Then the explosion came. Beatrice capsized her chair, attacked the skeleton, threw it crashing into a corner. She cleaned off the shelves of Skip’s Museum, bouncing specimens off the walls, trampling them on the floor.
Rumfoord was flabbergasted. “Good God — ” he said, “what made you do that?”
“Don’t you know everything?” said Beatrice hysterically. “Does anybody have to tell you anything? Just read my mind!”
Rumfoord put his palms to his temples, his eyes wide. “Static — all I get is static,” he said.
“What else would there be but static!” said Beatrice. “I’m going to be thrown right out in the street, without even the price of a meal — and my husband laughs and wants me to play guessing games!”
“It wasn’t any ordinary guessing game,” said Rumford. “It was about how long the human race was going to last. I thought that might sort of give you more perspective about your own problems.”
“The hell with the human race!” said Beatrice.
“You’re a member of it, you know,” said Rumfoord.
“Then I’d like to put in for a transfer to the chimpanzees!” said Beatrice. “No chimpanzee husband would stand by while his wife lost all her coconuts. No chimpanzee husband would try to make his wife into a space whore for Malachi Constant of Hollywood, California!”
Having said this ghastly thing, Beatrice subsided some. She wagged her head tiredly. “How long is the human race going to be around, Master?”
“I don’t know,” said Rumfoord.
“I thought you knew everything,” said Beatrice. “Just take a look at the future.”
“I look at the future,” said Rumfoord, “and I find that I shall not be in the Solar System when the human race dies out. So the end is as much a mystery to me as to you.”
In Hollywood, California, the chimes of the blue telephone in the rhinestone phone booth by Malachi Constant’s swimming pool were ringing.
It is always pitiful when any human being falls into a condition hardly more respectable than that of an animal. How much more pitiful it is when the person who falls has had all the advantages!
Malachi Constant lay in the wide gutter of his kidney-shaped swimming pool, sleeping the sleep of a drunkard. There was a quarter of an inch of warm water in the gutter. Constant was fully dressed in blue-green evening shorts and a dinner jacket of gold brocade. His clothes were soaked,
He was all alone.
The pool had once been covered uniformly by an undulating blanket of gardenias. But a persistent morning breeze had moved the blooms to one end of the pool, as though folding a blanket to the foot of a bed. In folding back the blanket, the breeze revealed a pool bottom paved with broken glass, cherries, twists of lemon peel, peyotl buttons, slices of orange, stuffed olives, sour onions, a television set, a hypodermic syringe, and the ruins of a white grand piano. Cigar butts and cigarette butts, some of them marijuana, littered the surface.
The swimming pool looked less like a facility for sport than like a punchbowl in hell.
One of Constant’s arms dangled in the pool itself. From the wrist underwater came the glint of his solar watch. The watch had stopped.
The telephone’s chimes persisted.
Constant mumbled but did not move.
The chimes stopped. Then, after twenty seconds, the chimes began again.
Constant groaned, sat up, groaned.
From the inside of the house came a brisk, efficient sound, high heels on a tile floor. A ravishing, brassy blond woman crossed from the house to the phone booth, giving Constant a look of haughty contempt.
She was chewing gum.
“Yah?” she said into the telephone. “Oh — it’s you again. Yah — he’s awake. Hey!” she yelled at Constant. She had a voice like a grackle. “Hey, space cadet!” she yelled.
“Hm?” said Constant.
“The guy who’s president of that company you own wants to talk to you.”
“Which company?” said Constant.
“Which company you president of?” said the woman into the telephone. She got her answer. “Magnum Opus,” she said. “Ransom K. Fern of Magnum Opus,” she said.
“Tell him — tell him I’ll call him back,” said Constant.