“I think they almost got by,” Eric said.
“Yes, they did,” Molinari agreed, somber now. “It was very close. But everything in politics is close; that’s what makes it worth the effort. Who wants a sure thing? Not me. By the way: those videotapes are going on the air as planned; I sent poor Prindle back to the vault or wherever it is he hangs out.” Again Molinari laughed loudly.
“Am I right,” Eric said, “that in your world—”
“This is my world,” Molinari interrupted; putting his hands behind his head he rocked back and forth, eyeing Eric brightly.
Eric said, “In the parallel world you came from—”
“Garbage!”
“—you were defeated in your attempt to become UN Secretary; is that right? I’m just curious. I don’t intend to discuss it with anyone.”
“If you do,” Molinari said, “I’ll have the Secret Service glunk you and sink you in the Atlantic. Or drop you in deep space.” He was silent a moment. “I got elected, Sweetscent, but the drats knocked me right out of office in a no-confidence recall thing they cooked up. Having to do with the Pact of Peace. They were right, of course; I shouldn’t have gotten involved in it. But who wants to make a deal with four-armed shiny bugs who can’t even talk, who have to go around carrying a translation box like an indoor potty?”
“You know now,” Eric said guardedly, “that you have to. Reach an understanding with the reegs.”
“Sure. But it’s easy to see that now.” The Mole’s eyes were dark and intense, fighting this out with vast, native intelligence. “What do you have in mind, doctor? Let’s have a look. What did they used to say in the last century? Let’s kick it up on the roof and see if it-some damn thing.”
“A contact is ready for you in Tijuana.”
“Hell, I’m not going to Tijuana; that’s a dirty town-that’s where you go for a broad, age thirteen. Even younger than Mary.”
“You know about Mary, then?” Had she been his mistress in the alternate world?
“He introduced us,” Molinari said blandly. “My best friend; he fixed me up. The one they’re burying or whatever it is they’re doing with the corpse. It couldn’t interest me less, just so they get rid of it. I’ve already got one, that bullet-riddled one in the casket. Which you saw. One is enough; they make me nervous.”
“What were you going to do with the assassinated one?”
Molinari showed his teeth in a great grin. “You don’t get it, do you. That was the previous one. That came before the one that just died. I’m not the second; I’m the third.” He cupped his ear then. “Okay, let’s hear what you’ve got; I’m waiting.”
Eric said, “Um, you’ll go to TF&D to visit Virgil Ackerman. That won’t arouse suspicion. It’s my job to get the contact into the factory so he can confer with you. I think I can do it. Unless—”
“Unless Corning, the top ’Star agent in Tijuana, gets to your reeg first. Listen, I’ll give the Secret Service orders to round him up; that’ll keep the ’Stars busy for a while, get them off our knabs. We can cite their activity regarding your wife, their getting her addicted; that’ll be the covering story. You agree? Yes? No?”
“It’ll do.” Once more he felt weary, even more so than before. It was a day, he decided, that would never terminate; the huge former burden had returned to weigh him into submission.
“I don’t impress you very much,” Molinari said.
“On the contrary. I’m just exhausted.” And he still had to go back to Tijuana to bring Deg Dal Il into the factory from his room at the Caesar Hotel; it was not over yet.
“Someone else,” Molinari said acutely, “can pick up your reeg and bring it to TF&D. Give me the location and I’ll see that it’s done right. You don’t have to do any more; go get drunk or find some fresh new girl. Or take some more JJ-180, visit another time period. Anyhow enjoy yourself. How’s your addiction coming? Broken it yet, like I told you to?”
“Yes.”
Molinari raised his thick eyebrows. “I’ll be darned. Amazing; I didn’t think it could be done. Get it from your reeg contact?”
“No. From the future.”
“How’s the war come out? I don’t move ahead, like you do; I move sideways only, into the parallel presents.”
“It’s going to be tough,” Eric said.
“Occupation?”
“For most of Terra.”
“How about me?”
“Apparently you manage to get away to Wash-35. After holding out long enough for the reegs to come in with strength.”
“I don’t care for it,” Molinari decided. “But I guess I’ve got to do it. How’s your wife Katherine?”
“The antidote—”
“I mean your relationship.”
“We’re separating. It’s decided.”
“Okay.” Molinari nodded briskly. “You write out the address you have for me and in exchange I’ll write out a name and address for you.” He took pen and paper, wrote rapidly. “A relative of Mary’s. A cousin. Bit player in TV dramatic series, lives in Pasadena. Nineteen. Too young?”
“Illegal.”
“I’ll get you off.” He tossed Eric the paper. Eric did not pick it up. “What’s the matter?” Molinari shouted at him. “Has using that time-travel drug scrambled your wits, you don’t know you’ve got only one tiny life and that lies ahead of you, not sideways or back? Are you waiting for last year to come by again or something?”
Reaching out, Eric took the paper. “That’s exactly right. I’ve been waiting a long time for last year. But I guess it’s just not coming again.”
“Don’t forget to say I sent you,” Molinari said, and beamed broadly as Eric put the paper in his wallet.
It was night and Eric walked the dark side street, hands in his pockets, wondering if he was going in the right direction. He had not been in Pasadena, California, for years.
Ahead a major conapt building rose squarely against the sky, more dense than the atmosphere behind it, windows lit like the eyes of some great block-shaped synthetic pumpkin. Eyes, Eric thought, are the window of the soul, but a conapt is a conapt. What lies inside there? A bossy-or perhaps not so bossy-black-haired girl whose ambition it is to appear in one-minute beer and cigarette commercials on TV or whatever it is Molinari said. Someone to goad you to your feet when you’re sick, travesty of the marital vows, of mutual help, protection.
He thought about Phyllis Ackerman, their conversation at Wash-35, not so long ago. If I really want to repeat the pattern stamped on the matrix of my life, he thought, I need only look her up; Phyllis is just enough like Kathy to attract me. As both of us understand. And enough different from her so that it would seem-I say seem-like something new in my life. But then all at once he thought, This girl here in Pasadena; I didn’t pick her out. Gino Molinari did. So perhaps the matrix breaks here. And can be discarded. And I can go on in something that does not merely seem new but is new.
Locating the front entrance of the conapt building, he got out the slip of paper, again memorized the name, then found the proper button among the host of identical rows in the big brass plate and gave it a vigorous, Gino Molinari inspired push.
A ghostly voice presently issued from the speaker and a microscopic image formed on the monitoring screen set in the wall above the buttons. “Yes? Who is it?” In such absurd miniature the girl’s image could not be deciphered; he could not tell a thing about her. The voice, however, sounded rich and throaty and, although nervous with the typical caution of the unattached girl living alone, it had its warmth.
“Gino Molinari asked me to look you up,” Eric said, supporting his burden on the rock they all depended on in this, their collective journey.
“Oh!” She sounded flustered. “To look me up? Are you sure you have the right person? I only met him once and that was casually.”
Eric said, “May I come in for a minute, Miss Garabaldi?”
“Garabaldi is my old name,” the girl said. “My name, the name I work
under when I do TV shows, is Garry. Patricia Garry.”
“Just let me come in,” Eric said, and waited. “Please.”
The door buzzed; he pushed it open and entered the foyer. A moment later by elevator he had ascended to the fifteenth floor and was at her door, ready to knock but finding it ajar in expectation of him.
Wearing a flowered apron, her long dark hair hanging in twin braids down her back, Patricia Garry met him, smiling; she had a sharp face, tapered to a flawless chin, and lips so dark as to appear black. Every feature had been cut cleanly and with such delicate precision as to suggest a new order of perfection in human symmetry and balance. He could see why she had gone into TV; features like that, when ignited even by the ersatz enthusiasm of a mock-up beer-bust on a California ocean beach, could impale any viewer. She was not just pretty; she was strikingly, lavishly unique and he had a precognition as he looked at her of a long and vital career ahead, if the war did not catch her up in tragedy.
“Hi,” she said gaily. “Who are you?”
“Eric Sweetscent. I’m on the Secretary’s medical staff.” Or was, he thought. Up to a little earlier today. “Could I have a cup of coffee with you and talk? It would mean a lot to me.”
“What a strange come-on,” Patricia Garry said. “But why not?” She whirled about, her long Mexican skirt spinning out, and bobbed her way down the hall of her conapt, with him following, to the kitchen. “I have a pot on, in fact. Why did Mr. Molinari tell you to look me up? For any special reason?”
Could a girl look like this and not be conscious of what an overriding special reason she constituted? “Well,” he said, “I live out here in California, in San Diego.” And, he thought, I guess I work in Tijuana. Again. “I’m an org-trans surgeon. Miss Garry. Or Pat. Okay to call you Pat?” He found a seat at the bench table, clasped his hands before him, resting his elbows against the hard, irregular redwood.
“If you’re an org-trans surgeon,” Patricia Garry said as she got cups from the cupboard over the sink, “why aren’t you at the military satellites or at the front hospitals?”
He felt his world sink from beneath him. “I don’t know,” he said.
“There is a war on, you realize.” Her back to him, she said, “The boy I was going with, he was mangled when a reeg bomb got his cruiser. He’s still in a base hospital.”
“What can I say,” he said, “except that maybe you’ve put your finger on the great central weak link of my life. Why it hasn’t got the meaning it should have.”
“Well, who do you blame for that? Everyone else?”
“It seemed to me,” he said, “at the time anyhow, that keeping Gino Molinari alive somehow contributed to the war effort.” But, after all, he had only done that for a short time and had gotten into it not by his own efforts but by Virgil Ackerman’s.
“I’m just curious,” Patricia said. “I just would have thought that a good org-tran surgeon would want to be at the front where the real work is.” She poured coffee into two plastic cups.
“Yes, you’d think so,” he said, and felt futile. She was nineteen years old, roughly half his age, and already she had a better grasp on what was right, what one ought to do. With such directness of vision she had certainly patterned her own career out to the last stitch. “Do you want me to leave?” he asked her. “Just say so if you do.”
“You just got here; of course I don’t want you to go. Mr. Molinari wouldn’t have sent you here if there hadn’t been a good reason.” She eyed him critically as she seated herself across from him. “I’m Mary Reineke’s cousin, did you know that?”
“Yes.” He nodded. And she’s quite tough, too, he thought. “Pat,” he said, “take my word for it that I have accomplished something today that affects us all, even if it isn’t connected with my medical tasks. Can you accept that? If so then we can go on from there.”
“Whatever you say,” she said with nineteen-year-old nonchalance.
“Have you been watching Molinari’s TV cast tonight?”
“I had it on a little while earlier. It was interesting; he looked so much bigger.”
“ ‘Bigger.’ ” Yes, he thought; that described it.
“It’s good to see him back in his old form. But I have to admit-all that political spouting, you know how he does, sort of lectures in that feverish way, with his eyes flashing; it’s too long-winded for me. I put on the record player instead.” She rested her chin in her open palm. “You know what? It bores the hell out of me.”
The vidphone in the living room rang.
“Excuse me.” Pat Garry rose and skipped from the kitchen. He sat silently, no particular thoughts in his mind, only a little of the old weariness weighing on him, and then suddenly she was back. “For you. Dr. Eric Sweetscent; that’s you, isn’t it?”
“Who is it?” He labored to get up, his heart strangely leaden.
“The White House in Cheyenne.”
He made his way to the vidphone. “Hello. This is Sweetscent.”
“Just a moment, please.” The screen blanked out. The next image which formed was that of Gino Molinari.
“Well, doctor,” Molinari said, “they got your reeg.”
“Jesus,” he said.
“When we got there all we found was a banged-up big dead bug. Somebody, one of them, must have seen you go in. Too bad you didn’t take it directly to TF&D. Instead of that hotel.”
“I see that now.”
“Listen,” Molinari said briskly. “I called to tell you because I knew you would want to know. But don’t knock yourself; those ’Starmen are professionals. It could have happened to anyone.” He leaned closer to the screen, speaking with emphasis. “It’s not that important; there’re other ways to contact the reegs, three or four-we’re looking into how best to exploit it right now.”
“Should this be said on the vidphone?”
Molinari said, “Freneksy and his party just now took off for Lilistar, shot out of here as fast as they could. Take my word for it, Sweetscent, they know. So our problem is that we have to work fast. We expect to raise a reeg government station within two hours; if necessary we’ll do our negotiating on an open broadcast with Lilistar listening in.” He glanced at his wrist watch. “I have to ring off; I’ll keep you posted.” The screen, then, became dark. Busy, in hectic haste, Molinari had gone on to the next task. He could not sit gossiping. And then, all at once, the screen relit; again Molinari faced him. “Remember, doctor, you did your job; you forced them to honor that will I left, that ten-page document they were passing back and forth when you arrived. I wouldn’t be here now except for you; I already told you that and I don’t want you to forget it-I haven’t got time to keep repeating it again and again.” He grinned briefly and then once more the image faded. This time the screen stayed dark.
But to fail is to fail, Eric said to himself. He walked back into Pat Garry’s kitchen and reseated himself at his cup of coffee. Neither of them spoke. Because I messed it up, he realized, the ’Starmen will have just that much more time to close in on us, come rushing here to Terra with everything they have. Millions of human lives, perhaps years of occupation-that’s the price we’ll collectively pay. Because it seemed, earlier today, a good idea to put Deg Dal Il in a room at the Caesar Hotel instead of bringing him directly to TF&D. But then he thought, They have at least one agent at TF&D too; they might even have gotten him there.
Now what? he asked himself.
“Maybe you’re right, Pat,” he said. “Maybe I ought to become a military surgeon and go to a base hospital near the front.”
“Yes, why not?” she said.
“But in a little while,” he said, “and you don’t know this, the front will be on Terra.”
She blanched, tried to smile. “Why is that?”
“Politics. The tides of war. Unreliability of alliances. The ally of today is the enemy of tomorrow. And the other way around.” He finished his coffee and rose. “Good luck, Pat, in your television career and in every other aspect
of your glowing, just beginning life. I hope the war doesn’t touch you too deeply.” The war I helped bring here, he said to himself. “So long.”
At the kitchen table she remained seated, drinking her coffee and saying nothing, as he walked down the hall to the door, opened it, and then shut it behind him. She did not even nod goodbye; she was too frightened, too stunned by what he had told her.
Thanks anyhow, Gino, he said to himself as he descended to the ground floor. It was a good idea; not our fault nothing came of it. Nothing but a greater awareness on my part of how little good I’ve done and how much harm-by commission or omission-I’m responsible for in my time.
He walked the dark Pasadena street until he located a cab; he hailed and boarded it, then wondered where he was supposed to go.
“You mean you don’t know where you live, sir?” the cab asked.
“Take me to Tijuana,” he told it, suddenly.
“Yes sir,” the cab said and turned south at great speed.
14
Nightime in Tijuana.
He walked aimlessly, scuffing the pavement, passing one after another the neon signs of the narrow boothlike shops, listening to the clamor of the Mexican hucksters and enjoying as he always did the steady motion and ceaseless, nervous honking of wheels and autonomic cabs and old-time turbine surface cars made in the USA, which somehow, in their last decrepitude, had been brought across the border.
“Girl, mister?” A boy no older than eleven seized Eric by the sleeve and hung on, dragging him to a stop. “My sister, only seven, and never lay with a man in her life; I guarantee before God, you be assuredly first.”
“How much?” Eric asked.