“Does she have nice boobs?” Heather said.
“Actually, yes.” He grinned and Heather laughed. “You know my weakness. But I did my part of the bargain; I got her an audition–two auditions. The last one was six months ago and I know goddamn well she’s still smoldering and brooding over it. I wonder what she wants to tell me.”
He punched the control module to set up an automatic course for Marilyn’s apartment building with its small but adequate roof field.
“She’s probably in love with you,” Heather said, as he parked the skyfly on its tail, releasing then the descent stairs.
“Like forty million others,” Jason said genially.
Heather, making herself comfortable in the bucket seat of the skyfly said, “Don’t be gone very long or so help me I’m taking off without you.”
“Leaving me stuck with Marilyn?” he said. They both laughed. “I’ll be right back.” He crossed the field to the elevator, pressed the button.
When he entered Marilyn’s apartment he saw, at once, that she was out of her mind. Her entire face had pinched and constricted; her body so retracted that it looked as if she were trying to ingest herself. And her eyes. Very few things around or about women made him uneasy, but this did. Her eyes, completely round, with huge pupils, bored at him as she stood silently facing him, her arms folded, everything about her unyielding and iron rigid.
“Start talking,” Jason said, feeling around for the handle of the advantage. Usually–in fact virtually always–he could control a situation that involved a woman; it was, in point of fact, his specialty. But this. . . he felt uncomfortable. And still she said nothing. Her face, under layers of makeup, had become completely bloodless, as if she were an animated corpse. “You want another audition?” Jason asked. “Is that it?”
Marilyn shook her head no.
“Okay; tell me what it is,” he said wearily but uneasily. He kept the unease out of his voice, however; he was far too shrewd, far too experienced, to let her hear his uncertainty. In a confrontation with a woman it ran nearly ninety per cent bluff, on both sides. It all lay in _how_ you did it, not what you did.
“I have something for you,” Marilyn turned, walked off out of sight into the kitchen. He strolled after her.
“You still blame me for the lack of success of both–” he began.
“Here you are,” Marilyn said. She lifted up a plastic bag from the drainboard, stood holding it a moment, her face still bloodless and stark, her eyes jutting and unblinking, and then she yanked the bag open, swung it, moved swiftly up to him.
It happened too fast. He backed away out of instinct, but too slowly and too late. The gelatinlike Callisto cuddle sponge with its fifty feeding tubes clung to him, anchored itself to his chest. Already he felt the feeding tubes dig into him, into his chest.
He leaped to the overhead kitchen cabinets, grabbed out a half-filled bottle of scotch, unscrewed the lid with flying fingers, and poured the scotch onto the gelatinlike creature. His thoughts had become lucid, even brilliant; he did not panic, but stood there pouring the scotch onto the thing.
For a moment nothing happened. He still managed to hold himself together and not flee into panic. And then the thing bubbled, shriveled, fell from his chest onto the floor. It had died.
Feeling weak, he seated himself at the kitchen table. Now he found himself fighting off unconsciousness; some of the feeding tubes remained inside him, and they were still alive. “Not bad,” he managed to say. “You almost got me, you fucking little tramp.”
“Not almost,” Marilyn Mason said flatly, emotionlessly. “Some of the feeding tubes are still in you and you know it; I can see it on your face. And a bottle of scotch isn’t going to get them out. _Nothing_ is going to get them out.”
At that point he fainted. Dimly, he saw the green-and-gray floor rise to take him and then there was emptiness. A void without even himself in it.
Pain. He opened his eyes, reflexively touched his chest. His hand-tailored silk suit had vanished; he wore a cotton hospital robe and he was lying flat on a gurney. “God,” he said thickly as the two staff men wheeled the gurney rapidly up the hospital corridor.
Heather Hart hovered over him, anxious and in shock, but, like him, she retained full possession of her senses. “I knew something was wrong,” she said rapidly as the staff men wheeled him into a room. “I didn’t wait for you in the skyfly; I came down after you.”
“You probably thought we were in bed together,” he said weakly.
“The doctor said,” Heather said, “that in another fifteen seconds you would have succumbed to the somatic violation, as he calls it. The entrance of that _thing_ into you.”
“I got the thing,” he said. “But I didn’t get all the feeding tubes. It was too late.”
“I know,” Heather said. “The doctor told me. They’re planning surgery for as soon as possible; they may be able to do something if the tubes haven’t penetrated too far.”
“I was good in the crisis,” Jason grated; he shut his eyes and endured the pain. “But not quite good enough. Just not quite.” Opening his eyes, he saw that Heather was crying. “Is it that bad?” he asked her; reaching up he took hold of her hand. He felt the pressure of her love as she squeezed his fingers, and then there was nothing. Except the pain. But nothing else, no Heather, no hospital, no staff men, no light. And no sound. It was an eternal moment and it absorbed him completely.
2
Light filtered back, filling his closed eyes with a membrane of illuminated redness. He opened his eyes, lifted his head to look around him. To search out Heather or the doctor.
He lay alone in the room. No one else. A bureau with a cracked vanity mirror, ugly old light fixtures jutting from the grease-saturated walls. And from somewhere nearby the blare of a TV set:
He was not in a hospital.
And Heather was not with him; he experienced her absence, the total emptiness of everything, because of her.
God, he thought. _What’s happened?_
The pain in his chest had vanished, along with so much else. Shakily, he pushed back the soiled wool blanket, sat up, rubbed his forehead reflexively, gathered together his vitality.
This is a hotel room, he realized. A lousy, bug-infested cheap wino hotel. No curtains, no bathroom. Like he had lived in years ago, at the start of his career. Back when he had been unknown and had no money. The dark days he always shut out of his memory as best he could.
Money. He groped at his clothes, discovered that he no longer wore the hospital gown but had back, in wrinkled condition, his hand-tailored silk suit. And, in the inner coat pocket, the wad of high-denomination bills, the money he had intended to take to Vegas.
At least he had that.
Swiftly, he looked around for a phone. No, of course not. But there’d be one in the lobby. But whom to call? Heather? Al Bliss, his agent? Mory Mann, the producer of his TV show? His attorney, Bill Wolfer? Or all of them, as soon as possible, perhaps.
Unsteadily, he managed to get to his feet; he stood swaying, cursing for reasons he did not understand. An animal instinct held him; he readied himself, his strong six body, to fight. But he could not discern the antagonist, and that frightened him. For the first time in as long as he could remember he felt panic.
Has a lot of time passed? he asked himself. He could not tell; he had no sense of it either way. Daytime. Quibbles zooming and bleating in the skies outside the dirty glass of his window. He looked at his watch; it read ten-thirty. So what? It could be a thousand years off, for all he knew. His watch couldn’t help him.
But the phone would. He made his way out into the dustsaturated corridor, found the stairs, descended step by step, holding on to the rail until at last he stood in the depressing, empty lobby with its ratty old overstuffed chairs.
Fortunately he had change. He dropped a one-dollar gold piece into the slot, dialed Al Bliss’s number.
“Bliss Talent Agency,” Al’s voice came presently.
“Listen,” Jason said. “I don’t know where I am. In the name of Christ come and get me; get me out of here; get me someplace else. You understand, Al? Do you?”
Silence from the phone. And then in a distant, detached voice Al Bliss said, “Who am I talking to?”
He snarled his answer.
“I don’t know you, Mr. Jason Taverner,” Al Bliss said, again in his most neutral, uninvolved voice. “Are you sure you have the right number? Who did you want to talk to?”