A Saucer of Loneliness (31 page)

And wouldn’t say why.

Well, if I had anything to do with it he’d be back.

Opie, Lila Falsehaven, Klaus, Willy Simms, Hank. Each had done something they shouldn’t—maybe
couldn’t
was the word—have done. Each would not—could not?—go back. Sometimes the thing was just silly, like Lila Falsehaven’s dirty story. Sometimes it was deadly, like Klaus’s crazy break.

Well, I told myself, keep plugging at it. Get enough case histories and a basic law will show itself. Avogadro worked up a fine theory about the behavior of gas molecules because he had enough molecules to work with. Sociologists struggle toward theories without enough numbers to work with, and they make some sort of progress. If I worked hard enough and lived long enough, maybe I could pile up a couple hundred million case histories of people who didn’t go to Beck’s parties any more, and come out with an answer.

Meanwhile, I’d better talk to Hank.

This time I went to his office and closed the door. He picked up the phone and said, “Sue, don’t ring this thing until I tell you.… I know, I
know
. I don’t care. Tell him to wait.” Then he just lounged back and looked at me.

“Hank,” I said, “about this assignment. How much are you willing to help me?”

“All the way.”

“Okay,” I said. “Saturday night you have a date.”

“I have? Where?”

“Beck’s.”

He sat upright, his eyes still on my face. “No.”

“That’s what you mean by ‘all the way’?” I asked quietly.

“I said I’d help you. Me going there—that wouldn’t help anything. Besides, Beck wouldn’t hold still for it.”

“Beck told me to bring you.”

“The hell he did!”

“Look, Hank, when I tell you—”

“Okay, okay, cool down, will you? I’m not calling you a liar.” He pulled at his lip. “Tell me exactly what you said about it and what he said. As near as you can remember it.”

I thought back. “I asked him if I could bring someone and he said sure. Then I mentioned your name and he—well, sort of hesitated.
So I wanted to know why not, and he came off it right away. Said ‘If he wants to come, bring him.’ ”

“The foxy little louse!” Hank said from between clenched teeth.

“What’s the matter?”

Hank got up, smacked his fist into his palm. “He meant exactly what he said, Tom. Bring me—
if
I want to come. Conversely, if I don’t want to come, don’t bring me. I don’t want to, Tom.”

“Not even in the process of ‘going all the way’ to help me?” I asked sarcastically.

He said tightly. “That’s right.” I must have looked pretty grim, because he tried to explain. “If I could be sure it would break the case, Tom, I’d do it no matter what. If you can convince me that that one single act on my part is all you need, why, I’m your boy. Can you do that?”

“No,” I said in all honesty. “It might help like crazy, though. All right,” I conceded reluctantly. “If you don’t want to go, you won’t, and that’s that. Now—short of that, will you help?”

“Absolutely,” he said relievedly.

Then I aimed a forefinger at him and barked “Okay. Then you’ll tell me what happened to you there, and why you won’t go back. You’ll tell me now, and you won’t even try to wriggle out of it.”

It got real quiet in the office then. Hank’s eyes half-closed, and I had seen that sleepy look before. Every time I had, somebody had gotten himself rather badly hurt.

“I should have known better,” he said after a while, “than to put a real reporter on something that concerned me. You really want that information?”

I nodded.

“Tom,” he said, and his voice was almost a lazy yawn, “I’m going to punch you right in the middle of your big fat mouth.”

“For asking you a businesslike question that you made my business?”

“Not exactly,” Hank said. “I’m going to tell you, and you’re going to laugh, and when you laugh I’m going to let you have it.”

“I haven’t laughed at any of this yet,” I said.

“And you still want to know.”

I just waited.

“All right,” he said. He came around his desk, balled up his fist, and eyed my face carefully. “I went to one of Beck’s parties, and right in the middle of the proceedings I wet my pants.”

I bit down hard on the insides of my cheeks, but I couldn’t hold it. I let out a joyful whoop. Then I caromed off the water cooler, slid eight feet on the side of my head, and brought up against the wall. A great cloud of luminous fog rolled in, swirled, then gradually began to clear. I sat up. There was blood on my mouth and chin. Hank was standing over me, looking very sad. He dropped a clean handkerchief where I could reach it. I used it, then got my feet under me.

“Damn it, Tom, I’m sorry,” he said. The way he said it I believed him. “But you shouldn’t’ve laughed. I told you you shouldn’t.”

I went to the desk-side chair and sat down. Hank drew me some water and brought it over. “Dip the handkerchief,” he ordered. “Tom, this’ll make more sense to you when you have a chance to think it over. Why don’t you cut out?”

“I don’t have to, I guess,” I said with difficulty. “I guess if a thing like that happened to.…”

“If it happened,” Hank said soberly, “it wouldn’t be funny, and God help the man who laughed at it. It would shake your confidence like nothing else could. You’d think of it suddenly in a bus, at a board meeting, in the composing room. You’d think of it when you were tramping up and down the office dictating. You’d remember that when it happened it came without warning and there was nothing you could do about it until it was over. It would be the kind of thing that just couldn’t happen—and forever after you’d be afraid of its happening again.”

“And the last place in the world you’d go back to is the place where it happened.”

“I’d go through hell first,” he said, his voice thick, like taking a vow. “And … just to cap it, that damned Beck—”

“He laughed?”

“He did not,” said Hank viciously. “All he did was meet me at the door when I was escaping, and tell me I’d do just as well not to come again. He was polite enough, I guess, but he meant it.”

I dunked the handkerchief again and leaned over the glass desktop, where I could see my reflection. I mopped at my chin. “This Beck,” I said. “He certainly makes sure. Hank, all the other people who used to go to Beck’s and don’t any more … do you suppose Beck told them all not to come back?”

“I never thought of it. Probably so. Except maybe Klaus. He wasn’t going anywhere after what he did.”

“I saw Willy Simms,” I told him. “He acted mad at Beck, and said something about going there again being as impossible as writing another song. He’s tone deaf, you know.”

“I didn’t know. What about Miss Falsehaven? Did you see her?”

“She wouldn’t be seen dead in the place. She’s half crazy with the memory of what she did. To you or me, that would be nothing. To her it was the end of the world.”

The end of the world. The end of the world. “Hank, I’m just dimly beginning to understand what you meant about … Opie. That what she did wasn’t her doing.” Suddenly, shockingly—I believe I was more startled than Hank—I bellowed, “But it was in her to do it! There had to be that one grain of—of whatever it took!”

“Maybe, maybe …,” he said gently. “I’d like to think not, though. I’d like to think there is something there at Beck’s that puts the bee in people’s bonnets. An alien bee, one that couldn’t under any other circumstances exist with that person.” He blushed. “I’d feel better if I could prove that.”

“I got to get out of here. I’m meeting Beck,” I said, after a glance at his desk clock.

“Are you now?” He sat down again. “Give him my regards.”

I started out. “Tom—”

“Well?”

“I’m sorry I had to hit you. I had to. See?”

“Sure I see,” I said, and when I grinned it hurt. “If I didn’t see, they’d be mixing a cast for your busted back by now.” I went out.

Beck was waiting for me when I rushed into Kelly’s. I picked up his drink and started back to the corner.

“Not a table,” he bleated, following me. “I have a train to catch, Tom. I told you that.”

“Come on,” I said. “This won’t take but a minute.” He came, grumbling, and he let me maneuver him into the upholstered corner of a booth. I sat down where he’d have to climb over me if the conversation should make him too impulsive.

“Sorry I’m late, Beck. But I’m glad you’re in a hurry. I won’t have to beat about the bush.”

“What’s on your mind?” he said, irritatingly looking at his watch and, for a moment, closing his eyes as he calculated the minutes.

“Where’s your money come from?” I asked bluntly.

“Why, it—well, really, Tom. You’ve never—I mean—” He shifted gears and began to get stuffy. “I’m not used to being catechized about my personal affairs, old man. We are old friends, yes, but after all—”

“Shove it,” I said. “I’m the boy who knew you when, remember? We roomed together in college, and unless my memory fails me it was State College, as near to being a public school as you can find these days. We had three neckties and one good blanket between us for more than two years, and skipped forty-cent lunches for date money. That wasn’t so long ago, Beck. You graduated into pushing a pen for an insurance company—right? And when you left it you never took another job. But here you are with a big ugly house full of big ugly furniture, a rumpus room by Hilton out of Tropics, and a passion for throwing big noisy parties every week.”

“May I ask,” he said between his protruding front teeth, “why you are so suddenly interested?”

“You look more than ever like a gopher,” I said detachedly, figuring it wouldn’t hurt to make him mad. He always blurts things when he’s mad enough. “Now, Beck—working around a magazine like ours, we get a lot of advance stuff about things that are about to break. I’m just trying to do you a favor, son.”

“I don’t see—”

“How would you make out,” I asked, “if they dragged out your income tax returns for the last four years and balanced them against your real property?”

“I’d make out nicely,” he said smugly. “If you must know, my income comes from investments. I’ve done very well indeed.”

“What did you use for capital in the first place?”

“That’s really none of your business, Tom,” he said briskly, and I almost admired him for the way he stood up to me. “But I might remind you that you need very little capital to enter the market, and if you can buy low and sell high just a few times in a row, you don’t have to worry about capital.”

“You’re not a speculator, Beck,” I snorted, “Not
you!
Why I never figured you had the sense to pour pith out of a helmet. Who’s your tipster?”

For some reason, that hit him harder than anything else I’d said. “You’re being very annoying,” he said prissily, “and you’re going to make me miss my train. I’ll have to leave now. I don’t know what’s gotten into you, Tom. I don’t much care for this kind of thing, and I’m sure I don’t know what this is all about.”

“I’ll go with you,” I said, “and explain the whole thing.”

“You needn’t bother,” he snapped. He got up, and so did I. I let him out from behind the table and followed him to the door. The hat check girl rummaged around and found a pigskin suitcase for him. I took it from her before he could get a hand on it. “Give me that!” he yelled.

“Don’t stand here and argue,” I said urgently. “You’ll be late.” I barreled on out to the curb and whistled. I whistle pretty well. Cabs stopped three blocks in every direction. I shoved him into the nearest one and climbed in after him. “You know you could never catch a cab like I can,” I said. “I just want to help.”

“Central Depot,” Beck said to the driver. “Tom, what are you after? I’ve never seen you like this.”

“Just trying to help,” I said. “A lot of people starting to talk about you, Beck.”

He paled. “Really?”

“Oh, yes. What do you expect: hidden income, big parties that anyone can come to, and all?”

“Lot of people have parties.”

“Nobody talks about them afterward the way they do about yours.”

“What are they saying, Tom?” He hated to be conspicuous.

“Why did you tell Willy Simms never to show his face at your house again?” It was a shot in the dark, but the bell rang.

“I think I was quite reasonable with him,” Beck protested. “He talks all the time, and he bored me. He bored everybody, every time he came.”

“He still talks all the time,” I said mysteriously, and dropped that part of it. Beck began to squirm. “Personally, I think you get something from the people who come to those brawls. And once you’ve gotten it, you drop them.”

Beck leaned forward to speak to the driver, but for some reason his voice wouldn’t work. He coughed and tried again. “Faster, driver.”

“So what I want to know is, what do you get from those people, and how do you get it?”

“I don’t know what you mean, and I don’t see how any of this concerns you.”

“Something happened to my wife last Saturday.”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, dear.” Then, “Well, what do you suppose I got from her?”

I put my hands behind me, lifted up, and sat on them. “I know you awful well,” I grated, “which fact just saved your life. You don’t mean what you just said, old man, do you?”

He went quite white. “Oh, good heavens, Tom, no! No! It was what you said before—that I got something out of every one of these people. I’m more sorry than I can say about—about Opie—I couldn’t help it, you know, I was busy, there was a lot to do, there always is.… No, Tom, I didn’t mean that the way you thought.”

He didn’t, either. Not Beck. There were some things that were just not in Beck’s department. I took a deep, head-clearing breath and asked, “Why did you tell Hank not to come back?”

“I’d rather not say exactly,” he said, pleading and sincere. “It was for his own benefit, though. He … er … made rather a fool of himself. I thought it would be a kindness if he could be angry at me instead of at himself.”

I gave him a long careful look. He had never been very smart, but he had always been as glib as floor wax. The cab turned into the
station ramp just then, so I came up with the big question. “Beck, does everybody who goes to your parties sooner or later make a fool of himself?”