“Shut up!” Crandall yelled, exasperated. He had almost forgotten the kind of punishment a free man was forced to endure.
The private phone circuit on the television screen lit up.
He dried himself, hurried into clothes and asked, “Who’s calling?”
“Mrs. Nicholas Crandall,” said the operator’s voice.
He stared at the blank screen for a moment, absolutely thunderstruck. Polly! Where in the world had she come from? And how did she know where he was? No, the last part was easy—he was a celebrity.
“Put her on,” he said at last.
Polly’s face filled the screen. Crandall studied her quizzically. She’d aged a bit, but possibly it wasn’t obvious at anything but this magnification.
As if she realized it herself, Polly adjusted the controls on her set and her face dwindled to life-size, the rest of her body as well as her surroundings coming into the picture. She was evidently in the living room of her home; it looked like a low-to-middle-income-range furnished apartment. But she looked good—awfully good. There were such warm memories …
“Hi, Polly. What’s this all about? You’re the last person I expected to call me.”
“Hello, Nick.” She lifted her hand to her mouth and stared over its knuckles for some time at him. Then: “Nick. Please. Please don’t play games with me.”
He dropped into a chair. “Huh?”
She began to cry. “Oh, Nick! Don’t! Don’t be that cruel! I know why you served that sentence those seven years. The moment I heard your name today, I knew why you did it. But, Nick, it was only one man—just one man, Nick!”
“Just one man what?”
“It was just that one man I was unfaithful with. And I thought he loved me, Nick. I wouldn’t have divorced you if I’d known what he was really like. But you know, Nick, don’t you? You know how much he made me suffer. I’ve been punished enough. Don’t kill me, Nick! Please don’t kill me!”
“Listen, Polly,” he began, completely confused. “Polly girl, for heaven’s sake—”
“Nick!” she gulped hysterically. “Nick, it was over eleven years ago—ten, at least. Don’t kill me for that, please, Nick! Nick, truly, I wasn’t unfaithful to you for more than a year, two years at the most. Truly, Nick! And, Nick, it was only that one affair—the others didn’t count. They were just—just casual things. They didn’t matter at all, Nick! But don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!” She held both hands to her face and began rocking back and forth, moaning uncontrollably.
Crandall stared at her for a moment and moistened his lips. Then he said, “Whew!” and turned the set off. He leaned back in his chair. Again he said, “Whew!” and this time it hissed through his teeth.
Polly! Polly had been unfaithful during their marriage. For a year—no, two years! And—what had she said?—the others, the others had just been casual things!
The woman he had loved, the woman he suspected he had always loved, the woman he had given up with infinite regret and a deep sense of guilt when she had come to him and said that the business had taken the best part of him away from her, but that since it wasn’t fair to ask him to give up something that obviously meant so much to him.
Pretty Polly. Polly girl. He’d never thought of another woman in all their time together. And if anyone, anyone at all, had ever suggested—had so much as hinted —he’d have used a monkey wrench on the meddler’s face. He’d given her the divorce only because she’d asked for it, but he’d hoped that when the business got on its feet and Irv’s bookkeeping end covered a wider stretch of it, they might get back together again. Then, of course, business grew worse, Irv’s wife got sick and he put even less time in at the office and—
“I feel,” he said to himself numbly, “as if I’ve just found out for certain that there is no Santa Claus. Not Polly, not all those good years! One affair! And the others were just casual things!”
The telephone circuit went off again. “Who is it?” he snarled.
“Mr. Edward Ballaskia.”
“What’s he want?” Not Polly, not Pretty Polly!
An extremely fat man came on the sceen. He looked to right and left cautiously. “I must ask you, Mr. Crandall, if you are positive that this line isn’t tapped.”
“What the hell do you want?” Crandall found himself wishing that the fat man were here in person. He’d love to sail into sombody right now.
Mr. Edward Ballaskia shook his head disapprovingly, his jowls jiggling slowly behind the rest of his face. “Well, then, sir, if you won’t give me your assurances, I am forced to take a chance. I am calling, Mr. Crandall, to ask you to forgive your enemies, to turn the other cheek. I am asking you to remember faith, hope and charity—and that the greatest of these is charity. In other words, sir, open your heart to him or her you intended to kill, understand the weaknesses which caused them to give offenses—and forgive them.”
“Why should I?” Crandall demanded.
“Because it is to your profit to do so, sir. Not merely morally profitable—although let us not overlook the life of the spirit—but financially profitable. Financially profitable, Mr. Crandall.”
“Would you kindly tell me what you are talking about?”
The fat man leaned forward and smiled confidentially. “If you can forgive the person who caused you to go off and suffer seven long, seven miserable years of acute discomfort, Mr. Crandall, I am prepared to make you a most attractive offer. You are entitled to commit one murder. I desire to have one murder committed. I am very wealthy. You, I judge—and please take no umbrage, sir—are very poor.
“I can make you comfortable for the rest of your life, extremely comfortable, Mr. Crandall, if only you will put aside your thoughts, your unworthy thoughts, of anger and personal vengeance. I have a business competitor, you see, who has been—”
Crandall turned him off. “Go serve your own seven years,” he venomously told the blank screen. Then, suddenly, it was funny. He lay back in the chair and laughed his head off.
That butter-faced old slob! Quoting religious texts at him!
But the call had served a purpose. Somehow it put the scene with Polly in the perspective of ridicule. To think of the woman sitting in her frowsy little apartment, trembling over her dingy affairs of more than ten years ago! To think she was afraid he had bled and battled for seven years because of that!
He thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “Well, anyway, I bet it did her good.”
And now he was hungry.
He thought of having a meal sent up, just to avoid a possible rendezvous with another of Stephanson’s ball-throwers, but decided against it. If Stephanson was really hunting him seriously, it would not be much of a job to have something put into the food he was sent. He’d be much safer eating in a restaurant chosen at random.
Besides, a few bright lights, a little gaiety, would be really welcome. This was his first night of freedom—and he had to wash that Polly taste out of his mouth.
He checked the corridor carefully before going out. There was nothing, but the action reminded him of a tiny planet near Vega where you made exactly the same precautionary gesture every time you emerged from one of the tunnels formed by the long, parallel lines of moist, carboniferous ferns.
Because if you didn’t—well, there was an enormous leech-like mollusc that might be waiting there, a creature which could flip chunks of shell with prodigious force. The shell merely stunned its prey, but stunned it long enough for the leech to get in close.
And that leech could empty a man in ten minutes flat.
Once he’d been hit by a fragment of shell, and while he’d been lying there, Henck— Good old Blotto Otto! Cranda smiled. Was it possible that the two of them would look back on those hideous adventures, one day, with actual nostalgia, the kind of beery, pleasant memories that soldiers develop after even the ugliest of wars? Well, and if they die they hadn’t gone through them for the sake of fat cats lik Mr. Edward Ballaskia and his sanctified dreams of evil.