Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (57 page)

But he was disturbed over this second failure of the evening nevertheless.
Was his judgment that far off? Perhaps, he thought, he was losing the
vital ability of personality-projection. He didn't like that idea.

For hours, Gaius Titus walked the streets of New York.

New York.
Sure it was new. So was Old York, in England. Menenius
had seen both of them grow from tiny villages to towns to cities to
metropoli.

Metropoli.
That was Greek. It had taken him twelve years to learn
Greek. He hadn't rushed it.

Twelve years. And he still wasn't an adult. He could remember when the
Emperor had seen the sign in the sky:
In hoc signo vinces.
And, at
the age of four hundred and sixty-two, he'd still been too young to enter
the service of the Empire.

Gaius Titus Menenius, Citizen of Rome. When he had been a child, he had
thought Rome would last forever. But it hadn't; Rome had fallen. Egypt,
which he had long thought of as an empire which would last forever, had
gone even more quickly. It had died and putrified and sloughed off into
the Great River which carries all life off into death.

Over the years and the centuries, races and peoples and nations had come
and gone. And their passing had had no effect at all on Gaius Titus.

He was walking north. He turned left on Market Street, away from the
Manhattan Bridge. Suddenly, he was tired of walking. He hailed a passing
taxi.

He gave the cabby his address on Park Avenue and leaned back against the
cushions to relax.

The first few centuries had been hard. He hadn't grown up, in the first
place. By the time he was twenty, he had attained his full height—five
feet nine. But he still looked like a seventeen-year-old.

And he had still looked that way nineteen hundred years later. It had been
a long, hard drive to make enough money to live on during that time. Kids
don't get well-paying jobs.

Actually, he'd lived a miserable hand-to-mouth existence for centuries.
But the gradual collapse of the Christian ban on usury had opened the way
for him to make some real money. Money makes more money, in a capitalistic
system, if you have patience. Titus had time on his side.

It wasn't until the free-enterprise system had evolved that he started to
get anywhere. But a deposit of several hundred pounds in the proper firm
back in 1735 had netted a little extra money. The British East India
Company had brought his financial standing up a great deal, and judicious
investments ever since left him comfortably fixed. He derived considerable
amusement from the extraordinary effects compound interest exerted on a
bank account a century old.

"Here you are, buddy," said the cab driver.

Gaius Titus climbed out and gave the driver a five note without asking for
change.

Zeus,
he thought.
I might as well make a night of it.

He hadn't been really drunk since the stock market collapse back in 1929.

Leslie MacGregor pushed open the door of the San Marino Bar in Greenwich
Village and walked to the customary table in the back corner. Three people
were already there, and the conversation was going well. Leslie waved a
hand and the two men waved back. The girl grinned and beckoned.

"Come on over, Les," she yelled across the noisy room. "Mack has just sold
a story!" Her deep voice was clear and firm.

Mack, the heavy-set man next to the wall, grinned self-consciously and
picked up his beer.

Leslie strolled quietly over to the booth and sat down beside Corwyn, the
odd man of the trio.

"Sold a story?" Leslie repeated archly.

Mack nodded. "
Chimerical Review,
" he said. "A little thing I called
'Pluck Up the Torch.' Not much, but it's a sale, you know."

"If one wants to prostitute one's art," said Corwyn.

Leslie frowned at him. "Don't be snide. After all, Mack has to pay his
rent." Then he turned toward the girl. "Lorraine, could I talk to you a
moment?"

She brushed the blonde hair back from the shoulders of her black
turtleneck sweater and widened the grin on her face.

"Sure, Les," she said in her oddly deep, almost masculine voice. "What's
all the big secret?"

No secret, thought Gaius Titus. What I want is simple enough.

For a long time, he had thought that near-immortality carried with it the
curse of sterility. Now he knew it was simply a matter of time—of
growing up.

As he stood up to walk to the bar with Lorraine, he caught a glimpse of
himself in the dusty mirror behind the bar. He didn't look much over
twenty-five. But things had been changing in the past fifty years. He had
never had a heavy beard before; he had not developed his husky baritone
voice until a year before the outbreak of the First World War.

It had been difficult, at first, to hide his immortality. Changing names,
changing residences, changing, changing, changing. Until he had found that
he didn't have to change—not deep inside.

People don't recognize faces. Faces are essentially alike. Two eyes, two
ears, a nose, a mouth. What more is there to a face? Only the personality
behind it.

A personality is something that is projected—something put on
display for others to see. And Gaius Titus Menenius had found that two
thousand years of experience had given him enough internal psychological
reality to be able to project any personality he wanted to. All he needed
was a change of dress and a change of personality to be a different
person. His face changed subtly to fit the person who was wearing it; no
one had ever caught on.

Lorraine sat down on the bar stool. "Beer," she said to the bartender.
"What's the matter, Les? What's eating you?"

He studied her firm, strong features, her deep, mocking eyes. "Lorraine,"
he said softly, "will you marry me?"

She blinked. "Marry you? You? Marry?" She grinned again. "Who'd ever think
it? A bourgeois conformist, like all the rest." Then she shook her head.
"No, Les. Even if you're kidding, you ought to know better than that.
What's the gag?"

"No gag," said Leslie, and Gaius Titus fought his surprise and shock at
his third failure. "I see your point," Leslie said. "Forget it. Give my
best to everyone." He got up without drinking his beer and walked out the
door.

Leslie stepped out into the street and started heading for the subway.
Then Gaius Titus, withdrawing the mask, checked himself and hailed a cab.

He got into the cab and gave the driver his home address. He didn't see
any reason for further pursuing his adventures that evening.

He was mystified. How could
three
personality-facets fail so
completely? He had been handling these three girls well ever since he had
met them, but tonight, going from one to the next, as soon as he made any
serious ventures toward any of them the whole thing folded. Why?

"It's a lousy world," he told the driver, assuming for the moment the mask
of Phil Carlson, cynical newsman. "Damn lousy." His voice was a biting
rasp.

"What's wrong, buddy?"

"Had a fight with all three of my girls. It's a lousy world."

"I'll buy that," the driver said. The cab swung up into Park. "But look at
it this way, pal: who needs them?"

For a moment the mask blurred and fell aside, and it was Gaius Titus, not
Phil Carlson, who said, "That's exactly right! Who needs them?" He gave
the driver a bill and got out of the cab.

Who needs them?
It was a good question. There were plenty of girls.
Why should he saddle himself with Sharon, or Ginger, or Lorraine? They all
had their good qualities—Sharon's social grace, Ginger's vigor and
drive, Lorraine's rugged intellectualism. They were all three good-looking
girls, tall, attractive, well put together. But yet each one, he realized,
lacked something that the others had. None of them was really
worthy
by herself, he thought, apologizing to himself for what another man might
call conceit, or sour grapes.

None of them would really do. But if somehow, some way, he could manage to
combine those three leggy girls, those three personalities into one body,
there
would be a girl—

He gasped.

He whirled and caught sight of the cab he had just vacated.

"Hey, cabby!" Titus called. "Come back here! Take me back to the San
Marino!"

She wasn't there. As Leslie burst in, he caught sight of Corwyn, sitting
alone and grinning twistedly over a beer.

"Where'd they go? Where's Lorraine?"

The little man lifted his shoulders and eyebrows in an elaborate shrug.
"They left about a minute ago. No, it was closer to ten, wasn't it? They
went in separate directions. They left me here."

"Thanks," Leslie said.

Scratch Number One, Titus thought. He ran to the phone booth in the back,
dialed Information, and demanded the number of the East End Bar. After
some fumbling, the operator found it.

He dialed. The bartender's tired face appeared in the screen.

"Hello, Sam," the barkeep said. "What's doing?"

"Do me a favor, Jerry," Sam said. "Look around your place for Ginger."

"She ain't here, Sam," the bartender said. "Haven't seen her since you two
blew out of here a while back." Jerry's eyes narrowed. "I ain't never seen
you dressed up like that before, Sam, you know?"

Gaius Titus crouched down suddenly to get out of range of the screen. "I'm
celebrating tonight, Jerry," he said, and broke the connection.

Ginger wasn't to be found either, eh? That left only Sharon. He couldn't
call Kavanaugh's—they wouldn't give a caller any information about
their patrons. Grabbing another taxi, he shot across town to Kavanaugh's.

Sharon wasn't there when Schuyler entered. She hadn't been in since the
afternoon, a waiter informed him after receiving a small gratuity.
Schuyler had a drink and left. Gaius Titus returned to his apartment,
tingling with an excitement he hadn't known for centuries.

He returned to Kavanaugh's the next night, and the next. Still no sign of
her.

The following evening, though, when he entered the bar, she was sitting
there, nursing an old-fashioned. He slid onto the seat next to her. She
looked up in surprise.

"Bill! Good to see you again."

"The same here," Gaius Titus said. "It's good to see you again—Ginger.
Or is it Lorraine?"

She paled and put her hand to her mouth. Then, covering, she said, "What
do you mean, Bill? Have you had too many drinks tonight?"

"Possibly," Titus said. "I stopped off in the San Marino before I came up.
You weren't there, Lorraine. That deep voice is quite a trick, I have to
admit. I had a drink with Mack and Corwyn. Then I went over to the East
End, Ginger. You weren't there, either. So," he said, "there was only one
place left to find you, Sharon."

She stared at him for a long moment. Finally she said, simply, "Who are
you?"

"Leslie MacGregor," Titus said. "Also Sam Spielman. And W. M. Schuyler.
Plus two or three other people. The name is Gaius Titus Menenius, at your
service."

"I still don't understand—"

"Yes, you do," Titus said. "You are clever—but not clever enough.
Your little game had me going for almost a month, you know? And it's not
easy to fool a man my age."

"When did you find out?" the girl asked weakly.

"Monday night, when I saw all three of you within a couple of hours."

"You're—"

"Yes, I'm like you," he said. "But I'll give you credit: I didn't see
through it until I was on my way home. You were using my own camouflage
technique against me, and I didn't spot it for what it was. What's your
real name?"

"Mary Bradford," she said. "I was English, originally. Of fine Plantagenet
stock. I'm really a Puritan at heart, you see." She was grinning slyly.

"Oh? Mayflower descendent?" Titus asked teasingly.

"No," Mary replied. "Not a descendent. A passenger. And I'll tell you—I
was awfully happy to get out of England and over here to Plymouth colony."

He toyed with her empty glass. "You didn't like England? Probably my
fault. I was a minor functionary in King James' court in the early
seventeenth century."

They giggled together over it. Titus stared at her, his pulse pounding
harder and harder. She stared back. Her eyes were smiling.

"I didn't think there was another one," she said after a while. "It was so
strange, never growing old. I was afraid they'd burn me as a witch. I had
to keep changing, moving all the time. It wasn't a pleasant life. It's
better lately—I enjoy these little poses. But I'm glad you caught on
to me," she said. She reached out and took his hand. "I guess I would
never have been smart enough to connect you and Leslie and Sam, the way
you did Sharon and Ginger and Lorraine. You play the game too well for
me."

"In two thousand years," Titus said, not caring if the waiter overheard
him, "I never found another one like me. Believe me, Mary, I looked. I
looked hard, and I've had plenty of time to search. And then to find you,
hiding behind the faces of three girls I knew!"

He squeezed her hand. The next statement followed logically for him. "Now
that we've found each other," he said softly, "we can have a child. A
third immortal."

Her face showed radiant enthusiasm. "Wonderful!" she cried. "When can we
get married?"

"How about tomor—" he started to say. Then a thought struck him.

"Mary?"

"What … Titus?"

"How old did you say you were? When were you born?" he asked.

She thought for a moment. "1597," she said. "I'm nearly four hundred."

He nodded, dumb with growing frustration. Only four hundred? That meant—that
meant she was now the equivalent of a three-year-old child!

"When can we get married?" she repeated.

"There's no hurry," Titus said dully, letting her hand drop. "We have
eleven hundred years."