"Then you probably will, boy--" the Psychologist sat down to fill in
some forms--"but you'll have to go back three hundred years to do it.
You'll have to learn from books!"
There the dream would simply end, for no fantasy of wish-fulfillment
could have exceeded in satisfaction Joe's actual conquest of this
problem. At eighteen he wore thick glasses--he preferred them to
contacts or artificial irises. At twenty he took tests contrived
especially for him by the members of Central Education assigned to his
case. He was awarded equivalence degrees in Business Administration,
Metatomics and Interplanetary Law. His marks were the highest of the
year and Joe Caradac's name was briefly in the newsphones.
He started with the New Chicago offices of Mars Imports and Exports
as a mercury. After six weeks of flying back and forth with memos he
traded his anti-gravs for a desk.
And on June 32, 2401, the newly appointed Regional Buyer for M. I. and
E. got married and was flown to Mars by a chartered spacer to take
command of the regional office at Ofei, By the Great Canal....
* * * * *
He was putting the finishing touches on breakfast when he heard a groan
and the sound of a stretch from the bedroom. When he turned around,
Sarah was standing in the doorway.
Joe's sandy eyebrows went up. His wife was certainly not a modest
woman, but considering even that, this morning was an agreeable
surprise. Her eyes were still dull--he guessed that she'd worried about
those whatyoucallits after going to bed--but she was smiling broadly.
Joe began to have visions of missing work for half a day. He smiled
back at her and she laughed a little.
"_Hohn, Uarnl!_" she said.
Joe was thrusting halved oranges into the juicer. He turned off the
machine and grinned.
"You'll have to talk plainer than that, little monkey," he said. He
held out a glass of juice. "Drink this--it'll wake you--up--" The last
word faded into an astonished silence.
Then Joe said, "Hey--come back!" He set down the glass and went into
the bedroom.
She was lying on her bed, her face hidden. Joe dropped onto the edge of
the bed and put a tentative hand on her back.
"Hey now," he said softly, "if that's the way you feel about it I'll
juice up some grapefruit." He moved his hand down and spanked lightly.
"Hein?"
She didn't look up. She had turned her head and was looking at the
corner of the room by Joe's bed.
"I do not feel well. Go away."
Joe's face was immediately concerned. He bent over her, reached for a
wrist. "What's the matter, Sarah? Can I get you anything?" The wrist
hung limply in his hand.
"No. Go away."
Joe straightened up and drew his eyebrows together in thought. Sarah
was usually tearful and pretty much of a leech when she wasn't feeling
well. Excessive commiserations and breakfast in bed were the rule at
such times.
"Do you want me to get Doc Halprin?"
The blue-black head shook from side to side.
"So what am I supposed to do, monkey? I hate to leave you this way."
"Go away."
"But can't I--"
"Go away, damn you!"
Joe stood up abruptly. He clenched his fists and looked at his wife's
still form and gradually the anger dulled and left him. He had no
right to be angry. Everybody got tempermental once in a while.
But this was the first time she had ever cursed him.
"O.K.," he said softly. "I'll see you tonight."
* * * * *
The regional offices of Mars Imports and Exports sat upon a hill at
the end--or the beginning--of Ila Boulevard, depending upon which
way you were going. It was twenty-five-hundred feet of silver and
native marble, and covered four city blocks, and Joe Caradac was top
man--literally--since his office and personal staff took up the whole
two-hundred and fifty-first floor.
His morning mail--about twelve letters weeded out of the daily
thousands--was gotten out of the way with skill and dispatch. Grinning,
he propped his feet on the low, curving window sill and said: "Miss
Kal--take an audiogram."
Miss Kal used two of her arms to adjust pad and stylus, looking up
expectantly. Her other arms were busy transcribing a previously
dictated letter into Venusian--her native tongue, although she spoke
sixty-eight--and tugging at a humidified legging that had somehow
worked down almost to the floor.
"My dearest, darling monkey--" Joe began. Miss Kal looked up again in
amazement. Joe grinned at her and said, "It's to my wife."
Miss Kal nodded wisely and began to write.
"--I am sending this from my dark and dismal office," Joe went on. It
was a habit they had when anything went wrong at breakfast. Joe had
first proposed by audiogram.
He casually watched a skimmer that was in danger of creating a honey of
a traffic jam down below. Didn't that schlemiel know his left from his
right?
"--Where was I? Oh, yes--my dark and dismal office." Joe scratched a
cigarette alight, blew a happy smoke ring. "I hope that you are feeling
much, _much_ better and that you will take luncheon with me in the
Pluto Room of the you-know-what Hotel--" His mind went back to those
honeymoon days and he lost track of his dictation again. Another smoke
ring, a somewhat more thoughtful one.
"You-know-what Hotel--" said Miss Kal phlegmatically.
"Yes--ah--just end it 'at one fifteen sharp, your everloving Joe.'"
There was a knock on the door and Miss Kal set down her pad and stylus
and started to get up. Joe was on his feet and around the desk in a
second.
"Stay right where you are," he smiled; "I need the exercise."
Miss Kal smiled also and settled back into her specially built chair
with its temperature and humidity controls. A present from Mr. Caradac.
He was such a nice being to work for.
Joe opened the door, and said, "Oh, hullo, Kent. Since when are you
knocking?"
Big Kent nodded formally to Miss Kal and winked at Joe. He said, "Yoe,
there's something I'd like to talk over with you in private."
With a sigh, Miss Kal rose again and made her way through the other
door into her little office. The door closed behind her.
Kent let out a long breath. He smiled at Joe and the smile turned into
a laugh that had an odd sound of triumph.
"_Hohn, Uarnl_," he said, and laughed again. "_Ut sinna d'yonlwar?_"
Joe sat down behind his desk and looked at the big man. Hone you-arnel.
Wasn't that what Sarah had said--or something very much like it? He
shook his head.
"You wanted to talk to me about something, Kent? What are you and Sarah
cooking up with this gibberish?"
The brilliant Martian sunlight--not as dim as had been anticipated in
the days before space travel--came through the ceiling-high windows,
struck little lights here and there from the bouquet of Venusian
Glass-moss that Miss Kal tended so carefully. It slanted across Kent's
big face as he looked at Joe for a long moment, giving his left eye a
pale, shallow lustre and throwing the shadow of his jutting nose down
over his mouth. He opened and closed his hands, and said:
"Nothing. It'll wait, I guess." His gaze wandered over the room and
settled on a corner that was empty save for a throw rug--a relic of
Caradac's Iowa past. Kent's mouth tightened into a thin line. He stared
at the corner.
"It'll wait--for a while," he said stiffly and opened the door and went
into the outer office. Bone-faced, he walked toward the transveyor belt.
"Mr. Kent--Mr. Kent!" The big man's Mercurian secretary rose out of a
chair near the door, his voice quacking from the speaker set into his
fishbowl helmet.
"Yes?"
"They tolt me that you hat gone to Mr. Caradac's office, sir. I've been
trying to finte you all morning, sir. A laty, sir, on the visiphone.
She has callt many times--many times--"
"Thank you," Kent said tonelessly. "I know who it is."
* * * * *
Joe Caradac stared in astonishment at the door. First Sarah--now Kent.
This seemed to be the day for everybody to blast in orbits ... well,
hell ... he shrugged his shoulders and called Miss Kal back out of her
office. She dropped into her chair with a sigh and they picked up the
day's business from where it had fallen.
San-Vika of Saturn Enterprises was threatening all kinds of things if
he didn't receive his shipment of ato-rotors on the very next flight.
Joe didn't waste much time with that. One of the many things that made
him a top executive was that he knew how to deal with phonies. He told
San-Vika--via spacephone--that he could go stick his heads in a waste
eliminator and push the button, and that if he wanted to get nasty, M.
I. and E. had an army of lawyers hanging around just itching to get
their teeth into last year's insurance double-deal.
"We let everybody get away with it--once!" Joe told him and cut the
suddenly fawning image off the screen. M. I. and E.'s investigators, he
thought absently, could certainly give the Sol Secret Service a run for
their credits. Now that he had tactfully gotten San-Vika straightened
out, he might as well release those ato-rotors to be shipped.
At twelve fifteen an audiogram came from Sarah. _I don't feel well
enough to come. Love, S._ Well, at least it was an improvement in tone.
At one o'clock, Miss Kal went into her office to open the mysterious
little package of lunch that she brought with her every day. Joe
stretched out his legs on the window sill and looked at the traffic jam
below. That driver had really done a fine job. There were three Patrol
skimmers circling the mess, darting to and fro like angry wasps.
He didn't feel much like eating. Breakfast and supper were his big
meals--the habit was a long-standing one. However, he thought, this
morning's breakfast hadn't been much to rave about. Orange juice, some
burned Pohl, some undercooked sand-hoppers.
He switched on the inter-office visiphone.
"I would save you the trouble," he said, when Miss Kal's face appeared,
"but they built this place so that all of my inside calls have to be
routed through your selective tentacles."
"The usual, Mr. Caradac?"
"The usual."
Joe was rather proud of the fact that everything in his division of
M. I. and E. worked smoothly and efficiently--even the kitchens. In a
little less than forty seconds a portion of his desk folded back and
the "usual" appeared on an elevator tray. A pot of light coffee and
some doughnuts with powdered brown sugar.
Joe dunked the solid portion of his lunch and considered the morning's
peculiar happenings. Apparently unrelated incidents that were related
in part always intrigued him. There was usually a logical reason
for parallels. The trick, he thought, was to concentrate not on the
"coincidences" themselves but to examine the circumstances under which
they occurred.
Sarah's illness--Kent's queer behavior. Not obviously connected.
Separately neurotic. Yet what was it Kent had said that had reminded
him of Sarah's strange greeting?
Hone you-arnel?
The two had played practical jokes on him before. He grinned. This was
probably one of their special five-day jobs, designed to make him into
a shattered wreck by Friday so Sarah could duck him on Saturday and get
by with it.
Joe repeated the syllables aloud, trying to make some sense out of them:
"Hone you-arnel."
* * * * *
Instantly he was on his feet fighting, his lips raving silently. His
big chair tipped back and fell over to the floor.
A furious, icily cold intrusion was being made upon his mind. He stood
with feet planted on either side of the overturned chair and threw the
force off but it came back again and again. The office was suddenly
oppressive and stifling, and the objects about him were small and
crystal clear, as if seen through the wrong end of a hand galaxiscope.
The churning, utterly loathsome invasion surged up like a wave roaring
against a reef--and fell back and away in horrible desperation.
From a million miles away he heard--or felt--a voice. It said:
"_Uarnl--yes, Uarnl!_" and it said other things, raging things, that
Joe could not understand.
Then it was gone. As suddenly as it had come. The office regained its
normal perspective. The bright sunlight, reflected now from the tall
buildings across the Great Canal, erased the ragged, black hole out of
his consciousness.
Painfully he righted the chair and sank into it. His lungs felt pressed
in and stale, like the inside of a folded blanket. He took a deep
breath, shoved his wet palms hard at the top of the desk.
_Uarnl._ The nightmare.
It came back to him as dreams rarely do: down to its last beastly
detail. A dream of fear and peril--a running dream--and not a dream,
after all. _Uarnl._ He looked at the corner of the room, at the
colorful throw rug. It lay there under the sun, brighter than it had
been, as if a pane of glass had been lifted from it.
After a while he got up and went to the door of Miss Kal's office. She
looked up vaguely, concealing a small, resigned lizard under her jacket.
"Miss Kal," Joe said blindly, "do you have my morning papers?"
He took the facsimiles back to his desk, walking slowly, afraid to
get there and sit down and open them. The nightmare; the first aborted
attempt. Sarah and Kent--approaching him separately--yet similarly.
Allies. Each had been confident that during the night _Uarnl_--had--
There was nothing else on the front sheets but the names _Ih_, _Lof_,
_Dir_, and _Uarnl_ and the story of their possessors' escape from Mars
Detain. A power breakdown had weakened the energy barrier that kept
their elusive minds, and hence their bodies, in confinement. By the
time armed replacements could be sent to the _Aarnians'_ isolated cell
the beings had vanished. The guards had been strangled. Energy barriers
had been set up at all space and canal ports. Other barriers had been
formed into a hundred mile noose that was being carefully drawn in
toward Detain.
Joe folded the last paper over the cruel three-eyed faces that seemed
to mock him. He fumbled at the visiphone. Miss Kal was wiping her lips
cheerfully.
"Miss Kal," Joe said, "get me Mr. Reader in Shipping." He leaned his
elbows wearily on the desk and waited until Reader's puritanical face
appeared on the screen.
"Yeah, boss?"
"Reader, has anyone consigned four large crates to go off-world
tomorrow night?"
"Yeah," Reader replied promptly; "Mr. Kent. B-type mobile spacesuits.
Had me alter the manifest this morn--"
"Do you have the crates down there?"
"Uh-uh. Mr. Kent said he'd skim them in sometime tomorrow. He was
coming up to get the switch O.K.'d by you. Why? Anything wrong?"
Joe opened the center drawer of his desk.
"No. Nothing's wrong. Listen carefully, Reader. I'm going to take care
of those crates myself. If I'm--not in my office tomorrow you are _not_
to load them on-ship! No matter what Mr. Ke--_anyone_ says or does! If
the crates come in refrigerate them and call the Patrol and send the
name of the addressee to Detain immediately!"
Reader came as near as he ever had to looking surprised. Nothing
wrong? His right eyebrow shot up several millimeters. Joe added, "Keep
this in your cheek and there'll be double credits for you pay-day."