"So the capsules are technically moving at a hundred miles an hour, but they really don't move at all?"
"You could put it that way."
"Well, thank you, I guess, Mr. Shu."
On Sunday morning, after his devotions, Zwingli was sitting under the windows at the end of the pool, his favorite place to listen to music. Just now the music was Gliere's Ilya Mourametz. The dark sonorities seemed to tremble in his body, and in the structure of the airship around him; he could imagine that the Bayern was one vast diaphragm, that while the music played the ship was all music.
Miss Clitterhouse walked in and signaled to him. Zwingli turned the music down. "Yes?"
"There's something about Ed Stone on the news. I'll put it on the console here if you want it."
"All right, thank you." Zwingli turned the music up again and listened to it happily until it was over; then he keyed in the news playback.
"There are persistent rumors that Ed Stone, the missing messianic figure, is in hiding in the Vatican. Other stories are circulating that he has been seen in Moscow, in Bali, and that he is being held prisoner on a private zeppelin. In other news-"
Zwingli smiled and lit a cigar.
Through agents in Europe and America, Zwingli found a copy of Stone's old magazine and had it shipped. The price was quite high, even in dollars. Before he turned it over to Stone, he looked through it curiously. He noticed that several of the black-and-white illustrations featured insectile monsters with six legs. Was it from this magazine that the young man had formed his bizarre fantasies?
He read a few pages of the first story, "Dark Moon."
Above them and thirty feet away on a rocky ledge was a thing of horror. Basilisk eyes in a hairy head; gray, stringy hairs; and the fearful head ended in narrow, outthrust jaws, where more of the gray hairs hung like moss from lips that writhed and curled and sucked at the air with a whistling shrillness. Those jaws could crush a man to a pulp. And the head seemed huge until the body behind it came into view.
Zwingli shook his head. A few pages further on, he found:
In a dark-panelled room Herr Schwartzmann was waiting. (Ah, here was the villain: a German, naturally.) His gasp of amazement reflected the utter astonishment written upon his face, until that look gave place to one of satisfaction.
"Mademoiselle," he exclaimed, "-my dear Mademoiselle Diane! We had given you up for lost. I thought-I thought-"
"Yes," said Diane quietly, "I believe that I can well imagine what you thought."
"Ah!" said Herr Schwartzmann, and the look of satisfaction deepened. "I see that you understand now; you will be with us in this matter. We have plans for this young man's disposal."
Zwingli snorted and looked in the back of the magazine, where he found cheap advertisements for "Love Drops" and "Instant Relief from Burning Feet." That was rather sad.
On a morning in early November, Van Loon locked the comm room door, pocketed the card, then went down the corridor to the ladder beyond the stairs. He climbed the ladder, unlocked the hatch, pulled himself up onto the catwalk. He was whistling.
He locked the hatch again and stood up on the catwalk, listening to the familiar creak and rustle overhead, sniffing the faint aroma of diesel oil.
Now he went forward along the catwalk, past the closed doors of crew staterooms, farther along where the catwalk ran through emptiness, past the vent tube, seventy paces more ringing metallic on the catwalk to the control room. He put his card in, opened the door.
Peters was in the pilot's chair watching the dials. Ahead through the windscreen the towers of Munich were visible. Van Loon sat down in the copilot's chair and they watched in silence until the airport and the mooring tower came into view. "Ready?" Peters asked.
"Yes, go ahead."
Peters touched five keys on the console; one by one, the ceiling, walls and floor of the control room vanished, replaced by images from holocameras on the hull. Except for the control chairs and console, and the docking cone at the nose, the ship was transparent. Van Loon seemed to be floating in air, an illusion so strong that, as always, he had the crazy impulse to lean forward and spread his arms like the wings of a glider. It would not do to tell anyone about that; even Peters might not understand.
The mooring tower was coming up, ahead and a little to starboard. Computer-generated rings began to appear around the nose, and in the repeater on the console. The two men sat side by side with their hands on the armrests, with nothing to do. They were locked onto the tip of the tower; the autopilot corrected for every minute deviation as they slowly approached. The rings grew closer together, and a beeping tone climbed in pitch. The engines stopped; the tower drifted nearer, touched and clung. The docking was over. Van Loon sighed.
Zwingli took care of his business in Munich, spent a few hours with friends, and returned to the airship in time for dinner. He had cocktails with Stone in the lounge as usual.
"Mr. Stone," he said, "do you think it is curious that if your aliens exist, they have not come to rescue you?"
"Yeah, I wondered about that. They could do it. They got me out of a hospital once. They used to come through the walls and recharge my ring while I was asleep, so why couldn't they come in and leave me another ring?"
"Yes, why not?"
"I don't know. Maybe because if I put on the ring, you'd take it away from me, so that wouldn't work. But it could be that they just don't care anymore. I've already done what they wanted. If they got me out of here, some people would still believe I'm a phony."
"I see. You know that at some point we will let you go. What will you do then?"
"I'll tell my story, see if I can get more people to believe me. And then I'll just hang around till the end."
"To see how it all turns out."
"Yes."
"Mr. Stone, do you play cards?"
"Yeah, poker."
"Unfortunately poker is not a good game for two. Have you ever played piquet?"
"Never heard of it."
"It is quite an interesting game. I would be glad to teach it to you."
"Okay, why not?"
Zwingli found a deck of cards and a memopad in a cabinet, and gestured toward the game table. "Please." They sat down, and Zwingli began to shuffle the cards.
"I used to play piquet," he said, "with a secretary of mine, who was married, and decided not to come with me when I began to travel in the Bayern. He was quite a good player. I tried to teach the game to Captain Van Loon, but he does not have the head for it. Miss Clitterhouse does not like card games; she prefers Scrabble. The pilots all play chess. So you see, I have been waiting for you." He set the deck down. "Cut, please."
Zwingli picked up the deck again after the cut. "Now, there are two things you should know about piquet. First, it is played with thirty-two cards, the ace through the seven of each suit. So, if you have a lot of face cards, it is not so surprising. And, in fact, if you have a hand that has no face cards at all, that is carte blanche, and it is worth ten points. The other thing is, piquet is a game that is in two parts. First there is scoring of points for various things, and then there is play for tricks."
"Like pinochle?"
"Yes, quite similar. Now you see, I deal twelve cards to each of us, two at a time. The other eight we put here in the middle; that is the stock. The first five are the upper packet, the other three are the lower.
"Now, to begin, you discard any number of cards from one to five. You must discard at least one, but you can't discard more than five, and that means you can't find out what is in the lower packet. But I can, because I am the dealer. And you put your discards on your side of the table, not in the middle, because you can look at them later."