Authors: Marilyn Campbell
Topaz Dreams (7 page)
Underwood stepped
forward. Intending to remove quickly any ring she might be wearing, he
reached for her hand. As he did, she curved her fingertips into his
palm and he found himself bending at the waist to brush the back of her
hand with his lips. "Welcome to my home, lovely lady. I am your host,
Gordon Underwood. May I put a name to my good fortune?" He suddenly
felt like a young boy, playing at some long-forgotten game.
She
bowed into a deep curtsy before him, and when she rose, her emerald
eyes met his with open friendliness. "My name is Delphina, your Grace.
I do not believe I am where I was supposed to be. Might I be so bold as
to ask my location?"
"You may ask as many questions as you like, as
I will of you. But first, I believe some refreshment is in order. King,
champagne and pate in the drawing room, please. Oh, and bring some here
for Mr. Nesterman as well. I believe he also deserves to celebrate."
When Underwood offered her his arm, she gracefully placed her hand on
it and smiled her willingness to follow his lead.
And follow his lead, she had.
When
he had questioned her upon her arrival, her candidness had disarmed
Underwood. It was almost as if she could not have lied even if her life
had depended on it. This should have been an incredible stroke of luck
to help him carry out his plans. With her, he would need no tricks, no
chemicals, no deceptions or coercions. She had made no attempt to evade
his questions. The problem was she did not seem to have many answers,
and he had known instinctively that she was being completely truthful
every time she answered, "I do not know."
Underwood had immediately
noted she wore no ring. In fact, her only jewelry was a thin gold
choker which she had explained was a universal translator. She could
have responded in any language he spoke. She had shown no fear, no
conhision over her situation, and only mild curiosity as to her future.
Delphina had accepted her circumstances with surprising ease.
Delphina
had also made no objections to the fact that she was not permitted to
leave the house or to speak to anyone other than Gordon. When she was
not secured in her room, King was always close by, but she had made no
mention of her lack of freedom or the fact that the man she had met
upon her arrival had even stricter confinement than she did. It was
almost as if she had expected it to be that way.
Their lives had
quickly taken on a certain pattern, a mixture of reality and fantasy.
Underwood worked all day, but stopped to share each meal with her. She
had no preferences herself, always choosing exactly what he selected to
eat and drink.
Afterward they sat together in the drawing room over
coffee or crystal snifters of warmed brandy, talking or playing games.
Sometimes she would sing for him. From her ballads, he had learned the
history of Norona and Innerworld, where she had been born. When he had
questioned how much of the song was truth and how much folklore, she
had not seemed to know that there was a difference.
Delphina also
entertained him with her stories, another of her creative skills. Like
Scheherezade she could weave a spell about him with her imaginative
tales of faraway places and wild adventures.
At first Gordon had
done most of the talking without being aware of how that had happened.
He would begin asking her a question about her life, and he would end
up talking about his own. She was the perfect listener, turning
questions back on him, never interrupting with her own story, always
making eye contact with him, hanging on every word he said.
Eventually,
he had controlled the effect she had on him enough to learn about
Innerworld. She had created vivid pictures for him of cities where
crystal prism buildings stretched up to a lavender sky, and the barren
deserts of the far provinces where the large orange sun with its white
ring seemed even bigger because of the emptiness. Instead of attracting
an astrophysicist or chemist to his lair, he had a very creative,
stimulating sociologist. Delphina was well versed in the culture and
lifestyle of her world.
Now, after she finished her song, he asked her to tell him about the laws of her people.
As
always, she was more than happy to please. "The Noronian people,
whether on their home planet or in Innerworld, are subject to a handful
of basic laws: One must work at something productive, enjoy the work
one chooses, and maintain one's body in a good and healthy manner.
Violence and dishonesty are not tolerated."
Underwood thought it
sounded like paradise until she said that. "It sounds like a
workaholic's idea of heaven, as long as he's honest and nonviolent. But
what if he's not such a perfect specimen?"
"If someone cannot abide
by these laws, there are different methods of handling the problem. In
the most extreme case, one might be reprogrammed to help one become a
useful citizen."
"Reprogrammed?" Underwood said in disbelief. He did
not need a terribly active imagination to have an idea of what that
meant. He knew without asking that Delphina would not know how that was
done, either, so he merely encouraged her to go on.
"As important as
our work is, though, so is our leisure time. It is divided almost
equally, unlike Outerworlders who have a difficult time balancing the
two."
"Oh? And how do you know about Outerworlders' habits?" Gordon asked with a chuckle.
"I
have met a few in Innerworld. Since there are many who live in my
world, particularly at the mining camps, I was required to learn about
your culture and history."
Underwood learned that was how she had
been able to step into her role as empress so easily, right down to her
archaic speech. She had studied his world, not knowing she would ever
be whisked into it. "But Delphina, how did Outerworlders get into
Innerworld in the first place?"
"Through the doorways, of course."
He
pressed her for more information, but she knew very little about how it
was done, only that they were referred to as accidents, and there were
many doorways on the surface of the Earth. Immediately, he vowed to
find one of these doorways and to see her world for himself.
It was
not only a matter of curiosity, it was also because of something else
she had told him. The average life span there was at least one hundred
fifty years, and often much longer. Doubling his lifetime would be more
valuable than any high-tech secrets he could glean from her people.
What good would all his money do him if he was stricken with cancer?
According to Delphina, they had a cure for that and most other diseases
common to Terrans, as she called his kind. They had the ability to
replace defective body parts successfully, even restore life within a
limited time period. It was better than he could have dreamed. But how
could he locate one of these doorways?
Gradually over the past three weeks he had realized one of the major pieces to the ring's puzzle.
If
Delphina could be brought out by something Nesterman had done to the
ring, then someone could go in as well, back and forth between two
worlds at will. It had occurred to him that if Nesterman accidentally
transported himself into Innerworld, that would certainly convince the
scientist once and for all that Underwood had been right about the
alien civilization.
Delphina had explained to him that the ring
could be used for many purposes, such as moving a person from place to
place in seconds, and she had told him that the Noronians had ships in
which they could travel to distant galaxies in relatively short spans
of time. How these things were done did not interest her. They just
were. A person's behavorial motivation was much more interesting to her.
The
only subject close to science or industry he had discovered that she
was familiar with was mining. She had told him she had expected to
arrive at one of the mining camps where she was to begin work as an
entertainer. The Noronians mined for volterrin, a dustlike substance
located in the inner core of the Earth. It was the source of energy
used in Innerworld as well as shipped back to their home planet. That
was the extent of what she knew about it, but it had been enough for
Gordon to realize that the man who could introduce volterrin to his
world would have wealth and power beyond anything he had heretofore
imagined. All he needed was a way in and out of Innerworld.
As much
as Underwood enjoyed Delphina's company, he had also thought of her as
a lure, better than the ring that was obviously not one of a kind or
even worth its owner's time to retrieve. In her, he had something much
better. As the Innerworld had done before when he had held one of their
people captive, someone would come to rescue her. And when that
happened, he would force them to reveal the key to the ring's
operation. Unlike the first time he had captured an alien, he was now
prepared to keep him or her.
"Delphina?"
"Yes, Gordon?" She smiled and leaned forward in her chair, eager to answer his question.
"Do you like it here? With me?"
"Yes, Gordon, very much."
"You know that someone will come for you one day, to take you back to Innerworld, don't you?"
Delphina
considered his words for a moment. "I suppose that would be a
reasonable assumption, but no one has come yet, and it has been almost
three weeks. Perhaps they have no desire to find me, or are unable to
locate your home, and I do not know how to contact them."
He did not
believe they would abandon her so easily. If they did, his plans would
all be for nothing, and failure was not part of his destiny. Perhaps
the fact that she had not been wearing a ring made it more difficult
for her people to find her. They would still come... eventually. They
had to.
Gordon began again. "At any rate, I want you to know
something. Whatever happens, having you here with me has been the most
wonderful time of my life."
"I please you well then?"
Her words
surprised him. They insinuated that she had been making an effort to
please him and was not confident that she had. It seemed to come so
naturally to her that he had never questioned why she behaved as she
did. There could only be one reason that made sense to him now.
Delphina was as fascinated with him as he was with her. Love at first
sight. The little wheels in his brain spun a bit faster.
"Yes, Delphina, you please me very well. I don't care to think of how painful it will be when you leave."
"Painful?
But I would not wish to cause you pain, Gordon. It is not permitted. If
I am taken from here, you must find another to be your companion."
"I
have never needed anyone before and I would not attempt to replace you.
Any other woman would pale before my memories of you. No, there will be
no other, and it will be extremely painful for me, but I would not keep
you from your people."
"Then I will stay with you, Gordon, for as long as you need me." It was a statement of fact. She belonged to him now.
"Thank
you, Delphina," he replied sincerely. "I would like that very much."
What he actually had in mind was more along the lines of his returning
with her to her world.
He might have continued such a promising conversation if King had not appeared in the doorway at that moment.
"Yes?" Underwood said without shifting his adoring gaze from Delphina.
"Miss Preston is calling from San Francisco, sir."
"Thank
you, King. Delphina, please excuse me, my dear. Miss Preston would not
be calling unless it was very important. I must get back to work now
anyway. I shouldn't allow you to distract me so, but I can't seem to
help it. I will see you later this evening."
At the last moment he
gave in to a small temptation, a gesture to seal the beginning of a
more substantial relationship between them. Bending forward, he placed
a light kiss on her parted lips. He wondered fleetingly if there was
any way it could be different for him with her, or would he only
succeed in turning her look of love into a sneer of disgust? As he left
her, he decided there was too much at stake to take such a risk.
"Yes?" he said into the phone without any preliminaries.
"Something
very odd occurred yesterday, so I followed it up. I think you'll be
interested in my findings," Miss Preston replied quickly.
"Ill be the judge of that. Go on."
"Yesterday
morning a young punk photographer showed up here, and tried to bluff
her way into getting some pictures of you for a magazine I never heard
of
I
, she called it. Before I
got rid of her a man came in, long hair, looked like a model, but there
was something about him that was not quite right. After she left, he
decided he was in the wrong office and excused himself.
"I wouldn't
have given either one of them a second thought except for the call I
got from the Los Angeles office this morning. A woman had been there,
yesterday afternoon, claiming to be getting ready for a '60 Minutes'
segment you had agreed to appear on. She apparently bullied your
secretary there quite successfully. I do believe I warned you that she
might be a bit too young for that position."
"Continue!" Underwood barked at her.
"Yes,
well, I thought it was a strange coincidence that two women would be
trying to see you in two different offices on the same day. I had told
the photographer you would be in Los Angeles all week, but the woman
who turned up there a few hours later did not match the description of
the one I had met, except in a very general way. The man, however, was
unmistakably the same. Just before the alleged television woman got
there, the long-haired man had shown up, looking for employment of all
things.
"Naturally I instructed Los Angeles to pull the videotape
from her office surveillance camera, do a freeze-frame on the man and
the woman, and wire it to me immediately. I'll have the whole tape by
this evening, but I wanted to compare the faces right away, the woman's
in particular. I'm looking at the pictures right now, and I have no
doubt. It's the same two people. I'm not at all sure they know each
other, though." She quickly relayed their behavior in her office, and
that the woman had questioned the L.A. secretary about the man's
identity.
forward. Intending to remove quickly any ring she might be wearing, he
reached for her hand. As he did, she curved her fingertips into his
palm and he found himself bending at the waist to brush the back of her
hand with his lips. "Welcome to my home, lovely lady. I am your host,
Gordon Underwood. May I put a name to my good fortune?" He suddenly
felt like a young boy, playing at some long-forgotten game.
She
bowed into a deep curtsy before him, and when she rose, her emerald
eyes met his with open friendliness. "My name is Delphina, your Grace.
I do not believe I am where I was supposed to be. Might I be so bold as
to ask my location?"
"You may ask as many questions as you like, as
I will of you. But first, I believe some refreshment is in order. King,
champagne and pate in the drawing room, please. Oh, and bring some here
for Mr. Nesterman as well. I believe he also deserves to celebrate."
When Underwood offered her his arm, she gracefully placed her hand on
it and smiled her willingness to follow his lead.
And follow his lead, she had.
When
he had questioned her upon her arrival, her candidness had disarmed
Underwood. It was almost as if she could not have lied even if her life
had depended on it. This should have been an incredible stroke of luck
to help him carry out his plans. With her, he would need no tricks, no
chemicals, no deceptions or coercions. She had made no attempt to evade
his questions. The problem was she did not seem to have many answers,
and he had known instinctively that she was being completely truthful
every time she answered, "I do not know."
Underwood had immediately
noted she wore no ring. In fact, her only jewelry was a thin gold
choker which she had explained was a universal translator. She could
have responded in any language he spoke. She had shown no fear, no
conhision over her situation, and only mild curiosity as to her future.
Delphina had accepted her circumstances with surprising ease.
Delphina
had also made no objections to the fact that she was not permitted to
leave the house or to speak to anyone other than Gordon. When she was
not secured in her room, King was always close by, but she had made no
mention of her lack of freedom or the fact that the man she had met
upon her arrival had even stricter confinement than she did. It was
almost as if she had expected it to be that way.
Their lives had
quickly taken on a certain pattern, a mixture of reality and fantasy.
Underwood worked all day, but stopped to share each meal with her. She
had no preferences herself, always choosing exactly what he selected to
eat and drink.
Afterward they sat together in the drawing room over
coffee or crystal snifters of warmed brandy, talking or playing games.
Sometimes she would sing for him. From her ballads, he had learned the
history of Norona and Innerworld, where she had been born. When he had
questioned how much of the song was truth and how much folklore, she
had not seemed to know that there was a difference.
Delphina also
entertained him with her stories, another of her creative skills. Like
Scheherezade she could weave a spell about him with her imaginative
tales of faraway places and wild adventures.
At first Gordon had
done most of the talking without being aware of how that had happened.
He would begin asking her a question about her life, and he would end
up talking about his own. She was the perfect listener, turning
questions back on him, never interrupting with her own story, always
making eye contact with him, hanging on every word he said.
Eventually,
he had controlled the effect she had on him enough to learn about
Innerworld. She had created vivid pictures for him of cities where
crystal prism buildings stretched up to a lavender sky, and the barren
deserts of the far provinces where the large orange sun with its white
ring seemed even bigger because of the emptiness. Instead of attracting
an astrophysicist or chemist to his lair, he had a very creative,
stimulating sociologist. Delphina was well versed in the culture and
lifestyle of her world.
Now, after she finished her song, he asked her to tell him about the laws of her people.
As
always, she was more than happy to please. "The Noronian people,
whether on their home planet or in Innerworld, are subject to a handful
of basic laws: One must work at something productive, enjoy the work
one chooses, and maintain one's body in a good and healthy manner.
Violence and dishonesty are not tolerated."
Underwood thought it
sounded like paradise until she said that. "It sounds like a
workaholic's idea of heaven, as long as he's honest and nonviolent. But
what if he's not such a perfect specimen?"
"If someone cannot abide
by these laws, there are different methods of handling the problem. In
the most extreme case, one might be reprogrammed to help one become a
useful citizen."
"Reprogrammed?" Underwood said in disbelief. He did
not need a terribly active imagination to have an idea of what that
meant. He knew without asking that Delphina would not know how that was
done, either, so he merely encouraged her to go on.
"As important as
our work is, though, so is our leisure time. It is divided almost
equally, unlike Outerworlders who have a difficult time balancing the
two."
"Oh? And how do you know about Outerworlders' habits?" Gordon asked with a chuckle.
"I
have met a few in Innerworld. Since there are many who live in my
world, particularly at the mining camps, I was required to learn about
your culture and history."
Underwood learned that was how she had
been able to step into her role as empress so easily, right down to her
archaic speech. She had studied his world, not knowing she would ever
be whisked into it. "But Delphina, how did Outerworlders get into
Innerworld in the first place?"
"Through the doorways, of course."
He
pressed her for more information, but she knew very little about how it
was done, only that they were referred to as accidents, and there were
many doorways on the surface of the Earth. Immediately, he vowed to
find one of these doorways and to see her world for himself.
It was
not only a matter of curiosity, it was also because of something else
she had told him. The average life span there was at least one hundred
fifty years, and often much longer. Doubling his lifetime would be more
valuable than any high-tech secrets he could glean from her people.
What good would all his money do him if he was stricken with cancer?
According to Delphina, they had a cure for that and most other diseases
common to Terrans, as she called his kind. They had the ability to
replace defective body parts successfully, even restore life within a
limited time period. It was better than he could have dreamed. But how
could he locate one of these doorways?
Gradually over the past three weeks he had realized one of the major pieces to the ring's puzzle.
If
Delphina could be brought out by something Nesterman had done to the
ring, then someone could go in as well, back and forth between two
worlds at will. It had occurred to him that if Nesterman accidentally
transported himself into Innerworld, that would certainly convince the
scientist once and for all that Underwood had been right about the
alien civilization.
Delphina had explained to him that the ring
could be used for many purposes, such as moving a person from place to
place in seconds, and she had told him that the Noronians had ships in
which they could travel to distant galaxies in relatively short spans
of time. How these things were done did not interest her. They just
were. A person's behavorial motivation was much more interesting to her.
The
only subject close to science or industry he had discovered that she
was familiar with was mining. She had told him she had expected to
arrive at one of the mining camps where she was to begin work as an
entertainer. The Noronians mined for volterrin, a dustlike substance
located in the inner core of the Earth. It was the source of energy
used in Innerworld as well as shipped back to their home planet. That
was the extent of what she knew about it, but it had been enough for
Gordon to realize that the man who could introduce volterrin to his
world would have wealth and power beyond anything he had heretofore
imagined. All he needed was a way in and out of Innerworld.
As much
as Underwood enjoyed Delphina's company, he had also thought of her as
a lure, better than the ring that was obviously not one of a kind or
even worth its owner's time to retrieve. In her, he had something much
better. As the Innerworld had done before when he had held one of their
people captive, someone would come to rescue her. And when that
happened, he would force them to reveal the key to the ring's
operation. Unlike the first time he had captured an alien, he was now
prepared to keep him or her.
"Delphina?"
"Yes, Gordon?" She smiled and leaned forward in her chair, eager to answer his question.
"Do you like it here? With me?"
"Yes, Gordon, very much."
"You know that someone will come for you one day, to take you back to Innerworld, don't you?"
Delphina
considered his words for a moment. "I suppose that would be a
reasonable assumption, but no one has come yet, and it has been almost
three weeks. Perhaps they have no desire to find me, or are unable to
locate your home, and I do not know how to contact them."
He did not
believe they would abandon her so easily. If they did, his plans would
all be for nothing, and failure was not part of his destiny. Perhaps
the fact that she had not been wearing a ring made it more difficult
for her people to find her. They would still come... eventually. They
had to.
Gordon began again. "At any rate, I want you to know
something. Whatever happens, having you here with me has been the most
wonderful time of my life."
"I please you well then?"
Her words
surprised him. They insinuated that she had been making an effort to
please him and was not confident that she had. It seemed to come so
naturally to her that he had never questioned why she behaved as she
did. There could only be one reason that made sense to him now.
Delphina was as fascinated with him as he was with her. Love at first
sight. The little wheels in his brain spun a bit faster.
"Yes, Delphina, you please me very well. I don't care to think of how painful it will be when you leave."
"Painful?
But I would not wish to cause you pain, Gordon. It is not permitted. If
I am taken from here, you must find another to be your companion."
"I
have never needed anyone before and I would not attempt to replace you.
Any other woman would pale before my memories of you. No, there will be
no other, and it will be extremely painful for me, but I would not keep
you from your people."
"Then I will stay with you, Gordon, for as long as you need me." It was a statement of fact. She belonged to him now.
"Thank
you, Delphina," he replied sincerely. "I would like that very much."
What he actually had in mind was more along the lines of his returning
with her to her world.
He might have continued such a promising conversation if King had not appeared in the doorway at that moment.
"Yes?" Underwood said without shifting his adoring gaze from Delphina.
"Miss Preston is calling from San Francisco, sir."
"Thank
you, King. Delphina, please excuse me, my dear. Miss Preston would not
be calling unless it was very important. I must get back to work now
anyway. I shouldn't allow you to distract me so, but I can't seem to
help it. I will see you later this evening."
At the last moment he
gave in to a small temptation, a gesture to seal the beginning of a
more substantial relationship between them. Bending forward, he placed
a light kiss on her parted lips. He wondered fleetingly if there was
any way it could be different for him with her, or would he only
succeed in turning her look of love into a sneer of disgust? As he left
her, he decided there was too much at stake to take such a risk.
"Yes?" he said into the phone without any preliminaries.
"Something
very odd occurred yesterday, so I followed it up. I think you'll be
interested in my findings," Miss Preston replied quickly.
"Ill be the judge of that. Go on."
"Yesterday
morning a young punk photographer showed up here, and tried to bluff
her way into getting some pictures of you for a magazine I never heard
of
I
, she called it. Before I
got rid of her a man came in, long hair, looked like a model, but there
was something about him that was not quite right. After she left, he
decided he was in the wrong office and excused himself.
"I wouldn't
have given either one of them a second thought except for the call I
got from the Los Angeles office this morning. A woman had been there,
yesterday afternoon, claiming to be getting ready for a '60 Minutes'
segment you had agreed to appear on. She apparently bullied your
secretary there quite successfully. I do believe I warned you that she
might be a bit too young for that position."
"Continue!" Underwood barked at her.
"Yes,
well, I thought it was a strange coincidence that two women would be
trying to see you in two different offices on the same day. I had told
the photographer you would be in Los Angeles all week, but the woman
who turned up there a few hours later did not match the description of
the one I had met, except in a very general way. The man, however, was
unmistakably the same. Just before the alleged television woman got
there, the long-haired man had shown up, looking for employment of all
things.
"Naturally I instructed Los Angeles to pull the videotape
from her office surveillance camera, do a freeze-frame on the man and
the woman, and wire it to me immediately. I'll have the whole tape by
this evening, but I wanted to compare the faces right away, the woman's
in particular. I'm looking at the pictures right now, and I have no
doubt. It's the same two people. I'm not at all sure they know each
other, though." She quickly relayed their behavior in her office, and
that the woman had questioned the L.A. secretary about the man's
identity.
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