The Long Twilight (37 page)

"Yeah, the details were good," I went on. "It's just the big things that fit like a rent tuxedo. I went along to find out why."

"I'm out of it," the Senator said. "I wash my hands of the whole affair."

"What about the invasion?"

He looked at me and frowned.

"No invasion, huh?" I said. "Too bad. I kind of liked the invasion. It had possibilities. What then?"

His jaw muscles worked. "Aw, hell," he said, and made a face. "My name's Bardell. I'm an actor. I was hired to impersonate the Senator."

"Why?"

"Ask the man who hired me," he said in a nasty tone, and felt of his jaw.

"Hurts, huh?" I said. "I did that. I owed you a couple anyway for the beer. It was worth one without the Mickey."

"You're quite a fellow, aren't you? That dose should have held you until . . ." He cut himself off. "Never mind. I can see we handled it wrong from the beginning."

"Tell me about the beginning." He started to get up and I stood over him and shook my head. "I never hit a man when he's down," I said. "Unless I have to. Talk it up, chum."

He looked at me and grinned. He laughed a short laugh. "Florin, the Man of Iron," he said. "Florin, the poor unsuspecting boob who lets himself be roped in with the old call to duty. They fixed you up with a costume and makeup and lines to say—plus a little gadget back of the ear to coach you through the rough spots. And what do you do? You kick a hole in it you could march a Shriners' band through."

"Looks like you've got all the good lines," I said.

"Don't misunderstand me, Florin," he said. "Hell, don't you get it yet?" He tapped the mastoid bulge behind his ear. "I've got the twin to it right here. I was roped in the same way you were."

"By who? Or 'whom'—if it means a lot to you."

"The Council."

"Keep going; you're doing fine."

"All right! They had plans; obviously they aren't working."

"Don't make me coax you, Bardell. I'm the guy who wants to be told things. Start tying it all together. I don't like all these loose ends."

"What I could tell you won't make you any happier."

"Try me."

He gave me a crafty look. "Let me ask you one instead, Florin: how did you get from your room—in a rather seedy hotel, as I recall—to Government House? For that matter, how did you get to the hotel?"

I thought back. I remembered the room. It was seedy, all right. I tried to recall the details of checking in, the face of the room clerk. Nothing. I must have let my poker face slip because Bardell grinned a savage grin.

"What about yesterday, Florin? How about your last case? Your old parents, the long happy days of your boyhood? Tell me about them."

"It must be the dope," I said, and my tongue felt thick.

"There seem to be a few small blank spots in the Florin total recall," the ex-Senator jeered.

"What's the name of your hometown, Florin?"

"Chicago," I said, pronouncing it like a word in a foreign language. The Senator looked puzzled. "Where's that?"

"Between New York and LA, unless you've moved it."

"Ellay? You mean . . . California? On Earth?"

"You guessed it," I said, and paused to moisten my lips with the dry sock I found where my tongue used to be.

"That explains a few things," he muttered. "Brace yourself, fellow. You're in for a shock."

"Go ahead," I said, "but remember my heart murmur."

"We're not on Earth. We're on Grayfell, the fourth planet of the Wolf 9 system, twenty-eight light years from Sol."

"It's a switch," I said, and my voice felt as hollow as a Christmas tree ornament. "We're not being invaded by an alien planet; we've invaded
them
."

"You don't have to take my word for it, Florin." A split lip blurred his voice a little; or something did. "Look around you. Do these look like Terran plants? Don't you notice the gravity is eighteen percent light, the air is oxygen-rich? Look at the sun; it's a diffuse yellow giant, four hundred million miles away."

"All right. My old mother, if I had an old mother, always told me to look the truth in the eye. You're not helping much. It was bad enough when I was chasing my tail back in Chi. Start making it all clear, Bardell. Somebody went to a lot of trouble, either to transport me to a place called Grayfell or to build a pretty convincing set. There'll be a reason for that. What is it?"

He looked at me the way a surgeon looks at a leg that has to come off.

"You don't know what you're doing. You're getting in out of your depth; matters aren't what they seem—"

"Don't tell me what they aren't, Bardell; tell me what they are."

"I can't do that." He had something in his hands, fiddling with it; something with shiny knobs and a crystalline loop at the top that was hard to look at. "I've been patient with you, Florin," he said, but his voice was sliding away from me, talking faster and faster like a runaway Victrola.

My head was throbbing worse than ever; my vision wasn't all it could have been. I made a grab for the blurry face in front of me; but it slid back out of reach. I saw something glint in the sunlight, and heard a voice from over the hills saying, ". . . Sorry, Florin. . . ."

Then pink darkness exploded in my face and I was back on that freight, riding it over a cliff and down into an abyss filled with fading thunder.

"Mr. Florin," the feather-light voice was saying, "you're creating something of a problem for us all."

I opened my eyes and the chap with the snake's head smiled his lipless smile at me and puffed pink smoke from his noseless nostrils and glittered his lidless eyes. He was lounging in a deck chair, wearing an open jacket made of orange toweling, and a pair of yellow shorts, the color of which reminded me of something that I couldn't quite get a grip on.

"That's something," I said, and sat down in a camp chair. There was a table between us with a blue and white umbrella over it. There was a stretch of white sand behind the terrace that looked like the seashore except that there wasn't any sea. I tried not to look at his glistening silver-violet thighs, the ribby pale gray chest with tiny crimson flecks, the finger-thin toes in the wide-strapped sandals. He saw me not looking and made a soft clucking sound that seemed to be laughter.

"Forgive me," he said. "I find this curiosity of yours amazing. I suspect that in the moment of your dissolution, you'd crane your neck to discover the nature of the solvent."

"It's just a harmless eccentricity," I said, "like your taste in clothes."

"You pride yourself on your self-control," he said, not quite as genially as before. "But what if your equanimity is presented with anomalies too great to be assimilated? What then, eh?" He raised a hand and snapped his fingers. Fire billowed up around him; his smile rippled in the heat shimmer as gusts of flame whipped toward me. I sat tight, partly from paralysis and partly because I didn't believe it. He snapped his fingers again and green water was all around us, the sun dazzling on the surface ten feet above. A small fish came nosing between us, and he waved it away negligently and snapped his fingers again. Snow was falling. A thick layer of it covered the table, capped his head. His breath was a plume of ice crystals.

"Neat," I said. "Are you any good at card tricks?"

He waved the ice away and put his fingertips together.

"You're not impressed," he said matter-of-factly. "The manipulation of the Universe implies nothing to you?"

I faked a yawn. Then it wasn't a fake. "The Universe?" I said. "Or my eyeballs?"

"Umm. You're a surprising creature, Florin. What is it you want? What motivates you?"

"Who's asking?"

"You may call me Diss."

"That's not what I asked you."

"Just consider that . . . there are other interested parties than those you traditionally know. You act on a larger stage than you hitherto suspected. You should therefore conduct yourself with circumspection."

I yawned again. "I'm tired," I said. "I'm behind on sleep, on food, on love—on everything except mysterious phonies who drop large hints that big affairs are in the offing and that my best bet is to play along and keep my nose clean. Who are you, Diss? What are you? Do you really look like Alexander the croc, or is that just my bilious outlook?"

"I am a representative of certain powers active in the Cosmos. My appearance is of no importance. The fact of my existence is enough."

"Bardell said something about an invasion."

"A word reflecting a primitive view of reality."

"What are you invading? Earth—or Grayfell?"

I had the pleasure of seeing his head jerk.

"What do you know of Grayfell, Mr. Florin?"

"You know—in the Wolf 9 group, twenty-eight lights from old Chicago." I smiled a big happy smile. He frowned and reached almost casually for something on the table. I started to get up fast, and a flashbulb as big as the sky winked and folded down on blackness blacker than the inside of a sealed paint can. I lunged across the table, and my fingers brushed something as hot as a cook-stove, as slippery as raw liver. I heard an excited hiss and grabbed again and got a grip on something small and hard and complicated that resisted and then came free. There was an angry yell, a sense of words being shouted faster than I could follow, a blinding explosion—

She was sitting across the table from me, wrapped in a threadbare old cloth coat with a ratty squirrel skin collar. Her eyes looked into mine with a searching expression.

"Don't tell me," I said, sounding groggy even to me. "I was sitting here with my eyes crossed, singing old sea chanteys to myself in colloquial Amharic; so you sat down to see if I was all right. Good girl. I'm not all right. I'm a long way from all right. I'm about as far from all right as you can get and still count your own marbles."

She started to say something but I cut her off: "Let's not run through the rest of the lines; let's skip ahead to where you tell me I'm in danger, and I go charging out into the night to get my head bent some more."

"I don't know what you mean."

"I mean it seems we sat and talked like this before. We looked at each other in the same way then—"

"That's an old popular song."

"It seems to be. Everything seems to be something. Usually what it isn't. What are you?" I reached across and took her hand. It was cool and smooth and didn't move when my fingers closed around it. I said, "Listen carefully, Currie. I know your name because you told it to me. Sitting right where you're sitting now . . ." I paused to take a look around the room. It was done in pine paneling with varnish that was black with age and lack of laundering. A sign on the wall invited me to drink Manru beer.

". . . or almost. You said you came in answer to my ad—"

"You mean your telephone call."

"OK, make it a phone call. Or a carrier pigeon. That's not important. At least I don't think it's important. Maybe I'm wrong. Who knows? Do you?"

"Florin—you're not making sense. You told me on the telephone that it was urgent."

"And you came running—in the middle of the night."

"Of course I did."

"Who are you, Miss Regis?"

She looked at me with eyes as big and tragic as the cave where Floyd Collins was trapped.

"Florin," she whispered. "Don't you remember me? I'm your wife."

I leered at her. "Oh, yeah? Last time we talked you said we'd never met."

"I knew you'd been working too hard. It was too much—for anyone—"

"Ever heard of a place called Grayfell?" I cut into her routine.

"Of course. Our summer place at Wolf Lake."

"Sure. Silly of me. Twenty-eight miles from—where?"

"Chicago."

"One other point: among our close-knit circle of friends, does there happen to be a fellow with a purple head?"

She almost smiled. "You mean poor old Sid?"

"That's Diss spelled backward. Only with one S. Better make a note of that. Maybe it's important."

"Poor Florin," she started, but I waved that away.

"Let's marshal our facts," I said. "Maybe we don't have any facts, but let's marshal them anyway. Fact number one, a couple of hours ago I woke out of a sound sleep and found two men in my room. They gave me a pitch that smelled plenty fishy, but I went along. They took me to a committee of VIP's who told me the Senator was subject to delusions; that they'd arrange to make his delusions real; and I was to enter into his fantasy with him. But I have a feeling the fantasy had already started. Big Nose was part of it. But I didn't know that then. That was a couple of hours ago.

"Since then, I've been asking myself just how much I know about their boss—the 'Senator.' That one comes up blank too. Senator who? I don't even know the man's name. That strikes me as odd. How does it strike you?"

"Florin—you're raving—"

"I'm just starting, baby. Wait till I really get going. Fact number two, the Senator may or may not be someone else of the same name, got me? Possibly an actor named Bardell. Does the name ring a bell?"

"You mean Lance Bardell, the Trideo star?"

"Trideo . . . now that's an interesting word. But let's skip it for now. As I was saying, this Senator fellow is kind of an inconsistent player. First it was a murder plot. Then we had alien invaders. Next, he was an actor, a kidnap victim, or maybe a planted spy—I can't quite remember which. But I went along, followed him to a tavern where he fed me something that put me out like two runners at third. When I woke up you were there."

She just looked at me with those big, wide, hurt eyes.

"I won't ask the old one about what a nice girl like you was doing in a place like this," I said. "Or maybe I will. What was a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?"

"Now you're mocking me. Why must you be cruel, Florin? I only want to help."

"Back to the facts. How far did I get? Fact number three? That was where I hotfooted it on somebody's backtrail and found a missing door. Or didn't find it."