One and Wonder (33 page)

But he pushed through the swinging doors. And almost immediately he saw the man.

It had once been some kind of store. Shelves still lined the walls, coated with dust. Perhaps thirty by a hundred feet, its asphalt floor was streaked with filth, and a sour smell hung in the smoke-grey air.

There were perhaps two dozen card tables, regularly spaced, all of them filled, eight men to a table. Marvin recognized some of the games. Poker, pan, whiskey . . .

Here and there among the players was a young face that reminded him of himself when he was young and didn't know the meaning of horror. But three fourths of the faces were unmistakably those of spacemen, black men, yellow men, red men, white men—from a dozen parts of the galaxy.

Marvin moved toward the table where Claude Mathews sat. He went unnoticed in the thin crowd.

Would Claude Mathews recognize him? Did the man even know what he looked like?

“I'll take two,” the horribly familiar voice said.

Marvin moved closer, until he was so close he could have reached out and touched the man on the shoulder.

The dealer was a yellow-skinned man on the other side of the table. Claude Mathews scooped up his cards, in high good humor. He had plenty of chips in front of him.

He won the pot with two pair.

“You know how it is,” he gloated. “Lucky. That's me. Lucky at cards, lucky at love, lucky at everything,”

“Deal ‘em,” a red man said laconically.

“But none of this grasshopper stuff for me,” Claude Mathews went on, sticking up his cards as they were dealt. “Nine out of ten nice women want it, are waiting for it.”

When the red man opened, he tossed his cards in and said, “It's that way everywhere. How many husbands give their wife a real good time? None. They don't have what it takes. Nine out of ten married women are just waiting for a guy to walk in the door and give them a thrill they'll never forget.”

Marvin clamped a hand on Claude Mathews’ shoulder.

The round face turned up, the dark eyes staring at Marvin. No flicker of recognition showed.

“Move on, pal,” Claude Mathews said. “No handouts from me. Try someone else,”

“I don't want a handout,” Marvin said.

“No?” Claude Mathews shoved out of his chair and half turned. All movement at the table stopped. “What do you want?”

“Those nice women,” Marvin said. “One of them was my wife.”

“Oh?” Claude Mathews said, glancing up and down Marvin's slight frame with amusement.

“Cut it out,” a voice whined. “Let's play cards. The ship lifts at dawn, you know.” But no one listened.

“Yes,” Marvin said. He was calm now. He was remembering when he was a little boy, with his magic kit and book of instructions that said the secret of magic was to keep them interested in what one hand was doing and they wouldn't notice what the other did.

He pulled out the little paring knife, holding it in his left hand, half raised but not too threatening. All eyes, he knew, were on that little knife. Claude Mathews glanced at it. Marvin could see the gloating confidence in the little black eyes. One threatening move of the little knife and the long armed spaceman could grab the wrist that held it.

“You raped my wife,” Marvin said coldly.

“Well now, wait a minute,” Claude Mathews said. “Who says so? I don't know who you are, pal, but unless I'm invited—”

Marvin lifted the little paring knife as a left-handed man might draw back to stab downward. Claude Mathews reached to intercept it. He was unaware of the long, broad-bladed carving knife that was thrust point first into his groin, thrust in a twisting slicing motion that stopped only when the point was buried deeply in the upholstery of the chair seat.

The round face was only inches from Marvin's eyes, every pore and whisker magnified. Marvin saw the eyes glaze with shock and knew his thrust had gone where he intended.

He let go the carving knife and stepped back, the little paring knife still in his left hand.

He turned away and walked toward the entrance. Ahead of him, men stepped quickly aside. Behind him, abruptly, Claude Mathews screamed—and screamed again.

Marvin didn't look back. It was over now. Nothing made any difference. If the knife he had just used struck him in the back it would bring him happy oblivion. If Claude Mathews died, and they arrested him for the
murder, it didn't matter.

He was not stopped. He walked calmly out the door, unaware even that he had dropped the paring knife.

“Want a good time, darling?” a rather pretty girl asked. She looked into his eyes, then shrank away.

Marvin watched her move on. A man was coming up the street, a bit unsteadily. She hesitated, then moved toward him. The man stopped. They exchanged a few words. Then the man slipped his arm around the girl's waist. Together they walked back toward Marvin.

When they passed, the girl was looking up at the man, smiling. She didn't glance toward Marvin.

It had been one of the spacemen. He had been crooning something to the girl . . . “We lift at dawn.”

The song, old as space.

We lift at dawn. Soon we'll be gone. Good bye, my lover, good bye.

“Gods of Space!” a voice said behind Marvin. “He's standing right outside!”

He started to turn. Men in L.P. uniforms and crash helmets moved swiftly to surround him.

His only reaction was a wave of gratitude.

When he had emerged from that door he had had no idea what to do, where to go. There was nothing, anywhere, to draw him.

Now there was purpose. Maybe not his purpose, but something to carry him along so he wouldn't have to think of anything.

“What're we gonna do with him?” one of them said. “He's a hot potato. Why didn't he have sense enough to lam?”

“Let's get him out of here before the police get here,” another said urgently. “Gil, go back in and pass the word around that nobody saw nothin’.”

“Let's get him on the ship,” someone said. “The cops can't find him there. Last place they'd think of, on the ship.”

Marvin let himself be moved along.

He caught a fleeting glimpse of the little fat man looking at him owlishly through his thick lensed glasses. The happy dreams man. He was pushed into a car that jerked into motion a moment later. In the distance he heard the moan of sirens. After a few blocks one passed by, rising to a peak of deafening sound and dwindling away.

He felt the car make several turns, then lurch up onto something and stop. He felt the car dropping swiftly and knew he was on an elevator. He knew where he was—in the dock area, dropping down into the underground tubes leading out into the spaceport.

He had never been on a spaceship but he knew that they settled with exact precision so that their elevator shafts could connect to the subway elevator shafts.

In a few moments the car got into motion again. Then there was a fast lift upward. Up up up, higher than he had ever gone in an elevator.

Suddenly the very atmosphere around him seemed different, alien.

The car stopped rising. The car doors opened. He was pushed out gently but firmly.

“Let’s stick him in J room,” one of the L.P.’s said.

Marvin went along without protest.

He lifted his feet over a hatchway and was in a room with four of the strange, bulky forms that he had seen in pictures, and which were called crash boxes. There were also several conventional chairs, welded to the floor.

“Sit down,” he was told.

He sat down.

Two of the landside policemen stayed with Marvin. The others went away. Marvin closed his eyes and leaned back. His body tingled with fatigue. His mind floated in pools of darkness where the past and the future did not intrude.

After a while he was listening to the conversation of the two L.P.’s. Not what they talked about, but the words, their voices. Their accent was subtly different, the tempo of speech more rapid than he was used to.

Twice during the long wait the phone on the wall shrilled and one of the L.P.’s answered it. Marvin opened his eyes and watched, and knew the conversation was about him.

At last the wait was over. A man in the uniform of a space officer came in. Marvin knew nothing about the meanings of the insignia on the uniform, whether the man was the ship's Captain or some minor officer. He dismissed the L.P.’s and closed the door.

He was lean faced with a strong chin. His hair was iron gray. Marvin felt a liking for him.

“I'm Dr. Cavendish,” the man said abruptly.

“I'm Marvin Lake.”

“One name is as good as another,” Dr. Cavendish said with a twisted smile.

“Oh, but it is!” Marvin said.

“If you say so,” Dr. Cavendish said. “Have you ever been in space?”

“No. I've never even been on a ship until now.”

Dr. Cavendish smiled. “It probably seems as strange to you then as Jeffries’ Planet seems to me. What do you do for a living?”

“I have a diamond mine.”

“Oh? How many work with you in the mine?”

“I work it by myself. You see, the clay deposits are like long fingers sticking deep in the ground. We call them pipestems. They go down at very steep angles and are never more than six or eight feet in diameter, and usually about four feet. One man is all that can work comfortably. Besides, it's against the law to make a crew operation out of a mine. Inspectors make regular visits to make sure we clean the pipestem as we go down and don't let the cheap stuff go to waste.”

“Cheap stuff?”

“The grains that assay under a tenth of a karat.”

Dr. Cavendish nodded. “I see,” he said. “You work alone then, day after day.”

“That's right.”

“What do you think about while you're working alone, day after day?”

“Oh, I don't know,” Marvin said. “I have a lot of interests. But mainly, when you're working, you have to concentrate on what you're doing.”

“But you do think about things, at times?” Dr. Cavendish said.

“Oh, sure.”

“Like your wife being home alone, and a spaceship in, with the crew on ground leave?”

“So that's your line,” Marvin said. “Look.” He took a deep breath. “Let's get something straight. I did something. I don't regret it. I'm ready to take my punishment. Is that good enough for you?”

“But you haven't done anything,” Dr. Cavendish said quietly. “That's the point.
You haven't done anything.
”

Marvin blinked at the ship's officer. “What do you mean?” he asked
with a sinking feeling. “Are you trying to tell me I missed?” He leaped to his feet. “Where is he?” he said. “I'll get him—”

“Listen to me,” Dr. Cavendish said firmly. “Two members of our crew had a knife fight in a land-side card room. You, as one of the hundred or so spectators of that fight, saw it. You projected yourself into the fight, in your imagination, and
imagined
you were one of the two men.”

Marvin stared at the man unbelievingly.

“It's not a serious mental condition,” Dr. Cavendish went on. “It's well known that for every crime there are usually two or three people who come in and confess to it. It has to do with the urge to
be
somebody. Such confessions have to be checked against the facts. . . . We have witnesses, several dozen of them in fact, willing to swear to the fact that the fight occurred between two members of our crew.”

Dr. Cavendish leaned forward. “Don't you see what your story, if told to the police, could do to us? You would charge that one of our crew went out into the countryside and attacked a citizen of Jeffries’ Planet. Our ship would be grounded for weeks. If the courts of this planet believed your testimony—and I doubt that they would without your wife's testimony and a doctor's examination, and probably not even then—the most Claude Mathews could get would be two years in your local jail. That would be mild punishment compared to the damage that has already been done to him. On the other hand, it would cost us a lot of money and wreck our schedule. Other planets on our route—”

“Did I cut him, then?” Marvin interrupted.

“The crew member who knifed him did a very thorough job. He will live, but he would be much better off dead. I am not the one to say if he deserved what he got—there have been reports that he talked a pretty dirty game, only no one believed it was more than talk. However, that's beside the point. We intend to lift on schedule at dawn and deal with the matter in our own way in space. I would suggest you forget the whole thing. What could you do? Do you want your wife on the witness stand?”

“My wife is dead,” Marvin said quietly.

“I'm sorry,” Dr. Cavendish said. He looked away, uncomfortably. “But that still doesn't change the picture.” He stood up. “I understand now. I wish there were something I could do for you. All I can do is say, go home. Let time bring forgetfulness, as it will.”

The doctor went to the door and opened it.

“Take this man groundside,” he said. “Escort him to wherever his car is. See that he starts for home. And hurry back—We're at zero minus two hours right now.”

Marvin fished in his pocket for the claimcheck—the check he had been sure he would never be using. The L.P.’s helped him get into his suit, shook hands with him, and watched while he went to the airlock.

He could, he knew, wait outside until they had gone, then come back in. But what was there for him inside the city? What was there anywhere, for that matter?

But yes, there was something. Out across Paxton Hill, down in Tedrow Valley, fifty yards from bubble seven. A dark pool was waiting for him, and he was ready for it now.

A dark pool, little different than the surrounding darkness except that it reflected the stars. And when it had welcomed him it would ripple sluggishly, then become smooth again.

When he was well up Paxton Hill he stopped the truck and looked back. The city at night captured a strange sort of beauty, its transparent flat ceiling and dark outer wall making it appear to be a cauldron of molten fire in the night, as the lights of the city escaped upward into the darkness.

And the ship. There were lights on it. Red, blue, and green riding lights. Luminous discs of white that were portholes. Behind which ones was the room he had been in?