The Deadly Sky (4 page)

“That’s impossible,” I said, but he wasn’t having any of it, turned his back on me and strode away.

On an impulse I went into the building again and approached Somely. “I want to take the tests.”

He smiled. He said,. “Really?”

After I sat for three hours filling out forms and answering questions concerning everything from the impressions of my remotest daydreams to the present state of my viscera, he wouldn’t tell me my scores.

“Come back next Thursday,” he said, seemingly entertained by my annoyance. “Though if you want my opinion I think you passed.” He was one person I thoroughly disliked. No matter what he said I wouldn’t believe him.

“You what?” Sargoth said when I told him.

“It’s strictly to expose that bunch. They’re destroying lives and I think it’s past time to put them out of business.”

“What an extraordinary intention!”

In my younger days I had vented some of my frustrations by calling him a tinkling buzzard. I longed to call him that now but refrained with effort. It would do me no good anyway. I was convinced that with his arms and legs he had also turned over a unique something that had made him important and worth listening to.

“I don’t mean to be insulting,” I said.

“Yes, you do. You hate the fact that I’m an abomination who seems to get some satisfaction out of existing.”

I might have done well to take Falloway’s advice and leave the country. I suppose he must have been confused by his moments of weakness during which he tried to hand me my life. There I was unaware that anyone or anything was trying to take it away from me.

I knew no one named Grena but I received a note in the mail saying she would meet me at the Surf Restaurant for lunch. Since my time was my own and I didn’t have to consult with anyone, and since curiosity niggled at the back of my mind, I walked up to Square Boulevard at the proper hour.

It looked as if no one was in the restaurant except the hostess. The large room had many pillars holding up the roof but they also served as hideaways for diners. The waitress who approached me said that, yes, a young lady was at number seven table waiting for me, so off we went to a nearby pillar of green glass. Pressing a button on the floor, she handed me a menu, paused while I sat down in the chair that appeared and then sent me on a silent journey inside the stalk. I neither saw nor heard anyone until I suddenly entered a small nook where Grena sat at a table.

We were both surprised, she because I was a total stranger and I because she was the girl I had seen sunning herself on the mountain. Her eyes were wide and alert, hazel and warm, and I thought she might get up and leave in a hurry.

“You sent me a note,” I said.

“You sent me one.”

“How strange. I think we ought to order. What do you think?”

After hesitating, she said, “All right.”

“It’s a mystery. Someone wanted us to meet. How about broiled fish, salad and cake?” I relayed the order by speaking into a small microphone and soon our food was brought to us. Grena sat hunched against the wall as if something weighed heavily in her thoughts. It wasn’t any impression I was making on her. She had been feeling that way all along.

I introduced myself and spoke of my father. She told me her name. “Why would someone want us to meet?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

She ate without much enthusiasm. There was a quietness about her that reached out to me. She scarcely moved at all in her seat but stayed by the wall, touching it now and then as if to reassure herself that support was still there. She wasn’t as delicate as I had thought but was sturdy and strong looking, healthy and glowing like an athlete. I wanted to talk about the mountain but something warned me away from the subject. One thing I didn’t want to do was scare her away.

She said she lived in section fourteen.

“That’s uncanny,” I said.

“How so?” Her gaze was direct and steady.

“I was just passing through there yesterday.”

“What do you do? Who are you?”

“There does seem to be a reason why someone would throw us together like this, but I can’t think what it is. I’m not doing anything significant right now except for some scientific puttering. Nothing much. Light rays, antennae, stuff like that.” I talked some more about my father and Mrs. Pelf and gradually she relaxed, even smiled occasionally. She was pretty and frightened and I wondered why someone wanted me to think she was being handed over to me.

“What kind of work do you do?” I said.

“I’m a student home on vacation. Suttler’s University.”

“I received my degree from Farnard.”

“Are you sure we haven’t met before?”

“Do you think so?”

Slowly she shook her head. “I would have remembered.”

“Would you like to walk with me?”

“Why should we walk?”

“Why not?” I paid at the front for the meal and took her to the zoo where the animals entertained us. We walked through a park, sat on a hill, ate peanuts and looked at the shifting lights on the City spires.

“I have no brothers or sisters,” I said.

“Nor I.”

“Two only children. That’s something else we have in common.”

“What’s the first?”

“We fit. Like a hand in a glove.”

This time she smiled. “Do you suppose it was fate who sent us those notes?”

“Maybe.”

“It was probably someone we both know. A student, perhaps.”

“It was nice of them, whoever it was.”

When it was time to go home she wouldn’t let me take her there. “No, please,” she said. “I’m not walked out yet and I need to be by myself.”

“You won’t forget tomorrow?”

“Eleven o’clock. By the elephant section.”

I followed her, staying out of sight, walking when she walked, taking minicars whenever she did. Like Hallistair on the mountain, she lived in section fourteen which didn’t exist. She traveled to the central boulevard and entered a hotel. I watched the front exit for a while and then went home. Hallistair had lied about living in Emera. So had Grena. The fact was that she lived on the peaks of Timbrini, which made no sense at all.

The next day we rented two horses and rode them across the sand toward the sea. Grena didn’t want to go anywhere near Timbrini, saying that she hated heights and preferred the flat beach. The ocean wasn’t tranquil that day but heaved and spat like a cranky old man, dampening the sides of our steeds, spraying us with salty brine. We ate in the shadow of a dune while the tide nipped at our feet. My companion was in a different mood than yesterday, gay, full of humor, easily moved to laughter. She was at ease.

“The horses will wander off,” she said.

“Let them. They can’t go anywhere. The fence will stop them.”

“Poot beasts. They’re trapped.”

I couldn’t help noticing how subdued her tone was. “Everything has to be tamed. Don’t you know that?”

“Why?”

“So they can learn.”

“Do they have to be tamed with fences?”

“Or walls or whatever it takes.”

“And what if they’re too wild to endure it?”

“Then they’ll know for certain where they belong.”

She looked at me with a little smile. “You have life all figured out, haven’t you? No mysteries, no enigmas?”

“What’s your last name?”

“Falloway. What’s wrong?”

“Look at that dark cloud over there. Do you think it might rain?”

“I hope not. I hate rain. That’s all it ever does up—”

She broke off and I didn’t pursue the subject. Lying on the wet sand on my back, I looked at the darkening sky and wondered if Falloway had sent his daughter my way. Somehow I didn’t think so. He hadn’t struck me as the generous sort, No, he was the type to cling greedily to whatever he owned.

“Tomorrow we’ll come back here to swim,” I said. “Are you good at it?”

“No.”

“I’ll teach you. I’m expert.”

She laughed and threw sand at me.

I never asked her how long her vacation would last. I didn’t want to know. Every day I met her somewhere and we went out to look at the world from a fresh perspective. When I was with her it all looked different, more complicated and diverse, as if I peered through four eyes instead of two or as if I had acquired a piece of her that affected my sight and feelings.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she said of Emera. We sat on a balcony high on a building, sipping cold drinks. “It would be wonderful to live like this always.”

“You mean at peace? No strain, no worry? Everything tranquil?”

“Yes, that’s what I mean.”

When we were dancing she let her hair down so that it flowed across my arm. She liked slow music, dreamy songs, soft gentle refrains about gentle emotions.

“Who are you?” she said to me once. “Where did you come from? You were never in my life before.”

“You weren’t in mine, either.”

“But here I am. Here we are.”

The vacation came to an abrupt ending when I took her to my house. We were planning to go swimming and I wanted to pick up some money and instead of leaving her to stand outside I asked her in. A simple act of common courtesy and if I had it to do all over again I would have been rude.

She came inside with a tolerant smile for me as I stumbled getting across the threshold. She didn’t even call me clumsy. Naturally Sargoth came up from the lab to see who it was. It was something he always did, not that he was nosy about me, but whenever anyone came into the house he seemed to be compelled to look them over.

He looked overly large and strange that day as he came to stand in the doorway to examine my companion. In all the time I had known him I had never picked up any emotion from him other than mockery, faint amusement or perhaps irritation with me. I detected something unfamiliar in him all at once, a strong emanation of an emotion that I later decided was regret.

I couldn’t understand the terror that the sight of him evoked in Grena so I stood ogling first one of them and then the other. Sargoth simply stood like the crazy, insane entity that he was, big and glittering and weirdly silent, while Grena had me by the arm in a grip that turned my flesh blue. There was only horror in her expression while her breath seemed to stick like ice in her throat. The air came from her in a ragged gasp before she turned and ran out of my house as if the devil pursued her.

Naturally I went after her and tried to catch her but she stepped into a train and zoomed away from me.

“What’s the idea?” I said of Sargoth as soon as I returned home.

“I was wondering the same thing.”

“Don’t give me that. She took one look at you and had a fit. What did you do?”

“Answer your own question. What did I do?”

The fact was he hadn’t done anything and I knew it. Whatever reactions had taken place, they had all occurred within Grena, not within or around my drell.

“Why should the sight of you frighten her?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“You weren’t broadcasting threats or anything on another wavelength?”

“What does that mean?”

“How do I know? You scared her. There has to be a reason.”

He was silent for a minute. His voice came through a complex little box buried inside his rose-colored chest area. It didn’t sound exactly like a man’s but was more hollow and monotonous. “Some people are unaccustomed to drells. A few are quite disturbed by what we represent.”

She called me three days later as I was having lunch. “What was that drell doing in your house?” Her voice sounded tinny and strained.

“I’m glad you called. I was getting worried. You knocked me for a loop the way—”

“Please answer my question. What was he doing there?”

“He’s always there. Really, I don’t understand you. My father bought him years ago.”

For a long minute she was silent. “Nobody buys a drell,” she said suddenly and hung up.

It was true. It cost me a great deal of time and effort but I discovered that one simply did not buy a drell. To make the situation even more murky, Sargoth disappeared.

“Poppycock!” said Father. “I purchased him and that’s all there is to it. Paid fifty thousand for him and he had blamed well better show up.”

“Where did you buy him?”

“At their downtown establishment, where else?”

“They accepted your money?”

“Swiftly.” Peering at me through his disturbing eyes, he said, “What are you up to? What’s going on? What did you do to make Sargoth run away?”

“I don’t know that he’s run away, I didn’t do anything and I’m not going to worry about it. Does that satisfy you?”

“Not by half. I want my property back. He’s mine and he’s a good housekeeper. You, on the other hand, are an incomprehensible bit of goods. Half the time I don’t know how old you are. Are you a boy or a man?”

“You’ll have to decide that for yourself.”

He started toward the door.

“Where are you doing?” I said.

“Mrs. Pelf and I have a date for the theater.”

Grena wouldn’t answer my calls to the hotel. When I went there in person they told me she had checked out.

She called me the next day. “I’m sorry it has to end this way.”

“Wait.”

“Unless you want to go away with me. A long way where they’ll never find us.”

“Who?”

“That’s the trouble with you. You need to, fit everything and everybody into its niche, You’ll never go away with me.”

“You aren’t making any sense.”

“What difference does it make?” she said. “What difference does anything make?”

“Where are you? I’ll come and meet you and we can talk.”

She hung up.

Somely at the drell headquarters wouldn’t give me the time of day or permission to walk through the place.

“I’ve had it,” I said. “I’m going to the police.”

“Feel free.”

I did but it got me nowhere. Police preferred to deal with specifics and I hadn’t any. Officer Reece who accompanied me back to Somely was plainly dubious that any crime had been committed. On the other hand I wasn’t certain as to what I wished to complain about.

“A drell isn’t like an ordinary citizen,” Reece said to me in Somely’s grinning presence. “If they want to go off somewhere without telling anyone, I suppose it’s their business.”

“Even if they’re private property?”

“None of them are,” said Somely. “The very idea! They aren’t robots.”

To Reece I said, “All I want to do is look inside at some of the rooms.”

“Not without a warrant and there’s no reason for me to request one.”

“At least make him let me see some records.”

“No,” said Somely.

Reece frowned at him. “At least let this young fellow know why the drell named Sargoth lived with him for so many years.”

“How should I know why a drell does anything?”

“A ledger or something?” Reece said.

A thick tablet was produced by Somely, who thumbed through it in an impatient manner. “See here,” he said, showing me a page. “Sargoth— dispatched to the Merrick household eight years ago. Not bought, not even rented.”

“But why?” said the officer.

“Plainly because he wanted to.”

“Dispatched,” I said. “That sounds like someone ordered him to do it.”

“And I don’t care,” said Reece. “If the drell turns up I’ll give you a call, Mr. Merrick. Meantime get involved in community youth activities. Wonderful way to work off energy.”

My father was at sea over the incidents, as he was over most incidents. “I never,” he said. “Of course there’s been a clerical error made somewhere. They took my money and gave me Sargoth.”

“Who did it?” I said, “What individual?”