Tuning William - Fuzzy Bones

She nodded. The Rev spread his hands and smiled.' "There you are. Get uptown and apply for work at every tall building you can find. You don't belong down here, anyway."

". . . Ahmed has to go back out to Holloway Station," Sandra Glenn finished.

"In just over a week!"

"You 're going to get married right away and go with him, of course," Grego said.

"Of course," she replied.

"Mmmmm. You'd be crazy not to-the way that man worships you is beyond belief."

He paused. "But, then, you are a treasure, Sandra. I wonder why Major Lunt was so insistent.

"Well!" Grego leaped to his feet. "I'll tell Myra to take charge of all the details you want with the ceremony itself. /'// plan the reception. I think we can do the whole thing here. How about Saturday afternoon, with the reception staggering on into the evening?"

"I'll have to talk to Ahmed," she said. "Of course you will," Grego agreed. "I want the two of you back here to have cocktails with me promptly at 1700.

That's the one time of day when I know where to lay my hands on anyone and everyone. We '11 get it all discussed and start the ball rolling. Now, we want to make a big bash out of this-"

"I'm not sure we can-" she started to interrupt. Grego bent toward her and smiled benignly. "-Afford it?" he said. She nodded.

"The Company," he said evenly, "will insist on paying all the bride's expenses. That takes care of the reception, the entertainment, and practically all of it." "But-" she said.

"You see," Grego said, "/ am giving the bride away- heh, heh-and appropriate it is, too. Best damned Fuzzy sitter I ever had." He rubbed his hands together. "Yes, yes. We'll have all the Fuzzies in for it, too. And invite all the girls from the Company Executive Offices. Yes, yes. Some good-looking

young women around this place will have an ameliorating effect on the dispositions of old coots like Ben Rainsford and me."

By the end of breakfast the next morning, Victor Grego had amassed a hefty sheaf of notes. As he poured a second cup of coffee and lit a fresh cigarette, he riffled through them, looking for the must-do-right-now items he had underlined. On the communication screen across the breakfast room, Myra Fallada finished some notes on his instructions and pushed her pencil back to its roost in her elaborately curled white hair. Myra had been his secretary since he first came to Zarathustra.

"Oh, yes," Grego said. "There won't be time to have any invitations printed up and be certain that they get to all the guests at a decent time for them to reply. We'll go ahead and do that, of course, as a matter of courtesy and etiquette, bull want you to take the guest list and program a reasonably flowery invitaton into the computer so it will inform everyone by communication screen and log their replies. The caterer is going to be temperamental at best, given the short notice, so we'll have to let him know how many to expect immediately."

Myra ran the pencil in and out of her hair a couple of times as she braced for a reply. "Mister Grego," she said, "thisis more than any one person can manage-if I drop everything else, like-" she pursed her lips "-Company business, for example."

Grego drew thoughtfully on his cigarette. "Yes, Myra. I know there's a lot to do. Sandra can help a little-while she's not with Diamond. No, that won't do it. Listen, have we had any applications for office jobs lately?"

Myra consulted some clipped-together papers. "Yes," she said. "Two yesterday."

"Good," Grego boomed. "Hire one of them this instant. That'll give you a full-time assistant until we see the happy couple off to Beta. Also, you can spread around some of the detail work among the other workers in the office.

After all this Company has weathered in the past year, I think we can cope with putting a large wedding together on short notice."

Myra nodded and looked at him with half-closed eyes. "Yes, Mister Grego," she said.

"That's the stuff, Myra. I'll be down in a half-hour. I'm going directly to the Conference Room for the department heads' briefing, so I should be at my desk in less than ninety minutes."

After the meeting, Grego was chatting in the corridor with his Construction Director.

". . . So, by developing Company-owned real estate, we can head off some of the land grabbers and speculators, and still keep ourselves in an aggressive posture-profitably-as the largest builder on the planet."

"'I see what you mean, Don," Grego replied. "It's human nature. People will rent apartments and commercial space from us first if we have selection and price. Volume will give us the price by drying up supply to the smaller builders. It'll keep them from snowballing things for a fast buck-like what happened out in Mortgageville."

Leslie Coombes tugged gently at Grego's sleeve. "Okay, Don," Grego said. "Work up some presentations on specific projects and get back to me."

Then he turned to Coombes. "What is it, Leslie?" he said.

"I've been looking at your ops sheet for this wedding reception, Victor. Did you know mat Jerry Panoyian is listed as the caterer?"

"Of course I know it," Grego said. "I specifically asked that he be the caterer."

Coombes looked like he had just tasted something very sour. "But, Victor, surely you know he's in very thick with all the underworld bigwigs."

Grego nodded. "Um-hmm. I know that. But as far as the police can find out, he's only involved in catering their social functions for them. That aspect of it is disturbing to me, I'll admit, but he is the best caterer in all Mallorysport. And I want this to be a party to remember for some time to come.

I want to have only the finest of everything, so that means we'll be using Jerry Panoyian." He looked sideways at Coombes, "However, if it'll make you feel better, I'll have a couple plainclothes Company Policemen watch him from the moment he sets foot in Company House until he and his people have gone."

"And count your silverware before you let them leave," Coombes added.

Chapter 13

Mr. Chief Justice Frederic Pendarvis stepped deftly to one side of his wife and presented her formally to the bride and groom-although they had met each other before the ceremony.

"I hope you will be as happy together as we have been," she said, after shaking hands with both Ahmed and Sandra. Then she turned her gentle face toward her husband, with the soft light in Victor Grego 's living room catching her white hair with a halo-like glow, and smiled at Mm.

"Oh, Claudette," Pendarvis said, "you'll make these young people blush."

"No one is ever embarrassed by love," she chided him easily.

It was only fitting that Claudette and Frederic Pendarvis be the first to join the reception line. The newly weds had chosen him to perform the ceremony, and Ben Rainsford was the only person in the room whose civil rank was higher.

They took their places alongside the bride and groom to greet the balance of the guests-a process which might occupy the rest of the afternoon, judging from the mob of people milling about the penthouse, the outdoor pavilion on the terrace, and the bars and buffet that had been set up outdoors in the shade of the north and east sides.

Next to join the line was Victor Grego, the host and the man who had given the bride away, looking as jolly as a character from a Dickens novel in his stand-up shirt collar and gray swallow-tail coat.

Properly, Ben Rainsford should have been in the reception line, too, as the ranking civil official, but he had begged off on the excuse that he had a sprained hand and that standing there for so long would make his "gimpy leg"-invented along with the sprained hand-start acting up.

Chief Earlie of the Mallorysport P.O. sloshed the ice around in his glass and remarked to his opposite number in the Company Police Force, " Y 'know, Harry, if I was a crook this is the time I'd pick to stick up a bank." He motioned to where the temporary coat rack in the penthouse foyer was festooned with a perfect jungle of pistol belts and berets, hung there by their owners whose ethics forbade them to drink while wearing those badges of office. "Why, I bet