“Then just hold still,” said Walthers, and wondered just what to do with the eleventh wealthiest person in the human race. Dolly would be thrilled to meet him, of course. But after Dolly got over being thrilled, what schemes would she be hatching for Walthers to tap all that wealth and buy them an island plantation, a summer home in the Heather Hills or a trip home? Would it, in the long run, be better to hold the man here under some pretext until Dolly got home-or to ease him out and simply tell her about it?
Dilemmas pondered over long enough solve themselves; this one solved itself when the door lock pinged and crackled, and Dolly walked in.
Whatever Dolly looked like around the house-sometimes with her eyes streaming from an allergy to Peggy’s Planet’s flora, often grouchy, seldom with her hair brushed-when she went out she dazzled. She obviously dazzled the unexpected guest as she came in the door, and, although he had been married to that striking slim figure and that impassive alabaster face for more than a year, and even knew the rigid dieting that produced the first and the dental flaw that required the second, she pretty nearly dazzled Walthers himself.
Walthers greeted her with a hug and a kiss; the kiss was returned, but not with full attention. She was peering past him at the stranger. Still holding her, Walthers said, “Darling, this is Captain Santos-Schmitz. He was in a fight, and I brought him here-“
She pushed him away. “Junior, you didn’t!”
It took him a moment to realize her misunderstanding. “Oh, no, Dolly, the fight wasn’t with me. I just happened to be nearby.”
Her expression thawed and she turned to the guest. “Of course you’re welcome here, Wan. Let me see what they did to you.”
Santos-Schmitz preened himself. “You know me,” he said, allowing her to dab at the bits of bandage Walthers had already applied.
“Of course, Wan! Everyone in Port Hegraniet knows you.” She shook her head sympathetically over the blackened eye. “You were pointed out to me last night,” she said. “In the Spindle Lounge.”
He drew back to look at her more closely. “Oh, yes! The entertainer. I saw your act.”
Dolly Walthers seldom smiled, but there was a way of crinkling up the corners of her eyes, pursing the pretty lips, that was better than a smile; it was an attractive expression. She displayed it often while they made Wan Santos-Schmitz comfortable, while they fed him coffee and listened to his explanations of why the Libyans had been wrong to get angry at him. If Walthers had thought Dolly would resent his bringing this wayfarer home, he found he had nothing to fear in that direction. But as the hour got later he began to fidgety. “Wan,” he said, “I have to fly in the morning, and I imagine you’d like to get back to your hotel-“
“Certainly not, Junior,” his wife reproved him. “We have plenty of room right here. He can have the bed, you can sleep on the couch, and I’ll take the cot in the sewing room.”
Walthers was too startled to frown, or even to answer. It was a silly idea. Of course Wan would want to go back to the hotel-and of course Dolly was simply being polite; she couldn’t really want to set up the sleeping arrangements in such a way that they would have no privacy at all, on the one night he had before flying back into the bush with the irascible Arabs. So he waited with confidence for Wan to excuse himself and his wife to allow herself to be convinced, and then with less confidence, and then with none at all. Although Walthers was a short man, the couch was shorter than he was, and he tossed and turned on it all night long, wishing he had never heard the name of Juan Henriquette Santos Schmitz- A wish shared by a whole lot of the human race, including me.
Wan was not merely a nasty person-oh, it was not his fault, of course (yes, yes, Sigfrid, I know-get out of my head!). He was also a fugitive from justice, or would have been, if anyone had known exactly what he had swiped out of the old Heechee artifacts.
When he told Walthers he was rich, he did not lie. He had a birthright to a lot of Heechee technology simply because his mom had pupped him on a Heechee habitat with no other human beings to speak of around. This turned out to mean a lot of money for him, once the courts had time to think it over. It also meant, in Wan’s own mind, that he had a right to just about anything Heechee that he could find that wasn’t nailed down.
He had taken a Heechee ship-everybody knew that-but his money bought lawyers that stalled the Gateway Corporation’s suit to recover it in the courts. He bad also taken some Heechee gadgets not generally available, and if anyone had known exactly what they were, the case would have whisked through the courts in no time and Wan would have been Public Enemy Number One instead of merely an irritation. So Walthers had every right to hate him, though, of course, those were not the reasons involved.
When Walthers saw the Libyans the next morning, they were hung over and irritable. He was ~worse, the difference between them and Walthers being that his mood was even more savage, and he wasn’t even hung over. That was part of the reason for the mood.
His passengers didn’t ask him anything about the night before; in fact, they hardly spoke as the aircraft droned on over the wide savannahs, occasional glades, and very infrequent farm patches of Peggy’s Planet. Luqman and one of the other men were buried in false-color satellite bolos of the sector they were prospecting, one of the others slept, the fourth simply held his head and glowered out the window. The plane nearly flew itself, this time of year, with very little serious weather anywhere around. Walthers bad plenty of time to think about his wife. It had been a personal triumph for him when they were married, but why weren’t they living happily ever after?
Of course, Dolly had had a hard life. A Kentucky girl with no money, no family, no job-no skills, either, and perhaps none too much brainpower-such a girl had to use all the assets she had if she wanted to get out of coal country. Dolly’s one commercial asset was looks. Good looks, though flawed. Her figure was slim, her eyes were bright, but her teeth were buck. At fourteen she got work as a bartop dancer in Cincinnati, but it didn’t pay enough to live on unless you hustled on the side. Dolly didn’t want to do that. She was saving herself She tried singing, but she didn’t have the voice for it. Besides, trying to sing without moving her lips and exposing her Bugs Bunny teeth made her look like a ventriloquist … And when a customer, trying to hurt her because she’d turned his advances down, told her that, the light dawned over Dolly’s head. The M.C. considered himself a comic in that particular club. Dolly traded laundry and sewing for some old, used comedy routines, made herself some hand puppets, studied every puppet act she could find on PV or fantape, and tried out the act at the last show on a Saturday night when another singer was coming in to replace her on Sunday. The act was not boffo, but the new girl singer was even worse than Dolly, so she got a reprieve. Two weeks in Cincinnati, a month in Louisville, nearly three months in little clubs outside Chicago-if the engagements bad been consecutive she would have been well enough off, but there were weeks and months between them. She did not, however, actually starve. By the time Dolly got to Peggy’s Planet the jagged corners of The Act had banged against so many hostile audiences or drunk ones that it had worn into some sort of serviceable shape. Not good enough for a real career. Good enough to keep her alive. Getting to Peggy’s Planet was a desperation move, because you had to sign your life away for the passage. There was no stardom here, but she wasn’t any worse off, either. And if she was no longer saving herself, exactly, at least she didn’t spend herself very profligately. When Audee Walthers, Jr., came along, he offered a higher price than most others had proposed-marriage. So she did it. At eighteen. To a man twice her age.
Dolly’s hard life, though, wasn’t really that much harder than anyone else’s on Peggy’s-not counting, of course, people like Audee’s oil prospectors. The prospectors paid full fare to get to Peggy’s Planet, or their companies did, and every one of them surely had a paid-up return ticket in his pocket.