“Oh, it gets done,” the yellow-haired young man laughed as the cylinder began to slide down over him. “Whenever there’s a piece of work that only a human being can do, one us—the nearest responsible individual with the applicable training—takes care of it. But our personality goals are different from yours. In the words of the proverb: All play and no work makes Jack a dull boy.”
And he was gone.
So Mr. Mead went back to Mrs. Brucks’ room and told the others that the Department of State, as personified by Mr. Storku, couldn’t help them with Winthrop’s stubbornness.
Mary Ann Carthington tightened the curl of her blonde hair with a business-like forefinger while she considered the matter. “You told him all that you told us, and he still wouldn’t do anything, Mr. Mead? Are you sure he knows who you are?”
Mr. Mead didn’t bother to answer her. He had other things on his mind. Not only was his spirit badly bruised and scratched by his recent experiences, but his golf knickers had just woken into sentiency. And whereas the jacket merely had attempted to express its great affection for his person by trying to cuddle under his chin, the knickers went in more for a kind of patrolling action. Up and down on his thighs they rippled; back and forth across his buttocks they marched. Only by concentrating hard and pressing them tight against his body with his hands was he able to keep away the feeling of having been swallowed by an anaconda.
“Sure he knows who he is,” Dave Pollock told her. “Ollie waved his vice-presidency in his face, but Storku heard that Sweetbottom Septic Tanks Preferred fell to the bottom of the stock market just 481 years ago today, so he wasn’t having any. Hey, Ollie?”
“I don’t think that’s funny, Dave Pollock,” Mary Ann Carthington said and shook her head at him once in a “so, there!” manner. She knew that old beanpole of a school-teacher was just jealous of Mr. Mead, but she wasn’t sure whether it was because he didn’t make as much money or because he wasn’t nearly as distinguished-looking. The only thing, if a big executive like Mr. Mead couldn’t get them out of this jam, then nobody could. And that would be awful, positively and absolutely awful.
She would never get back to Edgar Rapp. And while Edgar might not be everything a girl like Mary Ann wanted, she was quite willing to settle for him at this point. He worked hard and made a good living. His compliments were pale, pedestrian things, true, but at least he could be counted on not to say anything that tore a person into little, worthless bits right before their very eyes. Not like somebody she knew. And the sooner she could leave the twenty-fifth century and be forever away from that somebody, the better.
“Now, Mr. Mead,” she cooed insistently. “I’m sure he told you something we could do. He didn’t just tell you to give up hope completely and absolutely, did he?”
The executive caught the strap end of his knickers as it came unbuckled and started rolling exultantly up his leg. He glared at her out of eyes that had seen just too damn much, that felt things had gone just too damn far.
“He told me something we could do,” he said with careful viciousness. “He said the Temporal Embassy could help us, if we only had the right kind of pull there. All we need is somebody with pull in the Temporal Embassy.”
Mary Ann Carthington almost bit the end off the lipstick she was applying at that moment. Without looking up, she knew that Mrs. Brucks and Dave Pollock had both turned to stare at her. And she knew, deep down to the bottom of her dismayed intestines, just exactly what they were thinking.
“Well, I certainly don’t—”
“Now, don’t be modest, Mary Ann,” Dave Pollock interrupted. “This is your big chance—and right now it looks like our only chance. We’ve got about an hour and a half left. Get yourself into a jumper, skedaddle out there, and girlie, turn on the charm!”
Mrs. Brucks sat down beside her and gave her shoulders the benefit of a heavy maternal arm. “Listen, Miss Carthington, sometimes we have to do things, is not so easy. But what else? Stuck here is better? That you like? So—” she spread her hands—“a touch here with the powder puff, a touch there with the lipstick, a this, a that, and, believe me, he won’t know what to do first for you. Crazy about you he is already—you mean to say a little favor he wouldn’t do, if you asked him?” She shrugged her massive contempt for such a sleeveless thought.
“You really think so? Well—maybe—” The girl began a preen that started at her delicately firm bottom and ended in a couple of self-satisfied wriggles somewhere around her chest.
“No maybes,” Mrs. Brucks informed her after considering the matter with great care. “A sure, yes. A certainly, yes. But maybes, no. A pretty girl like you, a man like him, nothing to maybe about. It’s the way, let me tell you, Miss Carthington, it’s always the way. What a man like Mr. Mead can’t accomplish, a woman has to do all the time. And a pretty girl like you can do it without lifting her little finger.”
Mary Ann Carthington gave a nod of agreement to this rather female view of history and stood up with determination. Dave Pollock immediately called for a jumper. She stepped back as the great cylinder materialized in the room.
“Do I have to?” she asked, biting her lip. “Those awful things, they’re so upsetting.”
He took her arm and began working her under the jumper with a series of gentle, urging tugs. “You can’t walk: we don’t have the time anymore. Believe me, Mary Ann, this is D-day and it-hour. So be a good girl and get under there and— Hey, listen. A good angle with the temporal supervisor might be about how his people will be stuck in our period if Winthrop goes on being stubborn. If anyone around here is responsible for them, he is. So, as soon as you get there—”
“I don’t need you to tell me how to handle the temporal supervisor, Dave Pollock!” she said haughtily, flouncing under the jumper. “After all, he happens to be a friend of mine, not of yours—a very good friend of mine!”
“Sure,” Pollock groaned, “but you still have to convince the man. And all I’m suggesting—” He broke off as the cylinder slid the final distance down to the floor and disappeared with the girl inside.
He turned back to the others who had been watching anxiously. “Well, that’s it,” he announced, flapping his arms with a broad, hopeless gesture. “That’s our very last hope. A Mary Ann!”
Mary Ann Carthington felt exactly like a Last Hope as she materialized in the Temporal Embassy.
She fought down the swimming nausea which always seemed to accompany jumper transportation and, shaking her head rapidly, managed to draw a deep breath.
As a means of getting places, the jumper certainly beat Edgar Rapp’s gurgling old Buick—if only it didn’t make you feel like a chocolate malted. That was the trouble with this time: every halfway nice thing in it had such unpleasant aftereffects!
The ceiling undulated over her head in the great rotunda where she was now standing and bulged a huge purplish lump down at her. It still looked, she decided nervously, like a movie house chandelier about to fall.
“Yes?” inquired the purplish lump politely. “Whom did you wish to see?”
She licked at her lipstick, then squared her shoulders. She’d been through all this before. You had to carry these things off with a certain amount of poise: it just did not do to show nervousness before a ceiling.
“I came to see Gygyo—I mean, is Mr. Gygyo Rablin in?”
“Mr. Rablin is not at size at the moment. He will return in fifteen minutes. Would you like to wait in his office? He has another visitor there.”