“Oh, you know Ben,” she said. “He won’t tell you but a little bit at a time. He claims you don’t need to know, but what he’s really doing is making your curiosity get up on its hind legs and beg for his tidbits. But he did finally tell me I’ll be rejoining you after tomorrow’s examinations. My hearing before the Atomic Energy commissioner is Tuesday.”
“Why not Monday?” he asked.
“Monday is the Memorial Day holiday,” she answered.
He had failed to remember the holiday because he was wondering about Slade’s possession of his profile, where it had come from, who had evaluated it, and how it had provided him with a free entry into Kyra’s boudoir.
Slade was waiting in Breedlove’s room when the ranger returned, and Slade’s debriefing procedure was to rub his hands together expectantly, grin, and say, “Okay, Breedlove, tell me all about it.”
Breedlove hung his coat in the closet, straightened its drape on the hanger, removed his tie and hung it in the closet, unbuttoned his shirt, and said, “I know you’ve got top clearance, Slade, but this report is on my own ‘need-to-know’ basis which I call tit for tat. If you want the details of my wild evening with Kyra, you’ve first got to tell me what it was in my profile that earned me the right to share her living quarters?”
“Boy howdy, this is going to be fun. I know more about you, son, than your mother knows, which is a break for her. You’ll remember you took a placement test for your ranger’s job. It was comprehensive enough to draw up your profile from. Naturally when you showed up here, I ran a make on you, and the psychologist who wrote you up should have been jailed for purveying hard-core pornography. One interesting little kink of yours is that you have Oedipal fixations on trees. Seems your mother put your crib under one when you were a baby, and you thought the tree was your mammy. There’s many a lumberjack who identifies his father with a tree and goes around axing his old man down, but you’re the first man in the history of psychological testing with strong Oedipal longings toward trees. Boy, you’re a knothole Casanova if there ever was one!”
Slade took such obvious relish in detailing a profile as unlikely as Laudermilk’s history of the Breedlove name that Breedlove could not restrain a smile of sympathetic glee.
“When I spotted your little kink,” Slade continued, “I wanted to check it against a bend in Kyra’s chart. I fed the two profiles into a dating computer, and when the kinks connected with the transistors, the computer shook, rattled, and rolled. It’s a perfect blend of compatibilities. Kyra has an Electra complex toward trees. To top it off, you both observe a code of sexual ethics that went out of style in 1889. For reasons you don’t need to know, we have to protect our heroine from ‘a fate worse than death,’ and you’ve got just the right morality for the job. Also, her high regard for you might affect her political judgment of the United States, and, if it comes down to it, leave her feeling kindlier toward all the earth.”
“Well, thanks for reposing special trust and confidence in my discriminating libido, Slade, but we may have a problem.” He told of Kyra’s remarks about the defensive capabilities of her spaceship, and Slade listened intently, dropping his burlesqued role of the uproarious Texan as quickly as he had donned it.
“She could still be bluffing,” he mused aloud, “but I don’t think so. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter to you and me, since we want what she wants. But she’s wrong if she thinks we’re not aware of her threat to the planet. I am. Now, what’s this thing behind her ear?”
“Oh, that. It’s just a simple device that permits her to hear and interpret high-frequency sounds.”
“You think that’s simple?” Slade’s question did not demand an answer. He was thinking. Then he whistled, low and thoughtfully, slapped his thigh in agreement with some inner argument, and stood up, saying with a note of exultation, “Boy, we don’t have to worry about the Navy’s vote any more. Our little lady’s given us a chance to grab Harper by the whingding.”
He turned from the room so excited and preoccupied with his plans he forgot to tell Breedlove good night.
On Friday morning, at the Federal Building, Breedlove lectured the scientists who had interrogated Kyra Thursday afternoon. After lunch he was walking back to the ready room when Harper stopped him in the passageway. “There’ll be no afternoon session, Ranger Breedlove.”
“What happened to my Friday-morning group?”
“That’s a national security matter.”
Vaguely curious about the cancellation, Breedlove drove back to the motel, and when he pulled into the parking lot he saw immediately that the lot was almost empty. The explanation came when he got to the desk and found a note from Slade.
Breedlove, I’m gone. Your baggage has been transferred to the bridal suite. You sleep in the ready room and give Kyra the recovery room. See you Tuesday.
B.S.
He had not noticed before how appropriate Slade’s initials were, and he knew when he read the note that he would not see Slade Tuesday. Slade used cover stories as a conditioned reflex, and the only thing one could be sure of about a cover story was that it was not true. Also Slade’s absence explained why there had been no afternoon lecture to Kyra’s interviewers—there had been no Friday interviews. Kyra had left Seattle and her entire security force had gone with her, with one exception, Breedlove.
He went upstairs to inspect his new lodgings and found them rather unusual for a family motel. The suite held two bedrooms separated by a spacious living room containing in addition to the standard furnishings a small open-leaf table for intimate dining and a sparsely stocked bookshelf. The living room opened onto a balcony directly above the swimming pool. Flanking and overarching the balcony, the artificial coconut palms gave a tropical touch to the scene.
He easily determined from Slade’s title, “the ready room,” which of the two bedrooms was his. It had red carpets, orange walls, and purple drapes. Long, phallicized bedlamps on two-ball bases flanked the king-sized bed, and a bifurcated rump pillow of hymen pink lay atop the purple bedspread. A huge mirror was anchored to the ceiling above the bed. Kyra’s bedroom was more tastefully decorated, and her bathroom was entered through a large dressing room.
As it developed, he would have almost six days to grow inured to the bedroom’s ghastliness, and each day added an increment to his loneliness and anxiety in the semi-deserted building. Each day of Kyra’s absence postponed her hearing, and he could sense the solstice rushing down on the northern hemisphere like an express train.
He augmented the collection of books on the shelf by shopping at used-book stores, balancing the Bible with
The Golden Bough
,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
with
Gone with the Wind
. He felt somewhat sheepish for shopping at the literary equivalent of a Salvation Army counter for so elegant a girl as Kyra, but he had decided to buy her the Polinski Creation, and he had to save money somewhere.
Once on a book-buying expedition he splurged, getting her a brand-new Pelican edition of Shakespeare and a copy of Bulfinch’s
Mythology
. On the flyleaf of the latter, he wrote, “Kyra, read about Merope on page 186. That is you. T.B.”
Evenings he spent mostly in the bar, nursing a drink and talking woods lore with a bartender who was a summer outdoorsman and who seemed particularly entertained by Breedlove’s tales of the Quinault Indians. On Wednesday he called Abe Cohen, who assured him the hearing would “probably be sometime this week.”
“The week’s half gone and they haven’t brought her back. Aren’t they dragging their feet?”
“Not as much as usual. If they held the hearing in mid—June, it’d be setting a track record.”
On Thursday morning he was awakened by Kyra tweaking his toes beneath the covers and calling, “ ‘Up, lad; thews that lie and cumber sunlit pallets never thrive.’ ”
He jackknifed to a sitting position to see her seated crosslegged at the foot of his bed, wearing navy-blue slacks and a white sailor’s tunic unbuttoned at the neck to reveal a golden tan. She had pulled the drapes, and sunlight flooded the room.
“Who’s been quoting Housman to you?”
“A cute little bluejacket in Diego.”
“What were you doing in San Diego?”
“The Navy is training porpoises for undersea rescue operations and wanted me to analyze their language with my acoustic converter.”
So here had been the reason for Slade’s exultation,—he had instantly spotted a use for the device that would gain Kyra the Navy’s vote.
“Were you able to talk with the dolphins?”
“Oh, yes. They have a simple language, mostly sailor talk, ‘Ahoy, there… Man overboard… Watch out for the doggamned propellers!’ I didn’t eat on the plane, Breedlove, so we could eat together, and I’ve ordered breakfast sent up.”
“Thank you. That’s a beautiful tan. Your complexion would let you pass for any ordinary, shapely, indescribably charming earth woman.”
“I got lots of sun. That’s a fantastic collection of books in the living room, and I’ll kiss you for comparing me to Merope as soon as you’re shaved.” She arched her neck and looked up at the mirror above his bed. “What an odd place for a mirror!” Then she looked at him, almost accusingly, and said, “Breedlove, you belong to a weird species. Now, get shaved and dressed. Breakfast will be here in fifteen minutes.”
He emerged into the living room only a few moments before a maid wheeled a serving table in and unfolded the leaf table. She was about Kyra’s age and size. Her coppery skin, twin-plaited black hair, and the slogging motion of feet accustomed to moccasins told him she was Indian, but there was about her too a tantalizing familiarity. He studied her covertly until a memory returned to him of a little girl, five years ago, on the Quinault Indian Reservation, the sister of the youth who had acted as Breedlove’s guide.
“Fawn Davies! How did you get here?”
She was pleased that he recognized her.
“I was going to beauty school,” she told him, “and yesterday a man came in and hired me for this job. When I get here each morning, Mr. Slade wants you and me to exchange a few remarks in the language of my people.”
“Why does the chief warrior wish this?” he asked her in the Quinault dialect.
“He fears a warrior greater than he from beyond the sunset who might come to take Kyra wearing my face,” Fawn answered in her tongue.
“Can you imagine,” he turned to Kyra, “that Slade’s afraid some Oriental disguised as Fawn might slip into these quarters and kidnap you?”
“Fear is Ben’s stock in trade,” she said. “When he can’t find it, he invents it.”
Over breakfast she described her excursion to San Diego, where she had been taken out to sea in a Navy barge to swim with trained dolphins. “They have a terrific sense of humor and really love one another—or any other mammal that gets in loving distance.”
Her skittering, breathless narrative was interrupted by three quick raps on the door. Slade entered, carrying a briefcase. In Kyra’s presence the security chief’s manner was courtly. He inquired about her breakfast with the interest of a chef inquiring about his own culinary creation and asked if her new quarters met with her approval.
“Our rooms are lovely, but you’ve taken my horizon and given me two potted palms.”
“You’ll not have to tolerate them long, ma’am. Your hearing is tomorrow at ten, and you’ve won the Navy vote with the dolphin caper. The commissioner’s name is Hunsaker. He has the power to veto your request, but he won’t, because the committee’s going to okay it and Hunsaker’s too cautious to assume sole responsibility for the committee’s action. He’ll forward the approval to the President, who can okay it or hand it back to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, but he should approve it. You may get a ‘No’ vote from Norcross, who commands the North American Air Defense. He once bragged that an acorn couldn’t fall in his air space without showing on his radar. Now that you’ve landed a spaceship undetected, the scrambled eggs he used to wear on his hat are on his face,—but if you can charm him into a ‘Yes’ vote, it’ll make the President’s approval easier. Your permit should be signed by Tuesday, and you should be on your way by Wednesday.”
Listening to the quiet confidence in Slade’s words, Breedlove felt no elation. Instead he felt sad and morose over Kyra’s imminent departure. He was not alone in his dejection.
Three tentative raps sounded on the door, and Kyra called, “Come in, Little Richard.”
Turpin entered, greeted the group, and Kyra said, “Pull up a chair while I pour you coffee. Ben tells me I’ll be leaving Wednesday.”
“I wish you would stay with us,” Turpin said. “The world has need of you.”
“Now for the best news of all,” Slade said, opening his briefcase and speaking directly to Kyra. “To get a seat at the petition hearing, the State Department has designated you a ‘head of state.’ That status entitles you to a credit card issued by State. The cover story is that you and Breedlove are newlyweds in town on your honeymoon. You’ll have the freedom of the city under covert surveillance, which means you’ll be guarded unobtrusively. As your husband, Breedlove will carry the credit card, but you’ll have control of the purchases, and whatever you buy will be a gift to you from the people of the United States.”
It was a subtle ploy to cement Kyra’s allegiance to the country, Breedlove felt, but it was nevertheless generous.
“We’re off to Mason’s, Breedlove,” Kyra said, “to buy you know what.”
“For you, Breedlove, there’s one proviso,” Slade began, shuffling through his papers, when Laudermilk entered without knocking and said, “Good morning, folks. This cat’s come to look at the queen.”
“Take a seat on the sofa, Gravy,” Kyra said, “and pour yourself a cup of coffee.”
Slade had taken a document from his papers and began to read: “ ‘At all time the head of state’s escort will observe appropriate behavior in the presence of the visiting dignitary, showing proper deference to the emissary’s status—’ ”
“That means no hanky-panky, Breedlove.” Laudermilk interjected.
“ ‘—and at all times his manner shall be friendly, helpful, cheerful, and reserved.’ ”