Frederik Pohl - Jem

She had to keep moving. It was very hard to stroll for more than seven hours, however many Camparis and soda you are willing to stop and drink. God bless, she passed something that called itself, in Cyrillic letters, an Expres-Restoran, and when she realized that it was a cafeteria, one problem at least was solved. She pointed at something that looked like roast chicken and probably was, and with the mashed potatoes and bread that went with it, at least she was full. Full of time. She emptied herself of as much of it as she could: a stroll through the botanical gardens, a long window-shopping stroll down the Boulevard Marshal Tito. And then it began to rain. She retreated into a bioskop and watched a Czech comedy with Serbo-Croatian subtitles until nine. The only problem was staying awake; but when she got to the hotel there was a real problem. Ghelizzi did not show up there either.

By now she was almost dizzy with fatigue, her clothes were sweaty and rain-stained, and she was sure she was beginning to smell. Poppa had not really thought these arrangements through, she thought with some bitterness. It should have occurred to him that the waiters at the hotel bar would not fail to notice a sweaty, dirty foreign woman among all their marble and their string trios. If she had been a man, it might not have mattered. A man could have been checking out the hotel whores — the skinny, dark-at-the-roots blond playing solitaire by the fireplace, the plump one with the bright red hair who had left the aperitif lounge twice in one hour, with different men, and was back again, ready for the next. Margie refused another Campari and sent the waiter for a Turkish coffee. The next appointment was not until the following afternoon, and where would she sleep?

The whores had rooms. If she had been one of them…

The idea did not disturb Margie in any moral way, but it took only a second for her to discard it as impractical. Even if she had a room, the waiters would surely throw her out to protect the existing monopoly the first time she looked toward one of the solitary males. They were already looking at her with interest and beginning to take the cloths off some of the tables in the farther end of the room.

Margie picked up her coffee and moved to the table of the streaked blond. She spoke to her in English, confident that in a tourist hotel the girls would be fluent in the necessary words in any major language.

“How much for all night?” she asked.

The blond looked scandalized. “For yourself? How disgusting! I could not possibly do such a thing with a woman.”

“Fifty dinars.”

“One hundred.”

“All right, one hundred. But I have very special tastes, and you must do exactly as I ask.”

The blond looked skeptical, then shrugged and signaled the waiter. “First you must buy me a real Scotch whiskey while you explain what these tastes are. Then we will see.”

In the morning Margie woke up refreshed. She used the whore’s tiny shower to get clean, dressed quickly and paid the woman off with a smile.

“May I ask a question?” the whore offered, counting the money.

“I can’t stop you from asking.”

“This thing you had me do, simply rubbing your neck each time you woke until you fell asleep again? Is that truly satisfying to you?”

“You wouldn’t believe how satisfying,” smiled Margie. She strolled grandly out of the hotel, nodding politely to the local police in their baggy gray uniforms open at the neck, hands on the guns in the cardboard holsters. A few blocks down the boulevard took her to the London Cafe, and there, nursing a beer at one of the indoor tables, was the slim, short Italian wearing a Skopje football cap.

She sat down and ordered a coffee, then visited the women’s w.c. When she came back the Italian was gone. The bag she had left on her chair did not appear to be disturbed, but her exploring fingers told her the camera was gone, and in its place was a guide folder about the hovercraft cruise to the Iron Gorge.

She made her way back across the border the same way she had come. By the time she was in Trieste again and able to resume the identity of the Swiss-Italian housewife, she was fully restored. On the clamjet to Paris she locked herself in the toilet and studied the contents of the travel folder.

How Ghelizzi had come to be a person of trust in Sir Tam’s army of spies was beyond her; he had not impressed her as being the sort of man one would repose faith in. But he had delivered the goods this time. The little device was on its way, and the complete file of secret tactran messages between Earth and the Fuel Bloc camp on Klong was in her hands in microfiche. Her father would be very proud.

WHAT ANA DIMITROVA had seen of the United States was what she had seen of most of the world: airports, hotel rooms, meeting halls, city streets. So at first she looked around with lively interest as the electrobus whined along an eight-lane superhighway toward the place she had been ordered to report to. So much open space, not even farmed! And contrar-ily, so many places lined up one after another as they passed through communities — places to eat, places to sleep, places to drink, places to buy gas. What prodigious devourers these Americans must be to keep them all flourishing!

More than half of her companions in the bus were Americans, and they were busy devouring, too, several smoking in flagrant disregard of the signs, a couple chewing gum, three in the back seat passing around a bottle in a brown paper bag. The army sergeant who had offered her part of a chocolate bar was now offering the Canadian agronomist woman some round hard candies with holes in them. Nan was making an effort to like the others because she surely would be seeing a lot of them in training. It wasn’t easy. One by one, each of the American men had made friendly overtures to her which turned in seconds into sexual ones. Even the Vietnamese colonel, so tiny and delicate that she had sat down next to him at first, thinking he was a woman, had begun to make personal remarks in his beautiful high-pitched English. She had changed seats six times so far and now resolutely sat staring out the window even though she was no longer seeing anything. Such compulsive consumers — she could not help feeling that they seemed obliged to consume her as well.

She touched the tiny microfiche from Ahmed at the bottom of her blouse pocket. She had no reader for it, but she needed none. As always it was formal, not very rewarding, and extremely short:

My dear Ana, I appreciate the letters you have been sending and think of you often. With great affection, Dulla

He could have spent a few P$ more, she thought resentfully, and then, as always, brought herself up sharply. Ahmed was from a poor country. Even fiched and faxed, the cost per square centimeter of a letter from Kungson to Earth was very high. (But in her own letters she had poured money out like water. (But she could not judge him; she had not had the life experience of measuring every penny. (But it was not just the economy of space and money — how much more he could have said if he had chosen, in even fewer words! — it was the economy of emotion that she begrudged.))) Three deep in parentheses, she took her mind off Dulla and resolved to think about more profitable subjects, and then realized the bus had stopped.

Three uniformed Americans had entered by the driver’s seat. One of them gestured for silence and said to the bus at large, “You people are welcome, and let’s see some ID.”

Craning her neck, Nan could see a barricade with two other soldiers standing by it. They were not at attention, but they were watching the bus quite carefully, and she observed that what had looked like a well-clipped hedge stretching away on both sides of the barrier had barbed wire inside it. How curious. They were treating this place as though it were some sort of military installation rather than a center for preparing scientists and support personnel for a peaceful expedition to Kungson. Big-power customs were so strange to her. When the MPs came to her, she handed her passport over and smiled at the tall black one who was studying it. He returned her look impassively.