oh-in two and a half hours. Lou informed me that the reported altitude was equivalent to approximately twenty-seven hundred feet since, she said, a meter is only a little longer than a yard
– thirty-nine and four-tenths inches, to be exact.
Already there were forests below us, and open fields, red roofs, plenty of lakes and streams, and more forests. I had a funny feeling of having seen it all before, although I'd never been doser to it than Britain and the continent of Europe. It was just something my romantic imagination was making up from knowing that my forebears had lived in this country a long time. I suppose a guy named Kelly would feel the same way flying over Ireland.
Then we swung out over the Gulf of Bothnia, that long finger of the Baltic that separates Sweden from Finland, and soon there was nothing to look at but water, roughened by a brisk cross wind. I turned to my companion and found that she was asleep. She looked all right that way, but at twenty-six, her age of record, she wasn't quite young enough to get sentimental about, sleeping. Only the truly young look really good asleep. They get a kind of innocence about them, no matter what kind of juvenile monsters they may be when they're awake. The rest of us haven't that much innocence left. We can be thankful if we manage to sleep with our mouths closed and don't snore.
She was wearing a brown wool skirt-kind of a pleasant rusty color-and a matching sweater with a neck high enough to cover the scar on her throat. The sweater was good wool but not cashmere; she wasn't a kid who blew her roll on clothes. Her shoes had set her back something, though. They were strong British walking shoes with sturdy soles. Although I had to respect her good sense, I must sayl prefer my women in high heels. Well, at least she'd had the decency to wear nylons. If there's anything that turns my stomach, it's a grown woman in bobby sox.
I lay back in my seat beside the sleeping girl and listened to the sound of the plane's motors and let my thoughts wander. Mac's little sentence had been a classic of its kind, I reflected: Realize difficulty of assignment, sympathize. In effect, I was being asked to locate, identify, and keep an eye on a man-eating tiger-but under no circumstances to shoot the beast. Repeat, under no circumstances. This is an order. This is an order. Clearly Mac was scared stiff I might try to be clever and rig up something resembling self-defense. He was in political trouble of some kind, and he didn't want any dead bodies whatever cluttering up the landscape until he got things straightened out.
Sara Lundgren had hinted that she was doing more than merely refusing to help me. What she'd meant, apparently, was that she'd lodged a stiff protest in Washington against my assignment. As Vance had said, it was ironical. I wondered how she'd have felt if she'd known that her action would prevent us, at least temporarily, from avenging her death. Of course, some of those idealists are pretty stubborn, and it was quite possible that she'd have been in favor of turning the other cheek.
Mac's worst enemies had always been the gentle folks back home. As he'd said himself once during the war, there wasn't much danger of the Nazis breaking us up, but one soft-hearted U.S. Senator could do it with a few words. Nowadays it seems to be all right to plan on, and create the machines for, extenninating millions of human beings at a crack, but just to send out the guy to rub out another who's getting to be an active menace, that's still considered very immoral and reprehensible.
I'll admit that I found the idea a little startling myself, even in wartime, when Mac first explained to me exactly what this group was that I'd been picked to join. It was in that office of his in London, with a view of wrecked buildings through the single dusty window, and I'd just been through the first phase of my training-the one you got while they were still evaluating your possibilities and deciding whether they wanted you, after all. Mac had looked up at me for a moment as I stood before his desk.