Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

“Now that’s a funny thing,” he said.

“You think I’m making a mistake?”

“Oh, no. You never have yet, so I don’t suppose you are now. The funny thing is that your moves here are almost exactly the same as those another very unusual customer of mine gave me over the phone not an hour ago.”

“Oh?” There was nothing very interesting about that. But, oddly enough, I was very interested.

“Yes. Miss Julia Reede. Only a child really, 21, but a brilliant girl. Possibly a genius. She comes from some little town up in the mountains. She has been in town here for just the past six months and her investments—well! Now I come to think about it, I believe they have very closely paralleled yours all along the line. Fabulously successful. You advising her?”

“Never heard of the girl.”

“Well, you really should meet her, Mr. Barth. You two have so much in common, and such lovely investments. Why don’t you wait around? Miss Reede is coming in to sign some papers this afternoon. You two should know each other.”

He was right. We should know each other. I could feel it.

“Well, Henry,” I said, “perhaps I will wait. I’ve got nothing else to do this afternoon.”

That was a lie. I had plenty of things to do, including a date with the captain of a visiting women’s track team from Finland. Strangely, my people and I were in full agreement on standing up the chesty Finn, let the javelins fall where they may.

Henry was surprised too. “You are going to wait for her? Uh. Well now, Mr. Barth, your reputation—ah—that is, she’s only a child, you know, from the country.”

The buzzer on his desk sounded. His secretary spoke up on the intercom. “Miss Reede is here.”

Miss Reede came right on in the door without waiting for a further invitation.

We stood there gaping at each other. She was small, about 5’2” maybe, with short, black, curly hair, surface-cool green eyes with fire underneath, fresh, freckled nose, slim figure. Boyish? No. Not boyish.

I stared, taking in every little detail. Every little detail was perfect and—well, I can’t begin to describe it. That was for me. I could feel it all through me, she was what I had been waiting for, dreaming of.

I made a quick call on the inside switchboard, determined to fight to override the veto I was sure was coming. I called.

No answer.

For the first time, I got no regular answer. Of course, by now I always had a kind of a sense or feeling of what was going on. This time there was a feeling of a celebration, rejoicing, everybody on a holiday. Which was exactly the way I felt as I looked at the girl. No objections? Then why ask questions?

“Julia,” old Henry Schnable was saying, “this is Mr. John Barth. John, this is—John! John, remember—”

I had reached out and taken the girl’s hand. I tucked her arm in mine and she looked up at me with the light, the fire in the green depths swimming toward the surface. I didn’t know what she saw in me—neither of us knew then—but the light was there, glowing. We walked together out of Henry Schnable’s office.

“John! Julia, your papers! You have to sign—”

Business? We had business elsewhere, she and I.

“Where?” I asked her in the elevator. It was the first word either of us had spoken.

“My apartment,” she said in a voice like a husky torch song. “It’s close. The girl who rooms with me is spending the week back home with her folks. The show she was in closed. We can be alone.”

We could. Five minutes in a cab and we were.

I never experienced anything remotely like it in all my life. I never will again.

And then there was the time afterwards, and then we knew.

It was late afternoon, turning to dusk. She lifted up on one elbow and half turned away from me to switch on the bedside lamp. The light came on and I looked down at her, lovingly, admiringly. Idly, I started to ask her, “How did you get those little scars on your leg there and… those little scars? Like buckshot! Julia! Once, along about ten years ago—you must have been a little girl then—in the mountains—sure. You were hit by a meteor, weren’t you??”

She turned and stared at me. I pointed at my own little pockmark scars.

“A meteor—about ten years ago!”

“Oh!”

“I knew it. You were.”

“’Some damn fool, crazy hunter,’ was what Pop said. He thought it really was buckshot. So did I, at first. We all did. Of course about six months later I found out what it was but we—my little people and I—agreed there was no sense in my telling anyone. But you know.”

It was the other ship. There were two in this sector, each controlled to colonize a person. My own group always hoped and believed the other ship might have landed safely. And now they knew.

We lay there, she and I, and we both checked internal communications. They were confused, not clear and precise as usual. It was a holiday in full swing. The glorious reunion! No one was working. No one was willing to put in a lot of time at the communications center talking to Julia and me. They were too busy talking to each other. I was right. The other ship.

Of course, since the other ship’s landfall had been a little girl then, the early movements of the group had been restricted. Expansion was delayed. She grew up. She came to the city. Then—well, I didn’t have to think about that.

We looked at each other, Julia and I. A doll she was in the first place and a doll she still was. And then on top of that was the feeling of community, of closeness coming from our people. There was a sympathy. The two of us were in the same fix. And it may be that there was a certain sense of jealousy and resentment too—like the feeling, say, between North and South America. How did we feel?

“I feel like a drink.”

We said it together and laughed. Then we got up and got the drinks. I was glad to find that Julia’s absent roommate, an actress, had a pretty fair bar stock.

We had a drink. We had another. And a third.

Maybe nobody at all was manning the inner duty stations. Or maybe they were visiting back and forth, both populations in a holiday mood. They figured this was a once in a millennium celebration and, for once, the limits were off. Even alcohol was welcome. That’s a line of thought that kills plenty of people every day out on the highway.

We had a couple more in a reckless toast. I kissed Julia. She kissed me. Then we had some more drinks.

Naturally it hit us hard; we weren’t used to it. But still we didn’t stop drinking. The limits were off for the first time. Probably it would never happen again. This was our chance of a lifetime and there was a sort of desperation in it. We kept on drinking.

“Woosh,” I said, finally, “wow. Let’s have one more, wha’ say? One more them—an’ one more those.”

She giggled. “Aroun’ an aroun’, whoop, whoop! Dizzy. Woozy. Oughta have cup coffee.”

“Naw. Not coffee. Gonna have hangover. Take pill. Apsirin.”

“Can-not! Can-not take pill. Won’ lemme. ’Gains talla rules.”

“Can.”

“Can-not.”

“Can. No rules. Rule soff. Can. Apsirin. C’mon.”

Clinging to each other, we stumbled to the bathroom. Pills? The roommate must have been a real hypochondriac. She had rows and batteries of pills. I knocked a bottle off the cabinet shelf. Aspirin? Sure, fancy aspirin. Blue, special. I took a couple.

“Apsirin. See? Easy.”

Her mouth made a little, red, round “O” of wonder. She took a couple.

“Gosh! Firs’ time I c’d ever take a pill.”

“Good. Have ’nother?”

It was crazy, sure. The two of us were drunk. But it was more than that. We were like a couple of wild, irresponsible kids, out of control and running wild through the pill boxes. We reeled around the bathroom, sampling pills and laughing.