The Player on the Other Side (2 page)

‘She doesn't change,' said the girl; and ‘Whatever
are
you talking about? What's a Boscawen? What's a penoe?'

‘A Boscawen,' said Tom Archer loftily, ‘is a provisional postage stamp issued in 1846 by the postmaster of Boscawen, New Hampshire. It's dull blue, and it says on it “paid five cents,” but it's worth enough to pay your salary and probably some of mine for the next year. And Sir Robert of York owns one.'

‘And he's happy about it. He ought to be! What's the one he's sad about, the penoe something?'

Archer laughed. He had good teeth to laugh by; in this last-of-spring twilight they glowed like the loom of foggy lights. ‘The so-called “penoe” is a blue 1848 stamp from the island of Mauritius, of two-pence denomination, showing the head of Queen Victoria. An error was not caught in one of the engraver's plates, and the word “pence” was spelled with an
o
instead of a
c
. A number of printings of the error were made that year, in slightly differing shades of blue and on different thicknesses and shades of paper. They're all valuable — especially good copies — but the most valuable is the earliest impression, which is a sort of indigo-blue on thick yellowish paper. Worth more than the Boscawen.'

‘Do go on,' said young Ann, successfully sounding fascinated.

‘I had no intention of stopping,' said young Archer. ‘Well, a couple of years ago Robert of York was hot on the trail of one of the earliest penoes, and sure enough he caught up with it. It was an especially fine copy, it was authenticated six ways from sundown and he paid through the nose for it. And then — it's much too long a story — it developed that he'd been sold a beautiful forgery. He wasn't the only one fooled — a lot of reputable people were embarrassed. Of course he got his money back, but he didn't
want
his money back — he wanted a genuine, fine-to-superb earliest-impression penoe. He still does.'

‘Why?'

‘Why?' Archer repeated severely. ‘Because everybody has an impossible dream, even people with umpty-eleven million dollars hanging over them ready to drop. What Sir Robert wants is one each of the world's ten most valuable postage stamps. He has six. Of course, he'll never get them all.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because one of them is the rarest stamp in the world, the famous British Guiana Number 13, and Mr. York isn't likely to get his hot little paws on that baby — there's only one copy extant.'

‘My, you know so
much
,' Miss Drew breathed.

‘No, I don't,' said Mr. Archer with extreme candor, although his teeth glowed again. ‘Mr. York, now: say what you like about that funny little guy,
he
knows. He really does. All I have is a sticky mind, and after hanging around the likes of him for nearly two years some of what he knows has stuck.'

‘Is that what you always wanted to be,' Miss Drew asked innocently, ‘a sticky-minded hang-arounder of an expert philatelist?'

‘Aha,' said Archer. ‘Looking for the keystone of Archer, eh?'

‘Oh, dear. I didn't mean —'

‘You did mean, and don't deny it. And don't apologize, either. It's honest, normal curiosity, and if there's anything York Square can use more of it's something normal. Two years ago I was only too eager to be paid to hang around anybody who knew anything. I was one of those perennial school kids. Went from college to postgrad work, got my master's, then started on a doctorate.'

‘I didn't know
that
,' the girl said.

‘I don't advertise it because I didn't get it, and I probably never will. As I was girding myself for the Ph.D., the Army — bless it — reached out and nabbed me.'

‘Bless the
Army
?' she asked, for he had said it without rancor or irony.

‘On two counts,' Tom Archer responded. ‘One: those old jokes about brain surgeons being assigned to drive tanks are rapidly becoming just that — old jokes. The Army really does make an effort nowadays to find out what you're good for and at. When they came to screen me, I just wouldn't go through the meshes. Classification: Useless.' He laughed. ‘Really. Pure academic background, philosophy major of a kind they couldn't even use in Public Relations or Intelligence. If not for the Army I might never have found that out. I might have gone on and on taking p.g. and extension courses for the rest of my pedantic life.'

‘And blessing number two?'

‘The Army taught me how Classification Useless can get along. Do what you're told, no more and no less, never volunteer, and the Army takes care of you in every possible way, without letting reality come in contact with you.

‘And as with the Army,' Philosopher Archer went on, ‘so with capital L-i-f-e. The perennial schoolboy who pursues degree after degree as ends in themselves is living in the same dream-world.'

‘But he hasn't the Army to feed him,' Ann Drew pointed out.

‘I had an uncle who left me an income. It wasn't enough to eat well on, but it kept me from rooting in garbage cans, and as for the rest — well, I just kept getting those fellowships.'

‘Well,' she said.

‘So there you are. I mean, there
I
am. Learned I was useless, learned that a school is an army, and that they're both unbroken eggs. And the yolk is on me.'

‘Oh, dear,' said the girl.

‘And now you'll be saying to yourself that becoming secretary, assistant and philatelic clerk to a Robert York isn't functioning in the real world, either.'

‘I suppose I will. Yes, I will.'

‘The difference,' said Tom Archer, ‘is that now I know it. B.A. — Before the Army — I didn't.'

‘But if now you know it,' murmured Ann Drew, ‘— I shouldn't ask this, but you brought it up — why don't you go out and function in the world?'

‘I probably will, and sooner than I think. I could teach — I don't want to, but I could. There's a school out West where you learn to run power shovels — I might do that. I don't know. The right thing will come along. This has been fascinating,' the young man said suddenly. ‘I talk too much. Now let's talk about you.'

‘No.'

‘No?'

‘It … wouldn't be fascinating,' Ann Drew said.

‘Let's try. You've been here about five months taking care of poor old Myra York —'

‘Who's pretty happy in spite of your adjectives.'

He tilted his head. ‘I thought we'd agreed it's best to live in the real world?'

‘Not for Myra York it isn't,' said Ann Drew.

‘Clever,' said Tom Archer. ‘Oh, clever. I want to talk about you and you deftly switch the conversation to someone else. All right, I'll talk about you all by myself. You're stacked. You're intelligent. You're
very
pretty. You were discovered somewhere, somehow, by our social-conscious, welfare-type York, Miss Emily. Which makes you some sort of waif.'

‘I don't like this,' the girl said with an uncertain smile.

‘Some of my best friends are waifs. Waives.'

‘I don't know that I like
you
, either.'

‘Oh, look,' Archer said, swiftly and warmly. ‘Please don't not like me. Please don't even try to not like me —' He stopped, cocking his head in his quick, odd way. ‘You don't understand me at all, do you?'

She looked at him. ‘I do,' she said reluctantly. ‘I had a father very like you once.'

‘That bodes well,' he grinned. ‘Dr. Freud says —' But he was able to see, even in the dim light, that this was no time for a witticism. ‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘What happened?'

‘He died,' said the girl.

There was a long pause, as if she had an invisible book to leaf through. Finally she murmured, ‘Daddy was brilliant and … unworldly and impractical and … well, he just couldn't cope. I did everything to — I mean, I took care of him as best I could. After he died and there wasn't anyone but myself to take care of' — her pause this time seemed full of silent syllables, because it ended just as if she had not stopped speaking at all — ‘Miss Emily found me and brought me here.'

‘You like it here,' Archer said.

She looked over at Percival York's house, then quickly around at the identical others. ‘I like the money I'm near. I mean, handed-down money. I like the feeling that nothing here ever has to change, nothing that starts from any … under-the-skin need.' She shook herself, or shuddered. ‘I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say any of that. It sounds envious.'

‘I'm glad,' he said seriously, so seriously that she could know for the first time that he really
was
serious. ‘These people — poor Miss Myra, do-gooding Miss Emily — and she does do good, I'm not denying it — Sir Robert and his little bits of expensive paper, and that
Percival
' — he said the name as its own cuss-word, without adjectives — ‘they're all laboratory specimens of the genus “have.” The tendency of the like of us have-nots
is
to envy them, and why shouldn't we? It's hard to feel that they deserve what they've got, when you know and I know that they don't and we do.'

She laughed as she had not been able to do when he was being not-serious. ‘That almost makes sense. Oh, dear!'

The last two words were evoked by the taxicab that pulled up before Percival York's little castle. From it alighted Percival, who after paying the driver assisted a blonde concoction to the sidewalk. The cab moved off and they had a wonderful glimpse, in the darkling light, of female calves taxing the tensile strength of the suffering nylon, of heels too high for the furtive speed urged on their wearer by Percival, of a black synthetic coat too glossily superb to be the Persian lamb to which it pretended — all surmounted by a piled-up confection of hair that looked as if it had been spun out of a cotton-candy machine.

‘He has,' murmured Ann Drew with a surprising touch of tartness, ‘and you have not, although you deserve it. Do you feel deserving of
everything
he has?'

‘My modesty,' replied Tom Archer, gazing with a slight shudder after the platinum blonde who was just being shooed into Percival's castle by its chatelain, ‘my modesty prevents me from being sure I deserve
that
part of it. Ann Drew, you're being catty.'

‘Yes,' Ann Drew said. ‘Refreshing, isn't it? —
Eeeeeeee
!'

Her fingers all but met through his sleeve and the flesh of his forearm.

‘God,' Archer whispered. ‘How long has
he
been there?'

‘Who? Where?' Her soft, shocked tone commanded the exact softness and shock from him. ‘Why, it's …' And Archer barked: ‘Walt! What the devil are you doing here?'

‘Mr. Robert sent me looking for you,' said Walt in his pale voice.

‘Did you have to come creeping up like that?'

Walt stood in a pool of shadow close by the memorial plaque. ‘I wasn't creeping, Mr. Archer.'

‘Did Mr. York say what he wanted?'

‘He only said to find you — he's got a Seebeck.'

‘He's got a Seebeck,' groaned Archer. ‘Go tell him I'll be right there.'

Only then did the girl release his arm; she fumbled in her handbag. ‘Walt. Wait.'

Walt waited.

‘I was at the post office just as it closed and they gave me this for you.' She handed him a letter.

Walt took it silently in both hands and, holding it so, walked away from them, across the street toward Robert York's castle. He had an odd walk — not exactly a shuffle, for it was silent, nor a shamble, for it was very contained, but a sort of sliding along, as if the lower part of his body were on tracks.

‘Creep,' muttered Archer.

‘How long
was
he there?'

‘No telling.'

‘Probably not long at all.' She was breathing as if breathing were something she had overlooked for a time. ‘And he
isn't
a creep.'

‘He looks like one.'

‘Don't you know why?'

‘He just looks it,' said Archer defensively.

‘It's his eyes,' said the girl. ‘They're almost perfectly round, didn't you ever notice? That's what creates the illusion of stupidity.'

‘It's no illusion. His brains are all in his wrists, and his nerves all run to his hands. I never yet saw that zombie angry or scared or worried or anything at all.' Tom Archer said rather tenderly, ‘Do we have to talk about Walt?'

‘All right,' Ann Drew said. ‘What's a Seebeck?'

‘Oh, Lord, the Seebeck! I haven't time now to tell you the whole dismal story — Sir Robert awaits. Take note of this, by the way, my girl — this is an historic occasion. You know, don't you, that the Naval Observatory calls him up to find out what time it is? And that the stars in their courses check with him before they shift their Dopplers?'

‘I know he has very regular habits,' she said cautiously.

‘Agreed — when working time comes, we work, when quitting time comes, we quit. Now hear this: This is the very first, the number-one original time, Robert York has ever yelled for me after hours! It really
must
be a Seebeck.' And Tom Archer waved his hand cheerfully, and he too set off across the street to Robert York's castle.

Ann Drew stood watching him. Then, very slowly, she shook her head. Perhaps it was wonderment.

3

Exchanges

Oh, another, oh, a new one.

Clutching the letter close (oh, there's something in it this time, extra pages and … and
a card
) he hurried to Robert York's house to deliver Tom Archer's message. It was with great reluctance that he removed one caressing hand from the envelope to get his keys out (Mr. Robert's door was always locked, as was Miss Emily's; Mr. Percival's and Miss Myra's, never). He let himself in, slid along to the library door and knocked.