“Well you’ve helped.”
“Mmm . . . look, Mary, why don’t you marry again and have some more squally brats? Keep you too busy to fret.”
“What? At my age? Now, really, Lazarus!”
“Nothing wrong with your age. You’re younger than I am.” She studied him for a moment. “Lazarus, are you proposing a contract? If so, I wish you would speak more plainly.”
His mouth opened and he gulped. “Hey, wait a minute! Take it easy! I was speaking in general terms . . . I’m not the domestic type. Why, every time I’ve married my wife has grown sick of the sight of me inside of a few years. Not but what I-well, I mean you’re a very pretty girl and a man ought to-”
She shut him off by leaning forward and putting a hand over his mouth, while grinning impishly. “I didn’t mean to panic you, cousin. Or perhaps I did-men are so funny when they think they are about to be trapped.”
“Well-” he said glumly.
“Forget it, dear. Tell me, what plan do you think they will settle on?”
“That bunch tonight?’
“Yes.”
“None, of course. They won’t get anywhere. Mary, a committee is the only known form of life with a hundred bellies and no brain. But presently somebody with a mind of his own will bulldoze them into accepting his plan. I don’t know what it will be.”
“Well . . . what course of action do you favor?”
“Me? Why, none. Mary, if there is any one thing I have learned in the past couple of centuries, it’s this: These things pass. Wars and depressions and Prophets and Covenants- they pass. The trick is to stay alive through them.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “I think you are right.”
“Sure I’m right. It takes a hundred years or so to realize just how good life is.” He stood up and stretched. “But right now this growing boy could use some sleep.”
“Me, too.”
Mary’s flat was on the top floor, with a sky view. When she had come back to the lounge she had cut the inside lighting and let the ceiling shutters fold back; they had been sitting, save for an invisible sheet of plastic, under the stars. As Lazarus raised his head in stretching, his eye had rested on his favorite constellation. “Odd,” he commented. “Orion seems to have added a fourth star to his belt.”
She looked up. “That must be the big ship for the Second Centauri Expedition. See if you can see it move.”
“Couldn’t tell without instruments.”
“I suppose not,” she agreed. “Clever of them to build it out in space, isn’t it?”
“No other way to do it. It’s too big to assemble on Earth. I can doss down right here, Mary. Or do you have a spare room?”
“Your room is the second door on the right. Shout if you can’t find everything you need.” She put her face up and kissed him goodnight, a quick peck. “‘Night.”
Lazarus followed her and went into his own room.
Mary Sperling woke at her usual hour the next day. She got up quietly to keep from waking Lazarus, ducked into her ‘fresher, showered and massaged, swallowed a grain of sleep surrogate to make up for the short night, followed it almost as quickly with all the breakfast she permitted her waistline, then punched for the calls she had not bothered to take the night before. The phone played back several calls which she promptly forgot, then she recognized the voice of Bork Vanning. “‘Hello,'” the instrument said. “‘Mary, this is Bork, calling at twenty-one o’clock. I’ll be by at ten o’clock tomorrow morning, for a dip in the lake and lunch somewhere. Unless I hear from you it’s a date. ‘Bye, my dear. Service.'”
“Service,” she repeated automatically. Drat the man! Couldn’t he take no for an answer? Mary Sperling, you’re slipping!-a quarter your age and yet you can’t seem to handle him. Call him and leave word that-no, too late; he’d be here any minute. Bother!
Chapter 2
WHEN LAZARUS went to bed he stepped out of his kilt and chucked it toward a wardrobe which snagged it, shook it out, and hung it up neatly. “Nice catch,” he commented, then glanced down at his hairy thighs and smiled wryly; the kilt had concealed a blaster strapped to one thigh, a knife to the other. He was aware of the present gentle custom against personal weapons, but he felt naked without them. Such customs were nonsense anyhow, foolishment from old women-there was no such thing as a “dangerous weapon,” there were only dangerous men.