Monsters in Orbit Page 8

  “Nothing’s like what I thought it would be,” said Jean. “Clothes…” She looked down at her dark green slacks, her black pullover sweater. “These are good enough. Men…” Mycroft watched her attentively. “They’re all the same, silly jackasses.”

  Mycroft made a small involuntary grimace, settled himself in his chair. At fifty he was three times her age.

  “The lovers are bad,” said Jean, “but I’m used to them, I’ve never lacked there. But the other ones, the financiers, the sharp-shooters—they upset me. Like spiders.”

  Mycroft made haste to explain. “It’s inevitable. They’re after anyone with wealth. Cranks—promoters—confidence men —they won’t leave you alone. Refer them to me. As your guardian I can dispose of them quickly.”

  “When I was poor,” said Jean mournfully, “I wanted so many things. And now—” she swung out her arms in a gesture of abandon “—I can buy and buy and buy. And I don’t want anything. I can have anything I want, and it’s almost as if I had it already…I’d rather like to make some more money…I guess what I’ve got is like the first taste of blood to a wolf.”

  Mycroft sat back in alarm. “My dear girl, that’s the occupational disease of old men! Not for a—”

  Jean said fretfully, “You act, Mr. Mycroft, as if I’m not human.” This was true; Mycroft instinctively behaved toward Jean as he might toward a beautiful, alarming and unpredictable animal.

  “It’s not that I especially want more money…I suppose the fact is that I’m bored.”

  Worse and worse, thought Mycroft. Bored people got into mischief. Desperately he searched his mind. “Ah—there’s always the theater. You could finance a production and perhaps you’d like to act in it yourself?”

  “Pish,” said Jean. “Bunch of fakers!”

  “You might go to school?”

  “It sounds very tiring, Mr. Mycroft.”

  “I suppose it would be…”

  “I’m not the scholastic type. And there’s something else on my mind. It’s probably foolish and pointless, but I can’t seem to get away from it. I’d like to know about my father and mother…I’ve always felt bitter toward them—but suppose I have been kidnaped or stolen? If that were the case, they’d be glad to see me.”

  Mycroft privately considered such a possibility unlikely. “Well, that’s perfectly normal and natural. Well put an investigator on the trail. As I recall, you were abandoned in a saloon on one of the outer worlds.”

  Jean’s eyes had become hard and bright. “At Joe Parlier’s Aztec Tavern. Angel City on Codiron.”

  “Codiron,” said Mycroft. “Yes, I know that district very well. As I recall, it’s not a large world nor very populous.”

  “If it’s like it was when I left—which was seven years ago—it’s backward and old-fashioned. But never mind the investigator. I’d like to look around myself.”

  Mycroft opened his mouth to cluck disapproval when the door slid back and Ruth, Mycroft’s receptionist, looked in.

  “Dr. Cholwell to see you.” She glanced sharply sidewise at Jean.

  “Cholwell?” grunted Mycroft. “I wonder what he wants.”

  “He said that you arranged to have lunch with him.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Show him in.”

  With a final hard glance at Jean, Ruth left the room. Jean said, “Ruth doesn’t like me.”

  Mycroft moved in his chair, embarrassed. “Don’t mind her. She’s been with me close to twenty years…I suppose the sight of a pretty girl in my office disturbs her sense of fitness. Especially—” his ears colored “—one that I take such an interest in.”

  Jean smiled faintly. “Someday I’ll let her find me sitting in your lap.”

  “No,” said Mycroft, arranging the papers on his desk. “I don’t think you’d better.”

  Cholwell came briskly into the room—a man Mycroft’s age, lean, bright-eyed, elegant in a jerky bird-like manner. He had a sharp chin, a handsome ruff of silver-gray hair, a long sensitive nose. He was precisely dressed, and on his finger Jean glimpsed the golden orb insignia of the Space-Dwellers Association.

  Jean looked away, aware that she did not like Cholwell.

  Cholwell stared at Jean, patently amazed. His mouth fell open. He took a short step forward. “What are you doing here?” he asked harshly.

  Jean looked at him with wonder. “I’m just talking to Mr. Mycroft…Does it matter?”

  Cholwell closed his eyes, shook his head as if he were about to faint.

  II

  Cholwell sank into a chair. “Excuse me,” he muttered. “I need a pill…It’s my little trouble—souvenir of a chlorosis bout in the Mendassir sloebanks.” He stole another look at Jean, then pulled his eyes away. His lips moved as if he were silently reciting verse.

  Mycroft said tartly, “My ward, Miss Parlier. Dr. Cholwell.”

  Cholwell regained his composure. “I’m charmed to make your acquaintance.” He turned to Mycroft. “You never mentioned such a lovely young obligation.”

  “Jean’s a recent addition. The court appointed me to take care of her money.” He said to Jean, “Cholwell hails from your comer of space, at least the last I knew.” He turned back to Cholwell. “You’re still out at the Rehabilitation Home?”

  Cholwell tore his eyes away from Jean. “Not precisely. Yes and no. I live on the old premises, but the Home has been abandoned—oh, a long time.”

  “Why in heaven’s name do you hang on then? As I recall, it’s a God-forsaken bleak hole.”

  Cholwell complacently shook his head. “I don’t find it so. The scenery is grand, monumental. And then—well, I have a little venture which keeps me busy.”

  “Venture?”

  Cholwell looked out the window. “I’m, ah, raising chickens. Yes.” He nodded. “Chickens.” His gaze alternated between Jean and Mycroft. “Indeed, I can offer you opportunity for an excellent investment.”

  Mycroft grunted. Cholwell continued easily.

  “No doubt you’ve heard tales of a hundred percent profit and thought them pretty wild. Well, naturally I can’t go quite that far. To be utterly frank, I’m not sure just what will eventuate. Perhaps nothing. My operation is still experimental; I’m short of capital, you see.”

  Mycroft stuffed his pipe with tobacco. “You’ve come to the wrong place, Cholwell.” He struck a match, puffed. “But— out of curiosity—just what is your operation?”

  Cholwell wet his lips, gazed an instant at the ceiling. “Well, it’s modest enough. I’ve evolved a strain of chickens which prospers remarkably. I want to erect a modem plant. With the proper backing I can deliver chickens around all the Orion Circuit at a price no domestic supplier can meet.”

  Jean said doubtfully, “I should think that Codiron would be too cold and windy for chickens.”

  Cholwell shook his head. “I’m in a warm spot under the Balmoral Mountains. One of the old Trotter sites.”

  “Oh.”

  “What I’m leading up to is this. I want to take you out on an inspection tour of the premises and you can see for yourself. There’ll be no obligation, none whatever.”

  Mycroft leaned back, looked Cholwell coolly up and down. “Isn’t this rather an impulsive offer?”

  Jean said, “I’ve been thinking of going out to Angel City for a visit—”

  Mycroft rattled papers on his desk. “It sounds good, Cholwell. I hope you make out. But I’ve tied Jean’s funds up in conservative stuff. She finds her income completely adequate. As far as I’m concerned personally, I’m lucky to pay the rent. So—”

  “Of course, of course,” said Cholwell. “I’m too hasty, too enthusiastic. It runs away with me at times.” He rubbed his chin with his fingers. “You’re acquainted with Codiron, Miss Parlier?”

  “I was bom in Angel City.”

  Doctor Cholwell nodded. “Not far from my own holdings…When do you plan to make your visit? Perhaps I could…” His voice faded politely, as if he were proffering anything Jean could lay her mind
to. ^

  “I’m not sure when I’ll be going out…In the near future.”

  Cholwell nodded. “Well, I’ll hope to see you again, and perhaps show you around and explain the scope of my work, and then—”

  Jean shook her head. “I’m not really interested in chickens—except in the eating line. And anyway Mr. Mycroft has been put in charge of my money. I’m a minor, I’m-not supposed to be responsible. So charm Mr. Mycroft, don’t waste it on me.”

  Cholwell took no offense. He nodded gravely. “Well, it’s definitely a speculation, and I know Mycroft has to be careful.” He looked at his watch. “What about lunch, Mycroft?”

  “Ill meet you downstairs in ten minutes.”

  Cholwell rose to his feet. “Good.” He bowed to Jean. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you.”

  After he had departed, Mycroft sank back into his chair, puffed reflectively at his pipe. “Rather an odd chap, old Cholwell. There’s a good brain under that fancy exterior, although you wouldn’t expect it…It sounds as if he might have a good proposition with his chickens.”

  “Codiron’s awfully windy and cold,” said Jean doubtfully. “A planet like Emeraud or Beau Aire would be better.” She considered the far worlds, and all the strange sights, colors, sounds, the mysterious ruins, the bizarre peoples, came rushing into her mind.

  In sudden excitement she jumped to her feet.

  “Mr. Mycroft, I’m going to leave on the next packet.”

  “That’s tonight.”

  Jean’s face fell. “The next after, then.”

  Mycroft expressionlessly knocked the charge out of his pipe. “I know better than to interfere.”

  Jean patted his shoulder. “You’re really a nice man, Mr. Mycroft. I wish I were as nice as you are.”

  Looking into the glowing face, Mycroft knew that there would be no more work for him this day.

  “Now I’ve got to run,” said Jean. “Ill go right down and book passage.” She stretched. “Oh heavens, Mr. Mycroft, I feel better already!”

  She left the office, gay and swift as the red Moon-chaser which she had watched across the sky.

  Mycroft silently put away his papers, rose to his feet, bent over the communicator.

  “Ruth, if there’s anything urgent I’ll be at the club this afternoon, probably in the steam room.”

  Ruth nodded indignantly to herself. “Little minx! Why won’t she stay away, keep to herself? Poor old Mycroft,…”

  III

  A community fading from life is a dismal place. The streets become barren of people; the air swims clear overhead with lifeless serenity; the general aspect is between gray and dirty brown. Buildings fall into disrepair: piers crumble, trusses sag, windows gape with holes like black starfish.

  The poor sections are abandoned first. The streets become pocked and pitted and littered with bits of yellow paper. The more prosperous districts coast on the momentum of the past, but only a few very old and a few very young people are left, the old with their memories, the young with their wistful daydreams. In attics and storerooms, old gear falls apart, releasing odors of varnish and wood, musty cloth and dry paper.

  All during Jean’s childhood, Angel City had been succumbing to moribundity and decay. Nearby three old volcanic necks, El Primo, El Panatela, El Tiempo, loomed clumsily on the silver Codiron sky. At one time the rotting shale at their bases had glittered with long hexagonal crystals. These possessed the singular property of converting sound into quick colored flashes of light. In the early times miners went forth at night to fire off guns, and stand watching the swift sparkle responding in a wave down the distance.

  With the mines prosperity came to Angel City. Fortunes were founded, ripened, spent. Houses were built, a spaceport established with adequate warehouses, and Angel City became a typical black-planet settlement—like thousands of others in many respects, but still one to itself, with the unique flavor that made it Angel City. The sun, Mintaka Sub-30 was a tiny disk of dazzling blue-white, the sky showed the color of black pearl. Earth vegetation refused the Codiron soil, and instead of geraniums, zinnia, pansies, petunias, growing around the white houses, there were mogadors, pilgrim vine with fluttering bumble-bee fruits, yeasty banks with great masses of bear-fungus.

  Then one by one, like a clan of old men dying, the mines gave out and closed—quietly, apologetically, and Angel City started on its route to dissolution. The miners left town, the easy-money emporiums closed their doors, paint began peeling from the back-street houses.

  But now a wild variable entered the picture: Lake Arkansas.

  It spread from Angel City out to the horizon, rusty-green and smooth as a table-top, crusted with two feet of algae, brittle and tough enough to support considerable weight. Idle men looked across the flatness, and thought of wheat: North Africa, the Great Plains, the Ukraine. Botanists were called in from Earth and not only evolved strains of wheat to thrive on Codiron’s mineral balance, to resist Codiron’s soil viruses, but also corn, cane, citrus, melons and garden truck.

  The course of Angel City’s development altered. And when the wheezing taxi-boat lifted from the space-port and slanted down over Tobacco Butte, Jean was immeasurably surprised. Where she had remembered raffishness and grime she found a neat farming community, clean and apparently prosperous.

  The pilot turned in his seat. “Where will I take you, miss?”

  “To the hotel. Is it still Polton’s Inn?”

  The pilot nodded. “There’s Polton’s and then there’s a new place downtown, the Soone House, sort of posh and expensive.”

  “Take me to Polton’s,” said Jean. It was no part of her plan to be conspicuous.

  The pilot turned her an appraising glance. “You’ve been here before, seems like.”

  Jean bit her Up in annoyance. She wanted to be known as a stranger; she did not care to be associated with four dead men of seven years ago. “My father worked in the mines and he’s told me about Angel City.”

  In all probability she was safe from recognition. Four deaths in the Angel City of seven years ago would have caused a week’s sensation and then passed out of mind, to be blended with a hundred other killings. No one would think to connect Miss Alice Young, as she had decided to call herself, with the ragged wide-eyed creature that had been Jean Pariier at the age of ten. However—it was just as well to play safe. “Yes, I’ll go to Polton’s,” said Jean.

  Polton’s Inn was a long ramshackle shed-roof building on a little rise overlooking the town, with a wide verandah and the front overgrown with blue pilgrim vine. In the first days of Angel City it had served as a bunk-house for miners; then as conditions became settled, Polton had added a few refinements and set himself up as innkeeper. In Jean’s recollection he was a bent crabbed old man whose eyes seemed always to search the ground. He had never married and did all his own work, scorning even a scullery boy.

  The pilot dropped the boat to the packed soil in front of Polton’s office, turned to help, but Jean had already jumped like a cat to the ground. She ran up on the verandah, forgetting her determination to act the sedate young lady.

  Polton was standing on a corner of the verandah, even more bent and crabbed than Jean had remembered.

  “Well,” he said in a rasping ugly voice, “you’re back again. You’ve got your nerve with you.”

  Jean stared at him, drained of feeling. She opened her mouth to speak, but found no words.

  “You pick up your grip,” said Polton, “and get on out here. I’m running a hotel, not a madhouse. Maybe that new place downtown will put up with your hijinks. Me, I’m once bitten, then I’m shy twice.”

  It came to Jean that he couldn’t possibly remember her from seven years back; he must be confusing her with a more recent guest. She noticed that his cheeks, near the outside comer of each eye, bulged with the tiny artificial reservoirs for aqueous humor; by contracting his cheek muscles he could pump fluid into his eyeball, thus correcting for far-sightedness. The fact seemed to indicate that his
sight was not the best. Jean said with an air of sweet reason, “Mr. Polton, you’re mistaking me for someone else.”

  “Oh no I’m not,” snapped Polton, raising his lip in wolfish looseness. “I got your name on the register if you want to look. Miss Sunny Mathison you call yourself, and your fingerprints too—they show who you are.”

  “It wasn’t me!” cried Jean. “My name is Alice Young!”

  Polton made a scornful sound. “I’ve just spent four hundred dollars to put pumps into my old eyes. I can see like a telescope. Do you think I’m making a mistake? I don’t…Now clear off the premises. I don’t want your kind around here.” He stood there glowering at her, until she turned away.

  Jean shrugged, stepped forlornly back into the cab.

  The pilot said sympathetically, “Old Polton’s half-cracked, that’s well known. And the Soone House is a lot better place anyhow…”

  “Okay,” said Jean, “let’s try the Soone House.”

  The cab coasted down from the height. Before them spread first the town, then Lake Arkansas, .an unfamiliar checker of yellow, dark green, light green, brown and black, and finally, rising from the horizon, the steel backdrop of the sky. The blue-hot spark of Mintaka Sub-30 hung at high noon, glittered in the cab’s plastic canopy and into the comer of Jean’s eye.

  She traced out the familiar patterns of the town: Central Square, with the concrete dance pavilion, the blue-painted courthouse and jail, with Paradise Alley ducking furtively behind. And that angular brown facade almost out at the edge of town—that was Joe Parlier’s old Aztec Tavern.

  IV

  The cab settled to a plat at the rear of the new Soone House, and the pilot carried Jean’s modest luggage to the side entrance. The hotel was obviously new, and made superficial pretensions to luxury, achieving only a rather ridiculous straddle between metropolitan style and the hard fact of its location in a small back-planet town. There was a fine floor of local moss agate and hand-padded mosaic-rugs from one of the cheap-labor planets, a dozen Earth palms in celadon pots. But there was no lift to the second and third floors and the porter’s shoes were noticeably scuffed.