Podkayne of Mars (19 page)

He considered this. “I think you’re wise, hon. Better do your practice kisses on boys who don’t tend to cause your gauges to swing over into the red. Anyhow, although he’s a good lad, he’s not nearly good enough for my savage niece.”

“Maybe so, maybe not. Uncle . . . what
are
you going to do about Clark?”

His halfway happy mood vanished. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“But we’ve got to do something!”

“But what, Podkayne?”

There he had me. I had already chased it through all the upper and lower segments of my brain. Tell the police? Mr. Chairman
is
the police—they all work for him. Hire a private detective? If Venus has any (I don’t know), then they all are under contract to Mr. Cunha, or rather, the Venus Corporation.

Run ads in newspapers? Question all the taxi drivers? Put Clark’s picture in the sollies and offer rewards? It didn’t matter what you thought of,
everything
on Venus belongs to Mr. Chairman. Or, rather, to the corporation he heads. Same thing, really, although Uncle Tom tells me that the Cunhas’ actually own only a fraction of the stock.

“Poddy, I’ve been over everything I could think of with Mr. Cunha—and he is either already doing it, or he has convinced me that here, under conditions he knows much better than I do, it should not be done.”

“Then what do we
do?
”

“We wait. But if you think of anything—
anything
—that you think might help, tell me and if it isn’t already being done, we’ll call Mr. Cunha and find out if it should be done. If I’m asleep, wake me.”

“I will.” I doubted if he would be asleep. Or me. But something else had been bothering me. “If time comes for the
Tricorn
to shape for Earth—and Clark isn’t back—what do you do then?”

He didn’t answer; the lines in his face just got deeper. I knew what the Awful Decision was—and I knew how he had decided it.

But I had a little Awful Decision of my own to make . . . and I had talked to Saint Podkayne about it for quite a while and had decided that Poddy had to break a Saint-Podkayne oath. Maybe this sounds silly but it isn’t silly to me. Never in my life had I broken one . . . and never in my life will I be utterly sure about Poddy again.

So I told Uncle all about the smuggled bomb.

Somewhat to my surprise he took it seriously—when I had about persuaded myself that Clark had been pulling my leg just for exercise. Smuggling—oh, sure, I understand that every ship in space has smuggling. But not a bomb. Just something valuable enough that it was worthwhile to bribe a boy to get it aboard . . . and probably Clark had been paid off again when he passed it along to a steward, or a cargo hand, or somebody. If I know Clark—

But Uncle wanted me to describe exactly the person I had seen talking to Clark at Deimos Station.

“Uncle, I can’t! I barely glanced at him. A man. Not short, not tall, not especially fat or skinny, not dressed in any way that made me remember—and I’m not sure I looked at his face at all. Uh, yes, I did but I can’t call up any picture of it.”

“Could it have been one of the passengers?”

I thought hard about that. “No. Or I would have noticed his face later when it was still fresh in my mind.
Mmm . . .
I’m almost certain he didn’t queue up with us. I think he headed for the exit, the one that takes you back to the shuttle ship.”

“That is likely,” he agreed. “Certain—
if
it was a bomb. And not just a product of Clark’s remarkable imagination.”

“But, Uncle Tom,
why
would it be a bomb?”

And he didn’t answer and I already knew why. Why would anybody blow up the
Tricorn
and kill everybody in her, babies and all? Not for insurance like you sometimes find in adventure stories; Lloyd’s won’t insure a ship for enough to show a profit on that sort of crazy stunt—or at least that’s the way it was explained to me in my high school economics class.

Why, then?

To keep the ship from getting to Venus.

But the
Tricorn
had been to Venus tens and tens of times—

To keep somebody in the ship from getting to Venus (or perhaps to Luna)
that trip.

Who? Not Podkayne Fries. I wasn’t important to anybody but me.

For the next couple of hours Uncle Tom and I searched that hilton suite. We didn’t find anything, nor did I expect us to. If there was a bomb (which I still didn’t fully believe) and if Clark had indeed brought it off the ship and hidden it there (which seemed unlikely with all of the
Tricorn
at one end and all of the city at the other end to choose from), nevertheless he had had days and days in which to make it look like anything from a vase of flowers to a—a
anything.

We searched Clark’s room last on the theory that it was the least likely place. Or rather, we started to search it together and Uncle had to finish it. Pawing through Clark’s things got to be too much for me and Uncle sent me back into the salon to lie down.

I was all cried out by the time he gave up; I even had a suggestion to make. “Maybe if we sent for a Geiger counter?”

Uncle shook his head and sat down. “We aren’t looking for a bomb, honey.”

“We aren’t?”

“No. If we found it, it would simply confirm that Clark had told you the truth, and I’m already using that as least hypothesis. Because . . . well, because I know more about this than the short outline I gave to you . . . and I know just how deadly serious this is to some people, how far they might go. Politics is neither a game nor a bad joke the way some people think it is. War itself is merely an extension of politics . . . so I don’t find anything surprising about a bomb in politics; bombs have been used in politics hundreds and even thousands of times in the past. No, we aren’t looking for a bomb, we are looking for a man—a man you saw for a few seconds once. And probably not even for that man but for somebody that man might lead us back to. Probably somebody inside the President’s office, somebody he trusts.”

“Oh, gosh, I wish I had really looked at him!”

“Don’t fret about it, hon. You didn’t know and there was no reason to look. But you can bet that Clark knows what he looks like. If Clark—I mean,
when
Clark comes back, in time we will have him search the I.D. files at Marsopolis. And all the visa photographs for the past ten years, if necessary. The man will be found. And through him the person the President has been trusting who should not to be trusted.” Uncle Tom suddenly looked all Maori and very savage. “And when we do, I may take care of the matter personally. We’ll see.”

Then he smiled and added, “But right now Poddy is going to bed. You’re up way past your bedtime, even with all the dancing and late-sleeping you’ve been doing lately.”

“Uh . . . what time is it in Marsopolis?”

He looked at his other watch. “Twenty-seventeen. You weren’t thinking of phoning your parents? I hope not.”

“Oh, no! I won’t say a word to them unless—until Clark is back. And maybe not then. But if it’s only twenty-seventeen, it’s not late at all, real time, and I don’t want to go to bed. Not until you do.”

“I may not go to bed.”

“I don’t care. I want to sit with you.”

He blinked at me, then said very gently, “All right, Poddy. Nobody ever grows up without spending at least one night of years.”

We just sat then for quite a while, with nothing to say that had not already been said and would just hurt to say over again.

At last I said, “Unka Tom? Tell me the Poddy story—”

“At your age?”

“Please.” I crawled up on his knees. “I want to sit in your lap once more and hear it. I need to.”

“All right,” he said, and put his arm around me. “Once upon a time, long, long ago when the world was young, in a specially favored city there lived a little girl named Poddy. All day long she was busy like a ticking clock.
Tick tick tick
went her heels,
tick tick tick
went her knitting needles, and, most especially,
tick tick tick
went her busy little mind. Her hair was the color of butter blossoms in the spring when the ice leaves canals, her eyes were the changing blue of sunshine playing down through the spring floods, her nose had not yet made up its mind what it would be, and her mouth was shaped like a question mark. She greeted the world as an unopened present and there was no badness in her anywhere.

“One day Poddy—”

I stopped him. “But I’m
not
young any longer . . . and I don’t think the world was ever young!”

“Here’s my handky,” he said. “Blow your nose. I never did tell you the end of it, Poddy; you always fell asleep. It ends with a miracle.”

“A truly miracle?”

“Yes. This is the end. Poddy grew up and had another Poddy. And then the world was young again.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s all there ever is. But it’s enough.”

TWELVE

I guess Uncle Tom put me to bed, for I woke up with
just my shoes off and very rumpled. He was gone, but he had left a note saying that I could reach him, if I needed to, on Mr. Chairman’s private code. I didn’t have any excuse to bother him and didn’t want to face anyone, so I chased Maria and Maria out and ate breakfast in bed. Ate quite a lot, too, I must admit—the body goes on ticking anyhow.

Then I dug out my journal for the first time since landing. I don’t mean I haven’t been keeping it; I mean I’ve been talking it instead of writing it. The library in our suite has a recorder built into its desk and I discovered how easy it was to keep a diary that way. Well, I had really found out before that, because Mr. Clancy let me use the recorder they use to keep the log on.

The only shortcoming of the recorder in the library was that Clark might drop in most any time. But the first day I went shopping I found the most darling little minirecorder at Venus Macy—only ten-fifty and it just fits in the palm of your hand and you can talk into it without even being noticed if you want to and I just couldn’t resist it. I’ve been carrying it in my purse ever since.

But now I wanted to look way back in my journal, the early written part, and see if I had said
anything
that might remind me of what That Man had looked like or anything about him.

I hadn’t. No clues. But I FOUND A NOTE FROM CLARK.

It read:

I got all blurry. That last line—I know a holographic last will and testament when I see one, even though I had never seen one before. Then I straightened up and counted ten seconds backwards including the rude word at the end that discharges nervous tension, for I knew this was no time to be blurry and weak; there was work to be done.

So I called Uncle Tom right away, as I agreed perfectly with Clark on one point: I wasn’t going to try to emulate Space Ranger Stalwart, Man of Steel, the way Clark evidently had; I was going to get all the help I could get! With both Clark and Girdie in some sort of pinch I would have welcomed two regiments of Patrol Marines and the entire Martian Legion.

So I called Mr. Chairman’s private code—and it didn’t answer; it simply referred me to another code. This one answered all right . . . but with a recording. Uncle Tom. And this time all he said was to repeat something he had said in the note, that he expected to be busy all day and that I was not to leave the suite under any circumstances whatever until he got back—only this time he added that I was not to let anyone into the suite, either, not even a repairman, not even a servant except those who were already there, like Maria and Maria.

When the recording started to play back for the third time, I switched off. Then I called Mr. Chairman the public way, through the Corporation offices. A dry deal that was! By pointing out that I was Miss Fries, niece of Senator Fries, Mars Republic, I did get as far as his secretary, or maybe his secretary’s secretary.

“Mr. Cunha cannot be reached. I am veree sorree, Miss Fries.”

So I demanded that she locate Uncle Tom. “I do not have that information. I am veree sorree, Miss Fries.”

Then I demanded to be patched in to Dexter. “Mr. Dexter is on an inspection trip for Mr. Cunha. I am veree sorree.”

She either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell me when Dexter was expected back—and wouldn’t, or couldn’t, find some way for me to call him. Which I just plain didn’t believe, because if I owned a planetwide corporation there would be some way to phone every mine, every ranch, every factory, every air boat the company owned. All the time. And I don’t even suspect that Mr. Chairman is less smart about how to run such a lash-up than I am.

I told her so, using the colorful rhetoric of sand rats and canal men. I mean I really got mad and used idioms I hadn’t known I even remembered. I guess Uncle is right; scratch my Nordic skin and a savage is just underneath. I wanted to pick my teeth at her, only she wouldn’t have understood it.

But would you believe it? I might as well have been cussing out a sand gator; it had no effect on her at all. She just repeated, “I’m-veree-sorree-Miss-Fries,” and I growled and switched off.