The Long Result (10 page)

Again, that tautening of her face. ‘Did he have any comments? I admit we’re extremely proud of her.’

‘He said it was a beautiful piece of design, though he
wasn’t able to pin down how she differs from an Earthly vessel.’

Ah! I was on to something. I gave silent thanks that Star-homers included the art of deception in the ‘soft’ human disciplines which they claimed were beneath their notice.

The way in which she changed the subject was almost painful. ‘Mr Vincent, I gather they called you out to the Ark again last night. That was why you had no sleep?’

‘Yes.’

‘I slept through all the fuss, of course – very deeply.’ Her voice was tightening, despite her attempted casualness. ‘Dr bin Ishmael told me this morning how helpful you’d been… You’re interested in the Tau Cetians?’

‘Indirectly, yes. Though my chief concern is with human colonial affairs.’

‘So I understand.’ She crossed her legs and paid some attention to the straightening of her breeches. ‘You find your work very – ah – fulfilling, I presume?’

‘Oh … yes, I guess so.’ I made the statement grudging, in an attempt to force her into the open. I thought this was the point she was probing, though I couldn’t yet see why.

‘You don’t sound very enthusiastic,’ she commented. Damned right I didn’t! I hadn’t meant to. And she went on: ‘Like anyone else, I imagine you’d take a better post elsewhere if one were offered?’

‘It’s highly unlikely. I’ve spent most of my working life in cultural exchange, and I wouldn’t care to move to another field entirely.’

‘I see that. You have what you call a vocation. On Star-home we’d say “preference aptitude”.’

Oh, come to the point, woman!
And she did.

‘In confidence, Mr Vincent, would you consider emigrating to Starhome if conditions were right?’

But this was ridiculous! I spoke my astonishment aloud. ‘Starhome? There are no openings for me on Starhome!’

‘Not at present, true. But we propose to found an organisation which will have all the facilities, and more, which your Bureau enjoys, and we’re looking for a man suitable to fill the post of Chief of Bureau.’

I was so stunned I almost forgot to make myself look as if I was considering the idea. What call was there to duplicate the Bureau? All our findings were freely available to anyone, including Starhomers!

‘Of course,’ she went on, ‘I realize you can’t make your mind up on the spur of the moment. But believe me, when we say we mean it to be superior to this Bureau, we can make it so. Our social organization is more efficient than – well, I don’t need to tell you about that.’

Blasted Starhomer smugness!

‘And our terms are generous. In fact’ – she looked me straight in the eye – ‘we are prepared to accept the right man at his own estimate of his value.’

This I was going to have to investigate. I said slowly, ‘You’re right, I can’t say yes or no without time to think it over. Are you staying on Earth long?’

‘The turnaround for my ship is ten days. Next week I’m supposed to make a tour of recruiting stations, checking on immigration figures, but I shall be at this address until Monday and again from next Friday morning.’

She handed me a slip of plastic with the details on it.

‘If you come to a positive decision – and I hope you will – just call me and leave a message. I look forward to seeing you again soon.’

And she took her leave.

By then it was sixteen-thirty, the time at which the cleaning robots moved in on Fridays. Until nine hours on Monday, the Bureau would be virtually dead, apart from the Integration section whose computers were too precious to lie idle and had to work the clock around from year’s end to year’s end.

I left the office to the machines and headed for home, with three things to worry me now – the League, Patricia, and what Kay Lee Wong had told me.

I couldn’t make sense of any of them. The idea of a competing body to the Bureau was silly, especially with Star-homers running it. It was some concession to the facts that they’d gone elsewhere to recruit a Chief of Bureau, but trying to get a Starhomer organization built up from scratch was a job I’d not even have offered to Tinescu, myself.

The way in which the League had jumped up in a single day – as far as I was concerned – from the bunch of crackpots defined by Tinescu to a menacing horde of fanatics willing to crash rockets and assassinate aliens was equally incredible.

And last, but not least, I didn’t know what the hell had got into Patricia.

I called as soon as I was home. She was in, but the automatic answer was connected, and when I identified myself I got a chill response from the politeness circuit.

‘Sorry, Mr Vincent. Instructions are to accept no calls from you.’

It left me staring at a blank screen.

I ran furiously through the events of last night, as though sheer repetition would clear the events which bin Ishmael’s shocking interruption had driven down in my memory. I was
half inclined to spend this evening, before going to catch the express to England, in a visit to a commercial clearing-house. An hour or two would suffice to re-stimulate the perceptions and give me a knife-sharp replay of what had been said.

And yet … paradoxically enough, I didn’t feel I’d lost anything significant. I just hadn’t seen the point of the things I did remember.

The possibility of losing Patricia brought me to the verge of frenzy. Up till now, I hadn’t realized how completely my subconscious had accepted the notion that we were going to make a permanency of our relationship. I dropped into a chair and scowled at nothing.

Was it that I’d threatened – even jokingly – to volunteer for a zoo ship and go off to Regulus? She wasn’t that much attached to me, surely! If she’d said it, I’d have been made thoroughly miserable at the prospect of the separation. But I’d have expected her to shrug and wait for someone else to come along. I was nothing special, after all; now was I?

In fact, to be honest, I’d never figured out why she’d got involved with me in the first place. I’d had attractive girls as often as I could reasonably have expected. Patricia, though, was downright spectacular – her body fabulous, her hair a crown of natural gold, her skin without a flaw. My first reaction had been to shy away because the competition for her would be too intense, and my latest – so it seemed – was to hang on her every word with tongue lolling.

Ah, to hell with it! I had five hours on my hands before going to the rocketport. Was I going to spend it mooning in this chair – or what?

I jumped up and began to pace the floor. On the third turn I snapped my fingers. Now
that
was an inspiration. I fished out the card Kay had given me and went back to the phone.

She answered in person. She had changed from her mannish day-clothes into typical Starhomer casual wear: a plain black sleeveless jacket and thin white one-piece hose. The
starkness of the contrast accentuated her dark hair and eyes against her sallow skin and made me think of a hungry bird.

Not that I could be very interested in her as a woman, with Patricia on my mind. But if I did have time to kill, I might as well try to spend it in resolving one of the other mysteries I was faced with.

‘Why, Mr Vincent! You’ve been amazingly quick in reaching your decision, haven’t you?’

For a second she caught me out, and I failed to recognize the note of mockery behind the words. Then I had to chuckle. ‘Well, not exactly, I’m afraid. The fact is, I realized how little I really knew about Starhome. Second-hand social assay is no substitute for the direct experience. Since I have to go to England for the week-end, I wondered whether we could – oh – have dinner together, for instance. And talk a little more about this proposition of yours.’

‘I think I’d like that very much,’ she said.

‘You’re not doing anything, then?’ I was coming back from my preoccupation with Patricia, and my normal sensitivity to nuances of intonation told me now she’d been glad to get this call, but was slightly ashamed of admitting it.

She took the plunge abruptly. ‘No, nothing. Frankly, Mr Vincent, this is my first trip to Earth, and it’s even more disorientating than I’d been told. I see there’s no shortage of things to do in leisure time, but I simply don’t know where to hook on to what’s happening.’

That was an apt way of putting it. I’d more than once had Starhomers get in touch with me at the Bureau – reluctantly, because only extreme pressure drove them to confess their problem – in order to ask questions that we natives found astonishing. The intense level of committal which Starhome demanded of its people left even their spare time tightly organized. On Earth, boredom swiftly gave way to a sense of helplessness and ultimately, in the worst case I’d seen, to anxiety neurosis brought on by having to make too many
unaccustomed decisions. The crisis might be precipitated by something as minor as how to spend the evening: at a dance, or a concert, or having dinner at a restaurant, or taking a girl flying, or – or – or…!

I suddenly felt rather sorry for this stranger to my planet. She must have had a gruelling time with the Tau Cetians, and for all that she’d come close to a breakdown, she hadn’t actually caved in, which argued a considerable strength of personality. My original prime intention of pumping her about the Starhomer plan to displace BuCult slipped down to second place in my thinking, and I found I was more concerned over how I could best give her examples she could follow on her own for the rest of her stay here.

I took her to the Kingdom more or less automatically; it was my and Patricia’s regular rendezvous, but that was a late development – I’d been using it ever since I joined the Bureau, because it was the best restaurant in that part of the city. That it also happened to be convenient for people from Area Met was a bonus, and this evening entailed a consequence which I didn’t know whether to take as amusing or annoying. At the next table to ours was one of Patricia’s colleagues, who recognized me at once and cocked an eyebrow on seeing me with another girl.

Oh, let it slide. If it was important, there was nothing I could do.

I began to enjoy myself quite quickly. A lot of Kay’s off-putting Starhomer arrogance turned out to be a mask for shyness, and when I’d persuaded her to call me Roald she began to relax. Before we’d finished eating we were already involved in a fierce argument about the social value of individual as opposed to communal recreation – I took the stand that the development of initiative was what counted, while she of course maintained the contrary, that integration of the individual into his society was the prime factor.

I was quite surprised by this. How much easier she was to talk to than Patricia! I could treat her as I might have treated an old friend like Jacky or Tomas from the Bureau, and if she found herself defending an illogical position she would just laugh and give up the struggle. All the time I was with Patricia I tended to be agreeing with her, trying to read into every remark the answer she wanted, for fear of antagonizing her. This was refreshingly different…

I pulled up short in dismay. What was happening to me? Was I getting disillusioned with Patricia so soon after deciding that here was the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with?

Oh, that was absurd. I shook my head and forgot the silly notion.

After dinner, as a concession to her ideas about communal recreation, I took Kay to a public dance and made sure that she obtained a variety of partners. That wasn’t difficult; she stood out among the Earthly girls like a pearl in a heap of diamonds. I’d heard it said by experts that the current generation on Earth was the most physically perfect of all time; we’d been selecting for beauty so long, and enjoyed such a high standard of living, that it was inevitable. I reflected that it was also inevitable for our concept of attractiveness to change. Every other woman in sight was tall, impeccably proportioned – slim-waisted, full-busted – and dressed and coiffed with care and taste. Kay looked skinny beside them, but the sinuous grace she displayed when dancing drew the attention of dozens of men, and after a while she started to preen a little. I couldn’t blame her. I went off to the bar for a drink.

In a way, I told myself as I sipped, the difference between Kay and Patricia matched the difference between Starhome and Earth. Kay was – not hard; that was a false definition. Tough? Wiry, perhaps, with a personality as firm and flexible as the slim body under her light clothes. Patricia was softer
and – well – more cuddly: the product of a society stable enough to flower instead of merely growing. Starhome was imbued with a revolutionary spirit dead on Earth these two hundred years.

Funny. I’d never thought of it that way before. I was a fit – opposite of misfit – by my own free choice; at least, I’d always imagined so. I’d had an intellectual comprehension of what life must be like on Starhome, because I dealt in the social assay material our survey missions sent to Earth. But before meeting Kay, I’d never considered this obvious and crucial point: that there must be a lot of people who actively approved and enjoyed that kind of life, or else the society simply couldn’t survive.

It was getting late. I went in search of her and found her surrounded by a swarm of would-be dancing partners. I told her about my rocket, and suggested that she might like to stay on – the dance didn’t close till thirty minutes in the morning, half after midnight.

But she said no, she’d rather I took her home if I had time, so I did. On the way she was bubbling with gratitude for my alleged trouble in giving her such a pleasant evening, and I completely failed to persuade her that it hadn’t after all been a chore in the slightest.

At the door of her apartment she turned to me rather shyly. ‘You’ve been very nice to me, Roald,’ she said. ‘Er – you do things differently from the way we have at home. Isn’t it the custom here that if a man takes a girl out for the evening he – they – well, do you expect to kiss me good night?’

I almost laughed, but fortunately managed to restrain myself. With gravity to match hers, I said, ‘Yes, that is the – the custom. But it’s entirely up to you. If you want to —’