Mary Ann Carthington thought swiftly. She didn’t entirely like the idea of another visitor, but maybe it would be for the best. The presence of a third party would be a restraining influence for both of them and would take a little of the inevitable edge off her coming back to Gygyo as a suppliant after what had happened between them.
But what was this about his not being “at size”? These twenty-fifth century people did so many positively weird things with themselves… .
“Yes, I’ll wait in his office,” she told the ceiling. “Oh, you needn’t bother,” she said to the floor as it began to ripple under her feet. “I know the way.”
“No bother at all, Miss,” the floor replied cheerfully and continued to carry her across the rotunda to Rablin’s private office. “It’s a pleasure.”
Mary Ann sighed and shook her head. Some of these houses were so opinionated! She relaxed and let herself be carried along, taking out her compact on the way for a last quick check of her hair and face.
But the glance at herself in the mirror evoked the memory again. She flushed and almost called for a jumper to take her hack to Mrs. Brucks’ room. No, she couldn’t—this was their last chance to get out of this world and back to their own. But damn Gygyo Rablin, anyway—damn and damn him!
A yellow square in the wall having dilated sufficiently, the floor carried her into Rablin’s private office and subsided to flatness again. She looked around, nodding slightly at the familiar surroundings.
There was Gygyo’s desk, if you could call that odd, purring thing a desk. There was that peculiar squirmy couch that—
She caught her breath. A young woman was lying on the couch, one of those horrible bald-headed women that they had here.
“Excuse me,” Mary Ann said in one fast breath. “I had no idea—I didn’t mean to—”
“That’s perfectly all right,” the young woman said, still staring up at the ceiling. “You’re not intruding. I just dropped in on Gygyo myself. Have a seat.”
As if taking a pointed hint, the floor shot up a section of Itself under Mary Ann’s bottom and, when she was securely cradled in it, lowered itself slowly to sitting height.
“You must be that twentieth century—” the young woman paused, then amended rapidly: “the visitor whom Gygyo has been seeing lately. My name’s Flureet. I’m just an old childhood friend—’way back from Responsibility Group Three.”
Mary Ann nodded primly. “How nice, I’m sure. My name is Mary Ann Carthington. And really, if in any way I’m—I mean I just dropped in to—”
“I told you it’s all right. Gygyo and I don’t mean a thing to each other. This Temporal Embassy work has kind of dulled his taste for the everyday female: they’ve either got to be stavisms or precursors. Some kind of anachronism, anyway. And I’m awaiting transformation—major transformation—so you couldn’t expect very strong feelings from my side right now. Satisfied? I hope so. Hello to you, Mary Ann.”
Flureet flexed her arm at the elbow several times in what Mary Ann recognized disdainfully as the standard greeting gesture. Such women! It made them look like a man showing off his muscle. And not so much as a polite glance in the direction of a guest!
“The ceiling said,” she began uncertainly, “that Gyg—Mr. Rablin isn’t at size at the moment. Is that like what we call not being at home?”
The bald girl nodded. “In a sense. He’s in this room, but he’s hardly large enough to talk to. Gygy’s size right now is —let me think, what did he say he was setting it for?—Oh, yes, 35 microns. He’s inside a drop of water in the field of that microscope to your left.”
Mary Ann swung around and considered the spherical black object resting on a table against the wall. Outside of the two eyepieces set flush with the surface, it had little in common with pictures of microscopes she had seen in magazines.
“In—in there? What’s he doing in there?”
“He’s on a micro-hunt. You should know your Gygyo by now. An absolutely incurable romantic. Who goes on micro-hunts anymore? And in a culture of intestinal amebae, of all things. Killing the beasties by hand instead of by routine psycho or even chemo therapy appeals to his dashing soul. Grow up, Gygyo, I said to him: these games are for children and for Responsibility Group Four children at that. Well, that hurt his pride and he said he was going in with a fifteen-minute lock. A fifteen-minute lock! When I heard that, I decided to come here and watch the battle, just in case.”
“Why—is a fifteen-minute lock dangerous?” Mary Ann asked. Her face was tightly set however; she was still thinking of that `you should know your Gygyo’ remark. That was another thing about this world she didn’t like: with all their talk of privacy and the sacred rights of the individual, men like Gygyo didn’t think twice of telling the most intimate matters about people to—to other people.
“Figure it out for yourself. Gygyo’s set himself for 35 microns. 35 Microns is about twice the size of most of the intestinal parasites he’ll have to fight—amebae like Endolimax nano, lodamoeba butschlii and Dientamoeba fragilis. But suppose he runs into a crowd of Endamoeba coli, to say nothing of our tropical dysentery friend, Endamoeba hystolytica? What then?”
“What then?” the blonde girl echoed. She had not the slightest idea. One did not face problems like this is San Francisco.
“Trouble, that’s what. Serious trouble. The colii might be as large as he is, and hystolyticae run even bigger. 36, 37 microns, sometimes more. Now, the most important factor on a micro-hunt, as you know, is size. Especially if you’re fool enough to limit your arsenal to a sword and won’t be seen carrying an automatic weapon even as insurance. Well, under those circumstances, you lock yourself down to smallness, so that you can’t get out and nobody can take you out for a full fifteen minutes, and you’re just asking for trouble. And trouble is just what our boy is having!”
“He is? l mean, is it bad?”
Flureet gestured at the microscope. “Have a look. I’ve adjusted my retina to the magnification, but you people aren’t up to that yet, I believe. You need mechanical devices for everything. Go ahead, have a Iook. That’s Dietamoeba fragilis he’s fighting now. Small, but fast. And very, very vicious.”
Mary Ann hurried to the spherically shaped microscope and stared intently through the eyepieces.
There, in the very center of the field, was Gygyo. A transparent bubble helmet covered his head and he was wearing some sort of thick but flexible one-piece garment over the rest of his body. About a dozen amebae the size of dogs swarmed about him, reaching for his body with blunt, glassy pseudopods. He hacked away at them with a great, two-handed sword in tremendous sweeps that cut in two the most venturesome and persistent of the creatures. But Mary Ann could see from his frantic breathing that he was getting tired. Every once in a while he glanced rapidly over his left shoulder as if keeping watch on something in the distance.
“Where does he get air from?” she asked.
“The suit always contains enough oxygen for the duration of the lock,” Flureet’s voice explained behind her, somewhat surprised at the question. “He has about five minutes to go, and I think he’ll make it. I think he’ll be shaken up enough though, to— Did you see that?”
Mary Ann gasped. An elongated, spindle-shaped creature ending in a thrashing whip-like streak had just darted across the field, well over Gygyo’s head. It was about one and a half times his size. He had gone into a crouch as it passed and the amebae surrounding him had also leaped away. They were back at the attack in a moment, however, once the danger had passed. Very wearily now, he continued to chop at them.