The Continent Makers and Other Tales of the Viagens (21 page)

Graham sighed. It was always that way. People looking for trouble, deceived by his long soupy look and unaware that boxing had been his undergraduate sport in college, insisted on picking on him, and then he just had to take measures. He took them now: he put away his glasses and followed this act with a lead with his left to the ribs and a long straight right to the man’s right eye.

The man tottered and fell backwards, supine, his head hitting the tiles with a distinct thud.

The other man turned at the sound, and Graham wondered in a flash if he had been so stupid as to provoke the man to shooting him. It really wasn’t worth—

However, Sklar instantly did something that shot a stream of vapor from the ring he wore into the second man’s face, so that the victim began at once to blink, sneeze, cough, and sputter. Then Sklar stepped close to the man. His hand came out of a pocket with a blackjack.
Thwuck!
went the sap against the man’s skull, and this man, too, swayed and collapsed like a felled Douglas fir.

But now the man Graham had hit was getting up, his still-open left eye glaring furiously. Sklar took a whack at him, too, but the man saw him coming and knocked him aside with a sweep of an arm like the loom of a galley oar. A fist came around and jolted Graham’s jaw, staggering him. For a few seconds they mixed it. Graham, taking advantage of his orangutanian reach, landed a couple more good ones to the face. Then a repeated thud told Graham that Sklar was working on the man’s cranium with his blackjack from behind. And although the man’s skull seemed to be one of more than ordinary thickness, this man at last folded up on the tiles also.

“Now, ain’t this somethink?” said Sklar, staring at the bodies. He quickly bent and searched the men, taking a pistol out of the pocket of one and stowing it in his own. “Help me get them out of here, quick,” he said.

“Huh? What d’you mean?” said Graham. “Why don’t you call a cop?”

“I
am
a cop!” said the small man impatiently, whipping out a wallet and flapping it in Graham’s face. Graham got a glimpse of the identification card of Reinhold Sklar, World Federation Constable, Second Grade. (Some sort of Central European, Graham surmised.) Sklar continued: “So I don’t want no city poliss buttink into my case.”

Sklar looked swiftly around, still puffing on the same cigarette he had been smoking when the fight started. In the far corner of the washroom there was a small green door bearing the words KIIP AUT—the kind of door found all over large modern buildings. Everybody walks by them without even wondering whether they conceal broom closets, back stairs, or what. Sklar pushed it and it opened.

“Lucky for us some pipple is laxative about locking doors,” he said. “Take that one’s shoulders, now; they are too big for me to move all by myself. Quick before somebody comes in.”

Graham, a bit bewildered by all this, did as he was told. Between them they lugged both unconscious forms through the small door and out onto an iron platform a little more than a meter square. This platform in turn gave access to a circular iron staircase that extended up and down from it. Upwards it disappeared into a tangle of dimly lit girders, while downwards it ended on the extreme end of one of the loading platforms of the High Speed Line, on the lowest level of the K.S.T. They were definitely backstage, now.

“Down,” said Sklar softly, and they began hauling one of the bodies down the helical stair. When they had dropped the first on the concrete they went back for the second. The platform tapered at the end like the bow of a ship, and a couple of meters back of the stair was a huge square concrete pillar that cut off the view of the rest of the platform. They stood in shadow and in near silence, except for the occasional distant rumble of a train on one of the higher levels.

Graham whispered: “What
is
all this about? Who are these gloops? And what’s it got to do with me?”

“Tell you tomorrow,” snapped Sklar, peering around the right side of the pillar. Below them gleamed the single ground rail of the High Speed Line, twice the size of a normal railroad rail, while the overhead rail, which kept the cars upright, glimmered above. A few meters from where they stood, on the other side of the pillar, the smooth nose of a High Speed articulated car, tapering to a rounded point like that of an artillery shell, reflected the lights of the station. Somewhere under the rounded body the air compressor chugged faintly.

“That one only goes to Washington, and won’t live for half an hour,” said Sklar. “Should be one comink in on the other track soon.”

As he spoke there came a click of relays from the other side of the platform, and a purr of motors, and another car crawled into view on the empty track. The nose came closer and closer and did not stop until it was even with the surface of the pillar behind which Sklar and Graham stood.

Sklar made a warning motion. “Wait till the yard motorman lives his cab,” he said. “Then we put these characters in the mail compartment.”

After a few seconds’ wait, Graham heard a door latch click, and the sound of retreating footsteps. Sklar murmured: “All right, now we got about two minutes. Help me!”

When they dragged the first body around the corner of the pillar, Graham fully expected to run into a flock of people: railroad employees and passengers. But the platform was empty. Sklar opened a door in the side of the car, and they lugged the man in. Then they repeated the operation with the other. As this one was showing signs of coming to, he had to be quieted by another tap of the blackjack.

“Graham,” said Sklar, “stand by the door. If you see anybody comink alunk the platform, tell me.” And he fell to work with the expertness of long practice to bind and gag the men with handkerchiefs, shoelaces, and other items of clothing.

“Nobody there?” he whispered. “Good. Hold this guy up so as I can get this mailbag over his head.”

When both men had been stowed in mailbags and shoved into a corner, Sklar dusted his hands and said: “All right, now we go. Your brother will be missink you. Not a word about this, you understand. Will you be alone in your apartment tomorrow afternoon?”

“I—uh—guess so,” said Graham. “Ivor never gets in before eighteen hundred and usually not till late in the evening.”

“Good.” Sklar took a last look at the car in which they had hidden their attackers. An electric truck piled with mailbags was rumbling towards them down the platform, and beyond it Graham could see a few early passengers coming down the escalator to board the car. Sklar said: “We just made it. I wrote ‘Kansas City’ on their tags, so unless some blip gets curious as to what’s in them, they will be in Kansas City in another fourtin hours. I only wish the Line ran on to Los Angeles.”

He led the way back up the circular staircase and into the washroom, where he coolly removed traces of the recent fracas. Graham, watching him with some slight awe, did likewise.

“Hurry, Graham,” said Sklar. “I don’t want your friends askink what you have been up to. Tomorrow at fiftin hundred, yes? Okus-dokus. So lunk. See you.” And he was gone.

II.

“And—er—what d’you think of Earth, Betty?” said Gordon Graham.

“Hey,” said Ivor Graham, “how’d you get your knuckles skinned? Been in a scrap?”

Gordon shook his head and kept looking at Jeru-Bhetiru, who answered: “Fascinating, but so much water! It would give me a complex to know the land is nothing but an island surrounded by water.”

“My Osirian tourists feel the same,” said Ivor. “Not having any oceans, none of ’em knows how to swim; in fact the mere suggestion makes ’em shudder. On the other hand the monkey-rats of Thoth, having nothing but one big ocean with a lot of islands . . .”

“Can swim,” Gordon broke in. “Go on, Betty.”

“And there are so few young ones!”

“With the lengthening of human life the old ones have become relatively more numerous, and we have to control our increase or there’d soon be standing room only. How about our human culture?”

“I was trying to say—” said Ivor.

Jeru-Bhetiru paid him no more attention than did his brother. She said: “It fascinates me too. To us poor backward Krishnans the Earth is a kind of glamorous fairyland. But most of all I am interested in human psychology. That is of course my—line, I think you call it? It is much like yours, but different in some ways. I should like to analyze you, for example.”

“Wh-what?” said Gordon, pinkening. “You mean you’d want me to lie down on a couch and Tell All?”

“Don’t waste your time on him,” said Ivor. “You wouldn’t get anything interesting. Gordon’s heart is pure even if his strength isn’t the strength of ten, but only two-point-seven. Now me—”

Gordon said: “Uh—don’t let him fool you, Betty. Ivor wouldn’t appreciate the purity of your motives. Couches make him think of things other than scientific research.”

“Depends on what you call research,” said Ivor. “If you two will stop gazing into each other’s eyes, I’ve been trying to say it’s time to go to your meeting. I’m going anyway; here’s my half of the check.”

Gordon Graham and Jeru-Bhetiru looked up in some confusion, but pulled themselves together to say good-bye to Ivor. After some further discussion of psychology Gordon Graham said: “Guess he’s right. We’d best be going.”

She took his arm as they walked slowly out, almost wandering through the door before a whistle from the cashier reminded Graham that he had not paid for his dinner. He laughed a silly laugh, let the cashier short change him without noticing, and continued on out. So busy were he and the Krishnan girl with each other that they bumped into two pillars and five pedestrians and got lost three times before they found the exit to the subway.

For Gordon Graham the world was beginning to take on that rosy glow it assumed when he had just met the latest girl of his dreams. His previous resolutions? Fooey. What if his friends would look askance on the idea of his marrying a being of another species? He cared nothing about that; let the morrow take care of itself. He’d found an ornamental companion, a soul mate, and a listener. What else mattered?

They took a Concourse Express to Bedford Park Boulevard and walked east towards where Mosholu Parkway emerges from Bronx Park, with the late June sunset at their backs. Among the apartment houses stood a sprinkling of old one-family houses, some going back centuries.

“Should be somewhere along here,” drawled Graham. “Sa-ay, Betty, what is this Churchillian Society?”

She replied: “The’erhiya told me it tries to prove that a twentieth-century playwright named George Bernard Shaw could not have composed the plays he is supposed to have written, but that, instead, they must have been conceived by a statesman of the time named Winston Churchill.”

“Churchill? Wasn’t he an early British labor-leader who wrote socially conscious novels around 1900?”

“I should not know, Gorodon.” (She always made three syllables of his name, a fault of enunciation he found wholly charming.)

“We can look it up later, but isn’t it funny for an Osirian to be interested in such things? Who’s The’erhiya?”

“My friends in Boonton told me he is a famous speculator. I met him at this party, with his partner, the Thorian Adzik. He carried Adzik around in the crook of his arm—”

“Hey! Are you sure you don’t mean Adzik the Thothian?”

“Why?”

“Thorians are too big to be carried on anybody’s arm. Ostrichmen, we call ’em.”

“You must be right. Thorian, Thothian, I confuse your Earthly names for other planets. Why did they choose two so much alike?”

“Just happened. You see we called the planets of our own system after Roman gods back before space travel, and when we found other planets we named ’em after other mythologies. Your star got Indian gods; Epsilon Eridani, Norse gods; and Procyon, Egyptian gods.”

“Why must you give your own names to other stars and planets? It seems—a little arrogant.”

“Because when we ask the natives of a strange planet what they call it, they give us answers in a hundred different languages, half of which we can’t pronounce and all meaning something like ‘home’ or ‘ground.’ Some don’t even speak, but talk by waving their tentacles. But go on about The’erhiya.”

“Well, he carried the Thothian—is that right?—in the crook of his arm like—like—”

“Like a teddy bear, I guess you’d say.”

“Teddy bear? Anyway, I do not much like Osirians, even this The’erhiya, who was polite enough. They frighten me with their big sharp teeth and that pseudo-hypnotic power they are said to have.”

“Oh, I dunno,” said Graham generously. “I’ve met some that weren’t bad sorts, in spite of their scales and that weird hissing accent. They’re kind of impulsive and sentimental, but otherwise not so different from Earthmen and Krishnans mentally. What more did The’erhiya tell you?”

“Not much, because he—how do you say it—passed out.”

“Really?”

“Yes. You know they cannot drink out of our kind of cups and glasses, but use a thing like an oilcan. And the first thing we knew, there was The’erhiya the famous speculator sprawled in a corner, with these empty vessels with the long spouts all around him, and the little Thothian making clucking noises to show how unhappy he was about it all.”

Graham tore his attention away from Jeru-Bhetiru long enough to look at a house number. He exclaimed: “Oh, shucks, we walked past our number. Have to go back.”

When they finally turned in at the right address, which proved to be one of the old private houses, a man standing in the shadow inside the doorway said: “Good evening.”

Graham said: “Good evening. Is this where the Churchillian Society meets?”

“Yes indeed. Wait a minute—aren’t you Gordon Graham, the geophysicist?”

“Yeah, that’s me. Why, how did you know?”

“Oh, you’re a better-known man than you think, Mr. Graham. And we’re
very
glad to see you. Won’t you step in?”

Light chairs were arranged in rows in what had evidently once been a living room. Some people occupied some of these chairs while others stood around talking. The room’s main decoration was a large portrait photograph of Winston Churchill, wearing the necktie and stiff collar of his period.