“Can you change that too?” Wendy said. “With your talent?”
Pat said, “I’m living with Joe. I’m his mistress. Under our arrangement I pay his bills. I paid his front door, this morning, to let him out. Without me he’d still be in his conapt.”
“And our trip to Luna,” Al Hammond said, “would not have taken place.” He eyed Pat, a complex expression on his face.
“Perhaps not today,” Tippy Jackson pointed out, “but eventually. What difference does it make? Anyhow, I think that’s fine for Joe to have a mistress who pays his front door.” She nudged Joe on the shoulder, her face beaming with what struck Joe as salacious approval. A sort of vicarious enjoying of his private, personal activities; in Mrs. Jackson a voyeur dwelt beneath her extroverted surface.
“Give me the ship’s over-all phone book,” he said. “I’ll notify the moratorium to expect us.” He studied his wrist watch. Ten more minutes of flight.
“Here’s the phone book, Mr. Chip,” Jon Ild said, after a search; he handed him the heavy square box with its keyboard and microscanner.
Joe typed out SWITZ, then ZUR, then BLVD BRETH MORA. “Like Hebrew,” Pat said from behind him. “Semantic condensations.” The microscanner whisked back and forth, selecting and discarding; at last its mechanism popped up a punch card, which Joe fed into the phone’s receptor slot.
The phone said tinnily, “This is a recording.” It expelled the punch card vigorously. “The number which you have given me is obsolete. If you need assistance, place a red card in-”
“What’s the date on that phone book?” Joe asked Ild, who was returning it to its handy storage shelf.
Ild examined the information stamped on the rear of the box. “1990. Two years old.”
“That can’t be,” Edie Dorn said. “This ship didn’t exist two years ago. Everything on it and in it is new.”
Tito Apostos said, “Maybe Runciter cut a few corners.”
“Not at all,” Edie said. “He lavished care, money and engineering skill on Pratfall II. Everybody who ever worked for him knows that; this ship is his pride and joy.”
“Was his pride and joy,” Francy Spanish corrected.
“I’m not ready to admit that,” Joe said. He fed a red card into the phone’s receptor slot. “Give me the current number of the Beloved Brethren Moratorium in Zurich, Switzerland,” he said. To Francy Spanish he said, “This ship is still his pride and joy because he still exists.”
A card, punched into significance by the phone, leaped out; he transferred it to its receptor slot. This time the phone’s computerized workings responded without irritation; on the screen a sallow, conniving face formed, that of the unctuous busybody who ran the Beloved Brethren Moratorium. Joe remembered him with dislike.
“I am Herr Herbert Schoenheit von Vogelsang. Have you come to me in your grief, sir? May I take your name and address, were it to happen that we got cut off?” The moratorium owner poised himself.
Joe said, “There’s been an accident.”
“What we deem an ‘accident,'” von Vogelsang said, “is ever yet a display of god’s handiwork. In a sense, all life could be called an ‘accident.’ And yet in fact-”
“I don’t want to engage in a theological discussion,” Joe said. “Not at this time.”
“This is the time, out of all times, when the consolations of theology are most soothing. Is the deceased a relative?”
“Our employer,” Joe said. “Glen Runciter of Runciter Associates, New York. You have his wife Ella there. We’ll be landing in eight or nine minutes; can you have one of your transport cold-pac vans waiting?”
“He is in cold-pac now?”
“No,” Joe said. “He’s warming himself on the beach at Tampa, Florida.”
“I assume your amusing response indicates yes.”
“Have a van at the Zurich spaceport,” Joe said, and rang off. Look who we’ve got to deal through, he reflected, from now on. “We’ll get Ray Hollis,” he said to the inertials grouped around him.
Removing the plastic disk from its place, its firm adhesion to his ear, Glen Runciter said into the microphone, “I’ll talk to you again later.” He now set down all the communications apparatus, rose stiffly from the chair and momentarily stood facing the misty, immobile, icebound shape of Joe Chip resting within its transparent plastic casket. Upright and silent, as it would be for the rest of eternity.
“Get him instead of Mr. Vogelsang?” Sammy Mundo asked.
“Get him in the manner of getting him dead,” Joe said. “For bringing this about.” Glen Runciter, he thought, frozen upright in a transparent plastic casket ornamented with plastic rosebuds. Wakened into half-life activity one hour a month. Deteriorating, weakening, growing dim… Christ, he thought savagely. Of all the people in the world. A man that vital. And vitalic.
“Anyhow,” Wendy said, “he’ll be closer to Ella.”
“In a way,” Joe said, “I hope we got him into the cold-pac too-” He broke off, not wanting to say it. “I don’t like moratoriums,” he said. “Or moratorium owners. I don’t like Herbert Schoenheit von Vogelsang. Why does Runciter prefer Swiss moratoriums? What’s the matter with a moratorium in New York?”
“It is a Swiss invention,” Edie Dorn said. “And according to impartial surveys, the average length of half-life of a given individual in a Swiss moratorium is two full hours greater than an individual in one of ours. The Swiss seem to have a special knack.”
“The U.N. ought to abolish half-life,” Joe said. “As interfering with the natural process of the cycle of birth and death.”
Mockingly, Al Hammond said, “If god approved of half-life, each of us would be born in a casket filled with dry ice.”
At the control console, Don Denny said, “We’re now under the jurisdiction of the Zurich microwave transmitter. It’ll do the rest.” He walked away from the console, looking glum.
“Cheer up,” Edie Dorn said to him. “To be brutally harsh about it, consider how lucky all of us are; we might be dead now. Either by the bomb or by being lasered down after the blast. It’ll make you feel better, once we land; we’ll be so much safer on Earth.”
Joe said, “The fact that we had to go to Luna should have tipped us off.” Should have tipped Runciter off, he realized. “Because of that loophole in the law dealing with civil authority on Luna. Runciter always said, ‘Be suspicious of any job order requiring us to leave Earth.’ If he were alive he’d be saying it now. ‘Especially don’t bite if it’s Luna where they want us. Too many prudence organizations have bitten on that.'” If he does revive at the moratorium, he thought, that’ll be the first thing he says. “I always was suspicious of Luna,” he’ll say. But not quite suspicious enough. The job was too much of a plum; he couldn’t resist it. And so, with that bait, they got him. As he always knew they would.
The ship’s retrojets, triggered off by the Zurich microwave transmitter, rumbled on; the ship shuddered.
“Joe,” Tito Apostos said, “you’re going to have to tell Ella about Runciter. You realize that?”
“I’ve been thinking about it,” Joe said, “since we took off and started back.”
The ship, slowing radically, prepared by means of its various homeostatic servo-assist systems to land.
“And in addition,” Joe said, “I have to notify the Society as to what’s happened. They’ll rake us over the coals; they’ll point out right away that we walked into it like sheep.”
Sammy Mundo said, “But the Society is our friend.”
“Nobody,” Al Hammond said, “after a fiasco like this, is our friend.”
A solar-battery-powered chopper marked BELOVED BRETHREN MORATORIUM waited at the edge of the Zurich field. Beside it stood a beetle-like individual wearing a Continental outfit: tweed toga, loafers, crimson sash and a purple airplane-propeller beanie. The proprietor of the moratorium minced toward Joe Chip, his gloved hand extended, as Joe stepped from the ship’s ramp onto the flat ground of Earth.
“Not exactly a trip replete with joy, I would judge by your appearance,” von Vogelsang said as they briefly shook hands. “May my workmen go aboard your attractive ship and begin-”
“Yes,” Joe said. “Go aboard and get him.” Hands in his pockets, he meandered toward the field’s coffee shop, feeling bleakly glum. All standard operating procedure from now on, he realized. We got back to Earth; Hollis didn’t get us – we’re lucky. The Lunar operation, the whole awful, ugly, rat-trap experience, is over. And a new phase begins. One which we have no direct power over.
“Five cents, please,” the door of the coffee shop said, remaining shut before him.
He waited until a couple passed by him on their way out; neatly he squeezed by the door, made it to a vacant stool and seated himself. Hunched over, his hands locked together before him on the counter, he read the menu. “Coffee,” he said.
“Cream or sugar?” the speaker of the shop’s ruling monad turret asked.