“Never!” Peace said numbly.
“I suppose you’re right. Nobody in his right mind would desecrate a mint, laser-imprimed, Waldo-folded 2292 newspaper.” Pennycook gave Peace a conspiratorial glance. “It’s a long time since I’ve seen a specimen as good as this—it’s almost as if you’d got hold of an extroverter and gone back for it.”
“But that sort of thing is illegal,” Peace said, winking in an effort to pass himself off as a useful source of contraband. The mentality of the dedicated collector was foreign to him, but—now that he finally understood the situation—he was determined to take every advantage it offered. “Listen, Mr. Pennycook, do you…”
“Call me Reggie, please.”
“Okay, Reggie—I’m Warren—do you think we could go into your office and talk? I feel a bit awkward standing around with practically no clothes on.” Acutely conscious of the thinness of his legs, Peace endured a head-to-foot perusal of his body.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you about that—I have to be very discreet, you know,” Pennycook said. “How did you lose your clothes?”
“Well…” Peace was stumped for a suitable reply. “You know how it is.”
Penny cook’s brow cleared. “I get it! Say no more, Warren.”
“I won’t,” Peace assured him.
“Her husband came home unexpectedly and you had to run for it, you randy old jack-rabbit.”
Pennycook gave Peace an amiable punch on the shoulder. “I don’t mind telling you, Warren, when you came in here dressed like that, and reeking of that awful rose perfume, I thought you were…”
“How dare you!”
“It’s all right—now that I know you better I can tell you’re a bit of a stud.”
Peace was nodding his agreement when a disturbing new thought crossed his mind. He could divine within himself no interest whatsoever in the opposite sex, which seemed curious in the case of a healthy young man who had had no physical gratification in over a month. I’ve been too tired, he decided, pushing aside memories of how all his comrades in the Legion—despite exhaustion and malnutrition—had spent their scant leisure planning the orgies of the next leave period. Frowning, and more than a little subdued, he followed Pennycook into an office at the rear of the premises.
“Have you any idea how I could get some clothes?” he said. “I don’t mind what it costs.”
Pennycook nodded. “The Ten Monk Tailors is a few doors along the block. I could ask somebody to bring you a suit and some other things.”
“Ten monits! That’s not bad.”
“It’ll be more like a hundred—inflation, you know.” Pennycook turned away with a humorous glance at Peace’s bare legs. “You really are a randy old jack-rabbit, Warren.”
“Don’t keep saying that,” Peace replied irritably, not wishing to be reminded of the vast new areas of unspeakable sin which might lie in his past. He glanced around the office and his attention was caught by an electronic calendar which announced the date as 6 September 2386. The red-glowing figures blurred in his vision and came back into sharp focus as he suddenly grasped their significance. If the calendar was accurate, it meant that the time machine—in one of the damping oscillations about which Professor Legge had spoken—had dropped him off at a point two months before he had joined the Space Legion.
A weakness developed in Peace’s knees as, with a thrill of almost superstitious awe, he realized that his mysterious former self was alive in some other part of the galaxy at that very moment, no doubt busily adding to the mountain of guilt which would eventually drive him to the Legion’s recruiting office and the memory eraser. The concept, inured to shock though he was, threw Peace into a mental spin.
“I’ll call the tailors now,” Pennycook said, sitting down at his telephone. “Fix you up in no time.”
“Thanks,” Peace said abstractedly. “By the way, is your calendar right?”
“Why? Don’t you know what day it is?”
“It’s not that.” Peace strove to orient himself in the present. “I’ve been travelling a lot and I’m losing track of the time zones.”
“We use a compatible local calendar to match the Aspatrian seasons,” Pennycook said. “If you want the date on Earth it’s … let me see … the eighth of November.”
Peace sat down abruptly, his legs giving way altogether as it came to him that—simply by lying in wait outside the Legion recruiting station in Porterburg, Earth, in two days’ time—he would be able to meet the one person in the universe who could answer all his questions.
9
A night’s sleep in a comfortable hotel bed, the feeling of being clean and well fed, the knowledge that he was properly dressed and had money in his pocket—all these should have improved Peace’s frame of mind as he set out to walk to the spaceport in Touchdown City.
Instead, his brain used its renewed energies to dredge up further hints at his abnormality. Not only did it appear that he had an unsavoury reputation as far as small boys were concerned, but there was the curious business of Professor Legge’s daughter and the time machine. He, Warren Peace, had defied death at gunpoint rather than step into the machine—and yet he had willingly thrown himself into it to escape the embrace of a woman. The only crumb of comfort he could derive from his memory of the incident was that the female concerned had resembled a two-metres-tall amorous blancmange. Perhaps, Peace speculated, he would have reacted differently had she been young, slim and pretty.
As he walked through the crisp brightness of the autumn morning, Peace put himself to the test by staring long and hard at every attractive girl he saw among the city crowds. He derived a certain aesthetic pleasure from their appearance, but to his disappointment felt none of the stirrings he believed appropriate to a recent member of the brutal and licentious soldiery.
The experiment came to an abrupt end when, in his anxiety for results, he failed to observe that one subject was accompanied by a bull-necked heavyweight of jealous disposition who spun on his heel and made a grab for Peace’s collar. The agility Peace had developed in a dozen battle zones got him out of what could have been a nasty situation, but he decided not to risk drawing any further attention to himself.
He was not scheduled to join the Legion until the following day, which meant he was not now being hunted as a deserter—nor had he yet done any of the other things which were to get him into trouble—so it seemed advisable to keep his nose clean until he got safely to Earth. The civil spaceport was further away than the hotel clerk had given him to believe, and Peace began to regret his decision to walk. On impulse he hailed a passing taxi. The yellow car pulled to a halt at the curb beside him and its window slid down to reveal the lugubrious countenance of Trev, the driver who was destined to have the same window beat in on top of him by Peace a month later.
Peace instinctively covered his own face with his hands and hissed, “Go away! Why don’t you leave me alone?”
Trev’s face twitched with indignation and he accelerated off along the street, mouthing silently.
Unnerved by the brief encounter, Peace made himself as inconspicuous as possible during the remainder of the walk. Ten minutes later he reached the spaceport and was surprised to find it was only about the size of a large sports stadium, and had a similar kind of architecture. So many spaceships were continuously arriving and departing that the air above the field was darkened by a huge spout-shaped cloud of blurred dumb-bells. Peace was shocked by the magnitude of the traffic control problems involved, until he noticed that the ship’s trajectories criss-crossed through each other at will, and it dawned on him that the peculiar form of locomotion the vessels employed, in which they were neither in one place nor another at any given instant, meant it was impossible for them to collide.