Six Stories by Robert A. Heinlein Part 11

"But I didn't. I remembered the oversight just a few minutes later and called your office back, but you had already left."

"I didn't say you gave it to me today," Potbury said testily; "you gave it to me yesterday."

Randall thought it over. He had offered Potbury his credentials the day before, but they contained only his business address. True, his home telephone was listed, but it was listed simply as a night business number, without address, both in his credentials and in the phone book. Perhaps Cynthia- But he could not ask Cynthia and the thought of her drove minor considerations out of his mind. "Are you sure there is nothing else I should do, doctor?" he asked anxiously.

"Nothing. Stay here and watch her."

"I will. But I surely wish I were twins for a while," he added emphatically.

"Why?" Potbury inquired, as he gathered up his gloves and turned toward the door.

"That guy Hoag. I've got a score to settle with him. Never mind-I'll put somebody else on his tail until I have a chance to settle his hash myself."

Potbury had wheeled around and was looking at him ominously. "You'll do nothing of the sort. Your place is here."

"Sure, sure-but I want to keep him on ice. One of these days I'm going to take him apart to see what makes him tick!"

"Young man," Potbury said slowly, "I want you to promise me that you will have nothing to do in any way with . . . with this man you mentioned."

Randall glanced toward the bed. "In view of what has happened," he said savagely, "do you think I'm going to let him get away scot-free?"

"In the name of- Look. I'm older than you are and I've learned to expect silliness and stupidity. Still-how much does it take to teach you that some things are too dangerous to monkey with?" He gestured toward Cynthia. "How can you expect me to be responsible for her recovery if you insist on doing things that might bring on a catastrophe?"

"But-listen, Dr. Potbury, I told you that I intended to follow your instructions about her. But I'm not going to just forget what he has done. If she dies . . . if she dies, so help me, I'll take him apart with a rusty ax!"

Potbury did not answer at once. When he did all he said was, "And if she doesn't die?"

"If she doesn't die, my first business is here, taking care of her. But don't expect me to promise to forget Hoag. I won't-and that's final."

Potbury jammed his hat on his head. "We'll let it go at that-and trust she doesn't die. But let me tell you, young man, you're a fool." He stomped out of the apartment.

The lift he had gotten from tangling wills with Potbury wore off in a few minutes after the doctor had gone, and a black depression settled down on him. There was nothing to do, nothing to distract his mind from the aching apprehension he felt over Cynthia. He did make the arrangements to raise the foot of the bed a little as suggested by Potbury, but it takes only a few minutes to perform such a trifling ch.o.r.e; when it was done he had nothing to occupy him.

In raising the foot of the bed he had been very cautious at first to avoid jarring the bed for fear of waking her; then he realized that waking her was just what he wanted most to do. Nevertheless he could not bring himself to be rough and noisy about it-she looked so helpless lying there.

He pulled a chair up close to the bed, where he could touch one of her hands and watch her closely for any change. By holding rigidly still he found that he could just perceive the rise and fall of her breast. It rea.s.sured him a little; he spent a long time watching for it-the slow, unnoticeable intake, the much quicker spilling of the breath.

Her face was pale and frighteningly deathlike, but beautiful. It wrung his heart to look at her. So fragile-she had trusted him so completely-and now there was nothing he could do for her. If he had listened to her, if he had only listened to what she had said, this would not have happened to her. She had been afraid, but she had done what he asked her to do.

Even the Sons of the Bird had not been able to frighten her- What was he saying? Get a grip on yourself, Ed-that didn't happen; that was part of your nightmare. Still, if anything like that had happened, that was just what she would do-stick in there and back up his play, no matter how badly things were going.

He got a certain melancholy satisfaction out of the idea that, even in his dreams, he was sure of her, sure of her courage and her devotion to him. Guts-more than most men. There was the time she knocked the acid bottle out of the hands of that crazy old biddy he had caught out in the Midwell case. If she hadn't been quick and courageous then, he would probably be wearing smoked gla.s.ses now, with a dog to lead him around.

He displaced the covers a little and looked at the scar on her arm she had picked up that day. None of the acid had touched him, but some had touched her-it still showed, it always would show. But she didn't seem to care.

"Cynthia! Oh, Cyn, my darling!"

There came a time when even he could not remain in one position any longer. Painfully-the cold he had caught in his muscles after the accident last night made his cramped legs ache like fury-he got himself up and prepared to cope with necessities. The thought of food was repugnant but he knew that he had to feed himself if he were to be strong enough to accomplish the watching and waiting that was going to be necessary.

Rummaging through the kitchen shelves and the icebox turned up some oddments of food, breakfast things, a few canned goods, staples, some tired lettuce. He had no stomach for involved cooking; a can of soup seemed as good a bet as anything. He opened a can of Scotch broth, dumped it into a saucepan and added water. When it had simmered for a few minutes he took it off the fire and ate it from the pan, standing up. It tasted like stewed cardboard.

He went back to the bedroom and sat down again to resume the endless watching. But it soon developed that his feelings with respect to food were sounder than his logic; he bolted hastily for the bathroom and was very sick for a few minutes. Then he washed his face, rinsed out his mouth, and came back to his chair, weak and pale, but feeling sound enough physically.

It began to grow dusky outside; he switched on the dressing-table lamp, shaded it so that it would not shine directly in her eyes, and again sat down. She was unchanged.

The telephone rang.

It startled him almost out of rational response. He and his sorrow had been sitting there watching for so long that he was hardly aware that there could be anything else in the world. But he pulled himself together and answered it.

"h.e.l.lo? Yes, this is Randall, speaking."

"Mr. Randall, I've had time to think it over and I feel that I owe you an apology-and an explanation."

"Owe me what? Who is this speaking?"

"Why, this is Jonathan Hoag, Mr. Randall. When you-"

"Hoag! Did you say 'Hoag'?"

"Yes, Mr. Randall. I want to apologize for my peremptory manner yesterday morning and to beg your indulgence. I trust that Mrs. Randall was not upset by my- By this time Randall was sufficiently recovered from his first surprise to express himself. He did so, juicily, using words and figures of speech picked up during years of a.s.sociation with the sort of characters that a private detective inevitably runs into. When he had finished there was a gasp from the other end of the line and then a dead silence.

He was not satisfied. He wanted Hoag to speak so that he could interrupt him and continue the tirade. "Are you there, Hoag?"

"Uh, yes."

"I wanted to add this: Maybe you think that it is a joke to catch a woman alone in a hallway and scare the daylights out of her. I don't! But I'm not going to turn you over to the police-no, indeed! Just as soon as Mrs. Randall gets well, I'm going to look you up myself and then-G.o.d help you, Hoag. You'll need it."

There followed such a long silence that Randall was sure that his victim had hung up. But it seemed that Hoag was merely collecting his wits. "Mr. Randall, this is terrible-"

"You bet it is!"

"Do you mean to tell me that I accosted Mrs. Randall and frightened her?"

"You should know!"

"But I don't know, truly I don't." He paused, and then continued in an unsteady voice. "This is the sort of thing I have been afraid of, Mr. Randall, afraid that I might discover that during my lapses of memory I might have been doing terrible things. But to have harmed Mrs. Randall-she was so good to me, so kind to me. This is horrible."

"You're telling me!"

Hoag sighed as if he were tired beyond endurance.

"Mr. Randall?" Randall did not answer. "Mr. Randall-there is no use in my deluding myself; there is only one thing to be done. You've got to turn me over to the police."

"Huh?"

"I've known it ever since our last conversation; I thought about it all day yesterday, but I did not have the courage. I had hoped that I was through with my . . . my other personality, but today it happened again. The whole day is a blank and I just came to myself this evening, on getting home. Then I knew that I had to do something about it, so I called you to ask you to resume your investigations. But I never suspected that I could possibly have done anything to Mrs. Randall." He seemed most convincingly overcome by shock at the idea. "When did . . . did this happen, Mr. Randall?"

Randall found himself in a most bewildered state of mind. He was torn between the desire to climb through the phone and wring the neck of the man he held responsible for his wife's desperate condition and the necessity for remaining where he was to care for her. In addition to that he was bothered by the fact that Hoag refused to talk like a villain. While speaking with him, listening to his mild answers and his worried tones, it was difficult to maintain the conception of him as a horrid monster of the Jack-the-Ripper type-although he knew consciously that villains were often mild in manner.

Therefore his answer was merely factual. "Nine thirty in the morning, about."

"Where was I at nine thirty this morning?"

"Not this morning, you so-and-so; yesterday morning."

"Yesterday morning? But that's not possible. Don't you remember? I was at home yesterday morning."

"Of course I remember, and I saw you leave. Maybe you didn't know that." He was not being very logical; the other events of the previous morning had convinced him that Hoag knew that they were shadowing him-but he was in no state of mind to be logical.

"But you couldn't have seen me. Yesterday morning was the only morning, aside from my usual Wednesdays, on which I can be sure where I was. I was at home, in my apartment. I didn't leave it until nearly one o'clock when I went to my club."

"Why, that's a-"

"Wait a minute, Mr. Randall, please! I'm just as confused and upset about this as you are, but you've got to listen to me. You broke my routine-remember? And my other personality did not a.s.sert itself. After you left I remained my . . . my proper self. That's why I had had hopes that I was free at last."

"The h.e.l.l you did. What makes you think you did?"

"I know my own testimony doesn't count for much," Hoag said meekly, "but I wasn't alone. The cleaning woman arrived just after you left and was here all morning."

"d.a.m.ned funny I didn't see her go up."

"She works in the building," Hoag explained. "She's the wife of the janitor-her name is Mrs. Jenkins. Would you like to talk with her? I can probably locate her and get her on the line."

"But-" Randall was getting more and more confused and was beginning to realize that he was at a disadvantage. He should never have discussed matters with Hoag at all; he should have simply saved him up until there was opportunity to take a crack at him. Potbury was right; Hoag was a slick and insidious character. Alibi indeed!

Furthermore he was becoming increasingly nervous and fretful over having stayed away from the bedroom as long as he had. Hoag must have had him on the phone at least ten minutes; it was not possible to see into the bedroom from where he sat at the breakfast table. "No, I don't want to talk to her," he said roughly. "You lie in circles!" He slammed the phone back into its cradle and hurried into the bedroom.

Cynthia was just as he had left her, looking merely asleep and heartbreakingly lovely. She was breathing, he quickly determined; her respiration was light but regular. His homemade stethoscope rewarded him with the sweet sound of her heartbeat.

He sat and watched her for a while, letting the misery of his situation soak into him like a warm and bitter wine. He did not want to forget his pain; he hugged it to him, learning what countless others had learned before him, that even the deepest pain concerning a beloved one is preferable to any surcease.

Later he stirred himself, realizing that he was indulging himself in a fashion that might work to her detriment. It was necessary to have food in the house for one thing, and to manage to eat some and keep it down. Tomorrow, he told himself, he would have to get busy on the telephone and see what he could do about keeping the business intact while he was away from it. The Night Watch Agency might do as a place to farm out any business that could not be put off; they were fairly reliable and he had done favors for them-but that could wait until tomorrow.

Just now-He called up the delicatessen on the street below and did some very desultory telephone shopping. He authorized the proprietor to throw in anything else that looked good and that would serve to keep a man going for a day or two. He then instructed him to find someone who would like to earn four bits by delivering the stuff to his apartment.

That done, he betook himself to the bathroom and shaved carefully, having a keen appreciation of the connection between a neat toilet and morale. He left the door open and kept one eye on the bed. He then took a rag, dampened it, and wiped up the stain under the radiator. The b.l.o.o.d.y pajama jacket he stuffed into the dirty-clothes hamper in the closet.

He sat down and waited for the order from the delicatessen to arrive. All the while he had been thinking over his conversation with Hoag. There was only one thing about Hoag that was clear, he concluded, and that was that everything about him was confusing. His original story had been wacky enough-imagine coming in and offering a high fee to have himself shadowed! But the events since made that incident seem downright reasonable. There was the matter of the thirteenth floor-d.a.m.n it! He had seen that thirteenth floor, been on it, watched Hoag at work with a jeweler's gla.s.s screwed in his eye.

Yet he could not possibly have done so.

What did it add up to? Hypnotism, maybe? Randall was not naive about such things; he knew that hypnotism existed, but he knew also that it was not nearly as potent as the Sunday-supplement feature writers would have one believe. As for hypnotizing a man in a split second on a crowded street so that he believed in and could recall clearly a sequence of events that had never taken place-well, he just didn't believe in it. If a thing like that were true, then the whole world might be just a fraud and an illusion.

Maybe it was.

Maybe the whole world held together only when you kept your attention centered on it and believed in it. If you let discrepancies creep in, you began to doubt and it began to go to pieces. Maybe this had happened to Cynthia because he had doubted her reality. If he just closed his eyes and believed in her alive and well, then she would be- He tried it. He shut out the rest of the world and concentrated on Cynthia-Cynthia alive and well, with that little quirk to her mouth she had when she was laughing at something he had said-Cynthia, waking up in the morning, sleepy-eyed and beautiful-Cynthia in a tailored suit and a pert little hat, ready to start out with him anywhere. Cynthia- He opened his eyes and looked at the bed. There she still lay, unchanged and deathly. He let himself go for a while, then blew his nose and went in to put some water on his face.

VIII.

The house buzzer sounded. Randall went to the hall door and jiggled the street-door release without using the apartment phone-he did not want to speak to anyone just then, certainly not to whoever it was that Joe had found to deliver the groceries.

After a reasonable interval there was a soft knock at the door. He opened it, saying, "Bring 'em in," then stopped suddenly.

Hoag stood just outside the door.

Neither of them spoke at first. Randall was astounded; Hoag seemed diffident and waiting for Randall to commence matters. At last he said shyly, "I had to come, Mr. Randall. May I . . . come in?"

Randall stared at him, really at a loss for words. The bra.s.s of the man-the sheer gall!

"I came because I had to prove to you that I would not willingly harm Mrs. Randall," he said simply. "If I have done so unknowingly, I want to do what I can to make rest.i.tution."

"It's too late for rest.i.tution!"

"But, Mr. Randall-why do you think that I have done anything to your wife? I don't see how I could have-not yesterday morning." He stopped and looked hopelessly at Randall's stony face. "You wouldn't shoot a dog without a fair trial-would you?"

Randall chewed his lip in an agony of indecision. Listening to him, the man seemed so d.a.m.ned decent- He threw the door open wide. "Come in," he said gruffly.

"Thank you, Mr. Randall." Hoag came in diffidently. Randall started to close the door.

"Your name Randall?" Another man, a stranger, stood in the door, loaded with bundles.

"Yes," Randall admitted, fishing in his pocket for change. "How did you get in?"

"Came in with him," the man said, pointing at Hoag, "but I got off at the wrong floor. The beer is cold, chief," he added ingratiatingly. "Right off the ice."

"Thanks." Randall added a dime to the half dollar and closed the door on him. He picked the bundles up from the floor and started for the kitchen. He would have some of that beer now, he decided; there was never a time when he needed it more. After putting the packages down in the kitchen he took out one of the cans, fumbled in the drawer for an opener, and prepared to open it.

A movement caught his eye-Hoag, shifting restlessly from one foot to the other. Randall had not invited him to sit down; he was still standing. "Sit down!"

"Thank you." Hoag sat down.

Randall turned back to his beer. But the incident had reminded him of the other's presence; he found himself caught in the habit of good manners; it was almost impossible for him to pour himself a beer and offer none to a guest, no matter how unwelcome.

He hesitated just a moment, then thought, Shucks, it can't hurt either Cynthia or me to let him have a can of beer. "Do you drink beer?"

"Yes, thank you." As a matter of fact Hoag rarely drank beer, preferring to reserve his palate for the subtleties of wines, but at the moment he would probably have said yes to synthetic gin, or ditch water, if Randall had offered it.

Randall brought in the gla.s.ses, put them down, then went into the bedroom, opening the door for the purpose just enough to let him slip in. Cynthia was just as he had come to expect her to be. He shifted her position a trifle, in the belief that any position grows tiring even to a person unconscious, then smoothed the coverlet. He looked at her and thought about Hoag and Potbury's warnings against Hoag. Was Hoag as dangerous as the doctor seemed to think? Was he, Randall, even now playing into his hands?

No, Hoag could not hurt him now. When the worst has happened any change is an improvement. The death of both of them-or even Cyn's death alone, for then he would simply follow her. That he had decided earlier in the day-and he didn't give a d.a.m.n who called it cowardly!