‘I’ll have to goose them about the air machinery,’ Virgil complained as he descended the ramp to the sidewalk, assisted by Jonas and Harv. It did not seem to bother him, however; he spryly hiked toward the doorway of the apartment building.
Robants in the shape of small boys hopped to their feet and one of them yelled authentically, ‘Hey Virg! Where you been?’
‘Had to do an errand for my mother,’ Virgil cackled, his face shining with delight. ‘How are ya, Earl? Hey, I got some good Chinese stamps my dad gave me; he got them at his office. There’s duplicates; I’ll trade you.’ He fished in his pocket, halting on the porch of the building.
‘Hey, you know what I have?’ a second robant child shrilled. ‘Some dry ice; I let Bob Rougy use my Flexie for it; you can hold it if you want.’
‘I’ll trade you a big-little book for it,’ Virgil said as he produced his key and unlocked the front door of the building. ‘How about Buck Rogers and the Doom Comet? That’s real keen.’
As the rest of the party descended from the ship, Phyllis said to Eric, ‘Offer the children a mint-condition 1952 Marilyn Monroe nude calendar and see what they’ll give you for it. At least half a popsicle.’
As the apartment house door swung aside, a TF&D guard belatedly appeared. ‘Oh, Mr Ackerman; I didn’t realize you’d arrived.’ The guard ushered them into the dark, carpeted hall.
‘Is he here yet?’ Virgil asked, with sudden apparent tension.
‘Yes sir. In the apt resting. He asked not to be disturbed for several hours.’ The guard, too, seemed nervous.
Halting, Virgil said, ‘How large is his party?’
‘Just himself, an aide, and two Secret Service men’.
‘Who’s for a glass of ice-cold Kool-Aid?’ Virgil said reflexively over his shoulder as he led the way.
‘Me, me,’ Phyllis said, mimicking Virgil’s enthusiastic tone. ‘I want imitation fruit raspberry lime; what about you, Eric? How about gin bourbon lime or cherry Scotch vodka? Or didn’t they sell those flavors back in 1935?’
To Eric, Harv said, ‘I’d like a place to lie down and rest, myself. This Martian air makes me weak as a kitten.’ His face had become mottled and ill-looking. ‘Why doesn’t he build a dome? Keep real air in here?’
‘Maybe,’ Eric pointed out, ‘there’s a purpose in this. Prevents him from retiring here for good; makes him leave after a short while.’
Coming up to them, Jonas said, ‘Personally I enjoy coming to this anachronistic place, Harv. It’s a fnugging museum.’ Tc Eric he said, ‘In all fairness, your wife does a superb job of providing artifacts for this period. Listen to that – what’s it called? – that radio playing in that apt.’ Dutifully they listened. It was ‘Betty and Bob,’ the ancient soap opera, emanating from the long-departed past. And even Eric found himself impressed; the voices seemed alive and totally real. They were here now, not mere echoes of themselves. How Kathy had achieved this he didn’t know.
Steve, the huge and handsome, masculine Negro janitor of the building – or rather his robant simulacrum – appeared then, smoking his pipe and nodding cordially to them all. ‘Morning, doctor. Little nip of cold we having these days. Kids be getting they sled out soonly. My own boy, Georgie, he saving for a sled, he say little while ago to me.’
‘I’ll chip in a 1934 dollar,’ Ralf Ackerman said, reaching for his wallet. In a sotto voce aside to Eric he said, ‘Or does old papa Virgil have it that the colored kid isn’t entitled to a sled?’
‘That no nevermind, Mr Ackerman,’ Steve assured him. ‘Georgie, he earn he sled; he not want tips but real and troo pay.’ The dignified dark robant moved off then and was gone.
‘Damn convincing,’ Harv said presently.
‘Really is.’ Jonas agreed. He shivered. ‘God, to think that the actual man’s been dead a century. It’s distinctly hard to keep in mind we’re on Mars, not even on Earth in our own time – I don’t like it. I like things to appear what they really are.’
A thought came to Eric. ‘Do you object to a stereo tape of a symphony played back in the evening when you’re at home in your apt?’
‘No,’ Jonas said, ‘but that’s totally different.’
‘It’s not,’ Eric disagreed. ‘The orchestra isn’t there, the original sound has departed, the hall in which it was recorded is now silent; all you possess is twelve hundred feet of iron oxide tape that’s been magnetized in a specific pattern … it’s an illusion just like this. Only this is complete.’ Q.E.D., he thought, and walked on then, toward the stairs. We live with illusion daily, he reflected. When the first bard rattled off the first epic of a sometime battle, illusion entered our lives; the Iliad is as much a ‘fake’ as those robant children trading postage stamps on the porch of the building. Humans have always striven to retain the past, to keep it convincing; there’s nothing wicked in that. Without it we have no continuity; we have only the moment. And, deprived of the past, the moment – the present – has little meaning, if any.
Maybe, he pondered as he ascended the stairs, that’s my problem with Kathy. I can’t remember our combined past: can’t recall the days when we voluntarily lived with each other. .. now it’s become an involuntary arrangement, derived God knows how far from the past.
And neither of us understands it. Neither of us can puzzle out its meaning or its motivating mechanism. With a better memory we could turn it back into something we could fathom.
He thought, Maybe this is the first sign of old age making its dread appearance. And for me at thirty-four!
Phyllis, halting on the stair, waiting for him, said, ‘Have an affair with me doctor.’
Inwardly he quailed, felt hot, felt terror, felt excitement, felt hope, felt hopelessness, felt guilt, felt eagerness.
He said, ‘You have the most perfect teeth known to man.’
‘Answer.’
‘I—’ He tried to think of an answer. Could words respond to this? But this had come in the form of words, had it not? ‘And be roasted into a cinder by Kathy – who sees everything that goes on?’ He felt the woman staring at him, staring and staring with her huge, star-fixed eyes. ‘Hmm,’ he said, not too cleverly, and felt miserable and small and exactly precisely right to the last jot and tittle what he ought not to be.
Phyllis said, ‘But you need it.’
‘Umm,’ he said, wilting under this unwanted, undeserved female psychiatric examination of his evil, inner soul; she had it – his soul – and she was turning it over and over on her tongue. Goddam her! She had figured it out; she spoke the truth; he hated her; he longed to go to bed with her. And of course she knew – saw on his face – all this, saw it with her accursed huge eyes, eyes which no mortal woman ought to possess.
‘You’re going to perish without it,’ Phyllis said. ‘Without true, spontaneous, relaxed, physical sheer—’
‘One chance,’ he said hoarsely. ‘In a billion. Of getting away with it.’ He managed, then, actually to laugh. ‘In fact our standing here right now on these damn stairs is folly. But what the —— do you care?’ He started on, then, actually passed her, continued on up to the second floor. What do you have to lose? he thought. It’s me; I’d be the one. You can handle Kathy just as easily as you can yank me around at the end of that line you keep paying out and reeling back.
The door to Virgil’s private, modern apt stood open; Virgil had gone inside. The balance of the party straggled after him, the blood clan first, of course, then the mere titled officers of the firm.
Eric entered – and saw Virgil’s guest.
The guest; the man they had come here to see. Reclining, his face empty and slack, lips bulging dark purple and irregular, eyes fixed absently on nothing, was Gino Molinari. Supreme elected leader of Terra’s unified planetary culture, and the supreme commander of its armed forces in the war against the reegs.
His fly was unbuttoned.
THREE
At his lunch break Bruce Himmel, technician in charge of the final stage of quality control at Tijuana Fur & Dye Corpor-ation’s central installation, left his post and shuffled down the streets of Tijuana toward the cafe at which he traditionally ate, due to its being cheap plus making the fewest possible social demands on him. The Xanthus, a small yellow wooden build-ing squeezed between two adobe dry-goods shops, attracted a variable trade of workmen and peculiar male types, mostly in their late twenties, who indicated no particular method of earning a living. But they left Himmel alone and that was all he asked. In fact this essentially was all he asked from life itself. And, oddly, life was willing to consummate a deal of this sort with him.