Now Wait for Last Year, Page 3

  But as to Lilistar: The reegs had no answer there because they had developed none for themselves; the ’Starmen had been their enemies for centuries and it was too late for anyone to give or take any advice on this subject. And anyhow ’Star “advisers” had already managed to take up residence on Terra for the performance of security functions … as if a four-armed, antlike organism six feet high could pass unnoticed on a New York street.

  The presence of ’Star advisers, however, easily passed unnoticed; the ’Starmen were phycomycetous mentally, but morphologically they could not be distinguished from Terrans. There was a good reason for this. In Mousterian times a flotilla from Lilistar’s Alpha Centaurus Empire had migrated to the Sol System, had colonized Earth and to some extent Mars. A fracas with deadly overtones had broken out between settlers of the two worlds and a long, degenerating war had followed, the upshot of which had been the decline of both subcultures to acute and dreary barbarism. Due to climatic faults the Mars colony had at last died out entirely; the Terran, however, had groped its way up through historical ages and at last back to civilization. Cut off from Alpha by the Lilistar-reeg conflict, the Terran colony had again become planet-wide, elaborated, bountiful, had advanced to the stage of launching first an orbiting satellite, and then an unmanned ship to Luna, and at last a manned ship … and was, as a chef-d’oeuvre, able once more to contact its system of origin. The surprise, of course, had been vast on both sides.

  “Cat got your tongue?” Phyllis Ackerman said to Eric, seating herself beside him in the cramped lounge. She smiled, an effort which transfigured her thin, delicately cut face; she looked, for a moment, appealingly pretty. “Order me a drink, too. So I can face the world of bolo bats and Jean Harlow and Baron von Richtofen and Joe Louis and—what the hell is it?” She searched her memory, eyes squeezed shut. “I’ve blocked it out of my mind. Oh yes. Tom Mix. And his Ralston Straightshooters. With the Wrangler. That wretched Wrangler. And that cereal! And those eternal goddam box tops. You know what we’re in for, don’t you? Another session with Orphan Annie and her li’l decoder badge … we’ll have to listen to ads for Ovaltine and then those numbers read out for us to take down and decode—to find out what Annie does on Monday. God.” She bent to reach for her drink, and he could not resist peering with near-professional interest as the top of her dress gave way to show the natural line of her small, articulated pale breasts.

  Put by this spectacle in a reasonably good mood, Eric said playfully but cautiously, “One day we’ll jot down the numbers the fake announcer gives over the fake radio, decode them with the Orphan Annie decoder badge, and—” The message will say, he thought glumly, Make a separate peace with the reegs. At once.

  “I know,” Phyllis said, and thereupon finished for him. “ ‘It’s hopeless, Earthmen. Give up now. This is the Monarch of the reegs speaking; looky heah, y’all: I’ve infiltrated radio station WMAL in Washington, D.C., and I’m going to destroy you.’ ” She somberly drank from her tall stemmed glass. “And in addition the Ovaltine you’ve been drinking—”

  “I wasn’t going to say precisely that.” But she had come awfully darn close. Nettled, Eric said, “Like the rest of your family you’ve got a gene that requires you to interrupt before a nonblooder—”

  “A what?”

  “That is what we call you,” he said grimly. “You Ackermen.”

  “Go ahead, then, doctor.” Her gray eyes lit with amusement. “Say your tiny say.”

  Eric said, “Never mind. Who’s the guest?”

  The great pale eyes of the woman had never seemed so large, so composed; they dominated and commanded with their utter inner universe of certitude. Of tranquility created by absolute, unchanging knowledge of all that deserved to be known. “Suppose we wait and see.” And then, not yet affecting the changelessness of her eyes, her lips began to dance with a wicked, teasing playfulness; a moment later a new and different spark ignited within her eyes and thereupon the expression of her entire face underwent a total change. “The door,” she said wickedly, her eyes gleaming and intense, her mouth twitching in a mirth-ridden giggle almost that of an adolescent girl, “flies open and there stands a silent delegate from Proxima. Ah, what a sight. A bloated greasy enemy reeg. Secretly, and incredibly because of Freneksy’s snooping secret police, a reeg here officially to negotiate for a—” She broke off and then at last in a low monotone finished, “—a separate peace between us and them.” With a dark and moody expression, her eyes no longer lit by any spark whatsoever, she listlessly finished her drink. “Yes, that’ll be the day. How well I can picture it. Old Virgil sits in, beaming and cackling as usual. And sees his war contracts, every fnugging last one of them, slither down the drain. Back to fake mink. Back to the bat crap days … when the whole factory stank to high heaven.” She laughed shortly, a brisk bark of derision. “Any minute now, doctor. Oh sure”

  “Freneksy’s cops,” Eric said, sharing her mood, “as you pointed out yourself, would swoop down on Wash-35 so dalb fast—”

  “I know. It’s a fantasy, a wish-fulfillment dream. Born out of hopeless longing. So it hardly matters whether Virgil would decide to mastermind—and try to carry off—such an encounter or not, does it? Because it couldn’t be done successfully in a million light-years. It could be tried. But not done.”

  “Too bad,” Eric said, half to himself, deep in thought.

  “Traitor! You want to be popped into the slave-labor pool?”

  Eric, after pondering, said cautiously, “I want—”

  “You don’t know what you want, Sweetscent; every man involved in an unhappy marriage loses the metabiological capacity to know what he does want—it’s been taken away from him. You’re a smelly little shell, trying to do the correct thing but never quite making it because your miserable little long-suffering heart isn’t in it. Look at you now! You’ve managed to squirm away from me.”

  “Have not.”

  “—So we’re no longer touching physically. Especially thighwise. Oh, perish thighwise from the universe. But it is hard, is it not, to do it, to squirm away in such close quarters … here in the lounge. And yet you’ve managed to do it, haven’t you?”

  To change the subject Eric said, “I heard on TV last night that the quatreologist with the funny beard, that Professor Wald, is back from—”

  “No. He’s not Virgil’s guest.”

  “Marm Hastings, then?”

  “That Taoist spellbinding nut and crank and fool? You manufacturing a joke, Sweetscent? Is that it? You suppose Virgil would tolerate a marginal fake, that—” She made an obscene upward-jerking gesture with her thumb, at the same time grinning in a show of her white, clean, and very impressive clear teeth. “Maybe,” she said, “it’s Ian Norse.”

  “Who’s he?” He had heard the name; it had a vaguely familiar sound to it, and he knew that in asking her he was making a tactical error; still he did it: this, if anything, was his weakness in regard to women. He led where they followed—sometimes. But more than once, especially at critical times in his life, in the major junctions, he followed guilelessly where they led.

  Phyllis sighed. “Ian’s firm makes all those shiny sterile new very expensive artifical organs you cleverly graft into rich dying people; you mean, doctor, you’re not clear as to whom you’re indebted?”

  “I know,” Eric said, irritably, feeling chagrin. “With everything else on my mind I forgot momentarily; that’s all.”

  “Maybe it’s a composer. As in the days of Kennedy; maybe it’s Pablo Casals. God, he would be old. Maybe it’s Beethoven. Hmm.” She pretended to ponder. “By God, I do think he said something about that. Ludwig von somebody; is there a Ludwig von Somebodyelse other than—”

  “Christ,” Eric said angrily, weary of being teased. “Stop it.”

  “Don’t pull rank; you’re not so great. Keeping one creepy old man alive century after century.” She giggled her low, sweet, and very intimate warm giggle of delighted mirth.

  Eric said, with as
much dignity as he could manage, “I also maintain TF&D’s entire work force of eighty thousand key individuals. And as a matter of fact, I can’t do that from Mars, so I resent all this. I resent it very much.” You included, he thought bitterly to himself.

  “What a ratio,” Phyllis said. “One artiforg surgeon to eighty thousand patients—eighty thousand and one. But you have your team of robants to help you … perhaps they can make do while you’re absent.”

  “A robant is an it that stinks,” he said, paraphrasing T. S. Eliot.

  “And an artiforg surgeon,” Phyllis said; “is an it that grovels.”

  He glowered at her; she sipped her drink and showed no contrition. He could not get to her; she simply had too much psychic strength for him.

  The omphalos of Wash-35, a five-story brick apartment building where Virgil had lived as a boy, contained a truly modern apartment of their year 2055 with every detail of convenience which Virgil could obtain during these war years. Several blocks away lay Connecticut Avenue, and, along it, stores which Virgil remembered. Here was Gammage’s, a shop at which Virgil had bought Tip Top comics and penny candy. Next to it Eric made out the familiar shape of People’s Drugstore; the old man during his childhood had bought a cigarette lighter here once and chemicals for his Gilbert Number Five glass-blowing and chemistry set.

  “What’s the Uptown Theater showing this week?” Harv Ackerman murmured as their ship coasted along Connecticut Avenue so that Virgil could review these treasured sights. He peered.

  It was Jean Harlow in Hell’s Angels, which all of them had seen at least twice. Harv groaned.

  “But don’t forget that lovely scene,” Phyllis reminded him, “where Harlow says, ‘I think I’ll go slip into something more comfortable,’ and then when she returns—”

  “I know, I know,” Harv said irritably. “Okay, that I like.”

  The ship taxied from Connecticut Avenue onto McComb Street and soon was parking before 3039 with its black wrought-iron fence and tiny lawn. When the hatch slid back, however, Eric smelled—not the city air of a long-gone Terran capital—but the bitterly thin and cold atmosphere of Mars; he could hardly get his lungs full of it and he stood gasping, feeling disoriented and sick.

  “I’ll have to goose them about the air machinery,” Virgil complained as he descended the ramp to the sidewalk, assisted by Jonas and Harv. It did not seem to bother him, however; he spryly hiked toward the doorway of the apartment building.

  Robants in the shape of small boys hopped to their feet and one of them yelled authentically, “Hey Virg! Where you been?”

  “Had to do an errand for my mother,” Virgil cackled, his face shining with delight. “How are ya, Earl? Hey, I got some good Chinese stamps my dad gave me; he got them at his office. There’s duplicates; I’ll trade you.” He fished in his pocket, halting on the porch of the building.

  “Hey, you know what I have?” a second robant child shrilled. “Some dry ice; I let Bob Rougy use my Flexie for it; you can hold it if you want.”

  “I’ll trade you a big-little book for it,” Virgil said as he produced his key and unlocked the front door of the building. “How about Buck Rogers and the Doom Comet? That’s real keen.”

  As the rest of the party descended from the ship, Phyllis said to Eric, “Offer the children a mint-condition 1952 Marilyn Monroe nude calendar and see what they’ll give you for it. At least half a popsicle.”

  As the apartment house door swung aside, a TF&D guard belatedly appeared. “Oh, Mr. Ackerman; I didn’t realize you’d arrived.” The guard ushered them into the dark, carpeted hall.

  “Is he here yet?” Virgil asked, with sudden apparent tension.

  “Yes sir. In the apt resting. He asked not to be disturbed for several hours.” The guard, too, seemed nervous.

  Halting, Virgil said, “How large is his party?”

  “Just himself, an aide, and two Secret Service men.”

  “Who’s for a glass of ice-cold Kool-Aid?” Virgil said reflexively over his shoulder as he led the way.

  “Me, me,” Phyllis said, mimicking Virgil’s enthusiastic tone. “I want imitation fruit raspberry lime; what about you, Eric? How about gin bourbon lime or cherry Scotch vodka? Or didn’t they sell those flavors back in 1935?”

  To Eric, Harv said, “I’d like a place to lie down and rest, myself. This Martian air makes me weak as a kitten.” His face had become mottled and ill-looking. “Why doesn’t he build a dome? Keep real air in here?”

  “Maybe,” Eric pointed out, “there’s a purpose in this. Prevents him from retiring here for good; makes him leave after a short while.”

  Coming up to them, Jonas said, “Personally I enjoy coming to this anachronistic place, Harv. It’s a fnugging museum.” To Eric he said, “In all fairness, your wife does a superb job of providing artifacts for this period. Listen to that—what’s it called?—that radio playing in that apt.” Dutifully they listened. It was “Betty and Bob,” the ancient soap opera, emanating from the long-departed past. And even Eric found himself impressed; the voices seemed alive and totally real. They were here now, not mere echoes of themselves. How Kathy had achieved this he didn’t know.

  Steve, the huge and handsome, masculine Negro janitor of the building—or rather his robant simulacrum—appeared then, smoking his pipe and nodding cordially to them all. “Morning, doctor. Little nip of cold we having these days. Kids be getting they sled out soonly. My own boy, Georgie, he saving for a sled, he say little while ago to me.”

  “I’ll chip in a 1934 dollar,” Ralf Ackerman said, reaching for his wallet. In a sotto voce aside to Eric he said, “Or does old papa Virgil have it that the colored kid isn’t entitled to a sled?”

  “That no nevermind, Mr. Ackerman,” Steve assured him. “Georgie, he earn he sled; he not want tips but real and troo pay.” The dignified dark robant moved off then and was gone.

  “Damn convincing,” Harv said presently.

  “Really is,” Jonas agreed. He shivered. “God, to think that the actual man’s been dead a century. It’s distinctly hard to keep in mind that we’re on Mars, not even on Earth in our own time—I don’t like it. I like things to appear what they really are.”

  A thought came to Eric. “Do you object to a stereo tape of a symphony played back in the evening when you’re at home in your apt?”

  “No,” Jonas said. “But that’s totally different.”

  “It’s not,” Eric disagreed. “The orchestra isn’t there, the original sound has departed, the hall in which it was recorded is now silent; all you possess is twelve hundred feet of iron oxide tape that’s been magnetized in a specific pattern … it’s an illusion just like this. Only this is complete.” Q.E.D., he thought, and walked on then, toward the stairs. We live with illusion daily, he reflected. When the first bard rattled off the first epic of a sometime battle, illusion entered our lives; the Iliad is as much a “fake” as those robant children trading postage stamps on the porch of the building. Humans have always striven to retain the past, to keep it convincing; there’s nothing wicked in that. Without it we have no continuity; we have only the moment. And, deprived of the past, the moment—the present—has little meaning, if any.

  Maybe, he pondered as he ascended the stairs, that’s my problem with Kathy. I can’t remember our combined past: can’t recall the days when we voluntarily lived with each other … now it’s become an involuntary arrangement, derived God knows how from the past.

  And neither of us understands it. Neither of us can puzzle out its meaning or its motivating mechanism. With a better memory we could turn it back into something we could fathom.

  He thought, Maybe this is the first sign of old age making its dread appearance. And for me at thirty-four!

  Phyllis, halting on the stair, waiting for him, said, “Have an affair with me, doctor.”

  Inwardly he quailed, felt hot, felt terror, felt excitement, felt hope, felt hopelessness, felt guilt, felt eagerness.

  He said, “You
have the most perfect teeth known to man.”

  “Answer.”

  “I—” He tried to think of an answer. Could words respond to this? But this had come in the form of words, had it not? “And be roasted into a cinder by Kathy—who sees everything that goes on?” He felt the woman staring at him, staring and staring with her huge, star-fixed eyes. “Hmm,” he said, not too cleverly, and felt miserable and small and exactly precisely right to the last jot and tittle what he ought not to be.

  Phyllis said, “But you need it.”

  “Umm,” he said, wilting under this unwanted, undeserved female psychiatric examination of his evil, inner soul; she had it—his soul—and she was turning it over and over on her tongue. Goddam her! She had figured it out; she spoke the truth; he hated her, he longed to go to bed with her. And of course she knew—saw on his face—all this, saw it with her accursed huge eyes, eyes which no mortal woman ought to possess.

  “You’re going to perish without it,” Phyllis said. “Without true, spontaneous, relaxed, physical sheer—”

  “One chance,” he said hoarsely. “In a billion. Of getting away with it.” He managed, then, actually to laugh. “In fact our standing here right now on these damn stairs is folly. But what the——do you care?” He started on, then, actually passed her, continued on up to the second floor. What do you have to lose? he thought. It’s me; I’d be the one. You can handle Kathy just as easily as you can yank me around at the end of that line you keep paying out and reeling back.

  The door of Virgil’s private, modern apt stood open; Virgil had gone inside. The balance of the party straggled after him, the blood clan first, of course, then the mere titled officers of the firm.

  Eric entered—and saw Virgil’s guest.

  The guest; the man they had come here to see. Reclining, his face empty and slack, lips bulging dark purple and irregular, eyes fixed absently on nothing, was Gino Molinari. Supreme elected leader of Terra’s unified planetary culture, and the supreme commander of its armed forces in the war against the reegs.