American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (66 page)

“That’s why I brought up this whole citizenship question in the beginning. I see no other way out; we’ve got to turn him loose.”

He was silent a moment, and then added, with almost his wonted gentleness:

“Maybe I’m naïve. I’m not a biologist, let alone a psychometrist. But I’d thought he’d be ready by now, and he isn’t, so I guess Ramon wins by default. The interviewers will take him as he is, and the results obviously can’t be good.”

This was precisely Ruiz-Sanchez’ opinion, though he would hardly have put it that way.

“I’ll be sorry to see him go, if he leaves,” Liu said abstractedly. It was evident, however, that she was hardly thinking about Egtverchi at all any more. “But Mike, I
know
you’re right, there’s no other solution in the long run—he has to go free. He
is
brilliant, there’s no doubt about that. Now that I come to think of it, even this silence isn’t the natural reaction of an animal with no inner resources. Father, is there nothing we can do to help?”

Ruiz shrugged; there was nothing that he could say. Michelis’ reaction to the apparent parroting and unresponsiveness of Egtverchi had of course been far too extreme for the actual situation, springing mostly from Michelis’ own disappointment at the equivocal outcome of the Lithia expedition; he liked issues to be clear-cut, and evidently he had thought he had found in the citizenship maneuver a very sharp-edged tool indeed. But there was much more to it than that: some of it, of course, tied into the yet unadmitted bond which was forming between the chemist and the girl; in that single word “Father” she had shucked the priest off as a foster parent of Egtverchi, and put him in a position to give her away instead.

And what remained left over to be said would have no audience here. Michelis had already dismissed it as “some rarefied theological torture” which was personal to Ruiz and of no importance outside the priest’s own skin. What Michelis dismissed would shortly fail to exist at all for Liu, if indeed it had not already been obliterated.

No, there was nothing further that could be done about Egtverchi; the Adversary was protecting his begotten son with all the old, divisive, puissant weapons; it was already too late. Michelis did not know how skilled UN naturalization commissions were at detecting intelligence and desirability in a candidate, even through the thickest smoke screen of language and cultural alienation, and at almost any age after the disease called “talking” had set in. And he did not realize how primed the commission would be to settle the Lithia question by a
fait accompli
. The visitors would see through Egtverchi within an hour at most, and then—

And then, Ruiz would be left with no allies at all. It seemed now to be the will of God that he be stripped of everything, and brought before the Holy Door with no baggage—not even such comforters as Job had, no, not even burdened by belief.

For Egtverchi would surely pass. He was as good as free—and closer to being a citizen in good standing than Ruiz himself.

Egtverchi’s coming-out party was held at the underground mansion of Lucien le Comte des Bois-d’Averoigne, a fact which greatly complicated the already hysterical life of Aristide, the countess’ caterer. Ordinarily, such a party would have presented Aristide with no problems reaching far beyond the technical ones with which he was already familiar, and used to drive the staff to that frantic peak which he regarded as the utmost in efficiency; but planning for the additional presence of a tenfoot monster was an affront to his conscience as well as to his artistry.

Aristide—born Michel di Giovanni in the timeless brutal peasantry of un-Sheltered Sicily—was a dramatist who knew well the intricate stage upon which he had to work. The count’s New York mansion was many levels deep. The part of it in which the party was being held protruded one storey above the surface of Manhattan, as though the buried part of the city were coming out of hibernation—or not quite finished digging in for it. The structure had been a carbarn, Aristide had discovered, a dismal block-square red brick building which had been put up in 1887 when cable street cars had been the newest and most hopeful addition to the city’s circulatory system. The trolley tracks, with their middle division for the cable grips, were still there in the asphalt floor, with only a superficial coating of rust—steel does not rust appreciably in less than two centuries. In the center of the top storey was a huge old steam elevator with a basketwork shaft, which had once been used to lower the trolley cars below ground for storage. There were more tracks in the basement and sub-basement, whose elaborate switches led toward the segments of rail in the huge elevator cab. Aristide had been stunned when he first encountered this underlying blueprint, but he had promptly put it to good use.

The countess’ parties, thanks to his genius, were now confined in their most formal phase to the uppermost of these three levels, but Aristide had installed a serpentine of fourteen two-chair cars which wound its way sedately along the trolley tracks, picking up as passengers those who were already bored with nothing but chatter and drinking, and rumbled onto the elevator to be taken down—with a great hissing and a cloud of rising steam, for the countess was a stickler for surface authenticity in antiques—to the next level, where presumably more interesting things were happening.

As a dramatist, Aristide also knew his audience: it was his job to provide that whatever was seen on the next levels
was
more interesting than what had been going on above. And he knew his
dramatis personae
, too: he knew more about the countess’ regular guests than they knew about themselves, and much of his knowledge would have been decidedly destructive had he been the talkative type. Aristide, however, was an artist; he did not bribe; the notion was as unthinkable to him as plagiarism (except, of course, self-plagiarism; that was how you kept going during slumps). Finally, as an artist, Aristide knew his patroness: he knew her to the point where he could judge just how many parties had to pass by before he could chance repeating an Effect, a Scene or a Sensation.

But what could you do with a ten-foot reptilian kangaroo? From where he stood in a discrete pillared alcove on the above-ground entrance floor, Aristide watched the early guests filtering in from the reception room to the formal cocktail party, one of his favorite anachronisms, and one which the countess seemed prepared to allow him to repeat year after year. It required very little apparatus, but the most absurd and sub-lethal concoctions, and even more absurd costumes on the part of both staff and guests. The nice rigidity of the costumes provided a pleasant contrast to the unlimbering of the psyche which the drinks quickly induced.

Thus far, there were only the early comers: here, Senator Sharon, waggling her oversize eyebrows in wholesome cheeriness at the remaining guests, ostentatiously refusing drinks, secure in the knowledge that her good friend Aristide had provided for her below five strong young men no one of whom she had ever seen before; there, Prince William of East Orange, a young man whose curse was that he had no vices, and who came again and again to ride the serpentine in hopes of discovering one that he liked; and, nearby, Dr. Samuel P. Shovel, M. D., a jovial, redcheeked, white-haired man who was the high priest of psichonetology, “the New Science of the Id,” and a favorite of Aristide’s, since he was easy to provide for—he was fundamentally nothing more complicated than a bottom-pincher.

Faulkner, the head butler, was approaching Aristide stiffly from the left. Ordinarily, Faulkner ran the countess’ household like an oriental despot, but he was no longer in control while Aristide was on the premises.

“Shall I order in the embryos in wine?” Faulkner said.

“Don’t be such a blind, stupid fool,” Aristide said. He had learned his first English from sentimental 3-C ’casts, which gave his ordinary conversation decidedly odd overtones; he was well aware of it, and these days it was one of his principal weapons for driving his underlings, who could not tell when he said these things dispassionately from when he was really angry. “Go below, Faulkner. I’ll call you when I need you—if I do.”

Faulkner bowed slightly and vanished. Fuming mildly at the interruption, Aristide resumed his survey of the early comers.

In addition to the regulars, there was, of course, the countess, who had posed him no special problems yet. Her gilded make-up was still unmussed, and the mobiles in the little caves Stefano had contrived in her hair spun placidly or blinked their diamond eyes. Then there were the sponsors of the Lithian monster into Shelter society, Dr. Michelis and Dr. Meid; these two might present special problems, for he had been unable to find out enough about them to decide what personal tastes they might need to have catered to down below, despite the fact that they were key guests, second only to the impossible creature itself. There was an explosive potential here, Aristide knew with the certainty of fate, for that impossible creature was already more than an hour late, and the countess had let it be known to all the guests and to Aristide that the creature was to be the guest of honor; fully half of the party would be coming to see him.

There was no one else in the room at the moment but a UN man wearing a funny hat—a sort of crash helmet liberally provided with communications apparatus and other, unnamable devices, including bubble goggles which occasionally filmed over to become a miniature 3-V screen—and a Dr. Martin Agronski, whom Aristide could not place at all, and whom he regarded with the consequent intense suspicion he reserved for people whose weaknesses he could not even guess at. Agronski’s face was as petulant as that of the Prince of East Orange, but he was a much older man, and it seemed unlikely that he was there for the same reasons. He had something to do with the guest of honor, which made Aristide all the more uneasy. Dr. Agronski seemed to know Dr. Michelis, but for an unaccountable reason shied away from him at every opportunity; he was spending most of his time at one of the most potent of Aristide’s punches, with the glum determination of a non-drinker who believes that he can perfect his poise by poisoning his timidity. Perhaps a woman . . .

Aristide crooked a finger. His assistant scuttled around the back of the hanging floral decorations with a practiced stoop, covering even the sound of his movements by a brief delay which allowed the serpentine to come into its station, and cocked his ear to Aristide’s mouth under the squeal of the train’s brakes.

“Watch that one,” Aristide said through motionless lips, pointing with the apex of one pelvic bone. “He will be drunk within the next half hour. Take him out before he falls down, but don’t take him off the premises. She may ask for him later. Better put him in the recovery room and taper him off as soon as he begins to wobble.”

The assistant nodded and pedaled away, bent double. Aristide was still talking to him in blunt, businesslike English; that was a good sign, as far as it went.

Aristide returned to watching the guests; their number was growing a little, but he was still most interested in assessing the countess’ reaction to the absence of the guest of honor. For the moment Aristide himself was in no danger, though he could see that the countess’ hints had begun to acquire a certain hardness. Thus far, however, she was directing them at the monster’s sponsors, Dr. Michelis and Dr. Meid, and it was plain that they had no answer for these gambits.

Dr. Michelis could only say over and over again, with a politeness which was becoming more and more formal as his patience visibly evaporated:

“Madame, I don’t know when he’s coming. I don’t even know where he lives now. He promised to come. I’m not surprised that he’s late, but I think he’ll show up eventually.”

The countess turned away petulantly, swinging her hips. Here was the first danger point for Aristide. There was no other pressure that the countess could bring to bear upon the monster’s sponsors, regardless of how ignorant they were of the actual situation in the countess’ household. By some trick of heredity, Lucien le Comte des Bois-d’Averoigne, Procurator of Canarsie, had been shrewd enough to spend his money wisely: he gave ninety-eight per cent of it to his wife, and used the other two per cent to disappear with for most of the year. There were even rumors that he did scientific research, though nobody could say in what field; certainly it could not be psichonetology or ufonics, or the countess would have known about it, since both were currently fashionable. And without the count, the countess was socially a nullity supported only by money; if the Lithian creature failed to show up at all, there was nothing that the countess could do to his sponsors but fail to invite them to the next party—which she would probably fail to do anyhow. On the other hand, there was a great deal that she might do to Aristide. She could not fire him, of course—he had kept careful dossiers against that possibility— but she could make his professional life with her very difficult indeed.

He signaled his second-in-command.

“Give Senator Sharon the canapé with the jolt in it as soon as there are ten more people on the floor,” he directed crisply. “I don’t like the way this is going. As soon as we have a minimum crowd, we’ll have to get them rolling on the trains— Sharon’s not the best Judas goat for the purpose, but she’ll have to do. Take my advice, Cyril, or you will rue the day.”

“Very good, Maestro,” the assistant, whose name was not Cyril at all, said respectfully.

Michelis had hardly noticed the serpentine at the beginning, except as a novelty, but somehow or other it became noisier as the party grew older. It seemed to wind along the floor about every five minutes, but he soon realized that there were actually three such trains: the first one collected passengers up here; the second returned parties from the second level, to discharge wildly exhilarated recruiters among the cautiously formal newcomers on the first level; and the third train, usually almost empty this early in the party’s course, brought glassy-eyed party-poopers from the sub-basement, who were removed efficiently by the countess’ livery in a covered station-stop well apart from the main entrance and well out of sight of new boarders for the nether levels. Then the whole cycle repeated itself.