Donald A. Wollheim (ed) (2 page)

Someone had called. Since his private number was not generally known,
the caller had probably been either Carrie or Old Man Vandervort himself. He
dropped into the comfortable chair behind his desk and punched the button.

It was Old Man Vandervort. His lined face
filled the screen, the snow-white beard bobbing up and down to punctuate his
sentences. "Hello, Ortega," he said. "Out again, I see. If you
should by chance show up in your office today, I want you to come out and see
me personally before you go home. Something important has come up. That's
all." The screen faded.

"Damnation,"
Ortega said aloud.
"The master's voice."

Well, there was no getting out of it. He
would have to go hold hands with the old joker, even though he knew that the
"something important" was probably nothing more than
Vandervort's
wanting
someone to talk to. This made the second time this week, but
then Vandervort was paying the bills.

He caught the elevator up to the main entrance at the thirtieth floor
copter field and signed himself out in a Foundation copter. It was still
raining hard enough to discourage traffic, but the wind conditions were not
really prohibitive.

He lifted the copter up to the
five-thousand-foot lane and gunned her north at a modest two hundred per. He
kept slightly inland from the coastline, and set his pilot to hold him well
below the overland freight routes. There was very little traffic, since the
subs were holding back from the unloading chutes until the weather calmed down
a bit.

In fifteen minutes, the copter veered off to the right and buzzed up
Vandervort's
Canyon. He was challenged four times by the
Old Man's watchdog scanners, but managed to convince them that he was who he
said he was. He made a wet, slippery landing on the patio field of the huge
estate, activated his rain-bender, presented his credentials to a guard who
should have known him by sight, and finally got inside the visitor's wing.

One
of the butlers bowed, smiled, and said, "Right this way, Dr. Ortega. Mr.
Vandervort is expecting you." "So I heard," Ortega said.

He followed the anachronism through the familiar labyrinth of
richly-carpeted hallways, his senses overwhelmed as usual by the sheer
richness
of the Old Man's castle. It wasn't really
that the place was in bad taste, but simply that there was so confounded
much
of it.

The procession of two moved sedately through
the visitors' wing and on into the private quarters, which were a trifle more
elaborate, if possible. It marched up the marble stairs to the second floor,
down the interminable gray passage, and finally came to
a
well-oiled halt before
a
fantastic
mahogany door.

Congratulations,
thought Ortega. You
have circled the globe on roller-skates.

The butler knocked discreetly on the mahogany
slab. A tiny green light blinked on in the center of the door.

"You
may go in now, sir," said the butler, and bowed.

Ortega resisted the impulse to bow back and
stepped through the opening door. He was just in time to catch a glimpse of an
exceedingly sensuous young woman making her swishing exit by means of another
door.

"Ah
there,
Ortegal
" boomed Old Man Vandervort,
straightening up in his chair. "What kept you?"

The room, like everything else in the
mansion, was big. It had
a
wall-to-wall
brown rug that must have cost a fortune, and it was literally stuffed with
tables, chairs, desks, fireplaces, books, paintings, tapes, flowers,
gew-gaws
, drapes, and nameless shapes and sounds. As
always, it was much too hot, like a greenhouse on a humid day.

James Murray Vandervort was
a
small man, but he looked like what he was: the richest human being on
Earth. He was dressed in
a
dark-green
lounging robe. His face was red from too much brandy and his trim white beard
was slightly askew. He was one hundred and five years old and he had a bad
heart.

Ortega
said, "I was delayed by a typhoon. Sorry."

Vandervort laughed rather gaspingly and his
face got still redder. "Well, well," he said, "never mind about
that. Have a brandy." His voice was surprisingly loud, as though he were
constantly shouting over great distances.

Ortega accepted the brandy, personally poured
by the Old Man, and wiped his already moist forehead. He figured that the room
temperature must be close to ninety, and he also figured that he was in for at
least an hour of it.

The Old Man began, as was his custom, by
energetically beating around some bushes. "How's business?" he asked.
"How many have we got for this load?"

Ortega sank into a huge, soft chair that
reduced his six feet of height to approximately pygmy stature. "It's been
a little slow today, Van. But we've got sixty-five so far. All healthy and
yelling their heads off."

"Um-m-m.
And the breakdown?"

"Thirty-four set for the Foundation. The
rest are already on the ship."

"Good.
Splendid.
Any problems?"

"None to speak of.
I'm still worried about parking that ship out in Arizona. If the
government should stumble onto that crate—"

Vandervort
laughed his alarming laugh and clapped his thin hands together.
"The
government!
How many times must I tell you, Keith—
I'll
handle the government.
Or anybody else, for that
matter.
More brandy?"

Ortega
could have struggled along without the brandy in the jungle heat, but he accepted
another glass. It was part of the ritual. You simply had to wait the Old Man
out. If he had something important to say, he would say it eventually.

If
not—well, Van was powerful enough to indulge in his whims.

"I'm
a big man, Keith," Vandervort said, his pale blue eyes darting around the
room. "I'm aware of that."

"I can buy and sell the government, and
make money on the deal. I've got the best experts in the world faking those
records at the Foundation. Half the babies stay here on Earth, and that's enough
to cover our tracks. I'm not worried about the government."

"So
you keep saying. But
I'm
worried, just the same."

Vandervort talked for twenty minutes on how
unworried he was by the world government. He pointed out again and again how
careful they had been, how many senators he owned, and how what they were doing
was not illegal—only extralegal. Finally, after Keith Ortega estimated that he
had dropped about five pounds sitting in the sweat bath with the Old Man, he
edged in again toward the subject.

"How about our
colonies?"
Vandervort demanded sipping his brandy.
"How about the
robots?"

Keith shrugged. "O.K. as far as I know," he said. "You
know as much about it as I do. It's still too early to get definite results.
Culture A is only six years old, after all, and that's the oldest one we've
got."

Vandervort drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. "In other
words," he said, "you don't know."

Keith raised his eyebrows. "Van, we're
getting reports every week, and we've got twenty men and women up there—"

"But
you
don't know. And you're the one who
has
to know." The Old Man got to his feet with an effort and paced the
floor.
The slippers on his feet
pad-padded
as he walked.
His eyes began to gleam with the strange fanaticism
that Keith had never understood. He stopped and jabbed
a
finger at Ortega. "Can't you see that, Keith? Can't you?"

Keith knew what Vandervort was talking about.
He felt
a
vague unease stirring within him. "Spell
it out, Van," he said.

Vandervort walked over and stood right in
front of him, breathing hard. A too-prominent vein pulsed in his neck. The heat
was stifling. "All right, Keith, 111
be
more
explicit. We've been working together for ten years, ever since I yanked you
off your soap-box and put you back on the job. It was understood when you set
up the colonies that you were to go out there yourself and supervise the
project. I think it's time you went, and I think you ought to stay at least a
year.
How about it?"

"There's no need—"

"I think there is a need. Nothing must
go wrong out there, do you hear? Nothing! You've master-minded enough from this
end. I think you and Caroline should go out with the next shipload—and I'd hate
to make that an order, Keith."

Keith smiled. "Sit down, Van. You'll pop
an artery. And don't threaten me, please. I'm not your slave."

The Old Man frowned, considered, and sat down
again. A faintly baffled expression crossed his face. "I should think you
would
want
to go, Keith."

"I'll think it over."

"All right.
Sorry. It's just . . . well, never mind. You
can go, Keith."

"Thanks
111 call you."

He left the room, anxious to get out of the
heat, and saw the quite amazing girl come back in before he got out the door.
The butler was waiting for him, and escorted him back to the patio field.

It was night, and still raining. He lifted
the copter out of the canyon and flew southeast toward his home on the desert.
Far below him, almost hidden in
a
mask
of rain, the light of Los Angeles glittered like multi-colored diamonds
embedded in black sand.

A government
airsign
loomed up like a pale violet ghost ahead of him: DON'T ROCK THE BOAT. Keith
flew through it and it reformed itself behind him, patiently.

Carrie would be waiting.

Keith looked up, into the darkness and the
rain. Venus was invisible, and a long, long way from home.

II.

They had real steak for
supper that night, which was excellent, and
when they were done they retired to the annex. They hardly ever sat in the
glass-and-steel living room, unless they were entertaining guests, since both
of them found it impossible to relax there. The annex was primarily a cozy room
stuffed off in a wing—an artless conglomeration of books, tapes, half-finished
paintings, old-fashioned furniture, and one small bar.

Mostly,
they lived in the annex.

Carrie slipped a battered smock over her head
and began to poke at her current artistic effort, an oil painting of a cactus
in the desert sun. The subject, Keith thought, was none too original. He
sprawled on a couch and pretended to read, watching his wife.

She was a tiny blonde, barely five foot two,
with a
dolllike
face that invariably earned her the
designation of "cute," an adjective she cordially detested. Ortega
had married her twenty years ago, when she was twenty-five, and they were
still comfortably in love with each other. They had had a good life together,
and Keith found it hard to put his finger on just what had been lacking in it.

Perhaps he was at fault. He was a big man, and she had tended to walk in
his shadow, both mentally and physically.

Twenty
years ago, he had been a leading socioculturist for the world federation, but
he had become bored with the exactness and easy predictions and trivial
problems. He had quit his job and gone around the world in an astonishing
sailboat, looking for something he couldn't find. Carrie had adjusted without
complaint. He had formulated his Dark Age thesis that had given him fame of a
sort, and had lectured and written about his culture until he discovered that
no one was taking him very seriously. He had drifted into an easy sarcasm that
reflected an inner unease that he could not quite understand, and even the
excitement of the Vandervort project had failed to satisfy him. He was not, he
knew, the easiest man in the universe to live with.