‘Just one?’ the soldier asked him as he led the way to his superior’s office. ‘We can give you fifty reegs. Two hundred. We’re overrun with them right now. From that last battle we nailed six of their transports.’
In the colonel’s office he filled out forms, signed for TF&D. Payment, he explained, would be forwarded through normal channels at the end of the month in response to presentation of a formal statement.
‘Take your pick,’ the colonel, bored to death, told him. ‘Look around; you can have any one of them – they’re all alike, though.’
Eric said, ‘I see a reeg filing forms there in the next room. He – or it – looks efficient.’
‘That’s old Deg,’ the colonel said. ‘Deg’s a fixture around here; captured in the first week of the war. Even built himself one of those translating boxes so he could be of more use to us. I wish all of them were as co-operative as Deg.’
‘I’ll take him,’ Eric said.
‘We’ll have to affix a considerable additional fee,’ the colonel said slyly. ‘Because of the amount of training he’s received here from us.’ He made a note of that. ‘And a service charge for the translating box.’
‘You said he built it.’
‘We supplied the materials.’
At last they agreed on a price and then Eric walked into the next room and up to the reeg, busy with his four multi-jointed arms at the insurance claim files. ‘You belong to TF&D now,’ Eric informed him. ‘So come along.’ To the colonel he said, ‘Will he try to escape or fight me?’
‘They never do,’ the colonel said, lighting a cigar and leaning against the wall of his office with dreary ennui. They don’t have the mentality for it; they’re just bugs. Huge, shiny bugs.’
Presently he was back outside in the hot sun, waiting for a cab from nearby Phoenix. If I had known it would take such a short time, he said to himself, I would have held onto the cranky, elderly cab. He felt uncomfortable, standing with the silent reeg; this was, after all, their formal enemy. Reegs battled with and killed Terrans, and this one had been and still was a commissioned officer.
Like a fly the reeg cleaned himself, combing his wings, his sensory antennae, then his lower set of extremities. He carried his translating box under one brittle arm, never letting go of it.
‘Are you glad to get out of that PO W camp?’ Eric asked.
Words, pale in the strong desert sun, appeared on the box.
NOT PARTICULARLY
The cab arrived and Eric, along with Deg Dal Il, entered it. Soon they were in the air, turning in the direction of Tijuana.
Eric said, ‘I know you’re an officer in reeg intelligence. That’s why I bought you.’
The box remained blank. But the reeg trembled. His opaque, compound eyes became even more filmed-over and the false ones gaped emptily.
‘I’ll take the risk of telling you this right now,’ Eric said. ‘I’m an intermediary acting to bring you together with someone high in UN circles. It’s in your interest, yours and your people’s, to co-operate with me. You will be dropped off at my firm—’
The box came to life.
RETURN ME TO CAMP
‘All right,’ Eric said. ‘I know you have to act out the pose you’ve maintained for so long now. Even though it’s no longer necessary I’m aware that you’re still in contact with your government. That’s why you can be useful to the personage you’re to meet in Tijuana. Through you he can establish relations with your government—’ He hesitated, then plunged in. ‘Without the ‘Starmen knowing.’ That was saying a lot; he had mightily presumed on what, for his part, was a very small role.
After a pause the box relit.
I HAVE ALWAYS CO-OPERATED
‘But this is different.’ And he dropped the subject then and there. For the remainder of the trip he did not try to communicate with Deg Dal Il; it was obviously the wrong thing to do. Deg Dal Il knew it and he knew it. The rest was up to someone else, not him.
——————————————————————————–
When they reached Tijuana Eric rented a room at the Caesar Hotel on the main street of town; the desk clerk, a Mexican, stared at the reeg but asked no questions. This was Tijuana, Eric reflected as he and Deg ascended to their floor. Everyone minded his own business; it had always been like this here, and even now, in wartime, Tijuana remained unchanged. You could obtain anything, do anything, you wanted. As long as it was not done blatantly on the public street. And most especially if it was consummated at night. Because at night Tijuana became a transformed city in which everything, even unimaginable things, was possible. Once it had been abortions, narcotics, women, and gambling. Now it was concourse with the enemy.
In the hotel room he handed over a copy of the ownership papers to Deg Dal Il; in case trouble arose during his absence the papers would prove that the reeg had not escaped from a POW camp, nor was he a spy. In addition Eric provided him with money. And instructed him to contact TF&D if any difficulty – especially the appearance of ‘Star intelligence agents – supervened. The reeg was to remain in the hotel room at all times, eating his meals there, watching the TV if he wished, admitting no one if he could avoid it, and if somehow ‘Star agents got through to him, he was to reveal nothing. Even if this brought about his death.
‘I think it’s my place to tell you that,’ Eric said, ‘not because I lack respect for reeg life or because I believe Terrans ought to tell a reeg when to die and when not to but simply because I know the situation and you do not. You’ll just have to accept my word that it’s that important.’ He waited for the box to light up but it did not. ‘No comment?’ he asked, disappointed in a vague way. There had been so little real contact between him and the reeg; it seemed a bad omen, somehow.
At last the box, reluctantly, lit.
GOOD-BY
‘You have nothing else to say?’ Eric said, incredulous.
WHAT IS YOUR NAME?
‘It’s on the forms I gave you,’ Eric said, and left the hotel room, shutting the door loudly after him.
Outdoors on the sidewalk he hailed an old-fashioned surface cab and told its human driver to take him to TF&D.
Fifteen minutes later he once more entered the attractive apteryx-shaped, gray-lit building and made his way down the familiar corridor to his own office. Or what had until recently been his office.
Miss Perth, his secretary, blinked in amazement. ‘Why, Dr Sweetscent – I thought you were in Cheyenne!’
‘Is Jack Blair around?’ He glanced toward the parts bins but he did not see his departmental assistant. Bruce Himmel, however, lurked in the dim last row, an inventory chart and clipboard in one hand. ‘How’d you make out with the San Diego Public Library?’ Eric asked him.
Startled, Himmel rose to a standing position. ‘I’m appealing, doctor. I’ll never give up. How come you’re back here in
Tijuana?’
Til Perth said, ‘Jack is upstairs conferring with Mr Virgil Ackerman, doctor. You look tired. It’s a lot of work there in Cheyenne, isn’t it? Such a big responsibility.’ Her long-lashed blue eyes showed sympathy and her large breasts seemed to swell a trifle in a motherly, mobile, nourishing way. ‘Can I fix you a cup of coffee?’
‘Sure. Thanks.’ He seated himself at his desk and rested for a moment, thinking back over the day. Strange that all these things had happened in a sequence which had returned him to this spot, to his own chair at last. Was this in some sense the end? Had he played out his little – or not so little – part in a brawl involving three races of the galaxy? Four, if the rotten-pear-shaped creatures from Betelgeuse were included … and out of sentiment he did. Perhaps the load was off him. A vidcall to Cheyenne, to Molinari; that would do it and once more he would be Virgil Ackerman’s physician, replacing organ after organ as they gave out. But there was still Kathy. Was she here at TF&D’s infirmary? Or in a San Diego hospital? Perhaps she was trying to resume her life, despite the addiction, doing her job for Virgil. She was not a coward; she would keep pushing until the end.
‘Is Kathy here in the building?’ he asked Til Perth.
‘I’ll check for you, doctor.’ She jiggled the button of her desk-corn. There’s your coffee, beside your elbow.’
‘Thanks.’ He sipped the coffee with gratitude. It was almost like old times; his office had always been for him an oasis where things were rational, safe from the fury of his botched-up domestic life. Here he could pretend that people were nice to one another, that relationships between people could be merely friendly, merely casual. And yet – that was not enough. There had to be intimacy, too. Even with its threat of becoming a destroying force.