“Is that true?” I asked, feeling contempt for him.
“True enough, but not relevant. Miss Friday, I did it because I wanted to. Because you are so sexy you could corrupt a Stylite. Or cause Venus to switch to Lesbos. I tried to tell myself that I couldn’t avoid it. But I knew better. All right, do you want my help in making it look like suicide?”
“Not necessary.” (So sexy I could corrupt a Stylite. What in the world is a Stylite?Ämust find out. He seemed to mean it as a superlative.)
He persisted. “Aboard ship you can’t run away. A dead body can be embarrassing.”
“Oh, I think not. You were hired to watch over me; do you think anything would be done to me? But you already know that I intend to let you get away with it. However, I want explanations before I let you go. How did you escape the fire? When I smelled you, I was astonished; I had assumed that you were dead.”
“I wasn’t at the fire; I ran for it before that.”
“Really? Why?”
“Two reasons. I planned to leave as soon as I learned what I had come for. But mostly on your account.”
“Mac, don’t expect me to believe too many unlikely things. What was this you had come there to learn?”
“I never found out. I was after the same thing they were after:
Why you had gone to Ell-Five. I heard them interrogate you and I could see that you did not know. So I left. Fast.”
“That’s true. I was a carrier pigeon . . . and when does a carrier pigeon know what a war is about? They wasted their time, torturing me.”
Swelp me, he looked shocked. “They tortured you?”
I said sharply, “Are you trying to play innocent?”
“Eh? No, no, I’m guilty as sin and I know it. Of rape. ButI didn’t
have any notion that they had tortured you. That’s stupid, that’s centuries out of date. What I heard was straight interrogation, then they shot you with babble juiceÄand you told the same story. So I knew you were telling the truth and I got out of there. Fast.”
“The more you tell me, the more questions you raise. Who were you working for, why were you doing it, why did you leave, why did they let you leave, who was that voice that gave you ordersÄthe one called the MajorÄwhy was everybody so anxious to know what I was carryingÄso anxious that they would mount a military attack and waste a lot of lives and wind up torturing me and sawing off my right tit? Why?”
“They did that to you?” (Swelp me, Mac’s face was utterly impassive until I mentioned damage done to my starboard milk gland. Will somebody explain males to me? With diagrams and short words?)
“Oh. Complete regeneration, functional as well as cosmetic. I’ll show youÄlater. If you answer my questions fully. You can check it against how it used to look. Now back to business. Talk.”
Mac claimed to have been a double agent. He said that, at the time, he was an intelligence officer in a quasi-military hired out to Muriel Shipstone Laboratories. As such, and working alone, he had penetrated the Major’s organizationÄ “Wait a minute!” I demanded. “Did he die in the fire? The one called the Major?”
“I’m fairly sure he did. Although Mosby may be the only one who knows.”
“Mosby? Franklin Mosby? Finders, Incorporated?”
“I hope he doesn’t have brothers; one is too many. Yes. But Finders, Inc. is just a front; he’s a stooge for Shipstone Unlimited.”
“But you said you were working for Shipstone, tooÄthe laboratories.”
Mac looked surprised. “But the whole Red Thursday ruckus was an intramural fight amongst the top boys; everybody knows that.”
I sighed. “I seem to have led a protected life. All right, you were working for Shipstone, one piece of it, and as a double agent you were working for Shipstone, another piece of it. But why was I the bone being fought over?”
“Miss Friday, I don’t know; that is what I was supposed to find out. But you were believed to be an agent of Kettle Belly BalÄ”