Complete Short Fiction, page 435
A blast of wind rushed past her.
Marie stood, then, watching the growing fire.
CHAPTER XI
At first she was blank.
After a while she realized that a crowd was gathering. In the distance there was the sound of a fire engine.
An instant later—it seemed—nine great engines roared up one after another. Uniformed men hurried past her.
Marie scarcely saw them.
She was having a fantasy.
In her mind’s eye, she saw both Walter and Mac in their separate cottages; they had their suitcases open, and they were packing.
So vivid was the imagined picture that she thought, The nightmare is over, and those who made it a nightmare know that their game is over, too.
She had a sudden qualm about Walter. Had he been a victim along with her?
She couldn’t be sure, but she thought not.
Everyone involved had realized at some level of their being that she was the one that was vulnerable.
And they had moved in on her. Without mercy they had forced her.
Mentally, she wrote a letter to Bob Lindley dismissing him as her attorney. And her lips were framing the savage words she would use to Mac and Walter—when she became aware that Dr. MacKerrie had come up beside her.
“Marie, my dear,” he said solicitously, “I have a sedative here for you. How awful this must be for you—”
Marie pulled away violently as she heard his voice. The shock memory came of what Carl had said . . . Appearance of suicide—”
She pictured the death notice: Overdose of sleeping medicine!
Aloud, she snapped, “Take your own damned sedative!”
She dodged as he grabbed at her and darted off through the crowd. As she ran, she heard MacKerrie’s voice, high-pitched, tense, desperate. “Hold that woman! She’s become hysterical.”
Someone grabbed her and held her. She looked up into Walter’s eyes. “Marie,” he said sadly, “what’s the matter with you?”
There was such a strange expression in his eyes that Marie shrank. “Walter,” she begged, “for God’s sake, Walter, don’t kill me.”
His grip on her tightened, and he placed his hand over her mouth. “It’s all right, my dear, it’s only a sedative.” He raised his voice. “Dr. Mac, come over here. She’s in a bad way.”
She thought, Doesn’t he realize? If Mac MUs me, then two people will know about my murder!
Deep inside, Marie began to laugh. She thought, Carl, Carl, I’ve really got to hand it to you. You did understand human beings.
Abruptly, she bit Walter’s hand as hard as she could. And gave him a shove with every bit of her strength.
It was like pushing at a wall. He held her. “Marie!” he said chidingly. “Marie.”
Dr. MacKerrie came up. She felt the needle sink into her arm.
As she drifted into unconsciousness, she heard her bewildered voice say, “But how did you both know? So quickly? Each separately? And why?”
Why had it become necessary to destroy her? And by what logic had each of them known it? Was it a male understanding?
It was awful to die and not know the reason.
These were the thoughts that she carried into the blackness.
CHAPTER XII
She came to.
Joy.
I’m alive, she thought. Oh, God, Tm still alive.
Marie opened her eyes and looked up into the kindly face of Dr. MacKerrie. Her gaze flashed beyond him, and she saw that she was in her own bedroom and that it was daylight. After bare instants she looked at Mac once more, and now she was cringing.
Dr. MacKerrie said, “Marie, that frightened expression is on your face again. Relax. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Waiter and I covered up for you completely.”
She heard only the first part of his statement; of his ending words, the reassurance came through, nothing else. She began to feel not safe but safer.
Abruptly she asked, “Covered up what?”
He bent down like a conspirator and said in a low voice, “The explosion brought Walter and me outside, and I guess we both saw right away what you had done—I should have realized when you were questioning me this afternoon that this whole thing was getting too much for you.” There must have been a frightened look on her face, for he said quickly, “Everything is okay. You’ll see.”
Marie, who had been about to deny that there was anything to cover up, almost bit her lip in her effort to remain silent.
Finally she asked, “How did you cover up?”
It turned out that they had removed the remote-control apparatus and the closed-circuit TV before the firemen got there.
“The one in Carl’s room was pretty well banged up,” Mac reported. “So we shoved that into the junk room. And when I talked to Carl—”
Marie galvanized. “Carl!” she gasped.
“You forgot about that metal roof he had rigged over the brain,” said Mac soothingly. “It diverted the full force of the explosion. It’s almost as if he anticipated the direction from which it would come. Anyway, he promised he would say nothing.”
Marie, lying there, grimly made up an aphorism of her own: “The kind of a man who offers his sweetheart a joint suicide pact usually has a good aim when he’s firing at her and a poor aim for himself.”
She grew very angry. Oh, he promised that, did he? But she didn’t say it aloud.
There were too many mixed emotions and uncertainties in her for speech.
It was clear now that Walter and Mac believed that they had saved her the night before from inadvertently revealing that she had tried to commit murder.
What was shocking was that the two men had teamed up to save her. Could that have a special significance?
She gazed up at Mac. “What are you planning to do?” she asked huskily.
“You’ll get no more one-sided arguments from me,” he answered. “You’ve convinced me.”
But of what? Marie thought. Of what?
Now that she knew Carl was alive, she felt vulnerable. But to what extent, she couldn’t decide. There was certainly no sign of Mac leaving.
“Where’s Walter?” she whispered.
“He’s waiting outside. I’ll send him in.” He bent and kissed her on the lips. “Don’t worry. You can have your cake and eat it, too.”
A minute later the door opened. Walter came in. He sank down beside the bed, and a slow smile came over his face.
“I’ve got to hand it to you,” he said. “It sure would have solved your problem, wouldn’t it?”
Marie gazed at him, infinite hostility in her eyes.
“But,” said Walter, “after what he said to me that night when he accused me, I’d rather he remained in this condition, alive, unable to function. So even though it was dangerous to me to have him like this, I never planned any further attack on him myself.”
For Marie, resentment yielded to puzzlement. She couldn’t quite decide what he was trying to say.
Walter continued. “When I realized that even my being impotent didn’t protect you from other men—I just waited my opportunity and ran him down.”
Marie felt her body contract under the sheets. “Why are you admitting this to me?” she breathed.
Walter explained. “Now, were in the same box. It’s a little hard to imagine either of us giving the other away.”
So he wasn’t leaving, either.
“Have you told Mac?” she asked.
“Don’t worry about Mac. After last night he and I had to come to an understanding.”
He shook his head, amazed. “You really forced this thing to a rapid conclusion. Trust a woman,” he said tolerantly.
Marie, who had been forced into every move, felt keenly the futility of any words.
Walter continued. “Just think, yesterday I was at the stage where I was merely toying with the idea of making love to Carl’s wife. Remember?”
Marie recalled the desperate battle that she had won.
Walter said, “I felt it would give me a lot of satisfaction—after the way Carl accused me. I decided I didn’t want any part of it, on thinking it over during the afternoon. And then—”
He spread his hands, grinning.
“After that thing last night, Mac insisted that I agree that he and I share you.”
There was a pause. Marie shrank. “Mac agreed to that?” she said.
Walter’s eyes glistened as he stared at her. “The way I look at it,” he said softly, “you’ve got some feeling for this man. I don’t know just how or what, but there’s something. I figure you can go for this guy.”
She was beginning to recover, to gird herself. Walter must have seen the look, for he held up his hand hastily. “Wait!” he said. “I could see right away that Mac was in some big emotion, and of course I realized you wouldn’t stand for it, and besides—”
He paused for a moment, then continued: “I’m afraid my dear wife toned me against women who are having affairs with other men.”
He stopped. His expression hardened. “But I can’t let Mac know that. So this is our agreement—yours and mine—he gets you, but don’t you ever let on that I haven’t got you, also. If you do—”
“What will you do?” Marie spoke in a low voice.
Walter’s eyes were narrowed slits. “I’ll say that you and I were lovers. I’ll say that we planned Carl’s murder. I’ll swear that you coaxed me into it. I’ll—”
He stopped. He swallowed hard. “Get it!” he said from between clenched teeth.
Marie seemed to be gazing at him as from a distance. There was a mist over her eyes, like clouds, hiding remote objects. She could not possibly have uttered a word, but she was remembering one of the aphorisms she had read in Carl’s book.
“It takes a lot of energy for a man to get a frigid female into bed and progressively more energy for him to keep her there. But every once in a while such a woman maneuvers herself into an emotional cul-de-sac whereby she has no alternative. I keep trying to figure out how I can work this swindle on Marie. But I can’t even imagine the energy that would do it.”
CHAPTER XIII
It was a month later.
She woke up; and there was the anger. Marie lay very still, conscious of her flushed skin and of a hard core of something inside her, a mixture of resentful thought and emotion, a feeling of resistance, a tense yet helpless condition of muscular rigidity. It was the anger of a prisoner, of a trapped being, and yes—she thought—of a slave.
A slave must never show anger even when abused.
Marie dressed impatiently. As she made up her face, she tried for the first time to relax the taut, drawn muscles around her mouth.
She thought uneasily, I’d better be careful. If I lose my looks, I’ll cease to be attractive, and Mac will leave me. And then who knows what will happen?
The realization had welled up so casually that a long moment passed before she grasped the full implication. Then—
“Oh, my lord.”
Ironically, she must use all the known feminine devices for keeping the situation exactly as it was: beauty aids, beauty parlors, masseurs.
The trap was as perfect as that.
After a short, bitter consideration of the reality, she leafed through the yellow pages, found the phone number of a beauty specialty shop in Beverly Hills, and made an appointment for the following morning.
She went next to research and examined the progress that was being made on certain problems. Each item of custom equipment presented special difficulties of construction.
Walter came up beside her. He said, “We’ll have to ask Carl about this one.”
Marie watched his face as he explained the difficulty in technical terms. He was so calm, so objective, so accepting of the whole situation.
She thought wonderingly, Why do I keep being so disturbed by the situation? Nobody else seems to worry.
She listened to the problem as he outlined it, saw what it was he was not observing in it—why the field would not reverse under conditions of superconductivity—and nodded quietly, saying, “I’ll ask Carl.”
These days she never volunteered solutions herself. That was a man’s world.
The hum of activity in the lab was abruptly silenced as she closed the door of the soundproof brain room behind her.
Mac was there.
He turned as she entered and waved at her cheerfully. “Everything dandy here!” he said. “Healthiest brain in the world. At this rate he’ll outlive all of us. Want to talk to him alone?”
“Yes.”
Mac headed for the door but paused on the threshold. “See you tonight?” he asked.
“Of course.”
Her voice held a bare edge of sharpness in it. What else? There was no escape for her.
But she turned and watched him leave, suddenly curious. He walked out of the room, head back, apparent acceptance in every movement and muscle in his strong surgeon’s body.
He had assigned his relationship with her to Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. On the other nights, he left the grounds early and stayed away till noon the following day.
It was his belief, of course, that she spent Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday nights with Walter. But it was interesting that he had not once stayed around to find out that it was not so.
His absence seemed to be a continuing evidence that Walter’s presence was still a knife painfully buried in a vital spot in Mac.
Marie thought, That’s all the pleasure I have out of this: that he’s in some kind of small agony.
As she pressed the button, she could feel the tense anger deep inside her, unchanged by all her rationalizations.
Exactly like yesterday.
And the day and week before.
She thought, I’m as lost as Carl.
So were Walter and Mac.
They were all moving through space together. Somewhere out beyond the orbit of Mars, at least.
Heading into the great night of the universe.
LOST: FIFTY SUNS
I
THE STREET loud-speaker clattered into life. A man’s voice said resonantly:
“Attention, citizens of the planets of the Fifty Suns. This is the Earth battleship Star Cluster. In a few moments, the Right Honorable Gloria Cecily, Lady Laurr of Noble Laurr, Grand Captain of the Star Cluster, will make an announcement.”
Maltby, who had been walking toward an airlift car, stopped as the voice sounded from the radio. He saw that other people were pausing, also.
Lant was a new planet for him; its capital city was delightfully rural after the densely populated Cassidor, where the Fifty Suns Space Navy had its main base. His own ship had landed the day before, on general orders commanding all warships to seek refuge immediately on the nearest inhabited planet.
It was an emergency order, with panic implicit in it. From what he had heard at officers’ mess, it was clear that it had something to do with the Earth ship whose broadcast was now being transmitted over the general-alarm system.
On the radio, the man’s voice said impressively, “And here is Lady Laurr.”
A young woman’s clear, firm silvery voice began, “People of the Fifty Suns, we know you are there.
“For several years my ship the Star Cluster has been mapping the Greater Magellanic Cloud. Accidentally, we ran into one of your space meteorological stations and captured its attendant. Before he succeeded in killing himself, we learned that somewhere in this cloud of about a hundred million stars, there are fifty inhabited sun systems with a total of seventy planets with human beings living on them.
“It is our intention to find you, though it may seem at first thought that it will be impossible for us to do so. Locating fifty suns scattered among a hundred million stars seems difficult in a purely mechanical way. But we have devised a solution to the problem that is only partly mechanical.
“Listen well now, people of the Fifty Suns. We know who you are. We know that you are the Dellian and non-Dellian robots—so-called; not really robots at all, but flesh-and-blood humanoids. And, in looking through our history books, we have read about the foolish riots of fifteen thousand years ago that frightened you and made you leave the main galaxy and seek sanctuary far away from human civilization.
“Fifteen thousand years is a long time. Men have changed. Such unpleasant incidents as your ancestors experienced are no longer possible. I say this to you in order to ease your fears. Because you must come back into the fold. You must join the Earth galactic union, subscribe to certain minimum regulations, and establish interstellar commercial ports.
“Because of your special reasons for concealing yourselves, you are allowed one sidereal week to reveal to us the location of your planets. During that time we shall take no action. After that time, for each sidereal day that passes without contact being established, there will be a penalty.
“Of this you may be sure. We shall find you. And quickly!”
The speaker was silent, as if to let the meaning of the words sink in. Near Maltby, a man said, “Only one ship. What are we afraid of? Let’s destroy it before it can go back to the galaxy and report our presence.”
A woman said uneasily, “Is she telling the truth, or is she bluffing? Does she really believe they can locate us?”
A second man spoke gruffly. “It’s impossible. It’s the old needle in the haystack problem, only worse.”
Maltby said nothing, but he was inclined to agree. It seemed to him that Grand Captain Laurr, of the Earth ship, was whistling in the greatest darkness that had ever hidden a civilization.
On the radio, the Right Honorable Gloria Cecily was speaking again:
“In the event that you do not keep time the way we do, a sidereal day is made up of twenty hours of a hundred minutes each day. There are a hundred seconds in a minute, and in that second light travels 100,000 miles exactly. Our day is somewhat longer than the old-style day in which a minute was sixty seconds and light-speed 186,300-odd miles a second.
“Govern yourselves accordingly. One week from today I shall call again.”
