Age Of The Pussyfoot Part 11

"Sweat!" Whitlow was awed. Then he shrugged. "Well, h.e.l.l, Ah guess we can't let you get killed for a lousy fifteen bucks. Ah'll get you fixed up on spec."

"Fifteen?"

Whitlow grinned. "That's without mah commission. Come on with me, boy. You got some ropes to learn!"

The Forgotten Men lived on the castoffs of the great world overhead, but it did not seem to Forrester that they lived badly. Jerry Whitlow was not fat, but he was obviously not starving, either. His clothes were clean and in good repair, his att.i.tude relaxed. Why, thought Forrester, it might even turn out that I'll like it here, once I learn my way around. . . .

Whitlow was a first-rate teacher, even though he never stopped talking. He conducted Forrester through underbuilding mazes and footbridges Forrester had not even seen, his mouth going all the while. Mostly it was the story of his life.

". . . Laid off at the mahns when Ah was sixteen. Out of work, Chuck, and me with a family to support. Well, we made out, kahnd of, until mah wahf Murry got sick and we had to go on the relief. So a gov'ment man came around and put me on the Aydult Retraining and gave me tests and, Chrahst, Chuck, you know Ah scored so hah Ah just about broke the scales. So then Ah went back to school and-"

He stopped and glanced apprehensively overhead. They were between buildings, under a tiny square of open sky. He grabbed Forrester and dragged him swiftly back into the cellar where the joymaker-maker had kept his shop.

"Watch out!" he whispered fiercely. "They's a reporter up there!"

The word meant nothing to Forrester, but the tone carries the message. He ran one way, Whitlow the other. The joymaker-maker's shop had been in a sort of vermiform appendix to the plumbing of an apartment complex, in an area where some installation had been designed into the plans, then was outmoded and removed, and the s.p.a.ce left vacant. The little man who sold the joymakers occupied a sort of triplex apartment-three rooms on three levels-and out of it and around it ran, for some reason, a net of empty, four-foot-wide tunnels. Down one of them Whitlow fled. Down another ran Forrester.

It was dark. The footing was uneven. But Forrester hurried down it, stooped over to avoid banging his head, until the blackness was total and he fell to the rough floor, gasping.

He still did not know what he had been running from, but Whitlow's fear was contagious. And it reawakened a hundred old pains; until this moment he had almost forgotten the beating he had taken the first day out of the freezer, but the exertion made every dwindling ache start up again. His sides pounded, his head throbbed.

He had now been a Forgotten Man for exactly two hours.

Time pa.s.sed, and the silence was as total as the darkness. Whatever it was that Whitlow had feared it did not seem to be pursuing here. It would take a human stoat to pursue a human rabbit in this warren, he thought; and in the darkness maybe even the rabbit would develop claws. It had been bad enough when all he had to fear was the crazy Martian. Now. . . .

He sighed, and turned over on the rough, cast-stone floor.

He wondered wistfully what had become of all the furnis.h.i.+ngs and gadgets he had bought so recklessly for the apartment he no longer owned. Shouldn't there be some sort of trade-in allowance?

But if there was, he did not have the skill to claim it. Nor did he own a working joymaker to help him with instructions. He wondered if Hara would help him out at this last juncture and resolved to go looking for the doctor. After all, it was in a way Hara's responsibility that he was in this predicament. . . .

"No," said Forrester in the darkness, aloud and very clearly.

It wasn't Hara's responsibility at all. It was his own.

If there was one thing that he had learned in his two hours as a Forgotten Man, it was that there were no responsibilities any more that were not his own. This was not a world where a protective state provided for its people. It was a world of the individual; he was the captain of his fate, the master of his soul- And the prisoner of his failings.

By the time he heard Whitlow cautiously calling his name, Forrester had come to terms with the fact that he was all alone in a cold and uncaring world.

Cautiously they tiptoed out of the pipes, across a hoverway, and under a huge building that was supported on a thousand elliptical pillars, set in beds of gra.s.s. What light kept the gra.s.s growing came from concealed fixtures in the ten acres of roof over their heads.

Whitlow, regaining the appearance of confidence, led the way to one particular pillar that held a door, marked in glittering red letters EMERGENCY EXIT. He pushed it open, shoved Forrester inside, and closed it behind them.

"Whew," he said cheerfully. "That was close, but we're all raht now. You beginning to get hungry?"

Forrester had been about to ask questions, but that totally diverted his attention. "Yes!"

Whitlow grinned. "Figured," he said. "Well, Ah've got just the thing for you, prob'ly. Ah've got a steady clah'nt in this building, fellow who used to work with me at the labs, back before. He's on diet programming now, see, and he always manages to slip me something out of the expurimental allowance. So let's see-"

He rummaged in a cupboard and emerged with a pair of thermal-covered hot dishes. They opened at a touch and displayed a steaming, fragrant dinner for two. "d.a.m.n, he done better than ever! Looks lahk smoked oysters Milanese! Sink your teeth in this, Chuck: Ah guarantee you won't do better at the Senate of the Twelve Apostles!"

While he wolfed down the food, Forrester glanced about him to discover what sort of place he was in. It seemed to be an air-raid access to the underground park from the building above, no longer used because, since the beginning of the Sirian threat, complete new facilities had been excavated at the five-hundred-foot subterranean level. But this little forgotten vestige of a completely stocked shelter remained, and, as no one else had any use for it, Whitlow had taken it for his own. It was temperature controlled; it had lights and plumbing; and, as Forrester had already seen, it was provided with food storage facilities. All Whitlow had to do was furnish the food. Forrester leaned back, relaxed; trying to summon up the energy to eat a chocolate mousse and half listening to Whitlow's stream of talk. ". . . So then when Ah got out of M. Ah. T. they weren't vurry many jobs open for coal-mahning engineers, of course. So Ah went back and took mah master's in solid-state electronics. Then Bell Labs sent they recruiter up to scout out prospects and he made me this offer, and Ah went into the labs at nahn thousand to start. Sweat, man, things looked good. Murry was puttin' on weight, and the kids were fahn. But Ah'd had this little cough for some tahm, and-"

"Whit," said Forrester, "hold off on that a minute, will you? I want to ask you something. Why did we hide from that reporter?"

Whitlow looked startled. "Ah'm sorry," he apologized after a minute. "Ah keep forgetting what a greenhorn you are. You don't know about these reporters."

"No, I don't."

"Well, all you have to know is seeing one of them's poison. Whah, that lahk a vulture hovering over a hill. You just know they's going to be a corpse down below. See, they've got this Freedom of the Press thing, so when anybody takes out a killing lahcense he got to tell the reporters raht away. And he's got to fahl a complete plan of action, see, so the reporters can be raht there when the blood starts flahing, because they tape it all and they put it on the view-walls. Specially if the killer's in one of the tournaments. Fella from the National Open was here last week and, G.o.d, they was reporters hanging out of every cloud."

"I think I understand," said Forrester. "You mean if you can keep out of the way of the reporters, you can probably keep out of the way of the a.s.sa.s.sins, too."

"Stands to reason, don't it?"

"I don't know what stands to reason," Forrester said humbly. He was beginning to wish he had not been so quick to follow the advice of Adne's children, so reluctant to wait and expose himself to more of Adne's gentle scorn. He felt a quick surge of anger. How dare this world treat his life so lightly!

But if it had not been for this world he would not have a life at all; would have stayed dead with a lungful of smoke and fire, centuries before, his body now no more than a soft place in the ground. He leaned back and let himself be lulled by Whitlow's continuing story of his own adventures.

"So then Ah went to the comp'ny doctor and he told me Ah had it, all rhat. The Big C. Well! Scared? But we had this comp'ny freezer plan at the labs, and Ah reported in to the medics. 'Sheeoot,' they said. 'Lung cancer, hey? Well, you lay raht down here and we'll freeze your bones-' "

Relaxing, half listening, Forrester found himself getting drowsy. It had been a very strange day, he thought; but then he stopped thinking and fell asleep.

In order to live successfully as a panhandler, you had to exercise special care in picking your "clients," Whitlow said. The worst thing you could do was guess wrong. There was always the chance that you might sidle up to somebody and hit him for a touch-and then find out that he was some jet-set happy-boy looking for an economical murder to commit, one that might get him out of the problem of paying for the victim's repairs, and one with double thrills, since there was always the chance that the victim would stay dead.

To avoid that, you had to study each prospective mark carefully. No one came down here on business. The best ones were the rubberneck tourists. They usually came in pairs; and, of any two, the one who was being shown around could safely be figured for a greenhorn-himself too fresh out of the freezers, or back from the starways, to be eager for murder as yet. The problem there was to make an accurate a.s.sessment of the one who was doing the showing. "That's whah Ah picked you, Chuck. Ah wasn't worried about the little boy. Though you can be vurry surprised sometahms."

And, of course, everything they did was more or less illegal, so you had to watch out for the coppers.

The coppers would not trouble you unless they saw you actually breaking the law-or unless you were wanted for something. Then they would trouble you a lot. Forrester's first contact with one of the coppers came as he was on the point of bracing a woman alone, Whitlow hiding behind a flowering lilac bush and coaching him in whispers. "See thur, Chuck, what she did? Threw away a cigarette b.u.t.t. Well, that's ten to one she's from nahnteen eighty or earlier, so go get 'er, boy!" But Forrester had taken no more than a single step before Whitlow's piercing whisper stopped him. "Copper!"

The copper was seven feet tall, uniformed in blue, swinging what looked like a nightstick but was not Forrester had been warned: it was a sort of joymaker, full of anesthetic sprays and projectile weapons. And the copper had seen him.

It strolled right up to them, swinging the stick. It stopped and looked Whitlow in the eyes, right through the lilac blooms. "Good morning, Man Whitlow," it said courteously and moved on to Forrester. It stared silently into his eyes. Then, "Nice day, Man Forrester," it said, and moved away.

"How'd he know?" gasped Forrester.

"Retina pattern. Don't worry about it; if he wanted you for anything he'd have you by now. Just give him a minute to get out of saht."

The woman prospect was gone then. But there were plenty of others.

Keeping out of the way of coppers, trying to learn Whitlow's skill at estimating the potentials of a mark, Forrester found that the time pa.s.sed. Nor was it the most disagreeable way he had ever spent a day. The weather was warm and dry, the growing plants were scented, the people he hit up were no worse than the average run. Forrester took five dollars from a pretty girl in a sort of mirror-bright bikini, then fifty from a man who had brought his pet animal-it was a little silk-furred monkey-down to the underbuilding park to run free, and who seemed to accept Forrester's touch as a form of rent for the use of the premises. Forrester paid back Whitlow's outlay for the fake joymaker and found himself with cash money in his pocket. As he could see no particular need for spending much of it, he began to feel solvent again.

Then Whitlow's hawk eyes brightened, and he whispered tautly, "Eeow! Look over thur, will you? We've got ourselfs a lahv one now!"

On the fringe of a bed of tall gladioli a man had stepped out of a hovercar and dismissed it. He seemed young, although you couldn't really tell. He moved idly across the gra.s.s, like a sightseer. His gait was peculiar, and he wore an expression of grave joy as he minced toward them.

"Look how he walks!" exulted Whitlow.

"I am looking. What about it?"

"Whah, Chuck, he's out of low-gee! Thur's a fella just back from a long trip if Ah ever saw one, and prob'ly loaded with pay. Sic 'im!"

Forrester accepted Whitlow's diagnosis unquestioningly. He marched up to the s.p.a.ceman and said clearly, "My name is Charles D. Forrester, and due to my ignorance of the customs of this time I've lost all my money and have no work. If you could possibly spare me some cash, I would be deeply indebted to you."

Whitlow appeared magically at his elbow. "That goes for me, too, boss," he said sorrowfully. "We both in pretty bad trouble. If you could be kahnd enough to help us now, we'd be eternally grateful."

The man stopped, his hands in his pockets, neither surprised nor disturbed. He turned to face them with grave interest. "Sorry to hear that, gentlemen," he said. "What seems to be your problem, sir?"

"Mahn? Well, it's just about lahk Forrester here. Mah name's Whitlow, Jurry Whitlow. It starts way back when Ah was first born, working in the mahns in West Virginia. They closed down, and-"

The s.p.a.ceman was not only polite but patient. He listened attentively through all of Whitlow's long story, and to as much of Forrester's as Forrester thought worth telling. He commiserated with them, wrote their names down, and promised to look for them again if he ever came back this way. He was, in short, an ideal prospect-not only a s.p.a.ceman, but a member of one of the rotating crews who manned the right-angle communications satellites that whirled out around the sun at ninety degrees to the ecliptic, furnis.h.i.+ng interference-free relay facilities for the whole solar system. The job paid well, but that was only part of it. Because of the energy budget for matching orbits with the right-angle satellites, the crews were relieved only at six-month intervals, and they came back with a fortune in their pockets and a mad hunger for company; and Whitlow and Forrester walked away from him with two thousand dollars apiece.

That night they ate their dinner in a restaurant. Over Whitlow's protests, Forrester insisted on standing treat.

The restaurant was a hangout for Forgotten Men-and Forgotten Women. It was something like a private home, something like an Automat. You had full joymaker service in it, but in order to make it work you had to feed money into a slot. The prices caused Forrester's scalp to p.r.i.c.kle, but he rea.s.sured himself that he was just learning the ropes and experience was worth paying for; so at Whitlow's suggestion they started with a squirt of joy apiece (fifty dollars a shot), then c.o.c.ktails (forty), then a clear, filling soup (twenty-five), then more drinks, and about then Forrester began to lose count. He remembered something that looked like meat but wasn't-it seemed to be coated with a sort of vanilla fudge, although it was b.l.o.o.d.y inside-and then they began drinking in earnest.

They were not alone. The place was crowded. Whitlow seemed to know everyone there, an a.s.sembly that hailed from six centuries, seven continents, and one or two extraterrestrial planets and moons.

There was a huge red-faced man named Kevin O'Rourke na Solis Lacis, who gave Forrester a shock until they exchanged names, for he resembled Heinzie the a.s.sa.s.sin. The reason was good, when Forrester found it out: they were both Martians. O'Rourke, however, was a poet. As a matter of principle, he refused to accept the bribes of what he called the iron-headed state. Probing, Forrester discovered that he was talking about foundation grants, which were available to poets in almost any quant.i.ty; but O'Rourke spurned them all. He had been briefly involved with the Ned Lud Society-but they were as bad as the iron-heads, he declared. All Earth was a disaster area. Let the Sirians take it away! "So why don't you go back to Mars?" Forrester inquired, politely enough; but the Martian took it as an insult, glowered, and lumbered away across the room.

"Don' worry 'bout heem," said the pretty little dark girl who had somehow come to be leaning against Forrester's shoulder, helping him drink his drink. "He be back. Certainement."

There was a certain United Nations quality to the gathering, Forrester was discovering. Apart from a few oddb.a.l.l.s like the Martian poet, the bulk of the Forgotten Men seemed to come from nearly his own time. Had the hardest time fitting in, he supposed-and the hardest time earning money.

But it was not always that. The tiny dark girl, for instance, had originally been a ballet dancer from Czechoslovakia, shot as a Chinese Bolshevik counter-revolutionary in 1991, frozen at great peril by the Khrushchevite underground, revived, killed seven times since in one way or another, and revived each time. Her reasons for hiding out with the Forgotten Men had nothing to do with money-she was loaded, Whitlow whispered; had made a collection of gold and gems from admirers in a dozen countries, over the centuries, and owned them with their pyramiding value now. But one of her a.s.sa.s.sinations had produced some cell changes in the brain, and now she awoke each time convinced that Stalinist agents lurked abroad, waiting for her. She did not exactly fear them. She objected to the idea of being killed somewhat as Forrester, in the old days, had objected to going to the dentist: you didn't really worry about it, but you were pretty sure it would be unpleasant. As someone who had seen each of seven centuries, Forrester found her fascinating-and she was beautiful as well. But she quickly became so drunk that her reminiscences stopped making sense.

He got up for another drink and found himself lurching slightly. Only slightly, he was sure, but somehow, when he got the drink, it spilled all over a lean, old, nearly bald man, who grinned and nodded and said, "Tenga dura, signore! E precioso!"

"You're right," said Forrester, and sat down beside him. Whitlow had pointed him out as they entered, as a sort of curiosity; he had actually been born before Forrester himself. He had been a hundred and seven years old when, in 1988, he had died of an embolism. The embolism could have been repaired at once, but the ravages of age could not. Not then. After six centuries in the dreamless, liquid-helium sleep, his original stake had multiplied to the point where the trustees of the freezer had decided to revive him; but there had been only money enough to give him operational youth. Not much had been done cosmetically; and it had taken everything he had. "I bet you've had an interesting life," Forrester told him solemnly, finis.h.i.+ng what remained in his gla.s.s.

The man gave him a grave nod. "Signore," he said, "durante la vita mia prima del morte, era un uomo grande! Nel tempo del Duce-ah! Un maggiore del esercito, io, e dappertutto non mi dispiacciono le donne!"

Whitlow patted the old man on the shoulder and led Forrester away. "Forebrain damage," he whispered.

"But he was talking in Italian."

"Sure, Chuck. He can't learn raht, that's what he's doing here. You know, they ain't many jobs for a fella that can't talk lahk the rest of us."

The Martian lurched past them, his head twisted sidewise toward them. Whether he had been listening or not Forrester could not say, but he was declaiming, "Talk like de rest. Live like de rest. Live for de state, for de state knows what's best."

The whole party was coming to life, thought Forrester, flushed and happy. A small man in a green ruff-it seemed to be an imitation of the Sirian coloration-cried, "And what's best? Adolf Berle asked it half a millennium ago: 'What does a corporation want?' And the state has become a corporation!"

The ballet dancer hiccoughed and opened glazed and angry eyes. "Stalinist!" she hissed, then returned to sleep; and Forrester dug deep for hundred-dollar bills and fed them to the joymaker slots for more drinks all around.

Forrester was perfectly aware that he was rapidly depleting his last thousand dollars. In a way, it pleased him. He was drunk enough, euphoric enough, to let tomorrow face tomorrow's fears. However badly the next day began, it could not be worse than this one had been. He saw advantages even in being a Forgotten Man: you could spend yourself into pennilessness, but not into bankruptcy; you could never go into debt, since you had no credit to begin with. Wise Tars Tarkas! Excellent kids, to have found him such fine advice. "Eat!" he cried, shaking off Whitlow's cautionary whisper. "Drink! Be merry! For tomorrow we die, again!"

"Domani morire!" shrilled the old Italian, uptilting his gla.s.s of heaven-knows-how-costly grappa that Forrester had provided for him, and Forrester returned the toast.

"Listen, Chuck," said Whitlow uneasily. "You better take it slow. We don't get a mark lahk that s.p.a.ce fella every day."

"Whit, shut up. Don't be a grandma, will you?"

"Well, it's your money. But don't blame me if you're broke again tomorrow."

Forrester smiled and said clearly, "You make me sick."

"Now, cut it out raht there!" blazed Whitlow. "Whur'd you be if it wasn't for me? G.o.d d.a.m.n, Ah don't have to take this kind of-"

But the Martian with the Irish name interrupted them. "Hey, you fellows! Dat's enough, dere. You got to buy drinks yet." As Whitlow cooled off, Forrester turned to inspect him; something had been on his mind.

"You," he said. "How come you talk like that?"

"Like what, 'like dat'? You tink dere's someting funny about de way I talk?"

"Yeah, matter of fact. Why?"

But something had occurred to the Martian. He snapped his fingers. "Wait a minute! Forrester, is dat what you said your name was?"

"That's right. But we're talking about you-"

"You should learn not to interrupt dat way," reproved Kevin O'Rourke na Solis Lacis. "What I want to tell you is dis. Dere's a Sirian been around looking for you."

"Sirian? One of the green fellows?" Fuzzily Forrester tried to concentrate, but it was not much fun. "You mean S Four?"

"How de h.e.l.l would I know his number? He came around in one of dem pressure-cloaks, but I could tell he was a Sirian. I saw plenty of dem."

"Probably wants to sue me for breach of contract," Forrester said bitterly. "He's welcome; there's plenty of others."

"No, I don't tink so, because-"

"Cut it out," interrupted Forrester. "You know, I hate the way you Martians keep changing the subject. What I want to know is why you all talk like that. This other one that wants to kill me, he had the same kraut accent, but in his case it figured, because he had a kraut name. But you talk the same way and you're Irish, right?"

Kevin O'Rourke stared at him disapprovingly. "Forrester, you're drunk. What de h.e.l.l's 'Irish'?"

How long the party lasted Forrester did not know. He remembered a long harangue in which the drunken ballet dancer was trying to explain to him that the accent was Martian, not German; something to do with six-hundred-millibar oxyhelium air, which got them out of the habit of hearing certain frequencies. He had a clear memory of reaching into his pocket one time and coming up empty; and a fuzzy, frightening recollection of something bad that had happened.

But it was all hazy and distant and it came back to him only in random patches.

What he knew for sure was that when he woke up the next morning he was back in the rough-hewn tunnel next to the joymaker shop. How he had gotten there he had no idea. And he was alone.

Except, that is, for the granddaddy of all hangovers.

He dimly remembered that Whitlow had warned him about that, too. There were no autonomic monitoring circuits on the public joymakers, Whitlow had said. He would have to decide for himself when he had had enough, because the joymaker would not stop service at the point of no return-not as long as the money held out.

Apparently it had held out too long.

He shook his head miserably. The movement sent cascades of pain down the back of his skull.