Nuts! he thought. Barney needs to be insecure, otherwise he’s as good as on Mars; that’s why he’s hired that talking suitcase. I don’t understand the modern world at all, obviously. I’m living back in the twentieth century when psychoanalysts made people less prone to stress.
“Don’t you ever talk, Mr. Bulero?” Miss Jurgens asked.
“No.” He thought, Could I dabble successfully in Barney’s pattern of behavior? Help him to–what’s the word?–become less viable?
But it was not as easy as it sounded; he instinctively appreciated that, expanded frontal lobe-wise. You can’t make healthy people sick just by giving an order.
Or can you?
Excusing himself, he hunted up the robot waiter, and asked that a vidphone be brought to his table.
A few moments later he was in touch with Miss Gleason back at the office. “Listen, I want to see Miss Rondinella Fugate, from Mr. Mayerson’s staff, as soon as I get back. And Mr. Mayerson is not to know. Understand?”
“Yes sir,” Miss Gleason said, making a note.
“I heard,” Pia Jurgens said, when he had hung up. “You know, I could tell Mr. Mayerson; I see him nearly every day in the–”
Leo laughed. The idea of Pia Jurgens throwing away the burgeoning future opening for her vis-à-vis himself amused him. “Listen,” he said, patting her hand, “don’t worry; it’s not within the spectrum of human nature. Finish your Ganymedean wap-frog croquette and let’s get back to the office.”
“What I meant,” Miss Jurgeris said stiffly, “is that it seems a little odd to me that you’d be so open in front of someone else, someone you don’t hardly know.” She eyed him, and her bosom, already overextended and enticing, became even more so; it expanded with indignation.
“Obviously the answer is to know you better,” Leo said, greedily. “Have you ever chewed Can-D?” he asked her, rhetorically. “You should. Despite the fact that it’s habit forming. It’s a real experience.” He of course kept a supply, grade AA, on hand at Winnie-the-Pooh Acres; when guests assembled it often was brought out to add color to what otherwise might have passed as dull. “The reason I ask is that you look like the sort of woman who has active imagination, and the reaction you get to Can-D depends–varies with–your imaginative-type creative powers.”
“I’d enjoy trying it sometime,” Miss Jurgens said. She glanced about, lowered her voice, and leaned toward him. “But it’s illegal.”
“It is?” He stared at her.
“You know it is.” The girl looked nettled.
“Listen,” Leo said. “I can get you some.” He would, of course, chew it with her; in concert the users’ minds fused, became a new unity–or at least that was the experience. A few sessions of Can-D chewing in togetherness and he would know all there was to know about Pia Jurgens; there was something about her–beyond the obvious physical, anatomical enormity–that fascinated him; he yearned to be closer to her. “We won’t use a layout.” By an irony he, the creator and manufacturer of the Perky Pat microworld, preferred to use Can-D in a vacuum; what did a Terran have to gain from a layout, inasmuch as it was a mill of the conditions obtaining in the average Terran city? For settlers on a howling, gale-swept moon, huddled at the bottom of a hovel against frozen methane crystals and things, it was something else again; Perky Pat and her layout were an entree back to the world they had been born to. But he, Leo Bulero, he was damn tired of the world he had been born to and still dwelt on. And even Winnie-the-Pooh Acres, with all its quaint and not-so-quaint diversions did not fill the void. However–
“That Can-D,” he said to Miss Jurgens, “is great stuff, and no wonder it’s banned. It’s like religion; Can-D is the religion of the colonists.” He chuckled. “One plug of it, wouzzled for fifteen minutes, and–” He made a sweeping gesture. “No more hovel. No more frozen methane. It provides a reason for living. Isn’t that worth the risk and expense?”
But what is there of equal value for us? he asked himself, and felt melancholy. He had, by manufacturing the Perky Pat layouts and raising and distributing the lichen-base for the final packaged product Can-D, made life bearable for over one million unwilling expatriates from Terra. But what the hell did he get back? My life, he thought, is dedicated to others, and I’m beginning to kick; it’s not enough. There was his satellite, where Scotty waited; there existed as always the tangled details of his two large business operations, the one legal, the other not… but wasn’t there more in life than this?
He did not know. Nor did anyone else, because like Barney Mayerson they were all engaged in their various imitations of him. Barney with his Miss Rondinella Fugate, small-time replica of Leo Bulero and Miss Jurgens. Wherever he looked it was the same; probably even Ned Lark, the Narcotics Bureau chief, lived this sort of life–probably so did Hepburn-Gilbert, who probably kept a pale, tall Swedish starlet with breasts the size of bowling balls– and equally firm. Even Palmer Eldritch. No, he realized suddenly. Not Palmer Eldritch; he’s found something else. For ten years he’s been in the Prox system or at least coming and going. What did he find? Something worth the effort, worth the terminal crash on Pluto?
“You saw the homeopapes?” he asked Miss Jurgens. “About the ship on Pluto? There’s a man in a billion, that Eldritch. No one else like him.”
“I read,” Miss Jurgens said, “that he was practically a nut.”
“Sure. Ten years out of his life, all that agony, and for what?”
“You can be sure he got a good return for the ten years,” Miss Jurgens said. “He’s crazy but smart; he looks out for himself, like everyone else does. He’s not that nuts.”
“I’d like to meet him,” Leo Bulero said. “Talk to him, even if only just a minute.” He resolved, then, to do that, go to the hospital where Palmer Eldritch lay, force or buy his way into the man’s room, learn what he had found.
“I used to think,” Miss Jurgens said, “that when the ships first left our system for another star–remember that?–we’d hear that–” She hesitated. “It’s so silly, but I was only a kid then, when Arnoidson made his first trip to Prox and back; I was a kid when he got back, I mean. I actually thought maybe by going that far he’d–” She ducked her head, not meeting Leo Bulero’s gaze. “He’d find God.”
Leo thought, I thought so, too. And I was an adult, then. In my mid-thirties. As I’ve mentioned to Barney on numerous occasions.
And, he thought, I still believe that, even now. About the ten-year flight of Palmer Eldritch.
After lunch, back in his office at P. P. Layouts, he met Rondinella Fugate for the first time; she was waiting for him when he arrived.
Not bad-looking, he thought as he shut the office door. Nice figure, and what glorious, luminous eyes. She seemed nervous; she crossed her legs, smoothed her skirt, watched him furtively as he seated himself at his desk facing her. Very young, Leo realized. A child who would speak up and contradict her superior when she thought he was wrong. Touching…
“Do you know why you’re here in my office?” he inquired.
“I guess you’re angry because I contradicted Mr. Mayerson. But I really experienced the futurity in the life-line of those ceramics. So what else could I do?” She half-rose imploringly, then reseated herself.
Leo said, “I believe you. But Mr. Mayerson is sensitive. If you’re living with him you know he has a portable psychiatrist that he lugs wherever he goes.” Opening his desk drawer he got out his box of Cuesta Reys, the very finest; he offered the box to Miss Fugate, who gratefully accepted one of the slender dark cigars. He, too, took a cigar; he lit hers and then his, and leaned back in his chair. “You know who Palmer Eldritch is?”
“Yes.”
“Can you use your precog powers for something other than Pre-Fash foresight? In another month or so the homeopapes will be routinely mentioning Eldritch’s location. I’d like you to look ahead to those ’papes and then tell me where the man is at this moment. I know you can do it.” You had better be able to, he said to himself, if you want to keep your job here. He waited, smoking his cigar, watching the girl and thinking to himself, with a trace of envy, that if she was as good in bed as she looked–
Miss Fugate said in a soft, halting voice, “I get only the most vague impression, Mr. Bulero.”
“Well, let’s hear it anyhow.” He reached for a pen.
It took her several minutes, and, as she reiterated, her impression was not distinct. Nonetheless he presently had on his note pad the words: James Riddle Veterans’ Hospital, Base III, Ganymede. A UN establishment, of course. But he had anticipated that. It was not decisive; he still might be able to find a way in.