Pohl, Frederik - The Age of the Pussyfoot

Taiko gave the girl a look of absent-minded puzzlement, then returned to Forrester. “Well,” he said, “I’m glad to hear that. I’ll keep that in mind, if anything comes up.”

It took all of Forrester’s self-control to keep his expression friendly and eager; why was Taiko being so slow? But Adne rescued him. Suppressing her giggles, she said excitedly, “Say, Taiko! Why don’t you let Charles in the Society? I mean, if he’d be willing.”

Taiko frowned and hesitated, but Forrester didn’t give him a chance. “I’m willing,” he said nobly. “I meant what I said. Glad to help.”

Taiko shrugged after a second and said, “Well, fine, then, Forrester. Of course, the money’s not much.”

“Doesn’t matter a bit!” cried Forrester. “It’s what I want to do! Uh, how much?”

“Well, basic scale is twenty-six thousand.”

“A day?”

“Sure, Forrester.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Forrester largely. “I only want to serve any way I can.” And, exultant, he allowed himself to be given a drink to celebrate, which he enlarged to be a meal. Adne was tolerantly amused.

And all the while the view-wall was displaying scenes of alarm and panic, unheeded.

Forrester had not forgotten that he had betrayed Earth to the Sirians; he had only submerged that large and unpleasant thought in the smaller, but more immediate, pleasure of having escaped from the Forgotten Men. He drank a warm, minty froth and ate nutlike little spheres that tasted like crisp pork; he accepted a spray of a pinkly evanescent cloud from Adne’s joymaker that made him feel about seventeen again—briefly. Tomorrow would be time enough to worry about what he had done to the world, he thought. For today it was enough to be eating well and to have a place in the scheme of mankind.

But all his worries came back to him when he heard his name spoken. It was Taiko’s joymaker that spoke it, and it said, “Man Hironibi! Permit an interruption, please. Are you in the company of Man Forrester, Charles Dalgleish?”

“Yes, sure,” said Taiko, a beat before Forrester opened his mouth to plead with him to deny it.

“Will you ask Man Forrester to speak his name, Man Hironibi?”

“Go ahead, Forrester. It’s to identify you, see?”

Forrester put down the cup of frothed mint and took a deep breath. The pink cloud of joy might as well never have been. He felt every year of his age, even the centuries in the freezer. He said, because he could think of no excuse for not saying it, “Oh, all right. Charles Dalgleish Forrester. Is that what you want?”

Promptly the joymaker said, “Thank you, Man Forrester. Your acoustic pattern is confirmed. Will you accept a message of fiscal change?”

That was quick, thought Forrester, clutching at a feeling of relief; the thing only wanted to acknowledge his new job! “Sure.”

“Man Forrester,” said Taiko’s joymaker, “your late employer, now permanently removed from this ecology, left instructions to disburse his entire residual estate as follows: to the League for Interspacial Amity, one million dollars; to the Shoggo Central Gilbert and Sullivan Guild, one million dollars; to the United Fraternity of Peace Clubs, five million dollars; the balance, amounting to ninety-one million, seven hundred sixty-three thousand, one hundred forty-two dollars, estimated as of this moment—mark!—to be transferred to the account of his last recorded employee as of date of removal, to wit, yourself. I am now so transferring this sum, Man Forrester. You may draw on it as you wish.”

Forrester sank weakly back against the cushions of Adne’s bright, billowy couch. He could not think of anything to say.

“God bless,” cried Adne, “you’re rich again, Charles! Why, you lucky creature!”

“Sure are,” echoed Taiko, grasping his hand warmly. Forrester could only nod.

But he was not really sure that he was so lucky as he seemed. Ninety-one million dollars! It was a lot of money, even in this age of large numbers. It would keep him in comfort for a long time, surely; it would finance all sorts of pleasures and pursuits; it would remove him from the whim of Taiko’s pleasure and insure him against a relapse to the Forgotten Men. But what would happen, Forrester thought painfully, when somebody asked, first, who that late employer happened to be—and why that employer, before returning to his native planet circling around the star Sirius, had so lavishly rewarded Charles Forrester?

The news from the view-wall kept coming in, in a mounting torrent of apprehension and excitement. Forrester, watching Adne and Taiko as they responded to the news reports, could hardly tell when they were reacting with fear and when with a sense of stimulation. Did they really expect Earth to be destroyed by the retaliation of the Sirians? And what were they going to do about it?

When he tried to ask them, Taiko laughed. “Get rid of the machines,” he said largely. “Then we’ll take ’em on—any snake or octopus from anywhere in the galaxy! But first we’ve got to clean house at home.”

Adne only said, “Why don’t you come with us—and relax?”

“Come along and see,” she said.

Considering his own guilt in that area, Forrester did not want to attract attention by seeming especially concerned about the Sirians. But he insisted, “Shouldn’t somebody be doing something?”

“Somebody will be,” said Taiko. “Don’t worry so, boy! There’ll be a run on the freezers—people chickening out, you see. You know. ‘Leave it to George.’ Then, by and by, the Sirians’ll come nosing around, and the appropriate people will deal with them. Or they won’t.”

“Meanwhile, Taiko and I have a date to crawl,” said Adne, “and you might as well come along. It’ll rest you.”

“Crawl?”

“It’s everybody’s duty to keep fit—now more than ever,” Taiko urged.

“You’re being very good to me,” Forrester said gratefully. But what he really wanted was to sit in that room and watch the view-wall. One by one the remote monitoring stations of Earth’s defense screen were reporting in, and although the report from each one of them so far was the same—“No sign of the escaped Sirian”—Forrester wanted to stay with it, stay right in that room watching that view-wall, until there was some other report. To make sure that Earth was safe, of course. But also to find out, at the earliest possible moment, if the (hopefully) recaptured Sirian would give out any information about his accomplice. . . .

“Well, we’re going crawling,” said Adne. “And we really ought to take off right now.”

Forrester said irritably, “Wait a minute. What did they just say about Groombridge 1830?”

“They said what they’ve been saying for a week, dear Charles. That thing they spotted is only a comet. Are we going to crawl or aren’t we?”

Taiko said humorously, “Charles is still a little dazed about his new loot. But look, old buddy, some of us have got things to do.”

Forrester took his eyes from the view-wall’s star map and looked at Taiko, who winked and added, “Now that you’re on the team, you ought to learn the ropes.”

“Team?” said Forrester. “Ropes?”

“I have to do a communication for the society,” Taiko explained. “You know. What you used to call a widecast. And as you’re on the payroll now you ought to come along and see how it’s done, because frankly—” he nudged Charles— “it won’t be too long before you’re doing them yourself.”

“But first we crawl,” said Adne. “So shall we the sweat get going?”

They hustled Forrester along, muttering and abstracted as he was, until he realized that he was attracting attention to himself, and he didn’t want to do that.