Baby Is Three (22 page)

“How much does she weigh?”

“34B,” said Naome, with instant understanding, “and presents a united front like a Victorian.”

He laughed. “And what have I to do with Miss Tillie Moroney?”

“She’s got money. I told you about her—that personals ad in the
Saturday Review—
remember? ‘Does basic character ever change? $1000 for authentic case of devil into saint.’ ”

“Oh my gosh yes. You had this bright idea of calling her in after I told you about getting the Weiss treatment in Turnville.” He waved at the manuscript. “Doesn’t that change your plans any? You might make a case out of
The Traveling Crag
versus the cat-kicking of Mr. Weiss, if you use that old man’s testimony that he’s been kicking cats and people for some years. But from my experience,” he touched his forehead, which was almost healed, “I’d say it was saint into devil.”

“Her ad didn’t mention temporary or permanent changes,” Naome pointed out. “There may be a buck in it. You can handle her.”

“Thanks just the same, but let me see what she looks like before I do any such thing. Personally, I think she’s a crank. A mystic maybe. Do you know here?”

“Spoke to her on the phone. Saw her picture last year. The Average American Miss is permitted to be a screwball. That’s what makes this country great.”

“You and your Machiavellian syndrome. Can’t I get out of it?”

“You cannot. What are you making such a fuss about? You’ve wined and dined uglier chicks than this.”

“I know it. Do you think I’d have a chance to see her if I acted eager?”

“I despise you,” said Naome. “Straighten your tie and go comb your hair. Oh, Cris, I know it sounds wacky. But what doesn’t, in this business? What’ll you lose? The price of a lunch!”

“I might lose my honor.”

“Authors’ agents have no honor.”

“As my friend in the general store is wont to remark: Heh! What protects you, little one?”

“My honor,” replied Naome.

The brown hair was neat and so was the tailored brown suit that matched it so well. The blue eyes were extremely dark. The rest well befit her Average Miss title, except for her voice, which had the pitch of a husky one while being clear as tropical shoals. Her general air
was one of poised shyness. Cris pulled out a restaurant chair for her, which was a tribute; he felt impelled to do that about one time in seven.

“You think I’m a crank,” she said when they were settled with a drink.

“Do I?”

“You do,” she said positively. He did, too.

“Well,” he said, “your ad did make it a little difficult to suspend judgment.”

She smiled with him. She had good teeth. “I can’t blame you, or the eight hundred-odd other people who answered. Why is it a thousand dollars is so much more appealing than such an incredible thought as a change from basic character?”

“I guess because most people would rather see the change from a thousand dollars.”

He was pleased to find she had the rare quality of being able to talk coherently while she laughed. She said, “You are right. One of them wanted to marry me so I could change his character. He assured me that he was a regular devil. But—tell me about this case of yours.”

He did, in detail: Sig Weiss’s incredible short story, its wide impact, its deep call on everything that is fine and generous in everyone who read it. And then he described the man who had written it.

“In this business, you run into all kinds of flukes,” he said. “A superficial, tone-deaf, materialistic character will sit down and write something that positively sings. You read the story, you know the guy, and you say he couldn’t have written it. But you know he did. I’ve seen that time after time, and all it proves is that there are more facets to a man than you see at first—not that there’s any real change in him. But Weiss—I’ll admit that in his case the theory has got to be stretched to explain it. I’ll swear a man like him simply could not contain the emotions and convictions that made
The Traveling Crag
what it is.”

“I’ve read it,” she said. He hadn’t noticed her lower lip was so full. Perhaps it hadn’t been, a moment ago. “It was a beautiful thing.”

“Now, tell me about this ad of yours. Have you found such a basic change—devil into saint? Or do you just hope to?”

“I don’t know of any such case,” she admitted. “But I know it can happen.”

“How?”

She paused. She seemed to be listening. Then she said, “I can’t tell you. I … know something that can have that effect, that’s all. I’m trying to find out where it is.”

“I don’t understand that. You don’t think Sig Weiss was under such an influence, do you?”

“I’d like to ask him. I’d like to know if the effect was at all lasting.”

“Not so you’d notice it,” he said glumly. “He gave me that bouncing around after he wrote
The Traveling Crag
, not before. Not only that …” He told her about the latest story.

“Do you suppose he wrote that under the same circumstances as
The Traveling Crag?”

“I don’t see why not. He’s a man of pretty regular habits. He probably—wait a minute! Just before I left, I said something to him … something about …” He drummed on his temples. “… Something about the
Crag
reading as if it had been written in a different place, by a different person. And he didn’t get sore. He looked at me as if I were a swami. Seems I hit the nail right on the thumb.”

The listening expression crossed her smooth face again. She looked up, startled. “Has he got any …” She closed her eyes, straining for something. “Has he a radio? I mean—a shortwave set—a transmitter—diathermy—a fever cabinet—any … uh … RF generator of any kind?”

“What in time made you ask that?”

She opened her eyes and smiled shyly at him. “It just came to me.”

“Saving your presence, Miss Moroney, but there are moments when you give me the creeps,” he blurted. “I’m sorry. I guess I shouldn’t have said that, but—”

“It’s all right,” she said warmly.

“You hear voices?” he asked.

She smiled. “What about the RF generator?”

“I don’t know.” He thought hard. “He has electricity. I imagine he has a receiver. About the rest, I really can’t say. He didn’t take me on a grand tour. Will you tell me what made you ask that?”

“No.”

He opened his mouth to protest, but when he saw her expression he closed it again. She asked, “What are you going to do about Weiss?”

“Drop him. What else?”

“Oh, please don’t!” she cried. She put a hand on his sleeve. “Please!”

“What else to you expect me to do?” he asked in some annoyance. “A writer who sends in a piece of junk like that as a followup to something like the
Crag
is more than foolish. He’s stupid. I can’t use a client like that. I’m busy. I got troubles.

“Also, he gave you a bad time.”

“That hasn’t anyth—well, you’re right. If he behaved like a human being, maybe I would take a lot of trouble and analyze his trash and guide and urge and wipe his nose for him. But a guy like that—nah!”

“He has another story like the
Crag
in him.”

“You think he has?”

“I know he has.”

“You’re very positive. Your … voices tell you that?”

She nodded, with a small secret smile.

“I have the feeling you’re playing with me. You know this Weiss?”

“Oh, no! And I’m not playing with you. Truly. You’ve got to believe me!” She looked genuinely distressed.

“I don’t see why I should. This begins to look real haywire, Tillie Moroney. I think maybe we’d better get down to basics here.” She immediately looked so worried that he recognized an advantage. Not knowing exactly what she wanted of him, he knew she wanted something, and now he was prepared to use that to the hilt. “Tell me about it. What’s your interest in Weiss? What’s this personalityalteration gimmick? What are you after and what gave you your lead? And what do you expect me to do about it? That last question reads, ‘What’s in it for me?’ ”

“Y-you’re not always very nice, are you?”

He said, more gently, “That last wasn’t thrown in to be mean. It was an appeal to your good sense to appeal to my sincerity. You can always judge sincerity—your own or anyone else’s—by finding out what’s in it for the interested party. Altruism and real sincerity are mutually exclusive. Now, talk. I mean, talk, please.”

Again that extraordinary harking expression. Then she drew a deep breath. “I’ve had an awful time,” she said. “Awful. You can’t know. I’ve answered letters and phone calls. I’ve met cranks and wolves and religious fanatics who have neat little dialectical capsules all packed and ready to make saints out of devils. They all yap about proof—sometimes it’s themselves and sometimes it’s someone they know—and the proof always turns out to be a reformed drunk or a man who turned to Krishna and no longer beats his wife, not since Tuesday …” She stopped for breath and half-smiled at him and, angrily, he felt a warm surge of liking for her. She went on, “And this is the first hint I’ve had that what I’m looking for really exists.”

She leaned forward suddenly. “I need you. You already have a solid contact with Sig Weiss and the way he works. If I had to seek him out myself, I—well, I just wouldn’t know how to start. And this is urgent, can’t you understand—urgent!”

He looked deep into the dark blue eyes and said, “I understand fine.”

She said, “If I tell you a … story, will you promise not to ask me any questions about it?”

He fiddled about with his fork for a moment and then said, “I once heard tell of a one-legged man who was pestered by all the kids in the neighborhood about how he lost his leg. They followed him and yelled at him and tagged along after him and made no end of a nuisance of themselves. So one day he stopped and gathered them all around him and asked if they really wanted to know how he lost his leg, and they all chorused YES! And he wanted to know if he told them, would they stop asking him, and they all promised faithfully that they would stop. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘It was bit off.’ And he turned and stumped away. As to the promise you want—no.”

She laughed ruefully. “All right. I’ll tell you the story anyway. But you’ve got to understand that it isn’t the whole story, and that I’m not at liberty to tell the whole story. So please don’t pry too hard.”

He smiled. He had, he noticed in her eyes, a pretty nice smile. “I’ll be good.”

“All right. You have a lot of clients who write science fiction, don’t you?”

“Not a lot. Just the best,” he said modestly.

She smiled again. Two curved dimples put her smile in parenthesis. He liked that. She said, “Let’s say this is a science fiction plot. How to begin …”

“Once upon a time …” he prompted.

She laughed like a child. “Once upon a time,” she nodded, “there was a very advanced humanoid race in another galaxy. They had had wars—lots of them. They learned how to control them, but every once in a while things would get out of hand and another, and worse, war would happen. They developed weapon after weapon—things which make the H-bomb like a campfire in comparison. They had planet-smashers. They could explode a sun. They could do things we can only dimly understand. They could put a local warp in time itself, or unify the polarity in the gravitomagnetic field of an entire solar system.”

“Does this gobbledegook come easy to you?” he asked.

“It does just now,” she answered shyly. “Anyway, they developed the ultimate weapon—one which made all the others obsolete. It was enormously difficult to make, and only a few were manufactured. The secret of making it died out, and the available stocks were used at one time or another. The time to use them is coming again—and I don’t mean on Earth. The little fuses we have are flea-hops. This is important business.

“Now, a cargo ship was traveling between galaxies on hyper-spatial drive. In a crazy, billion-to-one odds accident, it emerged into normal space smack in the middle of a planetoid. It wasn’t a big one; the ship wasn’t atomized, just wrecked. It was carrying one of these super-weapons. It took thousands of years to trace it, but it has been
traced. The chances are strong that it came down on a planet. It’s wanted.

“It gives out no detectable radiation. But in its shielded state, it has a peculiar effect on living tissues which come near it.”

“Devils into saints?”

“The effect is … peculiar. Now …” She held up fingers. “If the nature of this object were known, and if it fell into the wrong hands, the effect here on Earth could be dreadful. There are megalomaniacs on Earth so unbalanced that they would threaten even their own destruction unless their demands were met. Point two: If the weapon were used on Earth, not only would Earth as we know it cease to exist, but the weapon would be unavailable to those who need it importantly.”

Cris sat staring at her, waiting for more. There was no more. Finally he licked his lips and said, “You’re telling me that Sig Weiss has stumbled across this thing.”

“I’m telling you a science fiction plot.”

“Where did you get your … information?”

“It’s a science fiction story.”

He grinned suddenly, widely. “I’ll be good,” he said again. “What do you want me to do.”

Her eyes became very bright. “You aren’t like most agents,” she said.

“When I was in a British Colony, the English used to say to me, every once in a while, ‘You aren’t like most Americans.’ I always found it slightly insulting. All right; what do you want me to do?”

She patted his hand. “See if you can make Weiss write another
Traveling Crag
. If he can, then find out exactly how and where he wrote it. And let me know.”

They rose. He helped her with her light coat. He said, “Know something?” When she smiled up at him he said, “You don’t strike me as Miss Average.”

“Oh, but I was,” she answered softly. “I was.”