Age Of The Pussyfoot Part 12

Something bad had happened. He tried halfheartedly to recall it, but all that would come to his memory was a mosaic of ma.s.s terror. Something had broken up the party with drunken men and women racing around in terror, even the Italian and the ballerina rousing themselves enough to flee. But what?

He was not sure; and he suspected that he would rather not remember, not just now.

He lurched to the end of the tunnel, climbed down metal steps, and pushed a door ajar. He stood gazing out over the plantings, touched by a warm breeze in which he took no pleasure at all. It was daylight, and, except for a distant swish of hovercar traffic, there was no sound of anyone around.

It was too soon to judge, on the basis of less than twenty-four hours' experience. And no doubt his troubles were all his own fault. But Forrester was ready to concede that life with the Forgotten Men was not his place in this new world, either.

If he had any place at all.

By the time Whitlow showed up, looking fat and happy and as though hangovers had never existed in the world, Forrester had come to the conclusion that, since he was alive, he would have to go on living.

"Ev'thing all raht this morning?" Whitlow asked cheerfully. "Man! You were flahing hah when we parted."

"I'm aware of that," said Forrester glumly. "I guess I'll have to take your word for the details. Whitlow, how do I go about getting a job again?"

"What for?"

"I think it's about time I grew up," said Forrester abjectly. "I'm not knocking you. But I don't want to live this way."

"You better start with some money," Whitlow offered. "Won't anybody hah'r you if you come in this way."

"All right. So the first step is to panhandle a stake?"

"Raht!" cried Whitlow. "And that's whut Ah came to tell you, Chuck! The flah-boy's around again. Whahn't you see if you can score again with him?"

They moved out across the broad green belt under the pylons, looking for open sky. Whitlow had seen the s.p.a.ce pilot in a one-man flier, cruising aimlessly around; according to Whitlow, the man had looked as though he were about to land and stroll among the Forgotten Men again, but there was no sign of him. "Sorry," Whitlow apologized. "But Ah'm sure he's around somewhere."

Forrester shrugged. Truth to tell, he was thinking, he wasn't sure he wanted to panhandle anybody. When you came right down to it, he had been living off this society without contributing anything in return. Not even anything in terms of the peculiar values of the society itself; something that, it appeared could be as little as a membership in Taiko's revolutionary society dedicated to its overthrow. With the endless flexibility of employment available, Forrester thought, surely there was something he could do-something that he would enjoy, and think worth his while to do. . . .

"Told you, Chuck!" Whitlow yelled. "See 'im? There!"

Forrester looked upward, and Whitlow was right. A face looked down from the flier; it looked like the astronaut's face, the eyes regarding them thoughtfully.

The figure picked up a joymaker and whispered into it. The flier dipped and slid away toward a landing.

"He's landing," said Forrester unnecessarily.

Whitlow was rubbing his chin, watching the flier descend toward the ground. He said abstractedly, "Uh-huh." His eyes looked worried.

"What's the matter?" Forrester asked.

"Huh?" Whitlow frowned at him, then back at the flier. "Oh, nothing, Chuck. Only Ah have a bad feeling raht now."

"What about?"

"Well . . . Nothing, Chuck. Only you never know what these flah-boys will want to do for fun, an'- Listen, Chuck. Ah believe Ah want to get out of here." And he turned briskly, catching Forrester's arm to pull him along.

Alarmed only because Whitlow seemed to be alarmed, not yet comprehending what it was all about, Forrester went along. If he thought at all, he only thought that it was rather cowardly of Whitlow to be so fearful, and not untypical of this cowardly age, where the very hope of immortality had produced exaggerated fear of permanent death. It was not until he felt the rush of air overhead that fear struck him personally and acutely.

The flier had taken off again, was now circling over them.

"It's him!" Forrester cried. "You're right, he is after us!"

He turned and ran, Whitlow dodging away in another direction, the two of them scattering as the flier dipped and turned overhead. . . .

It was funny, Forrester realized tardily, but he hadn't seen the man's face looking out of the flier this time.

At that moment he heard Whitlow's yell. The man hadn't been looking out of the flier. He hadn't even been in it; had sent the thing on its autonomic circuits into a hovering pattern, while he himself waited on the ground. And he stood there now, holding something that looked like a whip, directly in Whitlow's path, under the skirt of a tapering yellow building.

Whitlow tried to turn again and run, but he never had a chance. The thing that looked like a whip was a whip. The s.p.a.ceman seemed only to shake it gently, and its tip hissed out to touch Whitlow, then curled around his neck and threw him to the ground.

Forrester turned and ran. Directly behind him was the hoverway, with its hissing, rocketing, ground-effect cars following each other like tracer rounds out of a machine gun. If one of them struck him, he would die as surely as at the hands of any a.s.sa.s.sin; but he did not wait, he flung himself across the broad strip and miraculously missed them. A copper was standing, regarding him curiously, as Forrester turned to look back.

The s.p.a.ceman was lifting the whip again, an expression of alert pleasure on his face. Over the whush of the hovercars Forrester could hear Whitlow's scream. Their benefactor from s.p.a.ce reached out again with the whip as Whitlow tried to rise; he was slashed back to earth again; he tried to get up once more, and his body shook as the whip flicked blood from the side of his head. He tried again, and was thrown down. And stopped trying.

Forrester turned away and found he was sobbing.

I have aright to be scared, he told himself, half crazed. No one could watch a friend whipped to death unmoved. Not when the death was so vicious and so pointless. Especially not when the victim could so easily have been himself.

Could still be himself.

Forrester started to run and blundered into the ruddy metal arms of the copper. "Man Forrester," it said, staring into his eyes, "I have a message for you and good morning."

"Let go!" shouted Forrester.

"The message is as follows," said the copper inexorably. "Man Forrester, will you care to accept reemployment? It is from the one you know as Sirian Four."

"Let go of me, d.a.m.n you!" cried Forrester. "No. Or, yes-I don't know! I just want to get out of here!"

"Your wishful prospective employer, Man Forrester," said the copper, releasing him, "is nearby. He will see you now if you wish."

"He will go plumb to h.e.l.l," snarled Forrester, shaking himself. He trotted away, only coincidentally in the direction in which the copper had faced him; but it turned out that no coincidence was involved. The copper had pointed him toward the Sirian's waiting aircar. Forrester saw the aircar first, and outside of it something he did not immediately recognize. It looked a little like a glittering mushroom, a little like a chrominum ice cream cone. It rested on ducted jets that swept it across a bed of storm-tossed poppies toward Forrester. It moved toward him very fast, so fast that recognition was tardy; he did not realize it was a pressure suit until he was close enough to see within the bulge of the mushroom, behind an inset band of crystal, a ring of bright green eyes.

It was his Sirian. And it was reaching out to touch him with something that glittered and stung.

Forrester found himself lying on the ground, staring up at the suit that rode beside him on its jets.

"I never said I'd go back to work for you," he said. It hung there unresponding, the long tendril that had stung him now dangling slackly by its side.

"I don't need a job that bad," he babbled, squeezing his eyes closed. He thought that whatever the Sirian had stabbed him with was something very peculiar indeed. For he could not move. And the Sirian seemed to be changing shape.

It no longer looked like a Sirian at all.

Twelve.

At some later time Forrester realized that he could move again, and he found that he was in a flier, laughing to himself over something he had forgotten, staring down at a bright golden farm scene below.

A voice from behind him said, "Dear Charles, you are all right, it is true?"

He turned, grinning. "Sure. Only I've forgotten some things."

"You will say what those things are, dear Charles?"

He laughed, "Oh, what happened to the Sirian. Last I remember, he did something to me-it felt as though he were giving me a hypospray of something. And where we're going-would you believe it, I don't even remember getting into this thing with you. And another thing, I don't remember why you're wearing that funny-looking suit, Adne."

Adne said nothing, only regarded him roguishly through her circlet of green eyes.

He was no longer laughing. "It's confusing," he apologized. "I'm sorry if I've messed things up again."

She still did not speak, although she was busy enough. With others of her eyes she was apparently studying the instrument board of the flier, which was marked off in terrain segments, showing their flight plan as they moved.

"Dear Charles," she said suddenly, "you are ready to perform your programmed tasks?"

"What programmed tasks?"

But the question was a mistake. An explosion of pain formed under his skull and burst through his body to the tips of fingers and toes, where it recoiled and surged back and forth through his nervous system in dwindling echoes. He cried out. It was not the first time he had felt that pain; he remembered now. And he remembered his programmed tasks.

"You are Adne Bensen. As a joke you want me to smuggle you onto a starship. I must carry you aboard and plug in the command unit you have given me to the starship's circuits and tell no one, or it will spoil the joke. And hurt me."

"Dear Charles," boomed the hollow, resonant voice, "you are ready to perform your programmed tasks."

The pain was receding. Forrester leaned back, dizzy, sick, extremely confused. He wondered if his mind were breaking down. Certainly it would be no wonder if it were, after what he had been through.

It did not seem to him that Adne's joke was very funny. But Forrester recognized that his mind was not very sharp at that moment, and perhaps it was his judgment that was at fault, not the joke. He felt as though he were crazy. He felt both unbearably sleepy and keyed up, like an insomniac glaring hatefully at the slowly brightening window of his room. His eyes were gritty and sore, but when he closed them they sprang open again. It was frightening.

And he was disoriented in s.p.a.ce and time. He had no idea where they were. He realized with dismay that it was dark night outside the flier. When had that happened? Time pa.s.sed that he did not mark in any way; he would look up to see Adne regarding him with her strangely bright green eyes, look again, and she was somewhere else; but he had not seen her move. Delusions. Had he not thought that Adne had stabbed him with something like a hypodermic? What possible motive would she have for that? Had he not seemed to remember her telling him who she was over and over? (As though he couldn't recognize her!) Wasn't there a memory of the girl, looking so strangely unlike herself in that Sirian s.p.a.cesuit, repeating and endlessly repeating instructions on what he was to do at some later time, emphasizing them with jabs of that explosive pain?

He closed his eyes, groaning.

They flew open again, but curiously he was not in the flier any more. Dizzy and sick, he saw only in flashes, but the flashes told him that he was standing on hot, baked, dead gra.s.s; there was the whir of the flier's idling rotors behind him, ahead of him a metallic whining of gears as a port opened, beside him a hiss of ducted gas. He found himself pushing the bobbing, silent figure in the cone-shaped s.p.a.cesuit through the opening port; found himself connecting something flat and shiny to jacks on an instrument board. And then he was outside again, and under stars, and getting back into the flier.

But where was Adne?

He flung himself petulantly down on the seat. His head was splitting with pain. "d.a.m.n you," he whispered, and slept.

When he woke up, the flier was standing at the side of the hoverway, across from the tapering yellow spire. The engines were stopped and silent. As best he could tell, it was at the exact spot where the Sirian had reached out for him with the thing that stung.

He staggered out and breathed deep. Whush of vehicles from the hoverway, scream of tires from another, more distant road. There was no other sound. It appeared to be morning.

He called tentatively, "Adne?"

There was no answer. In a way, he had not expected one, only hoped.

Twenty-four hours had disappeared out of his life, and he was very hungry. He searched his pockets, to see what might be left of the handout from his friend, the whip-murderer. Nothing. He had expected that, of course. His resources were dwindling all the time. His money was gone. His credit was destroyed. Whitlow, his mentor among the Forgotten Men, was dead-irrevocably dead, Forrester thought, making the distinction in his mind that this age made out of instinct.

He had only Adne left-if he had Adne. So he did what he had known all along he was going to do; he headed for Adne's condominium.

He knew perfectly well, as he skulked through the underways and dodged pa.s.sing fliers, that he had no real claim on her. She might not be home; she might not admit him if she was.

But she was home and did admit him, without much enthusiasm. "You look a mess," she said, averting her face. "All right, come in."

He sat down, ill at ease. The two children were there, staring with total interest at something on the view-wall. They barely glanced his way, then returned to their show. For that matter, Adne's attention was on the wall as well.

Forrester cleared his throat. He was aware that, besides being hungry and broke, he was also far from clean. He cast about in his mind for some conversational gambit that would give Adne a chance to invite him to eat, or at least to wash up. "I, uh, had a funny experience," he said tentatively.

She grunted over her shoulder, "Hold it, will you, Charles?" She seemed very upset over something, he thought, watching her as she fingered her joymaker and stared at the changing patterns on the view-wall.

He said desperately, "I thought you were with me yesterday. It was all dreamlike and crazy, and I'm worried. It wasn't you, was it?"

"Charles, will you shut up a minute?" Her attention was on the wall. Forrester glanced at it. . . .

And saw a scene that he recognized. It was dried, seared gra.s.s on an open plain. There was a mark where something heavy had ground into the earth. A man s voice was saying, in tones of sonorous mourning, "The liftship appears to have evaded orbital patrols, and so it must be a.s.sumed to be on its way to Sirius itself. Radar-net surveillance detected it at launch, and appropriate challenges were issued. But there was no response. . . ."

Forrester swallowed a lump in his throat. "Did-did a Sirian-did one of them escape?"

The boy snapped, "Sweat, Charles! Where've you been? Happened hours ago!"

Forrester let his eyes close on his interior agony. The organ voice of the man narrating from the view-wall continued.

"Meanwhile, there is much concern at every level of authority. There can be no doubt that there must have been human complicity in the escape. Yet no joymaker monitors have registered any such event, nor can any motive be found. The Alliance for Solar-Sirian Amity has voluntarily offered all of its members for mind-probing; eight registered nihilist-obliterative organizations have been questioned about statements of policy suggesting that, in one formulation or another, all of humanity should destroy itself. No information suggesting complicity has emerged.

"But transcending any question of guilt are the considerations of consequence. One fact is beyond argument: a Sirian has managed to begin the long trip back to his home planet, undoubtedly carrying with him the information that Earth is the culprit in the destruction of a Sirian s.p.a.cecraft. Experts in Sirian psychology declare that the result will be war. All over the world at this hour-"

"He's looping it, Mim," grumbled the boy. "We heard this part twice already. Can I shut it off?"

Adne nodded and sank back, her face tense and almost expressionless as the wall relapsed into a decorative jungle scene.

Forrester coughed.

"Oh," said Adne. "I almost forgot you were here. Did you want to ask me something?"

"Well," said Forrester, "I did, but it isn't important now.

"Not compared to this," she agreed. "What was it?"

"Nothing. It was just something about whether you were with me yesterday, but I don't have to ask you any more. I know who was with me now."

Thirteen.