Thunder and Roses (37 page)

“No,” said Mrs. Hallowell. “No. Not … now.”

They saved Fowler that time, too. It was a lot of trouble. They had to take this and that off, and the other out. He was put, finally, in a very short bed with a mass of equipment beside him, humming and clicking. It circulated fluids, and another part of it dripped into a tube, and there was a thing that got emptied a couple of times a day without Fowler’s worrying about it.

That was the trouble with Mrs. Hallowell’s talent. It lay in such broad lines. A mistake could cover a lot of territory. Fowler gradually became aware of her mistake. It took him about two months.

People came by and clucked their tongues when they saw him. There was a bright-eyed, dry-faced old lady who put flowers near him every week or so. He didn’t have to go on with that chip, chip, pay, pay any more. Everybody was sorry for him, and everybody always would be, as long as he lived, which would be very nearly as long as the equipment could be kept running. A long time. A long life. Mrs. Hallowell had been right, dead right, about the long life.

Where she made her mistake was in thinking that he would be unhappy.

J
EREMIAH
J
EDD STOOD
in the igneous dust of the spaceport margin, staring into the sky and shading his eyes with his arm. Occasionally he checked the time by his ristkron, shaking it to make sure it was wound, craning back toward the hunched Customs House and the great clock. The sign there announced placidly that the
Pinnacle
had reported, was overdue and would discharge passengers at Gate Three.

Jeremy shook his head and took the letter from Mars out of his pocket again. Slowly he unfolded it and read, in the manner of a man checking his mnemonics. He was certainly familiar enough with it after so much re-reading. The letter said:

Jeremy lowered the letter and rubbed his eyes again. They ached. Since he had received it a week ago, he hadn’t slept much. Supplying pipe for the Mars project was work enough without these long nights in the laboratory trying to figure a way out of this spot. Everything he and Hal had in the world was in this deal. They had worked together ever since they left school, right up until the time Hal went up to handle the Mars end.

Fervently he wished it were the other way around. If Hal were here, he’d dope out something. He had always been the real brains of Jedd & Jedd. And as a matter of fact, Hal already had doped out something. What an irony! Whatever his process or system was, he couldn’t write it or wire it. General Export carried the mails too, and if they wanted to find something out, it would be only too easy.

Jeremy looked up again. There was a growing, gleaming dot in the sky. He glanced at the building. Near it, men were manning the heatproof launch. He turned back to the letter, to read the cryptic part about Phyllis Exeter:

Jeremy’s brows matted together as he folded the note and put it away. There was more than met the eye in those last two paragraphs—much more. He got some of it. “Be good, little man.” And the references to Budgie—he wasn’t too sure, but he had the idea they weren’t in there for the purpose of using up ink. And the specific mention of Phyllis Exeter and her arrival. Now
that
was something.

If Hal wanted to be absolutely positive Phyllis Exeter would see him, he’d sure picked the right way. Just that line in the letter would be enough to have Phyllis hunt him up anywhere on Earth, even if he hid. General Export carried the mails. But why Phyllis? After all, Hal and Phyllis had been—He shrugged. If Hal wanted to throw them together again, all right. He began to get the old, familiar feeling, just thinking about it.

From overhead came the blowtorch susurrus of the
Pinnacle
’s braking and hovering jets. Down she came on her bed of fire, until she hesitated at five thousand feet. He distinctly heard the sudden shift to cold-jets, and in another minute the dust-cloud was piled up to receive her.

Jeremy stepped into the waiting room of Number Three Gate, just avoiding the sudden angry gusts of dust-laden air. He shouldered past the chattering crowd inside and got to a port, which was covered with a disc of transparent plastic whirling at high speed to afford clear vision through the mucky dust which hurtled so violently about the building. From the spaceport central, the little heatproof drifted toward the grounding liner, waiting its chance to settle on the huge hull and sink its extensible airlock into the monster like an ovipositor.

Fifteen minutes later the heatproof whickered slowly down to the roof of the gate building. The crowd pressed toward the elevators and was shunted back by the pageboys and officials. Jeremy stood on the fringes, trying to look indifferent and doing a very poor job of it.

The first load came down. A heavy-set man with a dark, rocky face. A quick, slender, cold-eyed man. These two stood aside and let a woman with two children and an aged couple pass them. And then Phyllis stepped out.

He wondered again, looking at her, what a man would have to do to ruffle that sleekness, to crumple the brilliant mask she seemed
to wear. Throw a kiss or a fist in that face, and there would be little difference. Her hair was soft, and iridescent green, now. She smoked with a long holder and the smoke matched her hair. Her voice was as lustrous, as colorful as ever, when she saw him.

“Jeremy!” she said. “Jeremy Jedd! How are you, darling?”

“Don’t call me darling,” he said.

“Oh, these people won’t think anything of me that they don’t think already,” she said.

“They might think it of me,” he said grimly. He took her arm, while she laughed as if trying to find out whether she could. She could.

“Come on,” he said. “I need a drink. Before, I just wanted one.”

She hung back and pouted. “You seem quite sure I’ll come.”

“You’ve been reading my mail!” he quipped grimly. She stopped hanging back. They moved toward the door and down the short path to the Customs House. Jeremy glanced back. The two men he had noticed at the elevators were following them. He gestured slightly with his head. “Yours?” She shrugged. “Oh, you know how it is.”

“No,” he said, “I don’t. Not altogether. But I’ll learn the rest of it.”

She laughed again, and hugged his elbow close to her body. “Jeremy,” she said cozily, “do you still feel the same way about me?”

He glanced down into her wide gray-green eyes. “Yup. Always will, I guess. Worse luck.”

“Worse luck?”

“It gets in my hair,” he grumbled.” When I think of all the time I’ve spent thinking about you when I could’ve been making pipe—”

“That’s what I like about you,” she flashed. “You make a person feel so—welcome.” She released his arm. “What makes you think you can treat me like that?”

“Several things. They all add up to the fact that you won’t walk away from me until you find out what you think I know about stowing pipe. No matter what I say or do to you, you’ll tag right along.”

“All right,” she said, in quite a new, matter-of-fact voice. “I’d just as soon play that way then. All the cards face up, and such sordidness. It could have been pleasant, too.”

“Not with me. Not with you and me.”

“That’s what I meant.”

Inside the building they turned to the right elevator bank and dropped to the cafeteria two levels below. There was no conversation in the elevator due to the silent presence of the two men who had followed them from the gatehouse. Jeremy glared at them, but the younger man refused to catch his eye and stared at the ceiling, whistling softly. The other man gazed at Phyllis’s feet.

“I think,” Jeremy said, as they emerged, “that you have hired these pugs just to bolster your ego. You’ll have men following you whatever you have to do.”

“It isn’t necessary to hire them for that,” she said coldly. “I’m sorry you find this unpleasant, Jeremy. But please don’t make it any more so than you have to. Strangely enough, there are lots of places I’d rather be than with you. Alone, for example.”

“You know,” he said, as he politely pulled out a chair for her, “I like you like this. I mean, I could if I tried. This is the first time I have ever seen you when you weren’t swinging the figurative female lasso round and round.”

“Compliments from you are more unpleasant than anything else could be. Light the menu, will you?”

He touched the stud that illuminated the menu screen. She studied it for a moment, and then dialed the code numbers of the items she wanted. Jeremy studied her as she did so.

She was an amazing girl, he admitted grudgingly. How she looked, what she was—amazing. Her smooth brow was crinkled a bit now, between the eyes. She used to look like that in college once in a while. It generally signified she was out of her depth, and it also meant that she was about to do something about it, like flapping her eyelids at a vulnerable professor, or cribbing from someone else’s paper.

Frowning, Jeremy studied Phyllis for several minutes more. Then he spoke.

“Tell me something,” he said. “Exactly how was this thing supposed to go?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

His voice tuned itself to his strained patience. “I mean, what was
supposed to happen here? You would meet me at the gate, or you would hunt me up, and then what?”

“You seem to know everything. Answer your own questions.”

“All right. You were going to overcome my time-honored distaste of you and give me the business—most likely the remorse angle. The time you pulled that factory-lease out from under us for the benefit of a cosmetic factory—and General Export, who were starting in the pipe business—you are sorry about that. The time Hal fell for Dolly Holleson and you told her so many lies about him that she up and married somebody else—you’re sorry about that too. The time you—” His voice got thick “—accepted my ring, all of my grand old ‘forgive and forget’ attitude, and a third of our company stock, only to turn the stock over to Genex and tell me to go fly it—that was an awful misunderstanding!

“You know, Phyl, if I had known when I gave you the stock that Hal had phonied up the stock certificate, I’d have killed him, I think. He took the chance. Felt that if you were on the up-and-up he could straighten out the stock later. If you weren’t—well, nothing would be lost but a little of mind. Mine.” He breathed very deeply, once. “Anyhow, Hal thinks you’re poison, and I think you’re poison, and I don’t know what in the universe you think you are, but certainly it isn’t anything that will get a new pipe-stowage process out of me.”

“You really slug when you start, don’t you?” she whispered. He had never seen her eyes so big, nor her face so white. “And you don’t mind lowering your sights, to mix a metaphor.”

“I adjust to the most obvious target,” he said bluntly. “Why don’t you get sore? Why don’t you leave?”

Slowly, with a small, tragic smile, she rose. “Watch,” she said.

She turned toward the door. At a far table, a man rose and sauntered toward the exit. Behind Jeremy, there was a scraping of chairs on the glossy flooring, and the two men who had followed her from the ship went past.

The man at the door, a suave-looking individual, lean and white-templed, folded his arms and leaned against the wall just out of range of the photocell which opened the door. When Phyllis drew abreast he spoke softly to her. She stopped and shook her head. He smiled
then, and shook his. She bit her lip, lowered her head a little and moved toward the door again. So smoothly that it did not seem swift at all, he blocked her.

The other two men reached them, greeted her effusively, took an arm each and led her back toward their table, talking and laughing. When they neared Jeremy’s place, they released her and went back to their own table, leaving her standing alone, staring at Jeremy with angry and terrified eyes. The whole thing was done so smoothly that no occupant of the restaurant seemed to notice.