Now Wait for Last Year (28 page)

It was night and Eric walked the dark side street, hands in his pockets, wondering if he was going in the right direction. He had not been in Pasadena, California, for years.

Ahead a major conapt building rose squarely against the sky, more dense than the atmosphere behind it, windows lit like the eyes of some great block-shaped synthetic pumpkin. Eyes, Eric thought, are the window of the soul, but a conapt is a conapt. What lies inside there? A bossy – or perhaps not so bossy – black-haired girl whose ambition it is to appear in one-minute beer and cigarette commercials on TV or whatever it is Molinari said. Someone to goad you to your feet when you're sick, travesty of the marital vows, of mutual help, protection.

He thought about Phyllis Ackerman, their conversation at Wash-35, not so long ago. If I really want to repeat the pattern stamped on the matrix of my life, he thought, I need only look her up; Phyllis is just enough like Kathy to attract me. As both of us understand. And enough different from her so that it would seem – I say seem – like something new in my life. But then all at once he thought, This girl here in Pasadena; I didn't pick her out. Gino Molinari did. So perhaps the matrix breaks here. And can be discarded. And I can go on in something that does not merely seem new but is new.

Locating the front entrance of the conapt building, he got out the slip of paper, again memorized the name, then found the proper button among the host of identical rows in the big brass plate and gave it a vigorous, Gino Molinari inspired push.

A ghostly voice presently issued from the speaker and a microscopic image formed on the monitoring screen set in the wall above the buttons. 'Yes? Who is it?' In such absurd miniature the girl's image could not be deciphered; he could not tell a thing about her. The voice, however, sounded rich and throaty and although nervous with the typical caution of the unattached girl living alone it had its warmth.

'Gino Molinari asked me to look you up,' Eric said, supporting his burden on the rock they all depended on in this, their collective journey.

'Oh!' she sounded flustered. 'To look me up? Are you sure you have the right person? I only met him once and that was casually.'

Eric said, 'May I come in for a minute, Miss Garabaldi?'

'Garabaldi is my old name,' the girl said. 'My name, the name I work under when I do TV shows, is Garry. Patricia Carry.'

'Just let me come in,' Eric said, and waited. 'Please.'

The door buzzed; he pushed it open and entered the foyer. A moment later by elevator he had ascended to the fifteenth floor and was at her door, ready to knock but finding it ajar in expectation of him.

Wearing a flowered apron, her long dark hair hanging in twin braids down her back, Patricia Garry met him, smiling; she had a sharp face, tapered to a flawless chin, and lips so dark as to appear black. Every feature had been cut cleanly and with such delicate precision as to suggest a new order of perfection in human symmetry and balance. He could see why she had gone into TV; features like that, when ignited even by the ersatz enthusiasm of a mock-up beer-bust on a Californian ocean beach, could impale any viewer. She was not just pretty; she was strikingly, lavishly unique and he had a precognition as he looked at her of a long and vital career ahead, if the war did not catch her up in tragedy.

'Hi,' she said gaily. 'Who are you?'

'Eric Sweetscent. I'm on the Secretary's medical staff.' Or, was, he thought. Up to a little earlier today. 'Could I have a cup of coffee with you and talk? It would mean a lot to me.'

'What a strange come-on,' Patricia Garry said. 'But why not?' She whirled about, her long Mexican skirt spinning out, and bobbed her way down the hall of her conapt, with him following, to the kitchen. 'I have a pot on, in fact. Why did Mr Molinari tell you to look me up? For any special reason?'

Could a girl look like this and not be conscious of what an overriding special reason she constituted? 'Well,' he said, 'I live out here in California, in San Diego.' And he thought, I guess I work in Tijuana. Again. 'I'm an org-trans surgeon, Miss Garry. Or Pat. Okay to call you Pat?' He found a seat at the bench table, clasped his hands before him, resting his elbows against the hard, irregular redwood.

'If you're an org-trans surgeon,' Patricia Garry said as she got the cups from the cupboard over the sink, 'why aren't you at the military satellites or at the front hospitals?'

He felt his world sink from beneath him. 'I don't know,' he said.

There is a war on, you realize.' Her back to him, she said. The boy I was going with, he was mangled when a reeg bomb got his cruiser. He's still in a base hospital.'

'What can I say,' he said, 'except that maybe you've put your finger on the great central weak link of my life. Why it hasn't got the meaning it should have.'

'Well, who do you blame for that? Everyone else?'

'It seemed to me,' he said, 'at the time anyhow, that keeping Gino Molinari alive somehow contributed to the war effort.' But, after all, he had only done that for a short time and had gotten into it not by his own efforts but by Virgil Ackerman's.

'I'm just curious,' Patricia said. 'I just would have thought that a good org-trans surgeon would want to be at the front where the real work is.' She poured coffee into two plastic cups.

'Yes, you'd think so,' he said, and felt futile. She was nineteen years old, roughly half his age, and already she had a better grasp on what was right, what one ought to do. With such directness of vision she had certainly patterned her own career out to the last stitch. 'Do you want me to leave?' he asked her. 'Just say if you do.'

'You just got here; of course I don't want you to go. Mr Molinari wouldn't have sent you here if there hadn't been a good reason.' She eyed him critically as she seated herself across from him. 'I'm Mary Reineke's cousin, did you know that?'

'Yes.' He nodded. And she's quite tough, too, he thought. 'Pat,' he said, 'take my word for it that I have accomplished something today that affects us all, even if it isn't connected with my medical tasks. Can you accept that? If so then we can go on from there.'

'Whatever you say,' she said with nineteen-year-old nonchalance.

'Have you been watching Molinari's TV cast tonight?'

'I had it on a little while earlier. It was interesting; he looked so much bigger.'

'"Bigger."' Yes, he thought; that described it.

'It's good to see him back in his old form. But I have to admit – all that political spouting, you know how he does, sort of lectures in that feverish way, with his eyes flashing; it's too long-winded for me. I put on the record player instead.' She rested her chin in her open palm. 'You know what? It bores the hell out of me.'

The vidphone in the living room rang.

'Excuse me.' Pat Carry rose and skipped from the kitchen. He sat silently, no particular thoughts in his mind, only a little of the old weariness weighing on him, and then suddenly she was back. 'For you. Dr Sweetscent; that's you, isn't it?'

'Who is it?' He labored to get up, his heart strangely leaden.

'The White House in Cheyenne.'

He made his way to the vidphone. 'Hello. This is Sweetscent.'

'Just a moment, please.' The screen blanked out. The next image which formed was that of Gino Molinari.

'Well, doctor,' Molinari said, 'they got your reeg.'

'Jesus,' he said.

'When we got there all we found was a banged-up big dead bug. Somebody, one of them, must have seen you go in. Too bad you didn't take it directly to TF&D. Instead of that hotel.'

'I see that now.'

'Listen,' Molinari said briskly. 'I called to tell you because I knew you would want to know. But don't knock yourself; those 'Starmen are professionals. It could have happened to anyone.' He leaned closer to the screen, speaking with emphasis. 'It's not that important; there're other ways to contact the reegs, three or four – we're looking into how best to exploit it right now.'

'Should this be said on the vidphone?'

Molinari said, 'Freneksy and his party just now took off for Lilistar, shot out of here as fast as they could. Take my word for it, Sweetscent, they know. So our problem is that we have to work fast. We expect to raise a reeg government station within two hours; if necessary we'll do our negotiating on an open broadcast with Lilistar listening in.' He glanced at his wrist watch. 'I have to ring off; I'll keep you posted.' The screen, then, became dark. Busy, in hectic haste, Molinari had gone on to the next task. He could not sit gossiping. And then, all at once, the screen relit; again Molinari faced him. 'Remember, doctor, you did your job; you forced them to honor that will I left, that ten-page document they were passing back and forth when you arrived. I wouldn't be here now except for you; I already told you that and I don't want you to forget it – I haven't got time to keep repeating again and again.' He grinned briefly and then once more the image faded. This time the screen stayed dark.

But to fail is to fail, Eric said to himself. He walked back into Pat Garry's kitchen and reseated himself at his cup of coffee. Neither of them spoke. Because I messed it up, he realized, the 'Starmen will have just that much more time to close in on us, come rushing here to Terra with everything they have. Millions of human lives, perhaps years of occupation – that's the price we'll collectively pay. Because it seemed, earlier today, a good idea to put Deg Dal Il in a room at the Caesar Hotel instead of bringing him directly to TF&D. But then he thought, They have at least one agent at TF&D too; they might even have gotten him there.

Now what? he asked himself.

'Maybe you're right, Pat,' he said. 'Maybe I ought to become a military surgeon and go to a base hospital near the front.'

'Yes, why not?' she said.

'But in a little while,' he said. 'and you don't know this, the front will be on Terra.'

She blanched, tried to smile. 'Why is that?'

'Politics. The tides of war. Unreliability of alliances. The ally of today is the enemy of tomorrow. And the other way around.' He finished his coffee and rose. 'Good luck, Pat, in your television career and in every other aspect of your glowing, just beginning life. I hope the war doesn't touch you too deeply.' The war I helped bring here, he said to himself. 'So long.'

At the kitchen table she remained seated, drinking her coffee and saying nothing, as he walked down the hall to the door, opened it, and then shut it behind him. She did not even nod good-by; she was too frightened, too stunned by what he had told her.

Thanks anyhow, Gino, he said to himself as he descended to the ground floor. It was a good idea; not your fault nothing came of it. Nothing but a greater awareness on my part of how little I've done and how much harm – by commission or omission – I'm responsible for in my time.

He walked the dark Pasadena street until he located a cab; he hailed and boarded it, then wondered where he was supposed to go.

'You mean you don't know where you live, sir?' the cab asked.

'Take me to Tijuana,' he told it suddenly. 'Yes sir,' the cab said and turned south at great speed.

Nighttime in Tijuana.

He walked aimlessly, scuffing the pavement, passing one after another the neon signs of the narrow boothlike shops, listening to the clamor of the Mexican hucksters and enjoying as he always did the steady motion and ceaseless, nervous honking of wheels and autonomic cabs and old-time turbine surface cars made in the USA, which somehow, in their last decrepitude, had been brought across the border.

'Girl, mister?' A boy no older than eleven seized Eric by the sleeve and hung on, dragging him to a stop. 'My sister, only seven, and never lay with a man in her life; I guarantee before God, you be assuredly first.'

'How much?' Eric asked.

'Ten dollars plus the cost of the room; there must be in name of God a room. The sidewalk makes love into something sordid; you cannot do it here and respect yourself after.'

'There's wisdom in that,' Eric agreed. But he continued on anyhow.

At night the robant peddlars and their enormous, useless, machine-made rugs and baskets, their carts of tamales, customarily vanished; the daytime people of Tijuana disappeared along with the middle-aged American tourists to make way for the night people. Men, hurrying, pushed past him; a girl wearing a crushingly tight skirt and sweater squeezed past him, pressing momentarily against him ... as if, he thought, we had some durable relationship penetrating our two lives and this sudden heat exchange through body contact expressed the deepest possible understanding between the two of us. The girl went on, disappeared. Small tough Mexicans, youths wearing open-throated fur shirts, strode directly at him, their mouths agape as if they were strangling. He carefully stepped from their path.

In a town where everything is legal, he thought, and nothing achieves worth, you are wrenched back into childhood. Placed among your blocks and toys, with all your universe within grasp. The price for license is high: it consists of a forfeit of adulthood. And yet he loved it here. The noise and stirrings represented authentic life. Some people found all this evil; he did not. People who thought that were wrong. The restless, roving banks of males who sought God knew what — they themselves didn't know: their striving was the genuine primal under-urge of protoplasmic material itself. This irritable ceaseless motion had once carried life right out of the sea and onto land; creatures of the land now, they still roamed on, up one street and down another. And he went along with them.

Ahead, a tattoo parlor, modern and efficient, lit by a wall of glowing energy, the proprietor inside with his electric needle that did not touch the skin, only brushed near it as it wove a cat's cradle of design. How about that? Eric asked himself. What could I have etched on me, what motto or picture which would give me comfort in these unusual times of duress? In times when we wait for the 'Starmen to appear and take over. Helpless and frightened, all of us become essentially unmanly.