“What?” said Beatrice.
“Guess how long the human race will be around,” said Rumfoord.
From between Beatrice’s clenched teeth came a frail, keen, sustained note so high as to be almost above the range of the human ear. The sound bore the same ghastly promise as the whistle of fins on a falling bomb.
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.
The woman told Fern, got another message to relay to Constant. “He says he’s quitting.”
Constant stood unsteadily, rubbing his face with his hands. “Quitting?” he said dully. “Old Ransom K. Fern quitting?”
“Yah,” said the woman. She smiled hatefully. “He says you can’t afford to pay his salary any more. He says you better come in and talk to him before he goes home.” She laughed. “He says you’re broke.”
Back in Newport, the racket of Beatrice Rumfoord’s outburst had attracted Moncrief the butler to Skip’s Museum. “You called, Mum?” he said.
“It was more of a scream, Moncrief,” said Beatrice.
“She doesn’t want anything, thank you,” said Rumfoord. “We were simply having a spirited discussion.”
“How dare you say whether I want something or not?” said Beatrice hotly to Rumfoord. “I’m beginning to catch on that you’re not nearly as omniscient as you pretend to be. It so happens I want something very much. I want a number of things very much.”
“Mum?” said the butler.
“I’d like you to let the dog in, please,” said Beatrice. “I’d like to pet him before he goes. I would like to find out if a chrono-synclastic infundibula kills love in a dog the way it kills love in a man.”
The butler bowed and left.
“That was a pretty scene to play before a servant,” said Rumfoord.
“By and large,” said Beatrice, “my contribution to the dignity of the family has been somewhat greater than yours.”
Rumfoord hung his head. “I’ve failed you in some way? Is that what you’re saying?”
“In some way?” said Beatrice. “In every way!”
“What would you have me do?” said Rumfoord.
“You could have told me this stock-market crash was coming!” said Beatrice. “You could have spared me what I’m going through now.”
Rumfoord’s hands worked in air, unhappily trying on various lines of argument for size.
“Well?” said Beatrice.
“I just wish we could go out to the chrono-synclastic infundibula together,” said Rumfoord. “So you could see for once what I was talking about. All I can say is that my failure to warn you about the stock-market crash is as much a part of the natural order as Halley’s Comet – and it makes an equal amount of sense to rage against either one.”
“You’re saying you have no character, and no sense of responsibility toward me,” said Beatrice. “I’m sorry to put it that way, but it’s the truth.”
Rumfoord rocked his head back and forth. “A truth – but, oh God, what a punctual truth,” he said.
Rumfoord retreated into his magazine again. The magazine opened naturally to the center spread, which was a color ad for MoonMist Cigarettes. MoonMist Tobacco, Ltd., had been bought recently by Malachi Constant.
Pleasure in Depth! said the headline on the ad. The picture that went with it was the picture of the three sirens of Titan. There they were – the white girl, the golden girl, and the brown girl.
The fingers of the golden girl were fortuitously spread as they rested on her left breast, permitting an artist to paint in a MoonMist Cigarette between two of them. The smoke from her cigarette passed beneath the nostrils of the brown and white girls, and their space-annihilating concupiscence seemed centered on mentholated smoke alone.
Rumfoord had known that Constant would try to debase the picture by using it in commerce. Constant’s father had done a similar thing when he found he could not buy Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” at any price. The old man had punished Mona Lisa by having her used in an advertising campaign for suppositories. It was the free-enterprise way of handling beauty that threatened to get the upper hand.
Rumfoord made a buzzing sound on his lips, which was a sound he made when he approached compassion. The compassion he approached was for Malachi Constant, who was having a far worse time of it than Beatrice.
“Have I heard your whole defense?” said Beatrice, coming behind Rumford’s chair. Her arms were folded, and Rumfoord, reading her mind, knew that she thought of her sharp, projected elbows as bullfighter’s swords.
“I beg your pardon?” said Rumfoord.
“This silence – this hiding in the magazine – this is the sum and total of your rebuttal?” said Beatrice.
“Rebuttal – a punctual word if there ever was one,” said Rumfoord. “I say this, and then you rebut me, then I rebut you, then somebody else comes in and rebuts us both.” He shuddered. “What a nightmare where everybody gets in line to rebut each other.”