Georgia on My Mind and Other Places (12 page)

Pharaoh and the Coot brothers were built for short sprints, not for endurance events. Rocket serves became light zephyrs that drifted over the net. Returns, if they happened at all, floated through the air like summer thistledown. Protests at line calls became increasingly feeble.

As the pace slowed, the crowd quieted. Only our anguished sighs and despairing groans punctuated the gentle ping of ball on racket.

It went on for an endless age, and I knew it would go on forever. So it was a great shock to look up at last at the scoreboard, and find that Pharaoh and I were leading by five games to four, with my serve to come next. I was in a position to win the match.

At that point, the crowd became totally silent. I think they realized that they were witnessing something unique in tennis history. After all, how many other final games of a tournament match have been played with three of the four contestants sitting down?

It had been hard on all of us, but the other three were carrying twice my weight. For the final game, Mason Coot sat in the middle of the court. His brother slumped a few feet in front of him, all fear of violence from behind long since past. On my side Pharaoh was close to the net, lying facedown on the center line.

All I had to do was serve to the right part of the court and we would win, because no one else would move no matter where the ball went. It gives some idea of the quality of my play when I confess that the game went to deuce seven times, before the umpire could at last proclaim, “Game, set, and match to Potter and Carver.”

The crowd swept onto the court and carried us off. They had to. The victory ceremony was conducted with all parties lying down.

Pharaoh and I not only won our match, we won another prize, too. It was a special award, given for the contest that in the opinion of the crowd was the most enthralling of the day. No one else, I gather, came even close.

I thought that Pharaoh Potter might be offended about that, once he had somewhat recovered. But not at all; to him, a tennis trophy was a tennis trophy, however won. He was thrilled, and when he could again stand up he insisted on taking us to the pavilion and buying me and the Coot brothers, our good buddies now, as many drinks as we chose to take in.

In our depleted condition, that turned out to be rather a lot. It was maybe four hours later that I was buttoning my shirt, seeking my shoes, and reflecting to myself that it had been, despite a bad beginning, a perfect day for me as well as Pharaoh. I had never before, in my whole life, won anything in an athletic event. It is strange what such an experience can do to a man’s mind.

A perfect day, I thought.

I wrinkled my brow.

Perfect?

That didn’t seem quite right. Shouldn’t it be
almost
perfect?

Something started to drift back into my muddled consciousness. Hadn’t I been supposed to go to a funeral?

I had. Carlo Moolman’s funeral. What about that, and what about the immortality serum? If I had come to a tennis match instead of a funeral, then was it possible that . . .

For the first time in many hours, I wondered what had happened to Waldo.

* * *

Waldo had been late for his appointment, too, but for quite different reasons. The bleach had worked reasonably well on his tennis outfit, enough to mute shocking hot pink to a pale, fleshy tone. However, the washing process had produced an unforeseen side effect.

The tennis outfit had shrunk. A lot. Waldo managed to squeeze his bulk into it, but only with enormous effort. It was like a second skin. When he caught a glimpse of himself in a full-length mirror, the combination of tight fit and fleshy tones produced the momentary illusion that he was staring at a stark naked Waldo Burmeister.

He shuddered, but there was no time to change. Not that he was sure he could; getting those clothes off promised to be even harder than putting them on.

He glanced at a clock. He was
late
, late as he could be. Uncle Pharaoh would kill him.

He grabbed socks and tennis shoes, picked up the little yellow card that Pharaoh Potter had left on the hall table giving directions how to reach the tournament, rushed barefoot out into the street, and hailed the first cab that he could find.

He held out the card. “This address, fast as you can get there.”

The cabby, Waldo insists, was struck dumb by his appearance. This, if true, does much to support Waldo’s claim of looking something well beyond the mundane, since Luna City cabbies are not easily silenced. However, the cab made excellent speed, and when Waldo was dropped off in front of a huge circular building he gave the driver a big tip. It was only as the taxi vanished from view that he realized that he had left his socks, tennis shoes, and wallet on the cab seat.

No time to pursue them—Pharaoh Potter would be chomping at the bit. Anyway, Waldo could borrow shoes and socks before the match. He hurried into the building’s entrance foyer, which struck him as unusually somber, silent, and formal for a sports pavilion.

There was just one person to be seen, a wizened individual standing at the other side of the room and apparently guarding the players’ entrance.

Waldo padded to him across cold marble tiles. “I’m a beginner at this sort of event,” he said.

The man, who according to Waldo had the air of someone wearing a previously owned body, stared at Waldo’s attire. “I can see that.”

“So I wondered if there’s a special warm-up area, for people who don’t do this sort of thing regularly.”

It was a natural enough question, but the man was more than unresponsive. He was eyeing Waldo with odd suspicion.

“No,” he said. “Everybody has to go the same way. Right in there, and follow the line. Slowly now. No rushing about once you’re inside.”

It was an odd injunction. How did you ever win a tennis match, if you didn’t do a certain amount of rushing about?

Waldo went through the door and found himself facing an altogether excessive abundance of flowering plants. There were floral arrangements everywhere. The tennis courts, he decided, must be on just the other side of all the shrubbery.

He pushed aside a great mass of greenery. He blundered through. As he emerged into subdued lighting and soft music, it crossed his mind for the first time that perhaps things were not quite what they seemed.

Where was the net, where was the court? Where were all the other players?

Not, he was fairly sure, anywhere near here. He was standing in the middle of a group of maybe twenty people. But it was difficult to accept them as participants in a tennis tournament, since every man was clad in a customary suit of solemn black, while the women were all hatted and veiled. The whole line was moving slowly toward a dais, on which stood an elaborately carved casket. Waldo, willy-nilly, moved with them.

His present attire had made his flesh crawl, even in the privacy of his own bedroom. Now he realized what an overreaction that had been. All crawling of the flesh should have been saved for this moment, when every eye was on him and the moving line bore him irresistibly toward the dais. Soon he was approaching the coffin, wondering what to do next.

Waldo is given to exaggeration. It may well have been, as he said, an open-casket ceremony. It is not, I am sure, true that the corpse of Carlo Moolman rolled its eyes in horror at Waldo as he walked to stand by the coffin.

Carlo had been arranged to look his best for his final appearance. He was wearing a white shirt, a well-cut suit of subdued gray with a dark red pinstripe, and a maroon bow tie. Waldo stared down at those conservative clothes, and he coveted them. He was already dreading the return journey home, penniless, on public transportation. Just give him ten minutes alone with that corpse....

It was pure wishful thinking. Already the line was moving on, past the open casket. And it was then that Waldo became aware of something else. Everyone was staring, but they were not all looking at him the same way. Two men, standing on the other side of Carlo Moolman’s open coffin, had in their eyes a strange and speculative gleam as he moved past them.

Big men. Hard-eyed, tough-looking men. The sort of men who would cheerfully blow a large hole through Carlo Moolman, then attend his funeral in the hope of learning the whereabouts of the missing immortality serum.

Waldo hadn’t listened to much of what Imre Munsen said, because the words seemed at the time to have little relevance to him. But he remembered this comment: “Of course, his enemies will attend—the people who killed him. They’re as keen to get their hands on the serum as we are.”

It occurred to Waldo, with the force of revelation, that he and he alone knew exactly who those enemies were. They still didn’t have the serum, but it must be somewhere close by. Somewhere, probably, within this very funeral home.

Then came what Waldo described as his finest moment; or possibly, depending on your point of view, his act of supreme folly. Inadequately briefed—in both senses of the phrase—he decided that he must pursue the investigation.

Once the viewing line was past the coffin, it lost all cohesion and focus. Some people headed straight out of the door, back toward the entrance foyer. Others in the line broke into little groups, chatting together in low voices. Waldo waited for one of the rare moments when everyone did not seem to be staring at him. Then instead of going toward the exit he went on, through an unmarked door that led deeper into the funeral home.

He at once found himself in what might be termed the business district. The walls were cement, the floor uncarpeted. Lights were unshaded and harsh, and no flowers were anywhere in sight. What Waldo did see were a number of metal tables, and a variety of most unpleasant-looking surgical implements. Needles and stout thread on one of the tables, plus elaborate makeup kits, did nothing to make him feel more comfortable.

He hurried on, to still another door. As he passed through it, he heard the door through which he had come in beginning to open. Heavy footsteps sounded at the entrance.

Waldo pushed the door shut behind him and stared around in panic. It was another room, severe, chilly, and dimly lit, with only a couple more doors and no cupboards or closets within which he might hide. The furnishings were just a half-dozen metal tables. Most of them bore suspicious-looking long lumpy objects, each covered with a white sheet.

The footsteps in the other room were louder. Waldo could hear voices. He shuddered, climbed onto the one unoccupied table, and pulled a white sheet over himself. It was a little too short. He was able to cover his head, but then his bare feet remained uncovered.

The door was opening.

“Not here,” said a gruff voice, just the sort of voice Waldo expected a ruthless murderer to have. “It’s a bunch of stiffs.”

“He must have come through here, though.” That was the other man. “Nowhere else he could have gone. You head back and tell the boys what’s happening. I’ll keep going.”

Heavy feet clumped, closer and closer. Waldo tried to stop his heart beating. If they pulled back the sheet, and got one look at his face . . .

Another door opened and closed. Before the echo died away, Waldo was off the table. They would be back, no doubt about it. Shivering, he scurried across to the only other door and hustled through.

At least this little room was
warm
, for a change. And there was more. All along one wall was a broad shelf, about three feet wide. On it stood a dozen blue boxes, each one labeled with the notation, hold for pickup. Below that, each one bore a person’s name.

Personal possessions, they had to be. Things that happened to be on a body when it was brought to the funeral home. Waldo moved along the line of boxes. Near the end he saw, to his excitement, the name that he was looking for: carlo moolman.

The blue box held a miscellany of objects: articles of clothing, cleaned and pressed; shoes; watch, wallet, keys, checkbook, pens, coins, comb. And then, the jackpot: a small phial, no bigger than Waldo’s thumb.

Waldo picked it up. Three-quarters filled with a pale green liquid. This was the serum, it had to be. All he had to do now was find a way of getting out of the funeral home in one piece, and delivering the phial to Imre Munsen.

Unfortunately, that could be a problem. The room he was in had only two doors. The one through which he had entered would not be safe to use. And the other one . . .

Waldo went across, opened it, and recoiled. It led to the crematorium. A few feet beyond the sliding door lay the flames of hell. No wonder this room was pleasantly warm.

He gripped the phial tighter and ran back to the other door. And again he heard the sound of footsteps and voices. Many footsteps. Coming closer.

He was trapped. No matter how much he protested his innocence and insisted that he had just got lost inside the funeral home, they would not believe him. Not when he was carrying a phial of immortality serum.

Waldo came to a desperate decision. He uncapped the phial and raised it to his lips. It did not taste like an immortality serum—quite the reverse, as a matter of fact—but he gulped down every disgusting drop. Then he took the phial and tossed it into the consuming flames of the crematorium.

The fatal evidence was gone. Now it would be up to Imre Munsen and the United Space Federation to determine from an examination of Waldo just what the immortality serum contained. With luck, they would have a thousand years to do it.

The door was opening. Waldo crossed his arms and stood defiant, prepared if necessary to sell his life dearly.

The two hard-eyed uglies entered. “There he is!” one of them exclaimed. “I told you he had to be here. Come on in, chief, and take a look at him.”

They stepped aside. Through the open door strode Imre Munsen. “Oh, he’s all right,” he said. And then, to Waldo, “Hello, Mr. Burmeister. I didn’t expect you’d be coming here, so the undercover boys didn’t have your description.”

“Moolman’s k-k-killers!” The fluid that Waldo had drunk was puckering his mouth and throat, so that he could hardly talk.

“No sign of them, I’m afraid. And the funeral’s over. I’m beginning to agree with you, the whole thing was a scam, just an attempt by Moolman to get money.”