Tanderon (38 page)

“Ringer told me you were coming here for a rest,” he said, his long face showing nothing of curiosity. “Don’t you rate a regular vacation anymore?”

“Not these days,” I confirmed, deciding I’d wait a while before giving him as much of the story as I could. “How about being a good host and breaking out a chunk of bread? I want to show Teddy a few of the sights before it gets too late.”

His dark, sober eyes stared at me for a minute before he said, “Sure,” and went past me to the doorway directly behind my chair. There were two other doorways in the room, one to the left and one to the right, but his going to the one behind me probably made that the kitchen. His lack of expression had seemed stranger than usual, but it might have just been my imagination.

“He’s got great working conditions here,” Teddy commented in a soft voice, looking around at the broken down room before sitting in the other chair.

“It balances out,” I shrugged, keeping my voice as low as hers had been. “Living here might be depressing, but he doesn’t have to go into Flowerville. When he gets rotated out of here he’ll probably go back to his apartment near headquarters, but then he’ll have to stick his neck out again on whatever job comes up. If you’re looking for a way to beat the game go right ahead, but if you find one let me know.

I’m always interested in miracles.”

Teddy didn’t answer and I stretched out in the chair, relaxing my tired muscles. After thinking about it for a minute I decided it might be best if I cut the tour short and got back to the house as quickly as possible. Tomorrow, after some sleep, I’d be better able to do the tour job right. In a little while Lammerly called us, so we joined him in his dingy kitchen. We all took chairs, and Teddy and I sampled the stew-like meal he’d made. After the first taste I decided that Pete ought to meet Lammerly, and eagerly dug in. I finished it all and drank the coffee Lammerly had supplied, then leaned back with a sigh.

“I’m tempted to ask you to marry me, Alf, but you’d probably insist that I do the cooking,” I said. “Where did you learn to handle food like that?”

“It was learn or starve,” he replied with a shrug, but his pleasure at the compliment was still obvious. “There aren’t too many restaurants around here, at least not ones you can enjoy yourself in. How about some more?”

“Only if you want to see me explode,” I told him with regrettable truth. “And it’s time that Teddy and I got going. Are you finished, Teddy?”

“All set,” she acknowledged, pushing her empty plate away. We both got to our feet and Teddy turned to the door, but before I could follow her the room suddenly blurred. I grabbed at the back of her chair to keep my balance, but almost fell anyway. Blinking my eyes didn’t help to chase away the blur, but it did add to a growing dizziness that made the room spin around me. My legs and arms were abruptly very weak, but Lammerly was just as abruptly right behind me. His arm went around my waist, his strength alone holding me up.

“What’s the matter, Diana,” his voice murmured in my ear, sounding strange and blurry and very far away. “I thought you were leaving.”

It was hard to follow what was going on, but somehow the truth fought its way through the externals.

“What did you give me, Alf?” I tried to demand, but the words came out slurred and lazy, as though the question wasn’t at all important.

“Just what Ringer ordered,” his murmur answered, sounding as though he were slowly moving away from me. “Something to make you get the sleep you need.

Don’t fight it, Diana, it’s just what you need. Sleep is what you need … sleep …

sleep…”

His receding murmur dragged me with it, down a dark and floating corridor, farther and farther away from the world I wanted to be in. I tried to fight being pulled away, tried to ignore what was dragging me down, but the effort was worse than useless.

Alf’s arm was still around me, his broad body pressed to mine, and I managed to croak out, “Damn Ringer!” just before it all melted away.

There’s a certain point at which waking up in strange places stops being interesting.

When I opened my eyes the next morning I discovered I was rapidly reaching that point. I lay in a wide, rumpled bed, an old, thin sheet covering me, the sun’s glare coming in through a broken slat on the window blind. I took a deep breath and forced myself out of line with the glare, finding it possible to move with only a little difficulty.

It was necessary to move again in order to sit up, which actually banished the small amount of difficulty. That let me look around to see that the room I was in gave off a feeling of rarely having been used. It was as rundown and threadbare as the rest of Alf’s house, empty except for the bed I had slept in and my bag standing against the wall to the left of the bed. Clothes lay piled on top of the bag, casually dumped there by someone who wasn’t interested enough to fold them.

That, of course, was when I realized I was naked under the sheet. I cursed under my breath, knowing Alf wasn’t likely to have asked Teddy to undress me, and the anger I felt hit the charts and started to rise. When it came to men taking my clothes off I prefer to have a say in the matter, even if I happen to know the man and had gone through it with him once before when still awake. It was all Ringer’s fault, him and his damned orders, him and his damned concern. I didn’t like to have decisions made for me even under normal conditions; during an assignment there was no way I’d stand for it.

I threw the cover off me and got to my feet, then stalked over to my bag to find a cigarette. Ringer and I would have to have words when I got back, but right now there was someone nearer who could use a few of those words. I felt rested from the long night’s sleep I’d had, but an acrid, metallic taste had made camp in my mouth, telling me exactly what it was that had caused the night’s sleep. Alf had gotten cute since the last time I’d worked with him, and I couldn’t wait to tell him how much I appreciated it.

I lay down on the bed again until I finished the cigarette, then found a bathroom behind one of the two doors in my bedroom. The bathroom had another door besides the one I’d used, and I locked them both just for the hell of it before taking a shower. There was a water meter on the shower, shutting the water off after no more than a couple of minutes, but I was as clean by then as I was likely to get in that town. I let the air jets dry me before going back to my room for a clean outfit, and then I was ready to have that chat with Alf. Not even bothering to run a brush through my hair, I went out into the house’s dingy living room.

Lammerly had one of the table lamps in pieces and had obviously been working on the wiring when he heard me opening the door to my bedroom. His head came up and he watched me come closer, his hands still doing something to the wiring. He sat perched on a chair arm next to the lamp’s table, and he didn’t move or say a word.

Teddy was also in the room, I knew, but for the moment my mood considered her invisible.

“Well?” I demanded, stopping about five feet away from Lammerly to put my fists on my hips.

“Well what?” he countered, his long face looking uninterested. “You’re not thinking of starting something foolish, are you? This is hardly the place for it.”

“I’m thinking of finishing something,” I growled, taking another step closer to him.

“Since when are you so keen on following orders?”

“I follow them when they make sense,” he responded with a shrug, still looking unimpressed. “Ringer said not to use the stuff if you took it easy on your own, but you didn’t so I did. It’s as simple as that.”

“Simple is the right word,” I agreed with a nod, finding myself getting angrier. “In case you’ve forgotten, that’s not the way I work.”

“Then you’d better change the way you work while you’re here,” he came back, anger beginning to touch him as well. “You can’t expect to go into Flowerville while you’re half asleep. As long as you’re in my territory, you’ll do it right.”

“Is that so,” I murmured, feeling my voice soften as my anger built. “Well, congratulations, Alf. You should have let me in on the good news right away.”

“What good news?” he asked, finally changing his expression to one of confusion.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the news of your promotion,” I said, watching his eyes to see if it reached him. “I hadn’t known they’d made you senior to me. The last time we worked together, you weren’t.”

He went motionless as his sober gaze became startled, and he suddenly seemed to find himself with nothing more to say. There wasn’t much he could say, but I didn’t have that trouble.

“If the promotion hasn’t come through then you can keep your ideas to yourself,” I pressed, not about to let the matter drop. “As long as I’m senior agent here, we’ll continue to do things my way.”

“It’s hard to remember you’re senior to everyone but other hyper-A’s,” he muttered, sounding a lot less cocky than he had a couple of minutes earlier. “Why do you look like that?”

“My sins caught up with me,” I said in disgust, turning away to keep him from seeing my expression. “One of these days I’ll have to hang a sign around my neck, just to remind everyone who I am.”

“Believe me, you need it,” he said from behind me, giving me exactly the kind of support I was dying to get. I swallowed an appropriate comeback, then forced myself to turn and look at him again with less hostility.

“Anything interesting happen while I was in dreamland?” I asked, just to keep myself from starting the fight all over again.

“No,” he answered, then gestured to one side. “One of my neighbors dropped by early this morning with a couple of gifts, so I took Teddy around town and showed her the sights on my own.”

I looked at Teddy where she sat in a chair to my right, and for the first time noticed what she was wearing. It was a faded print dress that came down below her knees, and was at least three sizes too big. It hung on her like a sack, and if her face had been covered I wouldn’t have made any bets about whether she was a girl or a boy.

“Good thinking,” I said to her with a straight face. “Confusion to the enemy is always sound doctrine.”

“It was his idea!” she snarled, jerking a thumb at Lammerly as she straightened.

“‘You can’t walk around dressed like that with me,’ he said! ‘I have a role to protect,’

he said! ‘Put this dress on,’ he said! Dress! He wouldn’t know a dress if it dropped on him from a tree! Would it bother you if I told him where to put this dress?”

“It would bother me,” Lammerly said, bringing her blazing eyes over to him. “Life here has got to be as unpleasant as possible for you two, so you’ll have a good reason to run to Flowerville. If I let you parade around in your original get-up and never said a word, don’t you think people would start to wonder when you left?”

Teddy was still mad, but she turned back to me with a pleading look. Unfortunately, all I could do was shrug.

“He’s right,” I told her. “A slip like that on this end could mean the game for us in Flowerville. It’s a choice between feeling foolish here and feeling dead there.”

“Okay, okay, I understand it,” Teddy conceded in a grumble, throwing herself back into the slouch she’d been in a minute earlier. “But I don’t have to like it! How many more times do we have to go out?”

“Two more times should do it,” Lammerly said. “You learn fast and there isn’t too much left to show you.” Then he turned to me with a dirty grin. “One of those times Diana will be coming with us. She needs the excuse too, and I have another dress just her size. We’ll leave her here the second time, and she can get some more sleep while we finish up.”

Teddy sat up again and looked at me with sudden interest. “Let’s see her dress, Lammerly. I want to know which one of us is going to be more stylish.”

Lammerly laughed and went for the dress, and I went for another cigarette. It’s easy giving advice, but it’s not as easy to take it even when it’s your own advice. I didn’t like the idea either, but it was necessary to the job. When I went back in, Lammerly had the dress.

“It’s not really fair, Diana,” Teddy said, almost choking. “He saved the best one for you.”

I looked at the dress, then looked at Lammerly.

“Would you try to find something else if I took back what I said earlier?” I asked him. “Horizontal stripes don’t do a thing for me, and round, frilly collars and puffed short sleeves are definitely out this season.”

“I couldn’t find anything better if I tried,” Lammerly said soberly, the grin showing only in his eyes as he turned the dress around to look at it again himself. “This little number was made for you. You can get into it while I put a meal together, and we’ll go out after you’ve finished eating.”

“Oh, no,” I said as fast as I could. “I’ll do my own cooking, thank you. I’d hate to exhaust your supply of Lethe, so I’ll change when I finish.”

“You’ll change now,” he contradicted, holding the dress out to me. “You know you’re safe until after we get back, so you’re just stalling.”

“Life in this town has made you vicious, Alf,” I said, grabbing the dress. “I think I’ll recommend a transfer to the planet Esmonia for you when I get back.”

“If I thought you were serious about that crack, the next time you fell asleep you wouldn’t wake up again,” he said with a laugh. “Those so-called females on Esmonia are worse than you are. You don’t pick up a whip when I try to argue with you.”

“Well, just keep finding things like this dress for me, and you’ll see how fast I adapt to new ideas,” I told him sweetly. He grinned again and went into the kitchen, and I went into the bedroom to change.

I didn’t even look for a mirror when I was in the dress. The sagging belt around where my waist should have been, and the long-buttoned stay-tab down the front of the dress told the whole story. Needless to say, the high-thonged sandals made the whole thing look even more ridiculous. I went back out, and Teddy turned away from me fast to study the faded pattern on the wallpaper.

“I bet my knees are warmer than your knees,” I said to her, making her break up.

She turned back to me and we both laughed, then we looked at each other critically.