Her father, another gray-eyed booby … A projection room. “A hoax.” “Fifty thousand in small, unmarked . . .” The flickering reel change. “It can’t be-” “You should know that scar.” “I’ll kill you
first!” “That won’t burn the prints.” The lights. “The last one-I don’t believe . . .” “Fifty thousand.” “I’ll kill you-”
But he hadn’t. He’d killed himself, for no good reason that Smith could understand. Disgustedly, no longer a blackmailer, much out of pocket by this deal that had fizzled, he turned hawker and peddled prints of the film to the sort of person who would buy such things. He almost got his expenses back. After the week of concentration on his sudden mercantile enterprise, he had thought to inquire about Amy.
She had had her smashup, lost her job tape-punching now that her father was dead and her really scandalous behavior could no longer be ignored. She had got an unconventional job in the Open Quarter. She had left it. She appeared, hanging around the shops at Standard Transport, where the watchmen had orders to drive her away. She always came back, and one day, evidently, got what she wanted.
For on the Portsmouth-Jamestown run, which Smith was making to see a man who had a bar with a small theater in what was ostensibly a storeroom, his ship had parted at the seams.
“Dumped me where you found me—mid-desert.”
“T-urr-ss-t-ee,” sawed the native.
There seemed to be some reproach in the word, and Smith chided himself for imagining that a creature which spoke by stridulation could charge its language with the same emotional overtones as those who used lungs and vocal cords.
But there the note was again: “Ei-m-m-ee—t-urr-ss-t—t-oo.”
Amy thirst too. A stridulating moralist. But still . . . one had to admit … in his frosty way, Smith was reasoning, but a wash of emotion blurred the diagrams, the cold diagrams by which he had always lived.
It’s getting me, he thought—it’s getting me at last. He’d seen it happen before, and always admitted that it might happen to him—but it was a shock.
Hesitantly, which was strange for him, he asked if he could somehow find his way across the desert to Portsmouth. The creature ticked approvingly, brought in sand, and with one delicate appendage began to trace what might be a map.
He was going to do it. He was going to be clean again, he who had always had a horror of filth and never until now had seen that his life was viler than maggots, more loathsome than carrion. A warm glow
of self-approval filled him while he bent over the map. Yes, he was going to perform the incredible hike and somehow make restitution to her. Who would have thought an inhuman creature like his benefactor could have done this to him? With all the enthusiasm of any convert, he felt young again, with life before him, a life where he could choose between fair and foul. He chuckled with the newness of it.
But to work! Good intentions were not enough. There was the map to memorize, his bearings to establish, some portable food supply to be gathered—
He followed the map with his finger. The tracing appendage of the creature guided him, another quietly lay around him, its tip at the small of his back. He accepted it, though it itched somewhat. Not for an itch would he risk offending the bearer of his new life.
He was going to get Amy to a cure, give her money, bear her abuse—she could not understand all at once that he was another man —turn his undoubted talent to an honest—
Farewell! Farewell! Farewell, little ones. Farewell.
The map blurred a bit before Smith’s eyes. Then the map toppled and slid and became the red-lit ceiling of the burrow. Then Smith tried to move and could not. The itching in his back was a torment.
The screy mother did not look at the prostrate host as she turned and crawled up from the incubator to the surface. Something like fond humor wrinkled the surface of her thoughts as she remembered the little ones and their impatience. Heigh-ho! She had given them the best she could, letting many a smaller host go by until this fine, big host came her way. It had taken feeding and humoring, but it would last many and many a month while the little wrigglers grew and ate and grew within it. Heigh-ho! Life went on, she thought; one did the best one could. . .