She stared at him and then–incredibly–she began to laugh.
“Does that mean no?” he asked, woodenly.
“What,” Anne said, “is ‘Chicken Pox Prospects’? Oh, I see; that’s the code name of your hovel. I’m sorry, Barney; I didn’t mean to laugh. But the answer of course is no.” She moved away from him, and opened the outer door of the hovel’s entrance-chamber. And then she set down her lantern and stepped toward him, arms held out. “Make love to me,” she said.
“Not here. Too close to the entrance.” He was afraid.
“Wherever you want. Take me there.” She put her arms around his neck. “Now,” she said. “Don’t wait.”
He didn’t.
Picking her up in his arms, he carried her away from the entrance.
“Golly,” she said, when he laid her down in the darkness; she gasped, presently, perhaps from the sudden cold that spilled over them, penetrating their heavy suits which no longer served, which in fact were a hindrance to true warmth.
One of the laws of thermal dynamics, he thought. The exchange of heat; molecules passing between us, hers and mine mingling in–entropy? Not yet, he thought.
“Oh my,” she said, in the darkness.
“I hurt you?”
“No. I’m sorry. Please.”
The cold numbed his back, his ears; it radiated down from the sky. He ignored it as best he could, but he thought of a blanket, a thick wool layer–strange, to be preoccupied with that at such a time. He dreamed of its softness, the scratch of its fibers against his skin, its heaviness. Instead of the brittle, frigid, thin air which made him pant in huge gulps, as if finished.
“Are–you dying?” she asked.
“Just can’t breathe. This air.”
“Poor, poor–good lord. I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Hell of a thing.”
“Barney!”
He clutched her.
“No! Don’t stop!” She arched her back. Her teeth chattered.
“I wasn’t going to,” he said.
“Oooaugh!”
He laughed.
“Don’t please laugh at me.”
“Not meant unkindly.”
A long silence, then. Then, “Oof.” She leaped, galvanized as if lost to the shock of a formal experiment. His pale, dignified, unclothed possession: become a tall and very thin greenless nervous system of a frog; probed to life by outside means. Victim of a current not her own but not protested, in any way. Lucid and real, accepting. Ready this long time.
“You all right?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes Barney. I certainly very much am. Yes!”
Later as he tramped back alone, leadenly, in the direction of his own hovel he said to himself, Maybe I’m doing Palmer Eldritch’s work. Breaking her down, demoralizing her… as if she weren’t already. As if we all weren’t.
Something blocked his way.
Halting, he located in his coat the side-arm which had been provided him; there were, especially at night, in addition to the fearsome telepathic jackal, vicious domestic organisms that stung and ate–he flashed his light warily, expecting some bizarre multi-armed contraption composed perhaps of slime. Instead he saw a parked ship, the small, swift type with slight mass; its tubes still smoked, so evidently it had just now landed. Must have coasted down, he realized, since he hadn’t heard any retro noise.
From the ship a man crept, shook himself, snapped on his own lantern, made out Barney Mayerson, and grunted. “I’m Allen Faine. I’ve been looking all over for you; Leo wants to keep in touch with you through me. I’ll be telecasting in code to you at your hovel; here’s your code book.” Faine held out a slender volume. “You know who I am, don’t you?”
“The disc jockey.” Weird, this meeting here on the open Martian desert at night between himself and this man from the P. P. Layouts satellite; it seemed unreal. “Thanks,” he said, accepting the code book. “What do I do, write it down as you say it and then sneak off to decode it?”
“There’ll be a private TV receiver in your compartment in the hovel; we’ve arranged for it on the grounds that being new to Mars you crave–”
“Okay,” Barney said, nodding.
“So you have a girl already,” Faine said. “Pardon my use of the infrared searchlight, but–”
“I don’t pardon it.”
“You’ll find that there’s little privacy on Mars in matters of that nature. It’s like a small town and all the hovelists are starved for news, especially any kind of scandal. I ought to know; it’s my job to keep in touch and pass on what I can–naturally there’s a lot I can’t. Who’s the girl?”
“I don’t know,” Barney said sardonically. “It was dark; I couldn’t see.” He started on, then, going around the parked ship.
“Wait. You’re supposed to know this: a Chew-Z pusher is already operating in the area and we calculate that he’ll be approaching your particular hovel as early as tomorrow morning. So be ready. Make sure you buy the bindle in front of witnesses; they should see the entire transaction and then when you chew it make sure they can clearly identify what you’re consuming. Got it?” Faine added, “And try to draw the pusher out, get him to give as complete a warranty, verbally of course, as you possibly can. Make him sell you on the product; don’t ask for it. See?”
Barney said, “And what do I get for doing this?”
“Pardon?”
“Leo never at any time bothered to–”
“I’ll tell you what,” Faine said quietly. “We’ll get you off Mars. That’s your payment.”
After a time Barney said, “You mean it?”
“It’ll be illegal, of course. Only the UN can legally route you back to Terra and that’s not going to happen. What we’ll do is pick you up some night and transfer you to Winnie-the-Pooh Acres.”
“And there I’ll stay.”
“Until Leo’s surgeons can give you a new face, finger and footprints, cephalic wave pattern, a new identity throughout; then you’ll emerge, probably at your old job for P. P. Layouts. I understand you were their New York man. Two, two and a half years from now, you’ll be at that again. So don’t give up hope.”
Barney said, “Maybe I don’t want that.”
“What? Sure you do. Every colonist wants–”
“I’ll think it over,” Barney said, “and let you know. But maybe I’ll want something else.” He was thinking about Anne. To go back to Terra and pick up once again, perhaps even with Roni Fugate–at some deep, instinctive stratum it did not have the appeal to him that he would have expected. Mars–or the experience of love with Anne Hawthorne–had even further altered him, now; he wondered which it was. Both. And anyhow, he thought, I asked to come here–I wasn’t really drafted. And I must never let myself forget that.
Allen Faine said, “I know some of the circumstances, Mayerson. What you’re doing is atoning. Correct?”
Surprised, Barney said, “You, too?” Religious inclinations seemed to permeate the entire milieu, here.
“You may object to the word,” Faine said, “but it’s the proper one. Listen, Mayerson; by the time we get you to Winnie-the-Pooh Acres you’ll have atoned sufficiently. There’s something you don’t know yet. Look at this.” He held out, reluctantly, a small plastic tube. A container.
Chilled, Barney said, “What’s this?”
“Your illness. Leo believes, on professional advice, that it’s not enough for you merely to state in court that you’ve been damaged; they’ll insist on thoroughly examining you.
“Tell me specifically what it is in this thing.”
“It’s epilepsy, Mayerson. The Q form, the strain whose causes no one is sure of, whether it’s due to organic injury that can’t be detected with the EEG or whether it’s psychogenic.”
“And the symptoms?”
Faine said, “Grand mal.” After a pause he said, “Sorry.”
“I see,” Barney said. “And how long will I have them?”
“We can administer the antidote after the litigation but not before. A year at the most. So now you can see what I meant when I said that you’re going to be in a position to more than atone for not bailing out Leo when he needed it. You can see how this illness, claimed as a side-effect of Chew-Z, will–”
“Sure,” Barney said. “Epilepsy is one of the great scare-words. Like cancer, once. People are irrationally afraid of it because they know it can happen to them, any time, with no warning.”
“Especially the more recent Q form. Hell, they don’t even have a theory about it. What’s important is that with the Q form no organic alteration of the brain is involved, and that means we can restore you. The tube, there. It’s a metabolic toxin similar in action to metrazol; similar, but unlike metrazol it continues to produce the attacks–with the characteristically deranged EEG pattern during those intervals–until it’s neutralized–which as I say we’re prepared to do.”
“Won’t a blood-fraction test show the presence of this toxin?”
“It will show the presence of a toxin, and that’s exactly what we want. Because we will sequester the documents pertaining to the physical and mental induction exams which you recently took… and we’ll be able to prove that when you arrived on Mars there was no Q-type epilepsy and no toxicity. And it’ll be Leo’s–or rather your–contention that the toxicity in the blood is a derivative of Chew-Z.”