“Not for me, buddy,” someone unseen rumbled.
Kelly turned in that direction and smiled. No one else spoke for several seconds.
“The aliens won’t take orders from you, Mr. Kelly,” said Pierrard, using the word aliens with none of the incredulous hesitancy that had plagued others when they found they had no alternative.
“Won’t they, Pierrard?” replied Kelly, continuing to smile as he reached overhead and stretched his legs up on tiptoes besides. His fingers couldn’t touch the ceiling. This was a hell of a big plane, and as steady as a train through the skies besides. “How do you know? You can’t even speak with them.”
“Do you – ” someone began.
“One moment,” snapped Pierrard, his eyes meeting Kelly’s as the veteran lowered his hands and stood arms akimbo, relaxed in the way a poker player relaxes when he has laid down a straight flush to the king.
Pierrard got his moment, got several, while smoke from his pipe wreathed him and the hand with which he stroked his hair seemed as rigid as a claw. “Mr. Kelly,” he said at last, “there are quarters provided for you, and there’s a lounge. If you’d care to – ”
“My room have a shower?” the veteran interrupted.
“Yes.” The syllable Pierrard spoke held no emotion, but there was rage in his eyes to equal that of Kelly a few minutes before.
“You’ve got my address,” Kelly said with a brittle smile.
When Kelly opened the hall door, the two guards snapped to alertness. “Take this gentleman to room sixteen,” called Pierrard from behind Kelly, just before the veteran closed the door again.
One of the guards touched the key of his throat mike. “Bev, report to the Briefing Room,” came from his lips and was syncopated by the same order whispering down the corridor from a speaker forward.
“Christ, people, I can find a room number myself,” the agent said with a grimace. He had done so and was opening the door when the earnest-looking female attendant scurried past. High levels of government were the wrong places to look for women’s liberation. Generals and their civilian equivalents liked perks to remind them of their power, and chirpy girls in menial positions were high on their list of requirements.
The room wasn’t huge, though it had two windows with a nice view of clouds a hell of a long way down. The fittings were more than comfortable – chair, writing desk, and a bed which seemed a trifle longer than standard. VIPs tended to be men of above-average height, and the Strategic Air Command certainly had its share of officers who could not be comfortably fitted into fighter cockpits.
There was the promised shower, not an enormous luxury so far as space went… but the weight of the water to feed it and the other similar facilities was something else again. No wonder the bird in this configuration had an all-up weight of four hundred tons.
The water felt good, as it always did. Soap, dust, body oils, and dried blood curled down the drain as a gray slurry. By adjusting the taps as hot as he could stand it, Kelly was able to knead with his fingertips the injury that seemed most bothersome: the welt across his right temple where Doug had slapped him with the submachinegun. The general pain of the hot water provided cover for him to work loose the scabs and get normal circulation flowing.
The pain had another benefit. It made Kelly think of Doug as a figure beating him . . . displacing, for the moment, at least, memory of Doug as something recently human, huddled now and forever in a pool of blood and feces because Tom Kelly had made him that way.
Kelly hadn’t locked the door, hadn’t even looked to see if there was a lock.
It was no surprise to hear the door open, and a relief but no surprise that the intruder – water sprayed toward the bed when Kelly swung open the stall’s frosted glass door without first closing the faucets – was General Redstone, rather than six or eight of the husky attendants.
“Hey, Red,” said the veteran, shutting off the water, “good to see you.” Which was true on a number of levels.