Дэймон Найт - Orbit 3

He opened two packages of Birdseye Brawny Breakfasts, watched while the fried eggs and bacon began to mushroom from the tiny white capsules. Joy wouldn’t be arriving for a while yet. He drew the curtain around the cook unit and went to the bookcase to get his diary.

Faithfully he recorded the events of the evening. As a younger man he’d imagined he might be a latter-day Pepys. Now he wrote in the book out of habit more than anything, though occasionally he admitted to himself that what he was doing was hoping with words and phrases that a third-rate newspaperman could gain a slim remembrance after he died.

Someone might come across the diary among his effects, for instance. Recognize the burning perceptiveness and, lo! long after he was buried, elevate the name of Cassius Andrews to the heights of—

Rats. He knew it was idle foolishness. The prose was clear but mundane. It in no sense burned. Still, he wrote in the diary every night.

Joy de Veever arrived within an hour. Her evening wig, slightly awry, was an exotic purple to match her lip rouge. She hugged him briefly. They sat down to eat, Joy rather noisily and untidily. It was comforting to have her present.

Her real name was Joy Gollchuk. The editors believed, probably rightly, that Joy de Veever was the sort of byline housewives preferred in a helpful hints column. She shared a cell at the Capitol World Truth with a pert sixty-year-old grandmother named Mrs. Swartzmore, who reviewed films under the name Ma Cine.

“Really (munch munch), Cassius (swallow), this is the most despicable type thing I’ve ever (swallow) heard of. Stealing a body indeed! A Holy Joe’s body, too.”

“I don’t get mad about the minister part so much as over the fact that he was my brother. I feel an obligation not to let the whole thing pass.”

“Maybe (swallow) it’s some sort of obscene ring operating.”

“I’ve wondered that. It’s actually the reason I’m slightly leery of pushing too far. But I know in the long run I can’t let the possibility stop me.”

“Tell me again what the police said.”

“That they’ll do their best. I don’t doubt it. But I was there tonight, Joy. The handlers felt sorry about it, sure. Things were obviously in such a confused state that they could do nothing beyond what they did. Which was, admit someone drove in, picked up Timothy’s coffin with false papers, then drove away again.”

Joy’s eyes glittered. She leaned near. “Did you ask for police cooperation?”

“Didn’t I just tell you?”

“Not about that, silly. I mean cooperation in case there’s a juicy story behind—oh. You’re offended.”

“No I’m not.”

“Juicy was a bad word. I’m sorry, sweets. But there might be a piece in it for you, Cassius. Sort of a memorial to your brother, you might say,” hastily justifying herself. “After all, dear, let’s face it. You’re not the world’s hottest reporter. You could use some self-promotion.”

“Joy, after a while a man knows what he is and isn’t.”

“Oh come on, Cassius! Don’t you have any drive to assert yourself?”

He thought of the diary. He glanced at a collection of file card holders on the self-suspending bookshelves. He frowned.

“Of course. But it doesn’t come out in trying to make hay from what’s happened to Timothy.”

Joy crunched a last morsel of bacon. “Well, you certainly won’t do yourself any good with that silly biography you’ve been working on for six years. The poor man’s been written about in eleven different volumes.”

“Twelve,” Cassius corrected. “As you know, I’ve discovered some new angles which might—”

“Enshrine you with posterity?” Joy smiled. “Cassius, really.”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“It’s what you meant, though.”

“Joy, I like working on the book,” he said. “How did we get on this subject?”

For a moment anger sparked in his rather downturning brown eyes. He controlled the anger. Not a major effort at all. He gripped her hand across the fold-up table.

“Joy, if I didn’t know so well that you can’t help hunting for angles any more than a cat can help chasing a mouse, I’d get damned mad at you sometimes.”

“Yes, you do understand me,” she said gently. “Which is more than I do for you most of the time, I must confess.”

He squeezed her hand. “Thanks for coming tonight.”

“I apologize for calling your book silly, dear.”

“I don’t mind. So long as you realize I’ll keep right on working on it.”

For a moment Joy’s eyes were shadowed. “Still have the dream?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the reason for the book, isn’t it?”

“Um, partly, I guess.”

“I don’t have any dreams like that, Cassius. But I suppose I run after stories for the same reason too.”

“Yes.”

Suddenly she snapped her fingers. The cocktail zircon on her right hand flashed back the rays of the solar panels which lit the room. “I just had the most marvelous idea. If you get no satisfaction from the police, why don’t you go right to the W.B.I?”

“Are you out of your mind? I don’t know anybody down there.”

“What difference does that make? Go straight to the director himself! If you ask me, Cassius, this theft sounds downright sinister. Maybe the Neo-Leninists are making a comeback.”

“And you suggest I waltz right in and state my case to Flange himself?”

“That’s not as impossible as it sounds. I was talking to Charlie Pelz yesterday over morning vitamins.”

“Charlie Pelz?”

“Oh, you know. He does those Black Museum pieces on Sundays for the true-crime nuts. Charlie said he was down to the W.B.I. Building last week and it’s practically turned into an old people’s home. Offices empty. Men sitting around doing nothing. He asked whether he could see Flange’s assistant a moment, to get a comment on a story he was writing, and he almost dropped over when the secretary said Flange had no appointments all day, why didn’t Charlie talk to him? So you try him. Maybe this unstable world peace is more stable than we think.”

Cassius chewed his lip. “I don’t know who could set it up for me.”

“I tell you, Charlie Pelz said no one had to set it up! Flange was so unbusy even a bootboy could get in to see him.”

Although he rejected the idea as slightly ludicrous, Cassius nevertheless filed it away. He and Joy finished their caffeine water with a rehash of the mysterious events out at Dulles. It got them nowhere. She kissed him neatly and rather moistly on the cheek, squeezed his arm, and he ushered her to the door.

“Must run, sweets, but I do hope you sleep well. Try not to fret over what’s happened.”

“I have to find out what happened to Timothy, Joy. I must.”

“Of course. Take my suggestion, though. Thinking about the W.B.I. And Cassius—” Again the eyes, rimmed in purple mascara, glittered. Consolation went out the window, replaced by professionalism. “—if there is anything in it, a hot tidbit either one of us could use—oh, I know I sound terribly crass, but after all, you have only one life to live and you have to make the best of it.”

“That’s right,” Cassius said, hiding laughter. “Good night, Joy. And thanks.”

Poor girl, he thought when she’d gone. Imagines one day the story will fall into her lap. He’d never had the courage to tell her, as she repeatedly told him, that her talent was small.

Oh, she could do a major story, all right. But the material for the story would have to drop from heaven. She’d never find it picking around among new uses for paper undies in the home. Perhaps he’d continued their liaison so long because, unlike Joy, he had realized his personal limits and therefore could feel gently, privately superior.