The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (16 page)

"You see, Doctor—" Connington folded his hands in
his lap and bent them backward, cracking his knuckles, "you're not the
only mover in the world."

Hawks frowned slightly. "Mover?" Now his face
betrayed nothing.

Connington chuckled softly to himself over some private joke
that was burgeoning within him. "There're all kinds of people in this
world. But they break down into two main groups, one big and one smaller.
There's the people who get moved out of the way or into line, and then there's
the people who do the moving. It's safer and a lot more comfortable to go where
you're pushed. You don't take any of the responsibility, and if you do what
you're told, every once in a while you get thrown a fish. Being a mover isn't
safe, because you may be heading for a hole, and it isn't comfortable because
you do a lot of jostling back and forth, and what's more, it's up to you to
find your own fish. But it's a hell of a lot of fun." He looked into
Hawks' eyes. "Isn't it?"

Hawks said: "Mr. Connington—" He looked directly
back at the man. "I'm not convinced. This individual I requested would
have to be a very rare type. Are you sure you can instantly give him to me? Do
you mean to say your having him ready, as you say,
isn't
a piece of
conspicuous forethought? I think perhaps you may have had some other motive,
and that you're seizing on a piece of lucky coincidence."

Connington lolled back, chuckled, and lit a green-leaved
cigar from the tooled leather case in his breast pocket. He puffed, and let the
smoke drift out between his large, well-spaced teeth.

"Let's keep polite, Doctor Hawks," he said.
"Let's look at it in the light of reason. Continental Electronics pays you
to head up Research, and you're the best there is." Connington leaned
forward just a little, shifted the cigar just a little in his fingers.
"Continental Electronics pays me to run Personnel."

Hawks thought for a minute and then said: "Very well.
How soon can I see this man?"

Connington lolled back and took a satisfied puff on the
cigar. "Right now. He lives right nearby, on the coast—up on the cliffs,
there. If you've got an hour or so, what say we run on down there now?"

"I have nothing else to do if he turns out not to be
the right man."

Connington stretched and stood up. His belt slipped below
the bulge of his stomach, and he stopped to hitch up his trousers. "Use
your phone," he muttered perfunctorily around the cigar, reaching across
Hawks' desk. He called an outside number and spoke to someone briefly and, for
a moment, sourly, saying they were coming out. Then he called the company garage
and ordered his car brought around to the building's main entrance. When he
hung up the phone, he was chuckling again. "Well, time we get downstairs,
the car'll be there."

Hawks nodded and stood up.

Connington grinned at him. "I like it when somebody gives
me enough rope. I like people who stay suspicious when I'm offerin' them what
they want." He was still laughing over the secret joke. "The more
rope I get, the more operating room it gives me. You don't figure that way. You
see someone who may give you trouble, and you close up. You get into a shell,
and you stay there, because you're afraid it may be trouble you can't handle.
Most people do. That's why, one of these days, I'm goin' to be president of
this corporation, and you'll still be head of the Research Division."

Hawks smiled. "How will you like it, then, going to the
Board of Directors, telling them my salary has to be higher than yours?"

"Yeah," Connington said reflectively. "Yeah,
there'd be that." He cocked an eye at Hawks. "You mean it, too."

He tapped his cigar ash off into the middle of Hawks' desk
blotter. "Get hot, sometimes, inside your insulated suit, does it?"

Hawks looked expressionlessly down at the ash and up at
Con-nington's face. "Your car is waiting for us."

They drove along the coastal highway in Connington's new
Cadillac, until the highway veered inland away from the cliffs facing into the ocean.
Then, at a spot where a small general store with two gasoline pumps stood
alone, Connington turned the car into a narrow sand road that ran along between
palmetto scrub and pine stands toward the water. From there the car swayed down
to a narrow gravel strip of road that ran along the foot of the rock cliffs
only a few feet above the high water mark. The car murmured forward with one fender
overhanging the water side, and the other perhaps a foot from the cliffs. They
moved along in this manner for a few minutes, Connington humming to himself in
a tenor drone and Hawks sitting erect.

The road changed into an incline blasted out of the cliff
face, with the insecure rock overhanging it in most places, and crossed a
narrow, weatherworn timber bridge three car-lengths long across the face of a
gut wider than most. The wedge-shaped split in the cliff was about a hundred
feet deep. The ocean came directly into it, under the bridge, with no
intervening beach, and even now at low tide, solid water came pouring into the
base of the cleft and broke up into fountaining spray. It wet the car's
windshield. The timber bridge angled up from fifty feet above water level,
about a third of the way up the face of the cliffs, and its bottom dripped.

The road went on past the bridge, but Connington stopped the
car with the wheels turned toward a galvanized iron mailbox set on a post. It
stood beside an even narrower driveway that climbed steeply up into the side of
the cleft and went out of sight around a sharp break in its wall.

"That's him," Connington grunted, pointing toward
the mailbox with his cigar. "Barker. Al Barker." He peered slyly
sideward. "Ever hear the name?"

Hawks frowned and then said: "No."

"Don't read the sports pages?" Connington backed
the car a few inches until he could aim the wheels up the driveway, put the
transmission selector in Lo, and hunched forward over the wheel, cautiously
depressing the accelerator. The car began forging slowly up the sharp slope,
its inside fender barely clearing the dynamited rock, and its left side flecked
with fresh spray from the upsurge in the cleft.

"Barker's quite a fellow," Connington muttered
with the soggy butt of his cigar clenched between his teeth. "Parachutist
in World War II. Transferred to the O.S.S. in 1944. Specialized in
assassination. Now he's a soldier of fortune—the real thing, not the tramp
adventurer—and he used to be an Olympic ski-jumper. Bobsled crewman. National
Small Arms Champion, 1950. Holds a skin-diving depth record. Used to mountain
climb. Cracked an outboard hydroplane into the shore at Lake Meade, couple of
years ago. 'S where I met him, time I was out there on vacation. Right now,
he's built a car and entered it in Grand Prix competition. Plannin' to do his
own driving."

Hawks' eyebrows drew together and then relaxed.

Connington grinned crookedly without taking his eyes
completely off the road. "Begin to sound like I knew what I was
doin'?"

Before Hawks could answer, Connington stopped the car. They
were at the break in the cleft wall. A second, shallower notch turned into the
cliff here, forming a dogleg that was invisible from the road over the bridge
below. The driveway angled around it so acutely that Connington's car could not
make the turn. The point of the angle had been blasted out to make the driveway
perhaps eighty inches wide at the bend of the dogleg, but there were no guard
rails; the road dropped off sheer into the cleft, and either leg was a chute
pointing to the water below.

"You're gonna have to help me here," Connington
said. "Get out and tell me when my wheels look like they're gonna go
over."

Hawks looked at him, pursed his lips, and got out of the
car.

"O.K., now," Connington said, "I'm gonna have
to saw around this turn. You tell me how much room I've got."

Hawks nodded. Connington swung the car as far around the
dogleg as he could, backed, stopped at Hawks' signal and moved forward again.
He continued to repeat the maneuver, grinding his front tires from side to side
over the road, until the car was pointed up the other leg of the driveway. Then
he waited while Hawks got back in.

"We should have parked at the bottom and walked
up," Hawks said.

Connington started them up the remaining incline and pointed
to his feet. "Not in these boots," he grunted. He paused, then said:
"Barker takes that turn at fifty miles an hour." He looked sidelong
at Hawks.

"You see, Doc? You've got to learn to trust me, even if
you don't like or understand me. I do my job. I've got your man for you. That's
what counts." And his eyes sparkled with the hidden joke, the secret
knowledge that he still kept to himself.

At the top of the incline, the driveway curved over the face
of the cliff and became an asphalt strip running beside a thick, clipped, dark
green lawn. Automatic sprinklers kept the grass sparkling with moisture. Cactus
and palmetto grew in immaculate beds, shaded by towering cypress. A low,
cedar-planked house faced the wide lawn, its glassed nearer wall looking out
over the cliff at the long blue ocean. A breeze stirred the cypress.

There was a swimming pool in the middle of the lawn. A thin
blonde woman with extremely long legs, who was deeply sun-tanned and wearing a
yellow two-piece suit, was lying face-down on a beach towel, listening to music
from a portable radio. An empty glass with an ice cube melting in its bottom
sat on the grass beside a thermos jug. The woman raised her head, looked at the
car, and drooped forward again.

Connington lowered a hand half-raised in greeting.
"Claire Pack," he said to Hawks, guiding the car around to the side
of the house and stopping on a concrete apron in front of the double doors of a
sunken garage.

"She lives here?" Hawks asked.

Connington's face had lost all trace of pleasure.
"Yeah. Come on."

They walked up a flight of flagstone steps to the lawn, and
across the lawn toward the swimming pool. There was a man swimming under the
blue-green water, raising his head to take an occasional quick breath and
immediately pushing it under again. Beneath the rippling, sun-dappled surface,
he was a vaguely man-shaped, flesh-colored creature thrashing from one end of
the pool to the other. An artificial leg, wrapped in transparent plastic
sheeting, lay between Claire Pack and the pool, near a chromeplated ladder
going down into the water. The radio played Glenn Miller.

"Claire?" Connington asked tentatively.

She hadn't moved in response to the approaching footsteps.
She had been humming softly to the music, and tapping softly on the towel with
the red-lacquered tips of two long fingers. She turned over slowly and looked
at Connington upside down.

"Oh," she said flatly. Her eyes shifted to Hawks'
face. They were clear green, flecked with yellow-brown, and the pupils were
contracted in the sunlight.

"This is Doctor Hawks, Claire," Connington told
her patiently. "He's vice-president in charge of the Research Division,
out at the main plant. I called and told you. What's the good of the act? We'd
like to talk to Al."

She waved a hand. "Sit down. He'll be out of the pool
in a little while."

Connington lowered himself awkwardly down on the grass.
Hawks, after a moment, dropped precisely into a tailor-fashion seat on the edge
of the towel. Claire Pack sat up, drew her knees under her chin, and looked at
Hawks. "What kind of a job have you got for Al?"

Connington said shortly: "The kind he likes." As
Claire smiled, he looked at Hawks and said: "You know, I forget. Every
time. I look forward to coming here, and then when I see her I remember how she
is."

Claire Pack paid him no attention. She was looking at Hawks,
her mouth quirked up in an expression of intrigued curiosity. "The kind of
work Al likes? You don't look like a man involved with violence, Doctor. What's
your first name?" She threw a glance over her shoulder at Connington.
"Give me a cigarette."

"Edward," Hawks said softly. He was watching
Connington fumble in an inside breast pocket, take out a new package of
cigarettes, open it, tap one loose, and extend it to her.

Without looking at Connington, she said softly: "Light
it." A dark, arched eyebrow went up at Hawks. Her wide mouth smiled.
"I'll call you Ed." Her eyes remained flat calm.

Connington, behind her, wiped his lips with the back of his
hand, closed them tightly on the filtered tip, and lit the cigarette with his
ruby-studded lighter. The tip of the cigarette was bound in red-glazed paper,
to conceal lipstick marks. He puffed on it, put it between her two upraised
fingers, and returned the remainder of the pack to his inside breast pocket.

"You may," Hawks said to Claire Pack with a faint
upward lift of his lips. "I'll call you Claire."

She raised one eyebrow again, puffing on the cigarette.
"All right."

Connington looked over Claire's shoulder. His eyes were
almost tearfully bitter. But there was something else in them as well. There
was something almost like amusement in the way he said: "Nothing but
movers today, Doctor. And all going in different directions. Fast company. Keep
your dukes up."

Hawks said: "I'll do my best."

"I don't think Ed looks like a soft touch,
Connie," Claire said.

Hawks said nothing. The man in the pool had stopped and was
treading water with his hands. Only his head was above the surface, with short
sandy hair streaming down from the top of his small, round skull. His
cheek-bones were prominent. His nose was thin-bladed, and he had a clipped
moustache. His eyes were unreadable at the distance, with the reflected
sunlight rippling over his face.

"That's the way his life's arranged," Connington
was mumbling to Claire Pack spitefully, not seeing Barker watching them.
"Nice and scientific. Everything balances. Nothing gets wasted. Nobody
steals a march on Doctor Hawks."