Kane felt some embarrassment. He was being crowded out an exit toward a
line of cabs. Several shiny ten-foot saucers with railings around them
whirred past and disappeared in the fog. All of them had two or more
people on them, and from the sound, there were quite a number of them
up in the fog somewhere.
"We've all got a saucer now," Phil said. "Only we have to take cabs
over to Lucie's house. This way we can all ride together. We can all
get into two cabs, can't we, gang?"
"Yes!"
"Lucie?" Kane asked as they crowded around the two cabs. Who were these
people? Friends of Phil's of course.
"We're Lucie," the woman said softly. Kane caught a glimpse of a mature
face and a lovely figure. The face was odd, Kane thought, the maturity
seeming to be disguised by an insincere smile. What a peculiar way of
introducing oneself....
"We're having a little party at the house," Lucille said. "Aren't we?"
"Yes!"
"We've got lots of fun planned for us, Kane boy," Phil said.
Kane remembered a look of sardonic mockery in Lucille's eyes as her
face disappeared and was replaced by several others.
Somehow, Kane couldn't figure out how, five of them were jammed into
the back seat of one of the cabs and then they were moving away through
the fog.
Someone who said "We're Laura," with a tight tanned body was wriggling
on Kane's lap and her arm was around Kane's neck. She had bright teeth
and she breathed scentedly into Kane's face.
"Nothing to worry about, Kane boy," he heard Phil say in a muffled joy.
"We're the gang."
"'It's always fair weather, the Sunhill Gang is always together,'"
Laura was crooning. The red-faced fat man next to Kane laughed and then
Kane saw that the red-faced man whose name seemed to be Ben and the
woman on his lap whom he called Jenny, were kissing one another. There
was something embarrassingly intimate about the way they did it. It was
suddenly much more than a mere spontaneous show of affection.
Kane looked away. Beyond a certain point, he felt that love-making was
something that should be reserved for privacy.
That sort of thing might be expected to change, of course. Customs
changed, and as Kane recalled, one could say the trend had been
somewhat in that direction.
There were two drivers up front. That was a change too. Every cab had
had two drivers, a man and a woman.
It was all a bit overdone, Kane thought. Still, they were friends of
Phil's. A friend of yours is a friend of mine.
But it affected Kane adversely. He felt uneasy. He didn't really know
them at all. In fact, he scarcely even knew Phil.
"We're so glad with you," the girl on Kane's lap said. She crushed her
lips over his mouth and pressed her body against him. Kane couldn't say
that was affecting him adversely. In fact, if there weren't all these
other people around--
"We're nice together," Laura breathed against his lips.
Everyone was so damn glad to see him. All they needed were banners,
little pins. Official Welcoming Party to Greet the Arrival of Professor
Larry Kane.
Kane managed to look out the window as they crossed the Tri-Borough
Bridge at 125th Street and started up the East River Drive.
"Things haven't changed much," Kane said. "Not nearly so much traffic
though."
"The saucers," Phil said. "Most of the traffic's up in the air."
"We're looking at things," Laura said.
"Great old town," Ben said and laughed, on and on. Jenny laughed too,
then said. "It looks just the same almost as when we left."
They're all speaking for me. Kane thought. Funny, a damned funny
custom. It was a reflection of something else. What did it really
mean? His feeling of unease seemed exaggerated. But then their efforts
to make him welcome seemed pretty exaggerated too....
"Everybody happy?" the fat man yelled.
"Yes!"
"We're happy aren't we, honey," Laura said.
"Sure," Kane said.
Why not?
Kane noticed the amazing dearth of traffic on Madison Avenue.
No traffic cops either. That had changed too. One thing you had always
been sure of seeing and that was a cop in New York.
When Kane asked about it, the smiles almost fled from every face, and
the moment of silence seemed like a form of shock. Kane realized then
that there hadn't been even a second of silence before then.
"It's hard to realize we've been away so long," Phil finally said.
"I'm really tired," Kane said to Phil as they went on past the Midtown
Hotel toward Lucille's apartment. "I was intending to go directly to
the hotel and rest up a while--"
"We'll relax at Lucie's," Jenny said. "We got music, we got music, we
got music, who could ask for anything more?"
"But--" Kane started to protest at least mildly, but the rest of the
sentence was blotted out by a long kiss from Laura.
* * * * *
They had all crowded into an elevator, and then rushed into Lucille's
apartment on a high level of The Sunny Hill building near Washington
Square. The apartment consisted of one huge room with a circular couch
in the middle upon which everyone immediately sat.
Laura sat beside Kane who was getting more tired every minute. There
was just enough room for the gang to squeeze up tight to one another in
a circle around a table supporting some kind of machine with wires that
were immediately run from it and attached to everyone's wrist, and to a
narrow metal headband with which everyone's head was crowned.
Kane was listening to music. It was like being dropped unexpectedly
into the middle of a large symphony orchestra. The sound seemed to
pulse and vibrate gigantically all around him. It was more than merely
listening. He was in it. He felt himself a part of it, swimming in it,
and almost fighting to keep from being carried away by what seemed to
be perfectly recorded music that was now being delivered by some final
form of hi-fi.
The music itself was familiar enough. Instrumentalized opera arias
orchestrated on a fantastic scale. The quantity was so great that
sensitivity as to quality was dulled. Kane, shocked by thunderous
sweeps of sheer volume gave way before the sound. It wasn't sleep.
He could hardly say he rested, but he was in a semi-stupor. When he
glanced at his watch sometime later, two hours and some minutes had
passed.
The wires were being removed from wrists, headbands from heads. Kane's
head ached slightly. Everyone was reaching as cards fell out of the
machine in the middle.
Laura handed one to Kane. It was covered with symbols in the form of
some kind of graph, but he couldn't decipher it.
There was a great deal of chatter, musical jargon, colloquial in both
space and time, most of it eluding comprehension. Kane stood there
holding his card as everyone milled around one another.