"There won't be anybody there."
"I see. Right. In five minutes."
I left the office at once to walk to The Copper Beech.
At the door Tommy grabbed my lapels in his eagerness to tell me something.
"She just passed again, Mr. Mathers. If you hurry you'll catch up with
her."
"Thanks, Tommy," I said, released myself and went out into the mid-morning
sun.
Fifty yards ahead was the girl in the pink suit. Although I could see only
her back, there was no doubt whatever that she was Snow White. Her slim,
smoothly rolling hips were only one of the assets of a one-in-a-million
shape to go with her one-in-a-million face; it would have been a crime
to cover legs like hers with the sheerest nylons.
One small surprise: I wouldn't have expected such a girl to wear the same
outfit two days running.
Since she was alone this time, I'd have hurried after her and stopped
her. But it wasn't necessary. Glancing over her shoulder she saw me,
and making no pretense that she didn't know me from Adam, stopped and
leaned against a lamp standard to wait for me.
As I approached, her shoulders were suddenly bare. This time I saw more
clearly what happened, when it happened. Out of the corner of my eye I
still saw the lower part of her jacket and her skirt. It was as if my
gaze had burned a hole in her clothes.
There were a few people in the street, and some of them were staring. For
the most part, however, they seemed to be pretending that they hadn't
noticed anything. (This was Shuteley.)
When I was ten feet away Snow White's jacket was complete again, but
her skirt was abbreviated to playsuit length. Then she wore the whole
suit again except for a large circular cut-out round her navel.
Cut-out wasn't quite the right word. Material and flesh merged into each
other like candlelight and shadows.
More than her blue-black hair had made me think of her as Snow White. Her
flesh all over -- and by this time I'd seen quite a lot of it, in
aggregate -- was pale and creamy, and in this summer that was a rare
achievement. None of the giants was pale. Every one of them was tanned,
some lightly, some quite heavily.
She was with the giants but not of them.
I stopped. "Hello," I said.
She smiled.
"I'm Val Mathers," I said, "as I suspect you know very well."
I scored a point with this. Her eyes widened, and she asked: "What makes
you say that?"
"You recognized me in the bar last night."
She nodded, admitting it. But she added nothing, admitting no more.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"Miranda."
"Just Miranda?"
Her suit, oddly enough, was not changing any more. Perhaps what one
saw depended on the angle of vision. Moved by a spirit of experiment,
I stretched out my hand to touch her waist . . .
. . . She struck my hand hard, though without malice. "Wait for
an invitation," she said coolly, and turned and walked away, to my
disappointment. I had expected more from the encounter.
From the back, like the other girl, she wore perfectly normal clothes.
I found Gil in The Copper Beech. Although the lounge was not as empty
as it had been the previous evening, only half a dozen people were there.
We sat in the corner where the campers had sat the evening before,
and we had it to ourselves.
Gil and I were the same height and weight, and at one time had resembled
one another. Now he had thick glasses and a permanent leave-me-alone
frown, and I hoped I didn't look remotely like him.
Gil could have done anything. That is, he had the theoretical ability to
do almost anything. In practice he had achieved nothing and never would.
Being sensitive myself, I understood him better than anyone else except
possibly Barbara. But nobody could do anything for him. He couldn't do
anything for himself.
The slightest criticism, the merest breath of condemnation, even meant
as a jest, deeply wounded him. He was a bleeder. Scratch him, and he
bled for days. If he made a genuine mistake, it took him a month to
recover from it. But it didn't even have to be genuine. Someone merely
had to hint that something, anything he'd done was a stupid thing to do,
and he'd start to bleed slowly, silently.
Of course he defended himself. He spent his life and all his vast potential
defending himself against attack, when he wasn't being attacked.
I was nearly as sorry for him as for myself. What was the use of being
a near-genius when a casual remark by an office-boy could mean a month
of misery for you?
Gil had married Barbara, another moody genius, who sketched and sculpted
and wrote poetry and flatly refused ever to go further than five miles
from the village green. She had roots, apparently.
"What do you know, Val?" Gil asked abruptly, when the waitress had
brought our beers. "What do you think is going on?"
I took out a penny. "Let's toss for first innings," I said. Gil lost,
and I put him in first.
"A gang of kids have been hanging round the house," he said. "They seem
very interested in Garry."
Garry was Gil's two-year-old son. He was an only child and was going
to remain so for two excellent reasons. Barbara couldn't have any more
children, and neither -- as he had told me one moresely drunken night
when we were both feeling sorry for ourselves -- could Gil.
"Can I have Dina?" he asked. "She'd be company for Barbara."
So that was it. "Jota's coming," I reminded him. "And he wants to stay
with you."
"With us?" Gil was astonished. "You've got a great big house. We only
have . . . "
He stopped.
They had an outside lavatory. The wooden stairs up to their flat were
so worn that they looked as if they'd been carved curved. The floors
creaked and were uneven . . . when houses had been revalued a year or
two back, nearly everybody's valuation, including ours, was doubled,
at least. Gil's had been halved -- human beings weren't supposed to live
in such conditions any more.
Although as a bank clerk Gil didn't make a great deal of money, others
in his position, married with one child, managed to live far, more
comfortably. But neither Gil nor Barbara was remotely practical. They
bought things they thought they needed, but didn't. They didn't buy
things they did need.
"We can manage, I suppose," he said stiffly.
"You still want Dina?"
"Yes. I have to go to work, and Barbara's nervous."
"Dina won't be much help."
Gil shrugged impatiently. He was always impatient when anyone didn't
instantly understand him, even though he had not supplied all the
essential information.
"I don't think they mean any harm, the kids. Maybe they won't even come
back. It's just that Barbara's alone in the house all day . . . I thought
of Dina because she doesn't go out much. And if Jota's there . . . "
He let that hang, and I didn't take it off the hook. As far as we knew
Jota had only once broken trust with either of us in that particular
way. Gil knew what had happened -- Sheila had said something to Barbara.
The idea of Jota making a pass at Barbara seemed fantastic to me, but
it probably didn't seem so fantastic to Gil.
"All right," I said. "I'll ask her."
Rather surprisingly, Dina got on quite well with both Gil and Barbara.
Moody geniuses don't like competition or criticism, and Dina never gave
them any.
We said no more about Jota. Barbara would cling to
Dina, and away from me, away from Sheila (whom she
really trusted in a peculiar way) Dina would stick to the
one person she knew.
"There's something else about those kids," Gil said. "They came into
the bank and changed some money. Silver into notes. I was the only one
to notice a certain very strange thing, and for some reason I didn't
point it out to anyone else."
Gil felt in his pocket and produced two half-crowns, two florins, two
shillings. He made no comment, so I examined them.
It wasn't hard to get the point. The half-crowns were both fairly shiny,
dated 1961. The florins were old and worn, dated 1935. The shillings were
dated 1952.
"I see what you mean," I said.
"Do you?" He sounded skeptical. Gil, with his inflated IQ, could never
believe that anyone else had more capacity for putting two and two
together than . . . well, Dina.
I looked more closely, One half-crown had an infinitesimal scratch across
the Queen's hair. So had the other. The milling on the florins was
identical, particularly worn just below the date.
"There were a lot more of these?"
"Yes."
"Any notes?" I asked.
"No. Well?"
He was challenging me to reach his own conclusion.
I said: "I know why you didn't point this out."
"Do you?"
"They must be forgeries, of course. Forgeries so good they'd be hard to
detect, and won't ever be detected now that they're mixed with other
coins and the duplication isn't significant. Notes weren't forged,
or duplicated, because the numbers would eventually give them away."
Gil nodded with reluctant respect. "And why didn't I point it out?"
"Because you're responsible. This might mean trouble. If you let it go,
it can't possibly mean trouble."
"Clever," he sneered. "Now tell me why it was done."
"They needed money, so they made it," I said.
He sniffed, but didn't pursue the topic. Instead, he said: "Tell me what
you know."
I told him. I came last to the brief encounter with Miranda.
His eyes gleamed.
"The ultimate in provocation," he said.
"What do you mean?"
"Could it be simpler? The impact of any outfit any girl wears lasts
about five minutes. After she's taken off her jacket and you see the
lowest low-cut neckline you ever saw, after you've had a good look,
she might as well put the jacket on."
I must have looked unimpressed for he went on in a torrent of words to
develop the theme.
"Does anybody stare at the Grammar School senior girls in their little
white pants, except wistful old men? But let them put on skirts and ride
bicycles in a breeze . . . A pretty girl peels to a bikinl, and every
man on the beach stares. For a while. Then she puts on a beach wrap,
leaves it unfastened, and they stare again every time it falls open."
"I never thought of that," I said.
He gaped at me. "You never thought of it? Ten minutes after viewing the
delectable Miranda you've just been describing?"
"I was too busy doubting my own sanity. But I see what you mean now."
And I did. Successful strippers don't just take their clothes off. They
tantalize, And what could be more tantalizing than a luxon dress? What
greater inducement to look could there be than not knowing what you're
liable to see?
Gil had hit on a good phrase -- 'the ultimate in provocation.'
Current fashion wasn't anywhere near the ultimate in provocation. Indeed,
with untidy, too-long hair, tight jeans and loose sweaters, long pointed
flat shoes, unnatural makeup and too-short skirts on the wrong girls,
teenage glamour had never hit a lower low.
This kind of thing was nothing remotely like current fashion.
"Where are they from?" I murmured. "Outer space?"
The complete absence of reaction showed that I was not expressing any
idea completely new to Gil. And he was the most confirmed skeptic in
Shuteley . . .
I had meant to go home for lunch and ask Dina if she'd like to go and
stay with the Carswells for a while, but I hadn't phoned Sheila to warn
her, and it was just as well.
As I left the office, Miranda fell into step with me and asked: "Care
to buy me lunch?"
It was a question that needed no answer.
I took her to the Red Lion, partly through lack of choice and partly
because the idea of sitting opposite her in a stall all to ourselves
was anything but unattractive.
She was not wearing the pink suit. She wore a silvery gray dress that
didn't disappear, and she was still sensational.
She must, if the camp was the giants only base, have gone straight there
and come straight back.
As we sat down, I said: "I waited."
"For what?"
"An invitation."
She smiled a faint smile and said: "This is a different kind of
invitation."
"What are you going to tell me, Miranda?" I asked.
"Why are you so sure I'm going to tell you anything?"
"Because the only reasons you could have for being here with me now are
to tell me something or ask me something -- and I have a feeling that
I couldn't tell you much you don't know."
"There could be another."
"Such as?"
"Interest in you. I might be curious what you're like. Anyway -- what
would you like to know?"
"Where do you and your friends come from?"
"Here," she said, as Greg had done.
The waitress interrupted us then, and when she left with our order
Miranda moved back a square.
"I'll tell you one reason why I wanted to lunch with you, if you like."
"Why?"
"I want you to introduce me to Jota."
I might have guessed. In this crazy business, one thing could be expected
to be unchanged -- that Snow White would instantly be drawn to the prince.
"What do you know about Jota?" I said.
She merely smiled and shrugged.
"Greg called him Clarence Mulliner," I observed.
She sat up quickly. "Greg? When were you talking to Greg?"
"This morning. He came to see me."
She was angry, I saw, and perhaps afraid. It was an excellent chance,
and I hoped I'd be able to take it. The possibility that I might be
able to play Snow White against Giant No. 1 had not until that moment
occurred to me.
The less I said, and the more Miranda said, the better.
"What did he want?" she asked sharply.
"Amusement, I suppose. He wanted to insure against catastrophe here in
Shuteley in the next twenty-four hours."
"The vandal," she breathed.
"Vandal?" That was interesting. It hadn't eccurred to me that Greg might
be trying to insure against disaster and then cause it.
"You wouldn't understand."
"Of course not. I understand very little."
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be rude."
And then, with a baffling switch that took the wind out of my sails, she
smiled and said: "It doesn't matter anyway. Greg's a fool, a dangerous,
megalomaniac, irresponsible fool . . . but it doesn't matter."
Rallying, I said: "Why not? Because we don't matter? Because we don't
live in the same country as you? The same world? The same dimension? The
same time?"
Most inopportunely, the waitress brought our soup (brown windsor,
of course).
When she had gone, I asked: "How old are you, Miranda?"