Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon

Connington lolled back, chuckled, and unwrapped a greenleaved cigar from the tooled leather case in his breast pocket. He snipped open the end with a pair of gold nippers attached to the case by a golden chain, and used a gold-cased lighter set with a ruby. He puffed, and let the smoke writhe out between his large, well-spaced teeth. His eyes glinted behind the drift of smoke that hung in the air in front of his face.

“Let’s keep polite, Dr. 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, and changed the curve of his smile. “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?”

“I know the general location.”

“Good enough. 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. 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 Connington’s face. He reached into a desk drawer, took out a small manila envelope, and put it in his jacket. He dosed the drawer. “I think your car is waiting for us,” he said quietly.

They drove along the coastal highway in Connlngton’s new Cadillac, until the highway veered inland away from the cliffs facing onto 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 cliffs were sheer and composed of some rough, crumbling stone that had fissured vertically, leaving narrow guts whose bottoms were filled with the same detritus that had been used to form the road. 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 with his hands on his knees.

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 wider gut than most. The wedge-shaped split in the cliff was about a hundred feet deep. The ocean reached directly into it 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 cigars “Barker. Al Barker.” He peered slyly sideward. “Ever hear the name?”

Hawks frowned and then said, “No.”

“Don’t read the sports pages? No — I guess not.” Connington backed the car a few inches until he could aim the wheels up the driveway, put the transmission selector in Low, 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, 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 Two. Transferred to the OSS in 1944. Specialized in assassination. Used to be an Olympic skijumper. 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 Mead, couple of years ago. ’S where I met him, thne I was out there on vacation. Right now, he’s built a car and entered it in Grand Prix competition. Plans to do his own drivin’.”

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 directly into the cleft, and either leg was a chute pointing to the water a hundred feet 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. He squeezed out between it and the cliff, and walked to the point of the dogleg. Standing with the tips of his black oxfords projecting a little way over the edge, he looked down. The spray veiled the bottom of the gut. Hanging from two of the projections in the rough walls were a small automobile fender and a ragged strip of fabric from a convertible top. The fabric was bleached and raveled. The paint on the aluminum fender was rotten with corrosion. Hawks looked at them with intent curiosity.

Connington let down his window with a quick whirr. “Barker’s,” he said loudly over the sound of the surf in the cleft. “He put it in there last month. Almost went with it.”

Hawks ran the tip of his tongue over his front teeth, under his lip. He turned back to the road.