And Now the News (18 page)

“One characteristic that has been the subject of more worry, more sneers, more bad jokes than anything else here—except sex itself—is the back-to-the-womb movement. Introspection and introversion and agoraphobia and heaven knows what else, from the ridiculous—like the man who can't work in an office where he can't have his back to the wall—to the sublime—like the Nirvana concept—is traced to a desire for the womb—
the enclosed, sustaining, virtually gravityless womb
. As soon as you discover that the womb itself is only a symbol for this other heritage, what explanation do you need instead?”

“Bedamned,” whispered Chris.

“Another almost universal inner tension has to do with people, though some of us compensate admirably. What's the most ideal state for most people? The family—the enclosed, familiar, mutually responsive family unit. Only strangers cause communication to break down; only outsiders are unpredictable. Hence our cultural insanities—as I told you before, xenophobia, the fear of the foreigner. Spaceman travels in sexually balanced small-family units, the young getting their own ships and their own mates as the ships meet and cross the Universe over.”

“Bedamned again,” said Chris.

“Now your ideal spaceman: He'd have to be a neurotic on Earth, just as—if you can imagine it—a person brought up from birth to walk nothing but tight wires would be neurotic on solid ground. He'd wear himself out with unnecessary compensatory reflexes. Your true spaceman wants knowledge, not pastimes. His reaction to outside pressures is to retreat into his own resources—first, his ship (like you in your job); next, his own thoughts and where they might lead him (like you on your own time). And he wants a—”

Chris looked up into her eyes.

He said gently, “Go on.”

“He wants, not women, but a mate,” she said.

“Yes.”

It took a while, but she then could smile and say, “Any more
questions?”

“Yes … What's going to become of Billy?”

“Oh, he'll be all right,” she said confidently. “He and all his kind. He'll graduate, and train some more, and graduate again. He'll stay where he is, perhaps, and train others. Or he'll get a big job—skipper of a Moon ferry, maybe, or second officer on the first Mars ship. Space will make him sick—tense, always apprehensive, never comfortable—but he'll be strong and stick it out. After a while, he'll retire with honors and a pension.”

“And he'll never know?”

“That would be too cruel … Any more?”

“Only one big one and I haven't been able to think around it. One of the most penetrating fears of humankind—some say the only one we're actually born with and don't have to learn—is the fear of falling. How do you equate that with Spaceman?”

She laughed. “You can't see that?”

He shook his head.

She leaned forward, capturing him with her eyes and her urgency. “You are home, where you belong, in space, with all of safe immensity around you, and it's the way you live, and work, and sleep … and suddenly,
right there
, there's a
planet
under you!”

It hit him so suddenly, he gasped and actually strained upward to get away from the floor, the great pressing obtrusive bulk of Earth. “You're not falling,” she whispered into the heart of his terror.
“It's trying to fall on you!”

He closed his eyes and clutched at the table and forced himself to reorient. Slowly, then, he looked at her and managed to grin. “You've got yourself a boy,” he said, “Let's get out of here, Captain.”

I
T WOUND UP WITH A MURDER
, with someone being careless with a knife, and with a wonderful brawl. But it began very quietly, like:

“Get over to Maggie Athenson's,” said Brophy.

Howell's eyes opened slowly. “Why?” he yawned. “Do you mean to say she's demanding police protection again?”

“She is,” grunted the detective lieutenant. “Get your shoes on. Or do you plan to sneak up on somebody?”

“I thought the chief said the Athenson babe had sent out her last false alarm?”

“Maybe she has. She's pulled three blanks so far, and cost the city a pile of dough. This time she gets nothing whether she likes it or not.”

“I thought you just told me to go over there,” said Howell. He was small, thin, slow. That is, he seemed slow. There were times—but this wasn't one of them.

“I did, and that's what I mean by nothing.”

Howell reached for his other shoe. “Thanks.”

“We told her no more municipal bodyguards,” Brophy expanded. “We'll send a man anyway. But she won't know it. We'll send a man just in case she really has something to be scared of. Just because we got a homicide law.”

“Yeah, but why me?”

“It seems that Sister Maggie has been having business dealings with a character named Cassidy.”

“
Careful
Cassidy?” Howell's pale blue eyes popped.

Brophy nodded.

“Well,” said Howell. “My boy Cassidy. You're a pal, Brophy. A nice false alarm to trip me into a false arrest. Cassidy trapped an assistant D.A. into false arrest one time—remember? And he's back
chasing ambulances. What do you want me to do—drag Cassidy in here yelling his head off and then find myself changing tires on cruise cars? Who hates me up front, anyway?”

Brophy laughed. “Get on it, Howell. You know Cassidy and you know how he operates. You've never pinned anything on him. But twice already you've stopped him before he could start. Maybe this time you can put him away. It's worth the effort.”

“Careful Cassidy,” growled Howell. “The guy with fifty-two aces up his sleeve and a clean, clean nose. All right, Brophy. What's the pitch?”

Brophy glanced at the desk. “You know where Maggie lives. That big apartment hotel, the—uh—Cheshire. There's a drugstore across the street, and you can see the entrance easily from there. The harness bull's watching the side and the back of the Cheshire. All you have to do is see if anyone suspicious goes in or comes out.”

“An assignment,” scowled Howell. “Why couldn't it be a bar? Lend me a cigarette.”

With a slightly larger-than-life-size expression of patience, Brophy passed him a cigarette. “Why do I put up with you, Howell?”

Howell lounged out the door. “Because,” he said over his shoulder, “I'm the best man you've got.”

“That,” said Brophy to the opposite wall, after the small man was gone, “is the truth.”

It was a fairly large drugstore, with entrances on two streets. The open bronze gateways of the apartment hotel across the street were flooded with light and easy to watch from a small display window and from any of the long line of telephone booths.

Howell stopped outside, and the street light threw his shadow—shaped like a question mark—on the corner of the building. An unkind lieutenant once said that Howell's stance was a picture of his state of mind.

There was no one on the street, and no one in the entrance of the apartment hotel. Howell yawned and strolled into the store, and down toward the booths. A clerk kept pace with him on the other side of the counter.

Howell wondered how a man could actually bustle at 1.3 miles
per hour. When they reached the tobacco section the clerk asked if he could help him, sir?

“Yes,” said Howell. “Lend me a match.”

The match was delivered, while the clerk suspended himself in a sort of racing crouch, awaiting further orders. “Anything else, sir?”

Howell eyed him dourly. “Have you got anything that'll make a fellow relax?”

“Oh, yes, sir!” said the clerk eagerly, springing toward the pharmaceutical department.

“Take some,” said Howell.

He ambled back to the phones. One booth was occupied. Howell stopped short—a small change of pace indeed for him—when he saw who was in it. The man came out as Howell watched. He was a big man, wide-faced, smooth; pressed and pleated and expansive. He wore tan, all tan—light tan, dark tan.

“Very harmonious,” said Howell. “Whatcha doing, Mr. Cassidy—making a date?”

“Howell,” said the other, without enthusiasm, “what brings you out with your shoes on? Been to a formal?”

“To tell you the truth,” said Howell, “I was trying to make up my mind over a smorgasbord tray and blew a fuse, so I came here to get something for my head. I was wondering, to repeat myself, whether you were making a date just now.”

“Since you ask me,” said Cassidy, “I was trying to. The line's busy.”

“Since I asked you, you won't try to make the date. Right?”

“Right,” said Careful Cassidy.

“Good,” said Howell, and yawned again. “Then I can go home.”

“Beneath your tattered, patched pair of heads,” said Cassidy, “beats a noble brain. How much do you know about how much, Howell? I mean by that, just where the hell is any of my business your business?”

“What do I know? Let's see,” said Howell. “You are very careful about the way you order your food, dress yourself, talk, and work your lousy swindles. You are carrying a gun under your left armpit, which means that you are also carrying a permit for it, which
means that I would make a serious mistake if I searched you. You are in this neighborhood because Maggie Athenson, who is loaded with loot, lives in that minaret over the way.”

“Good old Maggie,” said Cassidy.

“You were about to commit—ah—no mistakes,” continued Howell. “Particularly the mistake of hiring anyone to do important business for you. Since Maggie Athenson changed her insurance of a hundred-odd G's in favor of her estate instead of a beneficiary, and since a business deal with you is backed up by a codicil in her will—”

Now, Howell had not known this at all, but he knew it now—not from any expression on Careful Cassidy's broad bland face, but by its utter absence. It was a long audacious shot in the dark, but he knew his man, and he knew that Maggie Athenson was a natural for just that kind of a fall.

Still looking at the middle distance over Cassidy's wide tailored shoulder, he continued, “And since said deal has mysteriously fallen apart we would be very interested if Maggie Athenson suddenly dropped dead of, say, Twonk's disease.”

“What's Twonk's disease?”

“A failing of the armpits,” said Howell. “I only know two more things. If you had been able to keep that date tonight—which you obviously won't—you would have a reservation on something which travels high and fast, probably south. Now you're going to have to cancel it.”

“What's the other thing?”

“My feet hurt.”

Cassidy shook his head admiringly. “You know a great deal for a man who couldn't possibly have any evidence of any kind of any of the things you suggest—except maybe your feet hurting.”

“I don't need evidence to know these things,” Howell pointed out. “It's a feeling I have—feet and all. Oh sure, I'd need evidence if I was going to prove anything. But since nothing is going to happen now, nothing needs proving. So let's all go home and go to bed.”

“A splendid idea. Goodnight to you, Howell.”

“After,”
finished Howell, “I have made a phone call.”

“Oh?”

“Yup. The same one you were making.”

“Howell: you're not detaining me?” asked Cassidy hopefully.

“I am not. I remember what happened to that assistant D.A. who played like that. I'm merely asking you to stand by while I have a word with our apprehensive friend Maggie Athenson. We'll both sleep better if we know she's well and happy.”

“Good,” said Cassidy. “It hurts me to have you suspicious.”

“I don't doubt it,” Howell said. “Lend me a dime.”

Cassidy thumbed a dime out of his tan topcoat. Howell stepped into the end booth, brushing past Cassidy as he did so. Cassidy was packing a gun, all right.