The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (13 page)

What we had for dinner was delicious and I don’t know the names of any of it, so I’ll let it go at that. We had just reached the burping stage when Mr. Kondo came out, leaned close to my ear, and said, “Sir, come, please.”

I followed him into the kitchen. Mama-San looked up from her work, paid no more attention. The Reverend Doctor Schultz was there, looking worried. “Trouble?” I asked.

“Just a moment. Here’s your pie of Enrico; I’ve copied it. Here are the papers for Bill; please look them over.”

They were in a worn envelope, and the papers were creased and worn and somewhat yellowed and more than somewhat soiled in places. Hercules Manpower, Inc., had hired William No-Middle-Name Johnson, of New Orleans, Duchy of Mississippi, Lone Star Republic, and had in turn sold his indenture to Bechtel High Construction Corp. (bond endorsed for space, free fall, and vacuum)—who had in turn sold the indenture to Dr. Richard Ames, Golden Rule habitat, circum Luna. Etc., etc.—lawyer talk. Stapled to the indenture was a very sincere birth certificate showing that Bill was a foundling, abandoned in Metairie Parish, with an assigned date of birth three days earlier than the date he was found.

“Much of that is true,” Dr. Schultz told me. “I was able to wheedle some old records out of the master computer.”

“Does it matter whether or not it’s true?”

“Not really. As long as it is sincere enough to get Bill out of here.”

Gwen had followed me in. She took the papers from me, read them. “I’m convinced. Father Schultz, you’re an artist.”

“A lady of my acquaintance is an artist. I will convey your compliment. Friends, now the bad news. Tetsu, will you show them?”

Mr. Kondo moved back in the kitchen; Mama-San (Mrs. Kondo, I mean) stepped aside. Mr. Kondo switched on a terminal. He punched up the
Herald
, cycled it for something—spot news I assume. I found myself staring at myself.

With me, in split screen, was Gwen—a poor likeness of her. I would not have recognized her but for the sound repeating:

“—Ames. Mistress Gwendolyn Novak. The female is a notorious confidence woman who has fleeced many victims, mostly male, around the bars and restaurants of Petticoat Lane. The self-styled ‘Doctor’ Richard Ames, no visible means of support, has disappeared from his address at ring sixty-five, radius fifteen, at point four gee. The shooting took place at sixteen-twenty this afternoon in Golden Rule Partner Tolliver’s office—”

I said, “Hey! That time is wrong. We were—”

“Yes, you were with me, at the Farm. Hear the rest.”

“—according to eyewitnesses both killers fired shots. They are believed armed and dangerous; use extreme caution in apprehending them. The Manager is grief stricken at the loss of his old friend and has offered a reward of ten thousand crowns for—”

Dr. Schultz reached over and shut it off. “It just repeats now; it’s on a loop. But it appears as a spot announcement on all channels. By now, most habitants must have seen and heard it.”

“Thanks for warning us. Gwen, don’t you know better than to shoot people? You’re a naughty girl.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I fell into bad company.”

“Excuses again. Reverend, what in hell are we going to do? That bastich will space us before bedtime.”

“That thought occurred to me. Here, try this on for size.” From somewhere about his ample person he produced a fez.

I tried it on. “Fits well enough.”

“And now this.”

It was a black velvet eyepatch on elastic. I slipped it on, decided that I did not like having one eye covered, but did not say so. Papa Schultz had obviously put effort and imagination into trying to keep me from breathing vacuum.

Gwen exclaimed, “Oh, goodness! That does it!”

“Yes,” agreed Dr. Schultz. “An eyepatch draws the attention of most observers so strongly that it takes a conscious effort of will to see the features. I always keep one on hand. That fez and the presence of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine was a happy coincidence.”

“You had a fez on hand?”

“Not exactly. It does have a former owner. When he wakes up, he may miss it…but I do not think he will wake up soon. Uh, my friend Mickey Finn is taking care of him. But you might avoid any Shriners from Temple Al Mizar. Their accents may help; they are from Alabama.”

“Doctor, I’ll avoid
all
Shriners as much as I can; I think I should board at the last minute. But what about Gwen?”

The Reverend Doctor produced another fez. “Try it, dear lady.”

Gwen tried it on. It tended to fit down over her like a candle snuffer. She lifted it off. “I don’t think it does a thing for me; it’s not right for my complexion. What do you think?”

“I’m afraid you’re right.”

I said, “Doctor, Shriners are twice as big as Gwen in all directions and they bulge in different places. It will have to be something else. Grease paint?”

Schultz shook his head. “Grease paint always looks like grease paint.”

“That’s a very bad likeness of her on the terminal. Nobody could recognize her from that.”

“Thank you, my love. Unfortunately there are a good many people in Golden Rule who do know what I look like…and just one of them at the boarding lock tonight could lower my life expectancy drastically. Hmm. With just a little effort and no grease paint I could look my right age. Papa Schultz?”

“What is your right age, dear lady?”

She glanced at me, then stood on tiptoes and whispered in Dr. Schultz’s ear. He looked surprised. “I don’t believe it. And, no, it won’t work. We need something better.”

Mrs. Kondo spoke quickly to her husband; he looked suddenly alert; they exchanged some fast chatter in what had to be Japanese. He shifted to English. “May I, please? My wife has pointed out that Mistress Gwen is the same size, very nearly, as our daughter Naomi—and, in any case, kimonos are quite flexible.”

Gwen stopped smiling. “It’s an idea—and I thank you both. But I don’t look Nipponese. My nose. My eyes. My skin.”

There was some more batting around of that fast but long-winded language, three-cornered this time. Then Gwen said, “This could extend my life. So please excuse me.” She left with Mama-San.

Kondo went back into his main room—there had been lights asking for service for several minutes; he had ignored them. I said to the good Doctor, “You have already extended our lives, simply by enabling us to take refuge with Tiger Kondo. But do you think we can carry this off long enough to board the shuttle?”

“I hope so. What more can I say?”

“Nothing, I guess.”

Papa Schultz dug into a pocket. “I found opportunity to get you a tourist card from the gentleman who lent you that fez…and I have removed his name. What name should go on it? It can’t be ‘Ames’ of course—but what?”

“Oh. Gwen reserved space for us. Bought tickets.”

“By your right names?”

“I’m not certain.”

“I do hope not. If she used ‘Ames’ and ‘Novak’ the best you can hope for is to try to be first in line for no-shows. But I had better hurry to the ticket counter and get reservations for you as ‘Johnson’ and—”

“Doc.”

“Please? On the next shuttle if this one is booked solid.”

“You can’t.
You
make reservations for
us
and—
phtt!
You’re spaced. It may take them till tomorrow to figure it out. But they will.”

“But—”

“Let’s wait and see just what Gwen did. If they aren’t back in five minutes, I’ll ask Mr. Kondo to dig them out.”

A few minutes later a lady came in. Father Schultz bowed and said, “You’re Naomi. Or are you Yumiko? Good to see you again, anyhow.”

The little thing giggled and sucked air and bowed from the waist. She looked like a doll—fancy kimono, little silk slippers, flat white makeup, an incredible Japanese hairdo. She answered, “Ichiban geisha girr is awr. My Ingris are serdom.”

“Gwen!” I said.

“Prease?”

“Gwen, it’s wonderful! But tell us, fast, the names you used in making our reservations.”

“Ames and Novak. To match our passports.”

“That tears it. What’ll we do. Doc?”

Gwen looked back and forth between us. “Pray tell me the difficulty?”

I explained. “So we go to the gate, each of us well disguised—and show reservations for Ames and Novak. Curtain. No flowers.”

“Richard, I didn’t quite tell you everything.”

“Gwendolyn, you never do quite tell everything. More Limburger?”

“No, dear. I saw that it might turn out this way. Well, I suppose you could say that I wasted quite a lot of money. But I—Uh, after I bought our tickets—tickets we can’t use now and are wasted—I went to Rental Row and put a deposit on a U-Pushit. A Volvo Flyabout.”

Schultz said, “Under what name?”

I said, “How much?”

“I used my right name—”

Schultz said, “God help us!”

“Just a moment, sir. My right name is Sadie Lipschitz…and only Richard knows it. And now you. Please keep it to yourself, as I don’t like it. As Sadie Lipschitz I reserved the Volvo for my employer. Senator Richard Johnson, and placed a deposit. Six thousand crowns.”

I whistled. “For a
Volvo?
Sounds like you bought it.”

“I did buy it, dear; I had to. Both rental and deposit had to be cash because I didn’t have a credit card. Oh, I do have; I have enough cards to play solitaire. But
Sadie Lipschitz
has no credit. So I had to pay six thousand down simply to reserve it—to rent it but on a purchase contract. I tried to get him down a bit but with all the Shriners in town he was sure he could move it.”

“Probably right.”

“I think so. If we take it, we still have to complete payment on the full list price, another nineteen thousand crowns—”

“My God!”

“—plus insurance and squeeze. But we get the unused balance back if we turn it in here, or Luna City, or Hong Kong Luna, in thirty days. Mr. Dockweiler explained the reason for the purchase contract. Asteroid miners, or boomers rather, had been hiring cars without putting up the full price, taking them to some hideout on Luna, and refitting them for mining.”

“A
Volvo?
The only way you could get a Volvo to the asteroids would be by shipping it in the hold of a Hanshaw. But nineteen—no, twenty-five thousand crowns. Plus insurance and graft. Bald, stark robbery.”

Schultz said to me rather sharply, “Friend Ames, I suggest that you stop behaving like the fabled Scotsman faced by a coin-operated refresher. Do you accept what Mrs. Ames could arrange? Or do you prefer die Manager’s fresh-air route? Fresh—but thin.”

I took a deep breath. “Sorry. You’re right, I can’t breathe money. I just hate to get clipped. Gwen, I apologize. All right where is Hertz from here? I’m disoriented.”

“Not Hertz, dear. Budget Jets. Hertz did not have a unit left.”

“Murphy was an optimist.”

(
O’Toole’s commentary on Murphy’s Law, as cited by A. Bloch
)

To reach the office of Budget Jets we had to go around the end of the spaceport waiting room and into it at the axis, then directly to Budget’s door. The waiting room was crowded—the usual lot, plus Shriners and their wives, most of them belted to wall rests, some floating free. And proctors—too many of them.

Perhaps I should explain that the waiting room—and the booking office and the lock to the passenger tunnel and the offices and facilities of Rental Row—are all in free fall, weightless; they do not take part in the stately spin that gives the habitat its pseudo-gravity. The waiting room and related activities are in a cylinder inside a much larger cylinder, the habitat itself. The two cylinders share a common axis. The big one spins; the smaller one does not—like a wheel turning on an axle.

This requires a vacuum seal at the outer skin of the habitat where the two cylinders touch—a mercury type, I believe, but I’ve never seen it. The point is that, even though the surrounding habitat spins, the habitat’s spaceport must
not
spin, because a shuttle (or a liner, or a freighter, or even a Volvo) requires a steady place in free fall to dock. The docking nests for Rental Row are a rosette around the main docking facility.

In going through the waiting room I avoided eye contact and went straight to my destination, a door in a forward corner of the waiting room. Gwen and Bill were tailed up behind me. Gwen had her purse hooked over her neck and was guarding the bonsai maple with one arm and clinging to my ankle with her other hand; Bill was holding on to one of her ankles and towing a package wrapped in Macy’s wrapping, with Macy’s logo prominent on it. I don’t know what that wrapping paper originally covered but it now concealed Gwen’s smaller case, her not-clothes.

Our other baggage? Following the first principle of saving one’s neck, we’d chucked it. It would have marked us as phony—for a one-day side trip Shriners on holiday do not carry great loads of baggage. Gwen’s smaller case we could salvage because, disguised with Macy’s wrapping, it looked like the sort of shopping many of the Shriners had obviously done. And so did the little tree—just the sort of awkward, silly purchase tourists indulge in. But the rest of our baggage had to be abandoned.

Oh, perhaps it could be shipped to us someday, if safe means could be worked out. But I had written it off our books. Doc Schultz, by scolding me for crabbing over the cost of the deal Gwen had arranged, had reoriented me. I had let myself become soft and sedentary and domesticated—he had forced me to shift gears to the real world, where there are only two sorts: the quick and the dead.

A truth of which I again became acutely aware in crossing that waiting room: Chief Franco came in behind us. He appeared to be unaware of us and I strove to appear unaware of him. He seemed intent only on reaching a group of his henchmen guarding the lock to the passenger tunnel; he dived straight toward them while I was pulling my little family along a lifeline stretching from the entrance to the corner I wanted to reach.

And did reach it and got through Budget Jets’ door, and it contracted behind us and I breathed again and re-swallowed my stomach.

In the office of Budget Jets we found me manager, a Mr. Dockweiler, belted at his desk, smoking a cigar, and reading the Luna edition of the
Daily Racing Form
. He looked around as we came in and said, “Sorry, friends, I don’t have a thing to rent or sell. Not even a witch’s broom.”