Authors: Robert Sheckley
“Confound it!” George muttered, and pressed the leftmost button. The motor of an overhead crane whirred into life. George pursed his lips and pushed another switch. The lights in the factory went off, though the machinery continued to run unabated. George punched wildly at the buttons and managed to get the lights on again. “Hang on!” George cried.
“Aieeeee!” Hob cried as he felt his treacherous muscles let go again and found himself carried to the revolving rollers.
And there he made a discovery.
His feet, though not unusually large, were too big to fit into the two-inch aperture between the rollers. He pushed and kicked against the revolving cylinders with his bound feet. The rollers turned and bumped under him. But there was no way he could be pulled between the cylinders.
Unless it caught his pants leg. Or picked up a shoelace.
No problem with his pants legs. His efforts had hiked them halfway to his knees. But looking down his body, he saw that his left shoelace was untied, the ends flapping free, dancing up and down the cylinders, just missing being caught and pulled in.
“George!” Hob screamed. “Forget about turning it off! Just pull me out of here!”
“I’m coming!” George shouted back, and raced down the stairs to the factory floor.
Hob kept on kicking at the cylinders, his neck craned to watch the flying shoelace of his left sneaker dancing in the air, kicking, kicking, trying to keep it free.
And then the shoelace floated through the air with an almost palpable malevolence, and dropped in between the cylinders.
At that same moment, George had his arms around him and was trying to lift him out of the conveyer-belt bed.
The cylinder took up the shoelace’s slack and began tugging at Hob’s foot.
For a few moments it was a tug of war between George and the cylinders, with Hob’s shoelace as the rope.
Hob remembered at that moment that his shoelace was woven rather than a single strand. He had thought it looked nice.
The damned thing wouldn’t part.
The cylinders were pulling him in foot first.
And then Hob’s sneaker came off and was pulled between the cylinders, and with one final wrench George had him off the conveyer belt, and both men were sprawled on the factory’s grimy floor.
1
1
Back at George’s house, George found a change of clothing for Hob.
“Just old gardening togs,” George said. “But they’ll have to do until we can find something better. And I think my Clark’s will fit you.”
“May I use your phone?” Hob said.
He tried to call Jean-Claude again in Paris. By some miracle, he got him on the first try.
Hob asked, “What’s happening? Where have you been?”
“I thought Nigel has explained it all to you by now.”
“That’s what I’m calling about. Where is Nigel? What’s been happening?”
“Ah,” Jean-Claude said, “then you don’t know about the letter.”
“I know about the letter but not what was in it. Damn it, Jean-Claude, talk!”
Jean-Claude told Hob that soon after Hob had left for Ibiza, a telegram arrived for him. Telegrams always have an air of urgency about them, so Nigel had opened it. As far as Jean-Claude could remember, it was from Santos and had been sent from his island nation of San Isidro. It had complimented Hob on his fine work in the recent case involving Aurora and Max. Santos had been on the other side then, but he had not been personally affected when Hob solved the case. He had been paid for his participation up front, and so was able to watch the events with a certain philosophical attitude that was entirely native to his personality. In any event, the telegram wasn’t about that case. Santos appreciated the fine work Hob and his agency had done. He had a little matter of his own that had recently come up. He didn’t want to discuss it in a telegram or letter, or even on the telephone. But he said that if Hob or one of his men would care to come to San Isidro, he could show him the hospitality of the island and discuss the job with them. If Hob didn’t want it, at least he could enjoy a few days in the sunny Caribbean. He had instructed Cooks Travel in Paris to have an open return ticket to San Isidro prepared and looked forward to Hob’s arrival.
“That’s great,” Hob said. “Why didn’t anyone tell me about this?”
“We tried,” Jean-Claude said. “But you were off in Ibiza trying to find the killer of Stanley Bower. We tried to telephone you at Sandy’s bar, but evidently you never got our message. So Nigel and I discussed it and finally decided that he would go on behalf of the agency and check it out.”
“So Nigel went to San Isidro,” Hob said. “What happened when he arrived?”
“I wish I could tell you,” Jean-Claude said.
But Hob thought he knew; it must have been Santos who set up the deal with Arranque.
George made him a nice cup of tea. The way George explained it, his division, the Future Developments group, had had its eye on the development of soma almost from the start. It was one of the big ones, one of the things that could change the future. But George’s brief was observational only. He was specifically forbidden by law to interfere in any way. After the many disasters of British intelligence, this was the only way a long-range prediction group was allowed to operate.
“I took the liberty of doing something when I saw how things were going,” George said. “I did it for Nigel even more than for you. I had you followed. When I learned where you were, I came after you myself.”
“Many thanks,” Hob said.
“Officially, nothing happened at all. We’re not supposed to interfere. Only observe.”
“What am I supposed to do now?” Hob asked.
“The best thing will be for you to get back to Ibiza,” George said. “I’m counting on you to get Nigel out of this.”
“Nigel’s on Ibiza now?”
“Correct. He’s doing the final supervision of the hanging of the pictures for the big hotel opening tomorrow. I want him out of it, Hob. I’ve telephoned and can’t get through to him. I can’t go through official channels. The Spanish police don’t want to hear about this. But you can tell him. You can do it.”
Hob nodded, though he wasn’t really in the mood for getting into this thing again.
“I’ll run you to the airport myself,” George said.
“Good for you,” Hob said. George’s manner was contagious.
FOUR
Ibiza
1
Hob washed up in the small toilet on his Iberia flight from London to Ibiza. A stewardess even found him a razor, but no shaving cream. He made do with a tiny bar of soap. There was nothing he could do about George’s old gardening togs, however. They would look out of place anywhere but in George’s garden. He resolved to change them at the first opportunity.
The plane landed at Ibiza at just past 1 p.m. Standard Hippie Time: a little too late for what he had planned. He wanted to get to the party for the hotel opening, but he had no invitation. Something told him this was one gate he wouldn’t be able to crash. His only hope was Big Bertha, who he knew had an invitation—and a habit of being late for everything.
A taxi took him from the airport into Ibiza City, snarled its way through the dense summer traffic, negotiated the turns up into the Dalt Villa, and finally left him off a block below Bertha’s flat. Hob hurried to her door and slammed the big iron knocker. No answer. He slammed the knocker a few times more, and, still getting no response, walked out into the street and shouted up to her open windows.
“Bertha! Are you there? It’s Hob.”
After the fifth repetition of this, a tousle-haired adolescent poked his head out of the small restaurant next door and said, “It doesn’t matter if you’re Hob or not. She’s not there.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I saw her drive away. You just missed her.”
“
Carrai!
” Hob said. It was the customary Ibicenco response for anything that goes wrong through no fault of one’s own.
“You musta seen her car as you came up,” the youth said. “It’s that mustard-yellow Simca. Couldn’t miss it.”
Now that he mentioned it, Hob did remember such a car. He had been so fixated on mentally urging the taxi around the hairpins to Bertha’s that he hadn’t noticed Bertha passing.
“Hell and damnation!” Hob said. He looked at the kid and after a moment recognized him. It was Ralphie, Sandra Olson’s second son. He looked about fourteen. There was supposed to be something peculiar about him: Either he was actually twelve and looked old for his age or he was actually seventeen and looked young for his age. Hob couldn’t remember which.
“What are you doing here, Ralphie?” Hob asked.
“I work in the kitchen. It’s a summer job, until school starts again.”
“I really need to get hold of Bertha,” Hob said.
“You got a car? She doesn’t drive very fast. You might catch up to her if you know where she’s going.”
Hob shook his head. “No car. I’ll have to go back down to the Pena and find a taxi.”
“Where’s she going?”
“The new hotel opening in San Mateo.”
“If you had a dirt bike,” Ralphie said, “you could catch her before she got there.”
“A what?”
“You know, a scrambler. An off-road motorcycle. Once you’re out of the city, you could take a shortcut over the hills.”
“I don’t have a dirt bike.”
“I do. And I’m for hire.”
“What about your job here?”
“Pablo will cover for me. A thousand pesetas. Is it a deal?”
“You’re on,” Hob said.
Ralphie went back inside the restaurant. There was a gabble of high-speed Ibicenco. Then Ralphie came out again wheeling a fire-red Bultaco Matador 250cc motorcycle with knobby wheels and high fenders. He kicked it into life. The machine’s roar, there in the narrow street, echoing off the close-packed buildings, was deafening.
“Climb aboard,” Ralphie said.
Hob had a moment to doubt the wisdom of riding with a high-school kid or perhaps younger who knew he was in a hurry. Still, what else was there to do? He got on—and grabbed Ralphie in time to prevent falling over backward as the boy gunned the machine.
They sped down the slick, steeply tilted, cobblestoned streets of the upper city, cutting through a back lane on their way, taking corners heeled over like a sailboat in a gale. The motorcycle had no horn, but pedestrians scattered at the high-pitched bellow of its motor. Twice Hob’s feet were jarred off the back pegs, and he had to struggle to stay aboard. The square-vented exhaust housing was close to his thigh, and he had to stay on without frying. They finally got through town without killing themselves or anyone else, even managing to avoid an Ibicenco hound sunning itself on the sidewalk they had to cut across to avoid oncoming cars as they plunged peremptorily onto the main road.
It was a little better after that. At least it was level. Ralphie twisted the throttle to its stop and held it there, and the motorcycle howled up the two-lane road. But the Bultaco wasn’t a road bike and couldn’t do much better than 80 miles an hour or so, so it wasn’t quite as dangerous as it sounded.
“Neat, huh?” Ralphie screamed over his shoulder.
“Keep your eyes on the road!” Hob screamed back.
They drove at full bore for about fifteen minutes, until they came to where the road divided, the right fork going to Santa Eulalia, the left to Santa Gertrudis, San Mateo, and San Juan. Ralphie took the left fork. Just a few minutes up the road he slowed and turned onto a dirt road that led across the hills instead of winding around as the main road did. It was a pretty good road, and if you ignored the possible danger of meeting horse-driven carts around blind curves, as Ralphie did, you could make pretty good time. The road leveled out on top of the hill, and they turned off again, speeding through a sparse pine forest and dodging the odd boulder that nature had set down for the purpose of providing a slalom course for aspiring motocross drivers. Then Ralphie braked hard, bringing the bike to a stop on a hilltop. He pointed to his left and down. A few hundred feet below, Hob could the see hotel’s private road, with Bertha’s mustard-yellow Simca—or one just like it—stopped at a little one room cement-block house that stood just beside an entrance cut through a high masonry wall. Hob could see the uniformed guard at the gate checking something, Bertha’s invitation no doubt, and then waving her through.
“Well, we almost made it,” Ralphie said. “I coulda brought us down this hill in about two minutes. Wanna try anyway?”
Hob looked at the hill, which was pitched at an angle that looked impossible even for a downhill skier, and thanked his lucky stars they hadn’t arrived five minutes earlier.
“What I want you to do now,” Hob said, “is take me, slowly, to where the hotel road joins the San Mateo road. I’m too late to catch Bertha, but somebody I know is sure to come along.”
Ralphie drove back over the hills to the main road, and then down it to where the hotel road crossed. He seemed sorry that the adventure was over. But the thousand peseta note that Hob gave him, and the extra five hundred he threw in for good luck, cheered him considerably. Ralphie took off in a cloud of dust and a sparkling of gravel; Hob found a rock by the side of the road and sat down to wait.