Between Planets (6 page)

“Was that man following me?” Don asked. “So help me, I had never laid eyes on that dragon before; I was just passing the time of day, being polite.”

“I’m sure you were. But I’ll ask the questions. Go ahead.”

“Well, we changed cabs twice—or maybe three times. I don’t know just where we went; I don’t know the city and was all turned around. But eventually we came back to Dr. Jefferson’s apartment.” He omitted mention of the call to the
Caravansary
; again, if his questioner was aware of the omission, he gave no sign of it.

The lieutenant said, “Well, that seems to bring us up to date.” He switched off the projector and sat staring at nothing for some minutes. “Son, there is no doubt in my mind but what you are potentially disloyal.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Never mind the guff. There’s nothing in your background to make you loyal. But that is nothing to get excited about; a person in my position has to be practical. You are planning to leave for Mars tomorrow morning?”

“I sure am.”

“Good. I don’t see how you could have been up to much mischief at your age, isolated as you were out on that ranch. But you fell into bad company. Don’t miss that ship; if you are still here tomorrow I might have to revise my opinions.”

The lieutenant stood up and so did Don. “I’ll certainly catch it!” Don agreed, then stopped. “Unless—”

“Unless what?” the lieutenant said sharply.

“Well, they held up my ticket for security clearance,” Don blurted out.

“They did, eh? A routine matter; I’ll take care of it. You can leave now. Open sky!”

Don did not make the conventional answer. The man said, “Don’t be sulky. It would have been simpler to have beaten the living daylights out of you, then questioned you. But I didn’t; I have a son about your age myself. And I never intended to hurt your horse—happens I like horses; I’m a country boy originally. No hard feelings?”

“Uh, I guess not.”

The lieutenant put out his hand; Don found himself accepting it—he even found himself liking the man. He decided to chance one more question. “Could I say goodbye to Dr. Jefferson?”

The man’s expression changed. “I’m afraid not.”

“Why not? You’d be watching me, wouldn’t you?”

The officer hesitated. “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t know. Dr. Jefferson was a man in very poor health. He got excited, suffered an attack and died of heart failure, earlier tonight.”

Don simply stared. “Brace up!” the man said sharply. “It happens to all of us.” He pressed a button on his desk a guard came in and was told to take Don out. He was led out by another route but he was too bemused to notice it. Dr. Jefferson dead? It did not seem possible. A man so alive, so obviously in love with life—He was dumped out into a major public tunnel while still thinking about it.

Suddenly he recalled a phrase he had heard in class from his biology teacher, “‘In the end, all forms of death can be classed as heart failure.’” Don held up his right hand, stared at it. He would wash it as quickly as he could.

H
E STILL
had things to do; he could not stand there all night. First, he supposed that he had better go back to the station and pick up his bags. He fumbled in his pouch for his claim check while he worried about just how he would get there; he still did not have hard money with which to pay off an autocab.

He failed to find the claim check. Presently he removed everything from the pouch. Everything else was there; his letter of credit; his identification card, the messages from his parents, a flat photo of Lazy, his birth certificate, odds and ends—but no claim check. He remembered putting it there.

He thought of going back into the I.B.I. warren; he was quite sure now that it must have been taken from him while he slept. Darn funny, him falling asleep like that, at such a time. Had they drugged him? He decided against going back. Not only did he not know the name of the officer who had questioned him, nor any other way of identifying him, but more importantly he would not have done back into that place for all the baggage in Gary Station. Let it go, let it go—he’d pick up more socks and shorts before blast off!

He decided instead to go to the
Caravansary
. First he had to find out where it was; he walked slowly along, looking for someone who did not seem too busy nor too important to ask. He found him in the person of a lottery ticket vendor at the next intersection.

The vendor looked him over. “You don’t want to go to that place, Mac. I can fix you up with something really good.” He winked.

Don insisted that he knew what he wanted. The man shrugged. “Okay, chump. Straight ahead until you come to a square with an electric fountain in it, then take the slidewalk south. Ask anybody where to get off. What month were you born?”

“July.”

“July! Boy, are you lucky—I’ve just got one ticket left with your horoscope combination. Here.” Don had no intention at all of buying it and he thought of telling the grifter that he considered horoscopes as silly as spectacles on a cow—but he found that he had purchased it with his last coin. He pocketed the ticket, feeling foolish. The vendor said, “About half a mile on the slidewalk. Brush the hay out of your hair before you go in.”

Don found the slidewalk without difficulty and discovered that it was a pay-as-you-enter express. The machine not being interested in lottery tickets he walked the catwalk alongside it to the hotel. He had no trouble finding it; its brilliantly lighted entrance spread for a hundred yards along the tunnel.

No one seemed to help him as he came in. He went to the reservation desk and asked for a room. The clerk looked him over doubtfully. “Did someone take care of your baggage, sir?”

Don explained that he had none. “Well…that will be twenty-two fifty, in advance. Sign here, please.”

Don signed and stamped his thumb print, then got out his father’s letter of credit. “Can I get this cashed?”

“How much is it?” The clerk took it, then said, “Certainly, sir. Let me have your ID, please.” Don passed it over. The clerk took it and the fresh thumb print, placed both in a comparison machine. The machine beeped agreement; the clerk handed back the card. “You are you, all right.” He counted out the money, deducting the room charge. “Will your baggage be along, sir?” His manner indicated that Don’s social status had jumped.

“Uh, no, but there might be some mail for me.” Don explained that he was going out on the
Glory Road
in the morning.

“I’ll query the mail room.”

The answer was no; Don looked disappointed. The clerk said, “I’ll have the mail room flag your name. If anything arrives before up-ship, you’ll be sure to get it—even if we have to send a messenger to the field.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Not at all. Front!” As he let himself be led away, Don suddenly realized that he was groggy. The big foyer clock told him that it was already tomorrow, had been for hours in fact—he was paying seven-fifty an hour, about, for the privilege of a bed, but the way he felt he would have paid more than that simply to crawl into a hole.

He did not go immediately to bed. The
Caravansary
was a luxury hotel; even its “cheap” rooms had the minimums of civilized living. He adjusted the bath for a cycling hot sitz, threw off his clothes, and let the foaming water soothe him. After a bit he changed the pattern and floated in tepid stillness.

He came to with a start and got out. Ten minutes later, dried, powdered, and tingling with massage, he stepped back into the bedroom feeling almost restored. The ranch school had been intentionally monastic, oldstyle beds and mere showers; that bath was worth the price of the room.

The delivery chute’s annunciator shone green; he opened it and found three items. The first was a largish package sealed in plastic and marked “CARAVANSARY COURTESY KIT”; it contained a comb and toothbrush, a sleeping pill, a headache powder, a story film for the bed’s ceiling projector, a New Chicago
News
, and a breakfast menu. The second item was a card from his roommate; the third item was a small package, a common mailing tube. The card read:
Dear Don, A package came for you on the
P.M.
—
I got the Head to let me run it into Alb-Q-Q. Squinty is taking over Lazy. Must sign off; I’ve got to land this heap. All the best—Jack
.

Good old Jack, he said to himself, and picked up the mailing tube. He looked at the return address and realized with something of a shock that this must be the package over which Dr. Jefferson had been so much concerned, the package which apparently had led to his death. He stared at it and wondered if it could be true that a citizen could he dragged out of his own home, then so maltreated that he died.

Was the man he had had dinner with only hours ago really dead? Or had the security cop lied to him for some reason of his own?

Part of it was certainly true; he had seen them waiting to arrest the doctor—why, he himself had been arrested and threatened and questioned, and had had his baggage virtually stolen from him, for nothing! He hadn’t been doing a thing, not a confounded thing, just going about his lawful business.

Suddenly he was shaking with anger. He had let himself be pushed around; he made a solemn vow never to let it happen again. He could see now that there were half a dozen places where he should have been stubborn. If he had fought right at the outset, Dr. Jefferson might be alive—if he actually were dead, he amended.

But he had let himself be bulldozed by the odds against him. He promised himself never again to pay any attention to the odds, but only to the issues.

He controlled his trembling and opened the package.

A moment later he was looking baffled. The tube contained nothing but a man’s ring, a cheap plastic affair such as one might find on any souvenir counter. An old English capital “H” framed with a circle had been pressed into the face of it and the grooves filled with white enamel. It was flashy but commonplace and of no value at all to any but the childish and vulgar in taste.

Don turned it over and over, then put it aside and sorted through its wrappings. There was nothing else, not even a message, just plain white paper used to pack the ring. Don thought it over.

The ring obviously was not the cause of the excitement; it seemed to him that there were just two possibilities: first, that the security police had switched packages—if they had, there was probably nothing he could do about it—and second, if the ring were unimportant but it was the right package, then the rest of the contents of the package must be important even though it looked like nothing but blank paper.

The idea that he might be carrying a message in invisible ink excited him and he started thinking of ways to bring out the message. Heat? Chemical reagents? Radiation? Even as he considered it he realized regretfully that, supposing there were such a message, it was not his place to try to make it legible; he was simply to deliver it to his father.

He decided, too, that it was more likely that this was a dummy package sent along by the police. He had no way of telling what they might have forced out of Dr. Jefferson. Which reminded him that there was still one thing he could do to check up, futile as it probably would be; he stepped to the phone and asked for Dr. Jefferson’s residence. True, the doctor had told him not to phone—but the circumstances had changed.

He had to wait a bit, then the screen lighted up—and he found himself staring into the face of the security police lieutenant who had grilled him. The police officer stared back. “Oh, me!” he said in a tired voice, “so you didn’t believe me? Go back to bed; you have to be up in an hour or so.”

Don switched off without saying anything.

So Dr. Jefferson was either dead or still in the hands of the police. Very well; he would assume that the paper came from the doctor—and he would deliver that paper in spite of all the slimily polite stormtroopers New Chicago could muster! The dodge the doctor had apparently used to fake the purpose of the paper caused him to wonder what he could do to cover up its importance. Presently he got his stylus from his pouch, smoothed out the paper, and started a letter. The paper looked enough like writing paper to make a letter on it seem reasonable—it might be writing paper in truth. He started in “Dear Mother and Dad, I got your radiogram this morning and was I excited!” He continued, simply covering space in a sprawling hand and finishing, when he was about to run out of paper, by mentioning an intention to add to the letter and have the whole thing sent off as soon as his ship was in radio range of Mars. He then folded it, tucked it into his wallet, and put the whole into his pouch.

He looked at the clock as he finished. Good heavens! He should be up in an hour; it was hardly worthwhile going to bed. But his eyes were trying to close even as he thought it; he saw that the alarm dial of the bed was graduated from “Gentle Reminder” to “Earthquake”; he picked the extreme setting and crawled in.

He was being bounced around, a blinding light was flashing in his eyes, and a siren was running up and down the scale. Don gradually became aware of himself, scrambled out of bed. Mollified, the bed ceased its uproar.

He decided against breakfast in his room for fear that he might go back to sleep, choosing instead to stumble into his clothes and seek out the hotel’s coffee shop. Four cups of coffee and a solid meal later, checked out and armed with hard money for an autocab, he headed for Gary Station. At the reservation office of Interplanet Lines he asked for his ticket. A strange clerk hunted around, then said, “I don’t see it. It’s not with the security clearances.”

This, Don thought, is the last straw. “Look around. It’s bound to be there”

“But it’s—Wait a moment!” The clerk picked up a slip. “Donald James Harvey? You’re to pick up your ticket in room 4012, on the mezzanine.”

“Why?”

“Search me; I just work here. That’s what it says.”

Mystified and annoyed, Don sought out the room named. The door was plain except for a notice “Walk In”; he did and found himself again facing the security lieutenant of the night before.