Narabedla Ltd (49 page)

I
t wasn’t a man with a gun who was waiting for me in Marlene’s apartment. It was Henry Davidson-Jones himself.

He was sitting at his ease at Marlene’s dining-room table, and he wasn’t alone. There was a Purry lying on Marlene’s couch, regarding me with its little pop eyes—undoubtedly the one who had imitated Marlene’s voice. There was a Kekkety in Marlene’s kitchen, apparently doing dishes. And there was my friend from Nice and the ambulance, escorting me into the apartment, with his hand in his pocket.

“Hello, Nolly,” said Henry Davidson-Jones. He looked tired, and he moved stiffly as he stood to reach out to shake my hand.

I didn’t let him. He sighed and sat down again. “You can go, Arnold,” he told my escort, and then as the black man reluctantly left, “I’ve just eaten something, Nolly. I’m sure the Kekkety can make something for you if you’re hungry. No? Then,” he called, raising his voice, “just bring us some coffee.”

“I didn’t come here for coffee,” I said. “I want to make a deal.”

“Well, do you mind if I drink some while we’re making it? What deal do you have in mind?”

I said, “There are two people I want taken care of. One is Irene Madigan. I don’t want her hurt, or confined in any way. I want her to be allowed to stay on the Earth. I’ll ask her myself not to say anything to anybody, ever. I think she’ll do it.”

He clasped his hands and looked at his thumbnails. “Who’s the other person?”

“Marlene Abramson.”

He looked up. “Nolly,” he said earnestly, “I give you my word I haven’t done one thing to harm Marlene Abramson. I was very sorry to hear that she had become ill.” 

“I’m glad to hear it,” I told him. “Are you sorry enough to take her to Narabedla to get fixed up?”

“Ah,” he said, nodding in satisfaction. “I see what you’re getting at. You think I’m a kidnapper, a profiteer, maybe a murderer—”

“That’s right,” I said.

“—and the Associated Peoples really ought to let the Earth in as a member, besides.”

“I’m not quite as sure of that,” I admitted. “But maybe so. At least we should have the choice.”

“Yes. The freedom of choice. And in spite of all these wrongs, you’re willing to let everything go on just as before, provided I arrange for Narabedlan medical treatment for one friend of yours.”

“That’s it exactly,” I said.

The Kekkety padded silently over with the coffee. Davidson-Jones mused over what I had said while the Kekkety poured for him, then brought a cup over to me.

It would have been a proper gesture to refuse it, but actually it smelled pretty good. I took a sip. Then I got up, pulled the wad of papers out of my pocket, and dropped it on Marlene’s dining-room table.

“We’ve sent out twelve copies of this,” I told Davidson-Jones.

“Yes, so you told the Purry on the phone,” he agreed. He riffled through the Xeroxes idly. “It seems quite complete,” he said.

“They were only mailed yesterday,” I told him. “There’s not much chance that any of them could be delivered today. The earliest would be tomorrow, just for the nearby ones. I don’t know how you could intercept them, but I imagine you’d have a way.”

“Possibly,” he agreed.

“I’ll give you the names and addresses of all those people. Right now. If you give me your word about the two conditions.”

“What about yourself, Nolly? You haven’t said anything about yourself.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

“That’s very commendable. And what makes you think I would keep a promise if I gave it?”

“I’ll take that chance, too.”

“I’m flattered, Nolly,” he told me, and he sounded very sincere.

He got up from the table and walked over to Marlene’s window, gazing out at the bare trees in the snowy joint backyards of all the buildings on that block. “I hate winter,” he said, rubbing his shoulder as though it pained him. “Nolly? There are pushing five billion human beings here on the Earth, and they all die sooner or later. Mostly sooner, and mostly in pain. Should I send them all off to Narabedla?”

“I don’t suppose you could do that,” I said reluctantly.

“So who do we save? Just the particular friends of Nolly Stennis?” -

“I’m not asking for that. I’m only asking for Marlene Abramson.”

He turned and shook his head at me. “Oh, but Nolly,” he said, chiding me, “you aren’t making your best deal. You’ve got something to trade that, I admit, is valuable to me. It’s worth a better price. Don’t you want something thrown in for the human race? The secret of the go-box, for instance. Look at what that would mean. No more trains, planes, trucks, supertankers. No more sixteen-wheelers killing people on the highways—no more highways! No more jets from LaGuardia deafening the crowds at the Mets games. No more big tankers spilling their oil into the ocean. No more oil imports to bankrupt the high-energy countries. No more—”

I interrupted his catalogue. “All right,” I agreed, “I’ll take that, too.”

“Will you? It wouldn’t be hard to do. The Associated Peoples wouldn’t object—they’re too busy trying to patch up their own troubles. And it’s just a matter of Einstein-Rosen separability. There are a lot of institutions right here that are close to finding it already. I’ve helped some of them, with money grants for research. Only—well, what about all those truckers and airline pilots and railroad workers? What are they going to do for jobs? How can you handle the unemployment that follows?”

“I don’t know,” I said, not liking the way the conversation was going.

“Neither do I,” he said soberly. “I haven’t known how to handle any of that, from penicillin to the silicon chip. I’ve helped them all, you know. For a long time.”

I stared at him. “You mean with grants, and maybe little tips from time to time? But why do that when you could just hand all these things over?”

“Is that what you’d do, Nolly?”

“It’s not my problem,” I said shortly.

“But if it were?” he persisted. “Wouldn’t you try to make all these changes gradually, so the human race would have time to adjust? And maybe even to give it a chance to keep its self-respect?”

“I might,” I said, “but I wouldn’t kidnap people.”

He was silent for a moment, looking at me. He snapped his fingers, and the Kekkety glided up with more coffee. “I’m afraid I’ve made a lot of mistakes lately,” he said. “I’m getting old.”

“So go back to Narabedla yourself, and get fixed up.”

“I have, Nolly, many times. I’m a good deal older than you think. It’s time for me to retire.”

I didn’t like the way he was looking at me, because I didn’t understand it. Then I began to understand it, and I liked it even less.

“Oh,
no!”
I cried.

“Oh, yes,” said Henry Davidson-Jones.

When Davidson-Jones’s doctors got Marlene out of the hospital I was sitting in the ambulance, waiting for her. She looked terrible. She was tiny. A lot of her hair had fallen out. Her face was like death itself. She was in a coma, all right, and she didn’t speak to me.

But when the Kekketies were gently lifting her into the box on the yacht I kissed her and whispered to her that everything was all right, and at least her eyelids flickered.

When the limo was taking us to the hotel Henry Davidson-Jones was silent. “Don’t you have any instructions for me?” I demanded bitterly as we turned into Lexington Avenue.

“You give the instructions now, Nolly,” he told me. “Just don’t forget to make those telephone calls. Then, if you want to, come down to the office and you can get started. I’ll be there. The car will come back and wait for you; it’s your car now.”

And I got out and stared after him as the limousine drove away.

It was early-evening dark. The streets were full. The hotel lobby was busy with well-dressed men and women intent on their own concerns.

They hardly glanced at me. They didn’t know who I was— who I had suddenly become.

I had never been in charge of anything bigger than a six-person accountancy office, but I acknowledged that it was true, as Davidson-Jones had ordered, that money was money and if you knew how to handle a sum it didn’t matter how many zeroes were at the end of it.

The second thing to do, I told myself, was to sit down with Irene Madigan and the telephones and call up each of the people we had sent those documents to to explain that they shouldn’t open them, because they were a mistake, and someone would come around to collect them.

That wouldn’t be too hard. The first thing would be harder.

In the elevator I found myself wondering whether I would ever have time to sing again, as I was trying to figure out how to explain to Irene Madigan that Narabedla was now ours—that the world was ours—to do with as we would and, most of all, to be responsible for.

Frederik Pohl has been everything one man can be in the world of science fiction: fan (a founder of the fabled Futurians), book and magazine editor, agent, and, above all, writer. As editor of
Galaxy
in the 1950s, he helped set the tone for a decade of sf—including his own memorable stories such as
The Space Merchants
(in collaboration with Cyril Kornbluth). He has also written
The
Way
the Future Was,
a memoir of his first forty-five years in science fiction. Frederik Pohl was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1919, and now lives in Palatine, Illinois.