Пол Андерсон - Orbit 1

Milord appeared in the hallway, sleepy and disheveled.

“What —” he began, and stopped. I think at that moment he’d have traded me in for a used Edsel.

Behind him the bathroom was brilliantly lit, and empty. The note on the mirror was gone. He’d never believe me. Never in the wide world.

“I. . uh. . thought I heard something,” I explained, lamely.

“You did,” he said, eyeing my broom, and long-handled barbecue fork, and me. “Thunder.”

Let us, for politeness’ sake, lower the curtain here and raise it again the following morning. This morning, to be exact. Visualize, if you will, the sunny kitchen with its limp rained-on curtains, and me staring bug-eyed and whopper-jawed at the name Chauncey written in strawberry jam on the refrigerator door.

I realize why the loolie’s strange attire. I wonder numbly what else he may have pocketed. The note on the mirror arises Phoenix-like in my mind.

Dearest Chauncey:

Someone who uses barbershop hair tonic used my hairbrush. Pray tell, could it be you? How would you like to be snatched baldheaded?

Love and kisses,

Guess Who

As you have no doubt surmised, Chauncey is milord’s middle name which he keeps under such careful guard that even Agent 007 couldn’t spring it. Well, I thought, it was out now. I could almost see the graffiti on the sidewalk, the locker room floor at the club, the office bulletin board…

Hastily, I soaped a sponge and wiped the refrigerator door, and none too soon, for milord burst into the kitchen as if shot from guns. His expression was deathly, his voice a knell.

“Honey,” he intoned in accents of doom, “I’m. . I’m getting bald!”

VIRGINIA KIDD was born in Baltimore, where she early inhaled the atmosphere — books and brew — of H. L. Mencken’s town. She has published poetry and criticism in the little magazines. Formerly married to James Blish, she collaborated with him on many stories and novels published under his byline. She appears here, under her own name, with her first major work of fiction. I think it will be long remembered.

The aliens arrived on Earth the same day that Wystan Godwin reported diffidently to work at Communications Complex, Middle Seaboard. By that time, everyone had grown accustomed to the message from outside — daily, brief, prompt and still just as mysterious in June as it had been six months before. Everyone except Wystan Godwin, that is; he had never heard it. He had never even heard of it.

Tulliver Harms, First Exec of Middle Seaboard Armies, had never lost track of the message. He had, indeed, taken sensible alarm the day the story broke. Regardless of what it meant, the message was alien. It was therefore to be feared, and to be silenced. Since it homed on Communications Satellite by tight-beam transmission, obviously Communications Tower would be the point of vantage when the originators of this babble would follow it down to Earth.

The realization that no other claimants were jousting with him for the privilege of dealing with the imminent invasion both pleased and disgusted Harms. Did nobody else listen to the news, put two and two together and scheme to meet Destiny halfway?

Expertly, he taloned his Liaison Agent out of the complex, recommending him for a job halfway across the world, leaving himself a clear field within which to operate.

He spent several joyously untrammeled days reorganizing the Armies’ establishment into an offensive-defensive unit, instead of the demolitions-and-constructions force that Pax Magna required it to be. He arbitrarily silenced newsmen who had never before experienced censorship, and set up road blocks around the entire area. He did all this without the stultifying aid of the Armies’ only check of balance: Liaison. And then the man the computers selected for him struck him as almost as good as no Agent at all.

Wystan Godwin was on sabbatical leave when his recall-to-duty notice came through. It was somewhat delayed, the last leg of its trip having been through Hindustan by yak-back. Godwin has spent six months at the Restoration Lamasery in Tibet—”everything traditional: no PIX, no FAX, positively no planned recreation of any kind”—and he was still trying to rouse himself out of his Tibetan-achieved calm when he announced himself to the First Exec.

He apologized for the several days lost in transit and found that he could not tear his eyes away from Harms’ bald head.

Glacially the Exec assured him that the lost time did not matter. “We’ve managed,” he said.

Chilled but still amiable (fearing that he had been rude, and looking carefully away from Harms’ head), Godwin explained that he was completely out of touch. “I’ll just order up my predecessor’s papers and a few FAX transcripts to bring myself up to date,” he said, expecting an immediate briefing.

“Do that,” snapped the Exec, and turned away, giving his entire attention to a sheaf of papers on his desk.

Startled at having been so curtly dismissed, but blissfully unaware that Harms planned to shield him from all job information, Godwin ambled off. He strongly suspected that this Exec might prefer him still in Tibet— which made the preference unanimous — as he entered his work cubicle next door.

He spent a profitless morning flicking dust off his desk. For a while he meditated on the way the world’s tempo seemed to have slowed down to that of the lamasery. It helped (looked at the right way) that girls were scarce in the complex. One such, a madonna-faced technician, came near enough for him to consider the possible consequences of a smile. She gave him one glance, lingering at the forehead, registered cool contempt and averted her face. He could feel his smile turning into a painful grimace.

When he had come down to Lhasa, he had not yet refocused on people as people, but by the time he left for the airport he had intuited an as yet indefinable difference in the aspect of the world. It was not the clothes, although women’s cloaks were long again, but then they went up and down like pump handles. His own garments could not be out of style: Liaison harness never changed… All the men were balding, that was it!

Over Paris, he decided he did not like the fad. The men on the plane looked strange. He resented the way everybody kept sneaking overt glances at him. Perhaps he would serve as the bellwether, guiding his fellow passengers in the return to sanity and a more natural hairline. As they went over London, he wavered a little; one or two well-shaped heads caught his eye.

Now, after one long, slow morning, he began to detect in the wealth of hair on his forehead a resemblance to the yaks he had left behind him. Harms’ total baldness must be an accident of nature rather than a fashionable extreme; nothing that ugly could have been intentional. But the fashion had changed while he had been away, and now that he was getting used to it, he might as well conform.

He decided to skip lunch, pick up a depilatory kit from General Stores and retire to his quarters. All alone, a man could work out a compromise with fashion.

Just a little off at the temples, and a ruthless swipe out of his widow’s peak, perhaps? He hummed quietly to himself, studying the effect in the mirror. He took off a little more, and a little more.

Then he drew a line across his skull from ear tip to ear tip and laid a really heavy coat of cream to the fore. Waiting for the depilatory to penetrate the hair follicles, he was gazing abstractedly out the window, when there came a sound that put an abrupt stop to his humming.

It moved rapidly on up beyond the audible range. He could still feel it, though, and he flinched, instinctively. All his senses clamored that something huge was hurtling through the air at him. A shock wave did indeed rock him slightly, and rattled everything movable, but not as much as he had braced for.