Narabedla Ltd (18 page)

Not the go-box, however.

It took Purry half an hour of hard work to come up with anything I could understand, and then it wasn’t any use. “The problem, Mr. Stennis,” he said sadly, “is that the basic technological principles do not have any equivalent on your planet.”

“You mean it’s something we haven’t discovered yet? Like electricity or the steam engine?”

“I suppose so,” he said doubtfully. “The closest I can come is to that it relates to something that your scientists call ‘Einstein-Rosen separability,’ but what that is I don’t know.”

Neither did I, but I wrote down the name all the same; maybe the library would have something about it. “Spaceships, then,” I ordered.

“Oh, the Peoples don’t use spaceships! Off-planet transportation is just another sort of go-box.”

“I thought you said something about probes?”

“Ah,” said Purry, gratified. “Of course. The go-boxes can’t work until there is a terminal for them, and the probes provide the terminals. Just a moment.”

But that took a lot more than a moment, too-. It wasn’t that Purry was trying to keep anything from me. It wasn’t that he was stupid, either—well, he was a musician, wasn’t he? And I’d never met a musician anywhere who knew much about simple arithmetic (that was what they paid their accountant for), much less things like Einstein-Rosen separability. Purry didn’t have any trouble finding out all the answers to all my questions through the skry. The trouble came later, because then he had to try to find English words for the answers, and, a lot of the time the English words apparently did not exist.

As to spaceships—yes, certainly, there were two kinds of them for voyages on routes where go-boxes had net yet been installed. There was the kind they used for relatively short trips—from planet to planet, or to quite nearby stars—and they were “rockets.” Well, not ordinary rockets; it took Purry a lot of sweat to find the term for the fuel they used, and it came out as “antimatter.” Then there were the longdistance probes. One was just about to be launched to some very far-off place—ultimately Purry found a name for that place, “Galaxy M-31 in Andromeda.” Those were light-sail ships. They required a special kind of light to propel them, though, and Purry hunted a long time before he came up with the word “pulsars.” “They’re a special
kind
of these pulsars, though,” he said dismally, and he couldn’t find any way of telling me what made them special.

The same with “slow time.” The same with the “skry.” The same with, for that matter, Purry himself, and the Kekkety folk, and all the other “robots.”

After two hours of that sort of frustration I possessed a number of words, but nothing that I could see a way to build back on Earth. (I imagined myself going to NASA: “Okay, folks, here’s how you explore Pluto. First you fuel your ship with antimatter—you don’t have any antimatter? Well, get some! Then you put a go-box on the ship—what do you mean, you don’t know how to make a go-box? Why, it’s just a matter of Einstein-Rosen separability, after all!”)

I wasn’t really sorry when the skry lighted up to show Sam Shipperton looking out at me. He looked annoyed as he said, “Nolly, come on in. I need to talk to you.”

Shipperton glowered at me over that flickering, flashing desk. “I’m expecting a call about you, Stennis,” he said. “What kind of a call?”

“It might be good news, but first we have to talk. You’ve got a problem.”

“Sure I do. The problem is you kidnapped me.”

He winced. “Will you shut up about that for a minute? That’s not your big problem. Your big problem is this woman Marlene Abramson. She’s going to find herself right down the tank if you don’t do something fast.”

I sat down on the chair next to his desk, suddenly alert. Was something happening back on Earth that might help me get out of this? I kept my face calm, and all I said was, “You don’t even offer me coffee first?”

“Get yourself some goddamn coffee if you want it! But pay attention,” he called to my back as I rose to do so. “You know what she’s done? She’s been to the FBI!”

I poured the coffee before I answered. “Well,” I said judiciously, “yes, I suppose it’s the FBI that a person would call in about a kidnapping. ”

“Don’t make jokes!”

“That wasn’t a joke, Shipperton,” I said, sitting down. “I’m talking about real kidnapping, and maybe murder, too.”

“Murder!” He gave me a stare of incredulous dislike. “Now what are you talking about?”

“Jerry Harper, for one. And then, when you took Tricia, you provided a corpse to substitute for her. You murdered some innocent woman just to cover it up.”

“Oh, hell, Stennis, you’ve got some crazy ideas, you know that? Harper was convicted of murder himself—not by Narabedla Limited, or the Fifteen Peoples; it was a jury of the other artists right here. And that body that was substituted for Tricia came right out of the morgue. Some unclaimed hooker; it was lucky one was there, otherwise they’d have had to do it some other way. But murder’s absolutely out of the question, believe me. Narabedla has never taken a human life. That’s rule number one.”

I sneered, “Are you trying to tell me that Davidson-Jones wouldn’t be willing to kill somebody to protect his position? Say if he made some big goof and wanted to keep the weirdos from finding out about it?”

He looked puzzled, then shook his head. “Stennis,” he said patiently, “the rule against murdering human beings doesn’t come from the Fifteen Peoples. Most of them wouldn’t care one way or the other. It’s Jonesy’s own rule, and he wouldn’t break it. Now look,” he said, beginning to build up steam again, “let’s cut out all this crap. We’ve got to do something about this woman! She’s blown the whistle on Henry Davidson-Jones, accused him of, Jesus, three counts of kidnapping, one of attempted murder, and—you’re not going to believe this!—even a violation of the civil-rights statutes, because she says he abducted you and prevented you from getting back to New York in time to vote in some cockamamie primary election there. My God, Stennis! What kind of a woman is this? I never even
heard
of some of the things she’s charged Jonesy with!”

I took a sip of my coffee and sat down again. I didn’t even try to make my voice sound sincere when I said, “Gosh, that’s really a shame.”

He glared at me. “Damn straight it is! If she doesn’t knock it off it’ll be just too bad for her! Think this thing through, Nolly. First place, there’s no way she can hang anything on Jonesy. How could she? He’s got the money, he’s got the lawyers, he’s got real good friends in important places. All she can do is make a little trouble.”

“I can see that,” I agreed. “So then why are you all in an uproar about it?”

“Because,” he gritted, “we don’t
want
trouble. David-son-Jones doesn’t have to
have
trouble. He can take
steps.
Is that what you want him to do?”

I thought that over. I had a pretty good idea of what the steps might be, and Shipperton was right, I didn’t want them taken. On the other hand, I didn’t want to cave in too quickly. “I wouldn’t mind having Marlene here for company,” I said, not very honestly.

“What company? Is she a tap-dancer maybe? Or plays the kazoo? No, Nolly, if Mr. Davidson-Jones had to bring her here the only thing we’d be able to do with her is put her in slow time, and, honest, it’d be like having a stiff for company. Cripes,” he went on, sounding injured, “maybe that’s what I should’ve done with you in the first place. Here I am knocking myself out trying to find work for a busted-down baritone, with the critics getting tougher all the time, and what do I get for it? So what are you going to do?”

I didn’t like what he was saying, but there was a certain amount of truth to it. I parried. “What do you want me to do?”

“Send her a postcard!”

That came out of left field. I blinked at him. “A what?” 

“A postcard,” he said. “This here is a postcard. I want you to write something on it so she’ll know it’s you. Tell her that everything’s all right, you’re just taking a little time off to think things over. And we’ll send it to her.”

I picked up the card he had tossed at me. It had a picture on the front of some beat-up row houses with some beat-up types lounging in front of them, and under the picture were the words:
Hi, mate, the best of Scottish luck from the Gorbals.

I said, “What’s a gorbal?”

“What do you care? It’s a neighborhood in Glasgow. That’s where you’re supposed to be now. See,” he explained, “we sort of laid a false trail after they, uh, picked you up in Nice. We got somebody to use your Eurailpass as far as Paris, then he bought a flight from De Gaulle to Heathrow, then a train to Glasgow, and stayed at a couple of hotels. He used your American Express card, so that’s cool, but we want Marlene to get somebody to check all this out, otherwise what’s the use? So write a nice little card for her. Say, ‘Dear Marlene, I just had to take a little time off. Don’t worry. I’ll be in touch later.’ Only put something in so she’ll believe it’s actually from you.”

“She never will!”

“Nolly,” he said patiently,
“make
her believe it. Or do you want her here in slow storage?”

“If you kidnap her, too, the FBI will really take an interest, Shipperton.”

“Right, Nolly. That’s our good reason for going to all this trouble.
Your
good reason is to keep that from happening to her. Write.”

I argued for another few minutes, but in the long run I did what he wanted me to do. I wrote.

I didn’t see any way out of it. I said just what Shipperton had told me, and added, “P.S., kiss Sally for me and tell her I’ll bring back some perfume from the duty-free.”

Shipperton read it carefully. “Who’s Sally?” he asked. “She’s our secretary. We always bring her something back when we travel.”

- He gazed at me darkly. Then he shrugged and whistled. One of the little bedbugs appeared. It took the card in its little claws and, holding it high, raced out the door. As it left, Shipperton relaxed.

“Now you’re being sensible,” he said approvingly. “Now comes the good news. Well, kind of good news. Barak’s back from his meetings. Any minute now we’ll be getting a call from him, and if everything’s all right we’ll be off to see the Tlotta-Mother.”

As Shipperton appeared to relax, I began to tense up again. I said, “I hate it when somebody says there’s ‘kind of’ good news.”

“Aw,” he said easily, “probably it’ll be just fine. You never know with the Mother, of course. But she’s the one with the most rank around here. She’s a
Mother.
So you have to get along with her—no, don’t ask, I know what you’re going to say; wait till you see her and she’ll tell you what she wants you to know.” He glanced at his watch. “But—”

“No buts,” he ordered. “Wait for the call.” Then he grinned. “If you want to talk about something else, we’ve got time. Did I ever tell you about how I got here?”

“You can if you want to,” I said.

“Aw, Nolly, just mellow down, why don’t you? I know how you feel. See, when I came here they didn’t have a place for me, either.” I stared at him and he nodded. “That’s right. Just like you—well, almost. In 1972 I was in a rock group, trying to hit the big time in Houston, Texas. They picked us up, and when we got here they didn’t want us at all!”

“Is that why you’re doing this kind of stuff instead of playing your music?” I asked.

“Hell, they did give us a try. We bombed! It was a mistake to bring us, I guess. We tried out on four or five planets, but it just didn’t work, you know?” He shrugged. “Jonesy said it was because our act was half technology, you know— electronic instruments, and makeup, and strobes and amplification. Hell, there wasn’t anything we could show these guys about technology! So Chuck Plandome, he was our keyboard guy, he caught on playing accompaniment for an Irish tenor. Our own vocalist does Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs, and Frankie and I got administrative jobs. Frankie’s on the road now. You’ll see him, maybe, one of these days.”

I got myself another cup of coffee, thinking. I decided to probe a little. “That must have been tricky, snatching four of you at once.”

“They didn’t really snatch us. It was more complicated than that. See, we were a new group, and, frankly, we had a few problems. I mean with the law. You could even say we were on the run—that was one reason why we all kept all that makeup on in public, and kept our private lives kind of secret, you know? So it wasn’t any sweat for Jonesy, just a little mistake in judgment.”

“I’m glad to hear you admit he can make mistakes.” 

“Oh, hell, man, everybody makes mistakes. Jonesy’s been doing this for a hundred years, give or take. Maybe he’s getting a little stale, overconfident—I don’t know. Anyway, they took us on and then, when we got here, it was just like it is with you. The
reason
Jonesy made us the offer was that Frankie knew something. Frankie talked a lot, and one of the things he talked about was the Martians. ”

That stopped me.
“Martians?
”

“Not real Martians. That’s just what they were called where Frankie used to work. Frankie probably shouldn’t have talked about it, because I guess that’s why Davidson-Jones came after us. I mean, well, back before we formed the group, Frankie used to work for a company in the Valley. In California, you know? They were one of those biotech outfits that did things like gene-splitting and stuff, making pharmaceuticals? That’s why Frankie took a job there in the first place. He thought he might score something, but that wasn’t the kind of drugs they made. Anyway. Even where Frankie worked, in the mail room, there was this joke about the ‘Martians.’ What it meant, every once in a while an outside director would come to the company with a suitcase full of papers. They’d have a secret meeting, and he’d turn the papers over. The people that worked there said it was all top-secret stuff. Like industrial espionage? You’ve heard of that? They said these were hush-hush reports they’d got— stole, I guess they meant—from places like Hungary and China and South Africa, where they were doing the same kind of work this company did. And they’d always be good ideas that the company would follow up on, and get patents, and make big bucks. They didn’t want to say where they got them, so they’d say they were from the ‘Martians.’” Shipperton grinned at me. “So guess who the Martians really were.”