‘Cat got your tongue?’ Phyllis Ackerman said to Eric, seating herself beside him in the cramped lounge. She smiled, an effort which transfigured her thin, delicately cut face; she looked, for a moment, appealingly pretty. ‘Order me a drink, too. So I can face the world of bolo bats and Jean Harlow and Baron von Richthofen and Joe Louis and – what the hell is it?’ She searched her memory, eyes squeezed shut. ‘I’ve blocked it out of my mind. Oh yes. Tom Mix. And his Ralston Straight Shooters. With the Wrangler. That wretched Wrangler. And that cereal! And those eternal goddam box tops. You know what we’re in for don’t you? Another session with Orphan Annie and her li’l decoder badge … we’ll have to listen to ads for Ovaltine and then those numbers read out for us to take down and decode – to find out what Annie does on Monday. God.’ She bent to reach for her drink, and he could not resist peering with near-professional interest as the top of her dress gave way to show the natural line of her small, articulated pale breasts.
Put by this spectacle in a reasonably good mood, Eric said playfully but cautiously, ‘One day we’ll jot down the numbers the fake announcer gives over the fake radio, decode them with the Orphan Annie decoder badge, and—’ The message will say, he thought glumly, Make a separate peace with the reegs. At once.
‘I know,’ Phyllis said, and thereupon finished for him, ‘”It’s hopeless, Earthmen. Give up now. This is the Monarch of the reegs speaking; looky heah, y’all: I’ve infiltrated radio station WMAL in Washington, D.C., and I’m going to destroy you.”‘ She somberly drank from her tall stemmed glass. ‘”And in addition the Ovaltine you’ve been drinking—”‘
‘I wasn’t going to say precisely that.’ But she had come awfully darn close. Nettled, Eric said, ‘Like the rest of your family you’ve got a sense that requires you to interrupt before a non-blooder—’
‘A what?’
‘This is what we call you,’ he said grimly. ‘You Ackermen.’
‘Go ahead then, doctor.’ Her gray eyes lit with amusement. ‘Say your tiny say.’
Eric said, ‘Never mind. Who’s the guest?’
The great pale eyes of the woman had never seemed so large, so composed; they dominated and commanded with their utter inner universe of certitude. Of tranquillity created by absolute, unchanging knowledge of all that deserved to be known. ‘Suppose we wait and see.’ And then, not yet affecting the changelessness of her eyes, her lips began to dance with a wicked, teasing playfulness; a moment later a new and different spark ignited within her eyes and thereupon the expression of her entire face underwent a total change. ‘The door,’ she said wickedly, her eyes gleaming and intense, her mouth twitching in a mirth-ridden giggle almost that of an adolescent girl, ‘flies open and there stands a silent delegate from Prox-ima. Ah, what a sight. A bloated greasy enemy reeg. Secretly, and incredibly because of Freneksy’s snooping secret police, a reeg here officially to negotiate for a—’ She broke off and then at last in a low monotone finished, ‘—a separate peace between us and them.’ With a dark and moody expression, her eyes no longer lit by any spark whatsoever, she listlessly finished her drink. ‘Yes, that’ll be the day. How well I can picture it. Old Virgil sits in, beaming and crackling as usual. And sees his war contracts, every fnugging last one of them, slither down the drain. Back to fake mink. Back to the bat crap days … when the whole factory stank to high heaven.’ She laughed shortly, a brisk bark of derision. ‘Any minute now, doctor. Oh sure.’
‘Freneksy’s cops,’ Eric said, sharing her mood, ‘as you pointed out yourself, would swoop down on Wash-35 so dalb fast—’
‘I know. It’s a fantasy, a wish-fulfilment dream. Born out of hopeless longing. So it hardly matters whether Virgil would decide to mastermind – and try to carry off – such an encounter or not, does it? Because it couldn’t be done successfully in a million light-years. It could be tried. But not done.’
‘Too bad,’ Eric said, half to himself, deep in thought.
‘Traitor! You want to be popped into the slave-labor pool?’
Eric, after pondering, said cautiously, ‘I want—’
‘You don’t know what you want, Sweetscent; every man involved in an unhappy marriage loses the metabiological capacity to know what he does want – it’s been taken away from him. You’re a smelly little shell, trying to do the correct thing but never quite making it because your miserable little long-suffering heart isn’t in it. Look at you now! You’ve managed to squirm away from me.’
‘Have not.’
‘—So we’re no longer touching physically. Especially thigh-wise. Oh, perish thighwise from the universe. But it is hard, is it not, to do it, to squirm away in such close quarters … here in the lounge. And yet you’ve managed to do it, haven’t you?’
To change the subject Eric said, ‘I heard on TV last night that the quatreologist with the funny beard, that Professor Wald, is back from—’
‘No. He’s not Virgil’s guest.’
‘Marm Hastings, then?’
That Taoist spellbinding nut and crank and fool? You manufacturing a joke, Sweetscent? Is that it? You suppose Virgil would tolerate a marginal fake, that—’ She made an obscene upward-jerking gesture with her thumb, at the same time grinning in a show of her white, clean and very impressive clear teeth. ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘it’s lan Norse.’
‘Who’s he?’ He had heard the name; it had a vaguely familiar sound to it, and he knew that in asking her he was making a tactical error; still he did it: this, if anything, was his weakness in regard to women. He led where they followed – sometimes. But more than once, especially at critical times in his life, in the major junctions, he followed guilelessly where they led.
Phyllis sighed. ‘lan’s firm makes all those shiny sterile new very expensive artificial organs you cleverly graft into rich dying people; you mean, doctor, you’re not clear as to whom you’re indebted?’
‘I know,’ Eric said, irritably, feeling chagrin. ‘With everything else on my mind I forgot momentarily; that’s all.’
‘Maybe it’s a composer. As in the days of Kennedy; maybe it’s Pablo Casals. God, he would be old. Maybe it’s Beethoven. Hmm.’ She pretended to ponder. ‘By God, I do think he said something about that. Ludwig van somebody; is there a Ludwig van Somebodyelse other than—’
‘Christ,’ Eric said angrily, weary of being teased. ‘Stop it.’
‘Don’t pull rank; you’re not so great. Keeping one creepy old man alive century after century.’ She giggled her low, sweet, and very intimate warm giggle of delighted mirth.
Eric said, with as much dignity as he could manage, ‘I also maintain TF&D’s entire work force of eighty thousand key individuals. And as a matter of fact, I can’t do that from Mars, so I resent all this. I resent it very much.’ You included, he thought bitterly to himself.
‘What a ratio,’ Phyllis said. ‘One artiforg surgeon to eighty thousand patients – eighty thousand and one. But you have your team of robants to help you … perhaps they can make do while you’re absent.’
‘A robant is an it that stinks,’ he said, paraphrasing T. S. Eliot.
‘And an artiforg surgeon,’ Phyllis said, ‘is an it that grovels.’
He glowered at her; she sipped her drink and showed no contrition. He could not get to her; she simply had too much psychic strength for him.
——————————————————————————–
The omphalos of Wash-35, a five story brick apartment building where Virgil had lived as a boy, contained a truly modern apartment of their year 2055 with every detail of convenience which Virgil could obtain during these war years. Several blocks away lay Connecticut Avenue, and, along it, stores which Virgil remembered. Here was Gammage’s, a shop at which Virgil had bought Tip Top comics and penny candy. Next to it Eric made out the familiar shape of People’s Drugstore; the old man during his childhood had bought a cigarette lighter here once and chemicals for his Gilbert Number Five glass-blowing and chemistry set.
‘What’s the Uptown Theatre showing this week?’ Harv Ackerman murmured as their ship coasted along Connecticut Avenue so that Virgil could review these treasured sights. He peered.
It was Jean Harlow in Hell’s Angels, which all of them had seen at least twice. Harv groaned.
‘But don’t forget that lovely scene,’ Phyllis reminded him, ‘where Harlow says, “I think I’ll go slip into something more comfortable,” and then when she returns—’
‘I know, I know,’ Harv said irritably. ‘Okay, that I like.’
The ship taxied from Connecticut Avenue onto McComb Street and soon was parking before 3039 with its black wrought-iron fence and tiny lawn. When the hatch slid back, however, Eric smelled – not the city air of a long-gone Terran capital – but the bitterly thin cold atmosphere of Mars; he could hardly get his lungs full of it and he stood gasping, feeling disorientated and sick.