The Man Who Lost the Sea (7 page)

Now, you see? he told himself out of the same sort of disgust, you see? Anybody else would freeze now, turn pale, start to sweat, throw the watch into the reclaimer, run up the wall like a rat in a box. But look at you, standing absolutely still thinking three times as fast as a Class Eight computer, checking everything, including all the things you have already done to handle just this situation—the moustache back on, the brown eyes again, the shorter stature again, the heel pads hidden in the reversible jacket and the jacket hidden in the secret panel behind the closet.

“Who is it?”

 … And your voice steady and your pulse firm—yes, Deeming’s voice and the pulse of innocence, not the jaunty Jimmy’s tone or his rutty heartbeat. So what’s to feel glum about, boy? What’s the matter with you, to dislike yourself and every situation you get into, purely because you know before you start that you’ll handle it so well?

“May I see you for a moment, Mr. Deeming?”

He didn’t recognize the voice. That was good, or it was bad, depending. If good, why worry? And why worry if it was bad?

He dropped the watch into his side pocket and opened the door.

“I hope I’m not bothering you,” said the pudgy man who stood there.

“Come in,” Deeming left the door open and turned his back. “Sit down.” He laughed the minor assistant’s timid little laugh. “I hope you’re selling something. I wouldn’t be able to buy it but it’s nice to have somebody to talk to for a change.”

He heard the door close carefully. The pudgy man did not sit down and he did not laugh. Deeming did not care for the silence so he turned to look at the man, which was apparently what the man was waiting for. “You can have somebody to talk to,” he said quietly. “You can talk to Richard E. Rockhard.”

“Great,” said Deeming. “Who might Richard E. Rockhard be?”

“You haven’t … well, that isn’t really surprising. When they’re big, everybody knows them. When they’re hiring and firing the big ones, they tend to be almost as quiet as assistant clerks, Mr. Deeming … You know Antares Trading? And the Lunar and Outer Orbit Lines? And Galactic Mines?”

“You mean this Rockhard is—”

“In part, Mr. Deeming. In part.”

Jimmy the Flick would have bugged his eyes and made a low whistle. Deeming put his fingertips together and whispered, “Oh, my goodness.”

“Well?” said the man, after waiting for something more and not getting it. “Will you come and see him?”

“You mean, Mr. Rockhard? You mean—me? You mean—now?”

“I mean all those things.”

“Why does he … what—well, why me?” asked Deeming, with becoming modesty.

“He needs your help.”

“Oh, my goodness. I don’t know what I could possibly do to help a man like … well, can you tell me what it’s about?”

“No,” said the man.

“No?”

“No, except that it’s urgent, it’s big, and it will be more worth your while than anything you have ever done in your life.”

“Oh, my goodness,” said Deeming again. ‘What you’d better do is go find an Angel. They help people. I can’t—”

“You can do things an Angel couldn’t do, Mr. Deeming.”

Deeming affected a laugh. It said a thousand words about the place and function of the Little Men of the world.

“Mr. Rockhard thinks you can, Mr. Deeming. Mr. Rockhard knows you can.”

“He knows … about
me?
”

“Everything,” said the pudgy man, absolutely without inflection.

Deeming had a vague swift wish that he had atomized the watch after all. It seemed to be as big and as spillable and as hot as a bowl of soup wedged into his side pocket. “Better get an Angel,” he suggested again.

The man glanced at the door and then took a step closer. He dropped his voice and said earnestly, “I assure you, Mr. Deeming, Mr. Rockhard will not and cannot do that in this matter.”

“It sounds like something I’d better not do,” said Deeming grimly.

The man shrugged. “Very well. If you don’t want it, you don’t want it.” He turned to the door.

Deeming couldn’t, for once, help himself. He blurted out, “What happens if I refuse?”

The pudgy man did not quite turn back to face him. “You promise me you will forget this interchange,” he said casually, “especially if asked by one of the gentlemen in the pretty cloaks.”

“And that’s all?”

For the first time a glint of amusement crossed the bland features. “Except for wondering, for all the days of your life, what you might have missed.”

Deeming wet his lips. “Just tell me one thing. If I go see your Mr. Rockhard, and have a talk, and still want to refuse …?”

“Then of course you may. If you want to.”

“Let’s go,” said Deeming. They were high over the city in a luxurious helicopter before it occurred to him that “If you want to,”
said the way the man had said it, might have many meanings. He turned to speak, but the man’s face, by its very placidity, said that this was a man whose job was done and who would not add one syllable to cap it.

Richard E. Rockhard had blue-white hair and ice-blue eyes and a way of speaking that licked out and struck deep like a series of sharp skilled axe blows, cutting deep, careless of the chips. This tool’s edge was honed so fine it was a gentleness. Deeming could well believe that this man was Galactic Mines and all those other things. He could also believe that Rockhard needed help. He was etched with anxiety and the scarlet webs of capillaries in his eyeballs were bloated with sleeplessness. He was a man who was telling the truth because he had not time to lie. “I need you, Deeming. I am supposing that you will help me and will speak my piece accordingly,” he said, as soon as they were alone in a fabulous study in an unbelievable penthouse. “I give you my word that you will be in no danger from me unless and until you do help me. If you do proceed with it, you may be sure the danger is sizeable.” He nodded to himself and said again, “Sizeable.”

Deeming, the hotel clerk, got just this far with his clerkly posture: “Mr. Rockhard, I am absolutely mystified as to why you should turn to a man like me for any …” because Rockhard brought both hands down with a crash and leaned half across his desk. “Mr. Deeming,” he said, in his gentle, edged voice, with all the power in the world throttled way back and idling at the ready, “I know about you. I know it because I needed to find such a man as you and I have the resources to do it. You may wear that common-man pose if it makes you comfortable, but do not deceive yourself that it deceives me. You are not a common man or—to put it on the very simplest terms—you would not be in this room at this moment, because the common man will not be tempted by anything which he knows offends the Angels.”

So Deeming dropped the invisibility, the diffidence, the courtesy and deference of an assistant to an associate, and said, “It is hardly safe for even an uncommon man to offend them.”

“You mean me? I’m perfectly safe from you, Deeming. You wouldn’t
report me, even if you knew I couldn’t strike back. You don’t
like
Angels. You never met another man before who didn’t like them. Therefore you like me.”

Deeming had to smile. He nodded. He thought, but when is he going to point out that if I don’t help him he will blackmail me?

“I will not blackmail you,” said the old man surprisingly. “I will pull you into this with rewards, not push you into it with penalties. You are a man whose greed speaks higher than his fear.” But he smiled when he said it. Then without waiting for any response at all, he made his proposition.

He began to speak of his son. “When you have unlimited credit and an only son, you begin by being quite certain that you can extend yourself through him to the future; for he is your blood and bone, and he will of course want to follow in your footsteps. And if it occurs to you that he might veer from that course—it never does occur to you until late in the game, too late—then you let the situation get past curing by the smug assumption that the pressures you can put on him will accomplish what your genes could not.”

“Ultimately you realize that you have a choice—not the choice of keeping or losing him; you’ve lost that already; but the choice of throwing him out or letting him go. If you care more for yourself and what you’ve built than you do for your son, you throw him out, and good riddance. I”—he stopped to wet his lips and glanced quickly at Deeming’s face and back to his folded hands—“I let him go.”

He was still a moment and then suddenly wrenched his hands apart and then laid them carefully and silently side by side before him. “I don’t regret it, because we are friends. We are good friends, and I helped him in every way I could, including not helping him when he wanted to make his own way, and giving him whatever he asked me for whether or not I thought it was valuable.” He smiled suddenly, and whispered more to his sleeping hands than to Deeming, “For a son like that, if he wants to paint his belly blue, you buy the paint.”

He looked at Deeming. “The blue paint is archaeology, and I bought it for him. Dead diggings, pure knowledge, nothing that will make a dime to buy a bun with. That isn’t my kind of work or my kind of thinking, but it’s all Donald wants.”

“There’s glory,” said Deeming.

“Not this trip. Now hear me out. That boy is willing to disappear, cease to exist, become nothing at all, just to follow a thread which almost certainly leads nowhere, but which, if it leads somewhere, can become only an erudite curiosity like the Rosetta stone or the Dead Sea scrolls or the frozen language in the piezo-crystals of Phygmo IV.” He spread his hands and immediately put them back to bed. “Blue paint. And I bought it.”

“What do you mean ‘cease to exist—become nothing’? You don’t mean ‘die,’ you mean something else.”

“Good, good, Deeming. Very perceptive. What it means is that in order to pursue this Grail of his, he must expose himself to the Angels. They can’t stop him, but they can wait for him to come back. And I bought him another bucket of paint for that. He has a paid-up ticket to Grebd.”

Deeming unhesitatingly released the low whistle. Grebd was the name of a sun, a planet and a city in the Coalsack matrix, where certain of the inhabitants had developed a method of pseudosurgery unthinkably far in advance of anything in the known cosmos. They could take virtually any living thing and change it as drastically as it wanted to be changed, even from carbon-base to boron-chain, or as subtly as it might want, like an alteration of all detectible brainwave characteristics or retinal patterns, or even a new nose. They could graft (or grow?) most of a whole man from a tattered lump, providing it lived. Most important, they could make these alterations, however drastic, and (if requested) leave the conscious mind intact.

But the cost of a major overhaul of this nature was beyond reason—unless a man had a reason compelling enough. Deeming looked at the old man with unconcealed awe. Not only had he been able to pay such a price, he had been willing—willing in a cause in which he could have no sympathy. To care that much for a son—to care so very much that the most he could ever hope for now would be to meet a total stranger in an unexpected place who might take him aside and whisper,
“Hello—Dad!”
but for whom he could do nothing further. For if he had transgressed some ruling of the Angels so drastically as to need a trip to Grebd, the Angels would have an eye
on the old man for all time to come, and he would not dare even to smile at the new stranger. Such a transgression meant death. Could a father so much as clasp his son’s hand under such circumstances?

“In the name of all that’s holy,” Deeming breathed, “What did he want so badly?”

Rockhard snorted. “Some sort of a glyph. There’s a theory that the Aldebaranian stock sprang from the same ethnic roots as those in the Masson planets. It sounds like nonsense to me, and even if it’s true, it’s still nonsense. But certain vague evidence points to a planet called Revelo. There may be artifacts there to prove the point.”

“Never heard of it,” said Deeming. “Revelo … n-no. And so he makes his discovery. And goes to Grebd. And gets his total disguise. And forever after, he can’t claim the discovery he made.”

“Now you know about Donald,” said the old man wryly. “He just wants the discovery made. He doesn’t care who makes it.”

They looked at each other in shared bafflement. At last Deeming nodded slightly to convey the thought that it didn’t matter if he understood. If Donald Rockhard was crazy, that was beside the point. He said, “Now where do the Angels come into this?”

“Revelo,” said the old man, “is—Proscribed.”

Well then, Deeming thought instantly, that seems to be that, and where’s the problem? A Proscribed planet was surrounded by a field of such a nature that if it was penetrated by a flickership, anything organic aboard would instantly and totally cease to live. If Donald had gone to Revelo, Donald was dead. If he had been snapped out of hyperspace on the way there by the outer-limit warning field, and had heeded the warning, then he hadn’t landed on Revelo, hadn’t broken an Angel dictate, and wasn’t in trouble. Deeming said so.

Slowly Rockhard shook his head. “He’s on Revelo right now, and alive. Far as I know,” he added.

“Not possible,” said Deeming flatly. “You just don’t penetrate the field around a Proscribed planet and live.”

“Very well,” said the old man, “nevertheless he’s there. Look, I’ll tell you something that only four other men know. There is a way to get through to a Proscribed planet.”

“About thirty years ago one of my ships happened on a derelict.
God alone knows where it came from. It was a mess, but it contained two lifeboats intact. Lifeboats with flicker drive.”

“Boats? They must be big as ships, then.”

“Not these. They do the same thing as our flicks, but they don’t do it the same way. It isn’t understood yet just how, though I have a man working on it. The captain of my freighter brought ’em back for me, for my spacecraft collection, never knowing just what he had. We found that out by accident. We fitted them out with Earth-type controls, but although we know what button to push, we don’t know what happens when we push it. It worked no better than our own flicks, so there was no point in filing the information with the Improvement Section. And when we found out the ships would penetrate the Proscribed planets, we just kept our mouths shut. I have my opinion of the Angels, but I will say that when they proscribe a planet, they do it for a good reason. It may have rock-plague aboard, or, worse still, yinyang weed. Or it may be just that the planet is deadly to humans, because of its sun’s radiation or the presence of some hormone poison.”