“Get out of the way,” he warned frantically. “You’ll get yourself killed.”
The woman caught a vertical frame and pulled herself down in front of him, disregarding the pistol.
“Take it easy, Tony,” she said gently. “You’ve been neglecting your milk again, haven’t you?”
Garnett stared up at her face. It was the colourless face of an alien woman, but those eyes….
After a long time he said, “Janice.”
She nodded and Garnett felt himself slide over the edge of reality into darkness.
The woman cradled his head in thin brown arms with a kind of reverence. “You did love me,” she whispered. “You did!”
Though large by Earth standards, the spaceship was in fact a rather old and rather shabby commercial vessel, the equivalent of a tramp steamer. Nor did the fact that its main drive had not been activated for forty-five Earth years make the task of getting under way any easier. There were many unforeseen difficulties in preparing for the journey and after three days it was still far from ready.
Garnett opened his eyes and found himself wrapped in a soft, warm cocoon which was anchored to the wall of a green and silver room. There was the smell of hot soup and he realised he had not eaten for a long time. He raised his head and looked around.
She was there beside him—the woman who had looked at him with Janice’s eyes. He remembered vaguely that she had been there on earlier occasions when he had wakened and fallen back into the sleep on which his body was gorging itself. Then he had been able to accept the impossible, but how—how could it be?
“Awake at last,” she said quickly, nervously. “It must have been the smell of food. The way to a man’s heart…. What disgusting anatomical details some of these sayings conjure up—or is it just my mind?”
Garnett closed his eyes and smiled peacefully. He knew Janice Villiers when he heard her.
“Are you going to sleep again, Tony? Or am I too horrible to look at?”
He took her hand. “I’m not going to sleep, so stop asking questions and provide a few answers.”
“All right, all right—don’t let the fact that you’re bigger than I am now go to your head. I can only remember part of what Xoanon told me. He said the only way they could control somebody down there was for one of them to have his own identity temporarily erased so that the new patterns could be impressed on his brain. Xoanon called it becoming a living analogue, whatever that means. He said a person they were controlling existed in two bodies at once, one up here and one down there. If anything happened to the body on Earth the identity was preserved up here—it’s a bit like astral bodies, isn’t it?”
“That means you too were under control?”
Janice shook her head. “I wasn’t—not until they discovered their mistake when they tried to kill you, then they had to act quickly. One of their women voluntarily died for me, Tony. Or, at least, her identity is in indefinitely prolonged storage—but she still had to go through it. Her name was Temnare. I’ve learned something from her.”
Garnett thought in silence. “I wasn’t under control though. If the meteorite had killed me, that would have been the end.”
“I know. Xoanon wasn’t: happy about it, but the population of the ship has grown to over three hundred and all of them will die eventually unless they get it back to their own world. The vitamin shortages caused by synthetic food are already chronic—look at my new hair! What would you do in a case where the life of one stranger was weighed against the lives of three hundred friends?”
“Well, if you put it like that…. Whose side are you on anyway?”
“I’m on their side. I’m one of them now. I can’t go back to Earth with you, Tony.”
He had known it was coming, and the decision was strangely easy. “I’m not going back to Earth either. I’m finished building aeroplanes and, from what the doctors told me, a low-gravity world is just what I need. Besides, all this hasn’t really changed anything so far as I am concerned. You might as well get ready to laugh—but I …’ He hesitated.
Janice smiled. “Go ahead and say it, Tony—some things have changed.”
Telemart Three
Four days after the honeymoon, Ted Trymble came home from golf and found his wife had been unfaithful to him. The evidence was there—right outside his front door—for all the world to see.
“Why did you do it, Maggie?” he demanded, setting his clubs down in a corner with exaggerated care. He kept his face immobile and his voice crisp, pretending to be not unduly shocked, though inwardly he was praying to hear it was all a mistake.
But Maggie smiled her calm, careless smile and shrugged, “It was just an impulse,” she said. “An irresistible impulse.”
Ted went to the window and eyed the evidence. The black Turbo-Cadillac was almost as long as the house, and its haunches gleamed in the late afternoon sun like those of a panther about to spring. So she was admitting it, just like that.
“Maggie,” he said reasonably. “Everybody gets that kind of impulse now and then, but they just have to learn to control it.”
“I can’t,” she replied blandly. “When I find something I like—I buy it.”
“I see.” Ted went into the kitchen, took a beer bulb from the the refrigerator and squirted some of the frothy liquid into his mouth. He sat down in the cool seclusion of the dining alcove to consider the matter of his wife’s dereliction. Maggie’s parents had left her a lump sum of almost $100,000, the income from which was just enough to maintain Ted and her in modest comfort for the rest of their lives. When they got engaged the agreement was that the capital would be kept intact. Ted was a personable young man and he knew he could probably have married real money; but he had exchanged his boyish hopes of someday owning a private airplane and yacht for the certitude of never having to work. And he had been prepared to stick to the bargain because marriage was, in his opinion, still a sacred covenant.
The trouble was that Maggie appeared not to share his high sense of principle—for she had just blown a noticeable fraction of their livelihood in one afternoon. A pang of anguish caused Ted’s fingers to clamp inwards on the plastic bulb, and a wavering stream of beer leaped across the kitchen. He composed himself with an effort and went back into the lounge.
“I forgive you this time, Maggie,” he said stiffly. “I guess it won’t do any harm for me to be seen in a better car, but you must promise not to do it again.”
“Of course, honey.” Maggie spoke a lack of effort which Ted found disturbing, and she went on flicking the glowing pages of a tri-di magazine.
Two days later he came in from a morning’s workout in the gymnasium to find that his fears had been well founded. Maggie was sporting a bracelet of genuine green-veined Venusian gold costing roughly ten times as much as its counterpart in Earth gold would have done.
“I promised not to buy another car,” was her defence. “This isn’t another car, is it? It doesn’t look much like a car to me.” She flirted her wrist in his face and the bracelet’s chunky links clicked like the action of a well-oiled rifle.
“It isn’t a car,” Ted agreed, ‘but it’s something we can afford even less. What about our investments?”
“This is an investment. Isn’t gold an investment?”
“Not that kind. Don’t you ever read the financial pages? Don’t you know that big nuclear powered ships have just been proved out on the Venus and Mars hauls? The cost of Venusian gold at the moment is ninety per cent freight charge, but by this time next year it’ll be as common as dirt.”
Maggie sniffed disbelievingly. “Well, I was bored sitting here by myself. Other girls’ husbands stay at home with them.”