Day After Tomorrow

intuition that they were not going to do any better in those cities than they had here.

In Alexandria, he left the public transport system tube at the station nearest to his house, and set out on foot. It was an older part of town and in its day had been the proudest section of the city. He loved it for its relative quiet, its relatively little traffic, the large trees which lined the streets, the quaint oldness of the mansions.

He strode up the steps of his home, crossed the porch and allowed the identity screen on the door to pick him up. He had hated to have the device installed in the beautiful, heavy door, but Ruth had insisted. Everybody, but everybody, had identity screens on their doors. They’d be the talk of the neighborhood if they didn’t have one. He wouldn’t want to get the reputation of being a weird, would he?

The door opened automatically before him and he went on in, down the hall and to the living room.

Ruth was sitting there, her mouth pursed. He recognized the expression from of old. Something was on her mind that she feared he wasn’t going to like and she was getting into a frame of mind for the fray.

Ruth was a tall girl with every pore in place. Her hair was in the very latest style from Budapest, hair style center of Europe, this year. Her make-up was perfect, which was to be expected, he reflected glumly, in view of the time she spent at it. Her clothing was the most chic available from Copenhagen. Scandinavian styles were all the thing this year. The French and Italian dressing houses must be starving to death.

He said, “Hello, darling. Sorry I’m a little late this evening. We’re on a big case. Probably the biggest one I’ve ever seen.” He went over to the auto-bar. “How about a drink? I could use one.”

She shook her head, and said, “Steve, there’s something I have to talk to you about.”

“All right.” He dialed for a vodka martini, telling himself grimly that he was going to learn to like to drink the damn things if it killed him,

“Ben and Tessy were here this afternoon.”

“Oh?” He brought the drink back and sat down on the couch beside her. “What did they have to say?”

“It wasn’t what they said. It was their attitude,” she said, and her mouth pursed again.

He fixed his eyes on her but held his peace.

She said, “They’ve recently moved into a new apartment in the Druid Hill section of Baltimore. It’s the name area now. Just everybody is moving there. You’re simply not with it, these days, unless you live near Druid Hill Park.”

“I don’t like Baltimore,” he muttered.

“What’s that got to do with it? Steve, we’ve simply got to take an apartment there. Houses have become old hat. We’ll be nobodies unless we move to a Baltimore apartment.”

“Those damn plastic and glass fish bowls? Good God, Ruthie, this house is comfortable. It has that lived-in feeling. The rooms are large, the furniture comfortable. The climate is relatively nice here. The neighborhood’s quiet. Most of the neighbors are old families; they’ve known we Hacketts for generations. Known us, respected us, liked us. It’s something you can’t buy. We have a pride of place here. It’s our turf.”

“That’s all you ever think about, your own comfort,” she said hotly. “It means nothing to you that I’ve become a social leper, in the circles in which we move.

“Oh, come off of it, Ruth,” he said wearily. He finished his drink and got to his feet disgustedly to go for another one. “For one thing, we own this house. So it’s rent free. If we had to pay rent these days, particularly in a prestige part of town, it’d cost so much that your budget would be half what it is now. What did you pay for those clothes you’re wearing?”

“We could sell this old monstrosity of a house and buy an apartment!”

He came back with his fresh drink. “No, we couldn’t. By the terms of the will, we have to live in it, or it reverts to the trust. This house was built by my great-grandfather back in Civil War days. Our family has lived in it ever since. When you and I die, it goes to our children, if any, or reverts to the trust to be assigned to some other family branch. But it remains in the family. I’m not allowed to sell it.”

“Good heavens, what the hell kind of a will is that? What you’re saying is we don’t really own this ramshackle joint.”

“The kind of will my great-grandfather set up,” he said dryly. “At any rate, there’ll be no moving to Baltimore because it’s the latest thing to do.”

“We’ll be ostrasized,” she said coldly.

“Sorry. Anything on for tonight? I’m going to have to get to the office early in the morning.” He wanted to get off the subject before the whine came into her voice.

She said, “Yes. We’ve been invited to the Calahan’s, Bess and Fred, to join their swap club.”

“Swap club?” he said. “What’s a swap club?”

“It’s becoming all the rage. You simply have to belong to at least one swap club or you’re nobody.”

“I’m sure it’s all the rage, or you wouldn’t want to join one. Frankly, I’ve never heard of them.”

“They’ve just been introduced from Common Europe. Everybody who is anybody belongs to one on the Continent.”

“But what do you do in a swap club?”

“Oh, don’t be silly. Isn’t it obvious? You swap.”

“Swap what ?”

“Husbands and wives. You trade bed companions. Each week, you swap with somebody else. Just for one night, of course.”

“Great Gods! And you want us to join something like that?”

“I told you. It’s a must these days. Just everybody belongs to at least one swap club. Bess and Fred have been kind enough to invite us to join theirs, in spite of the fact that we’re hasbeens, living in this neighborhood.”

XI

Before he had gone to bed the night before, Larry Woolford had ordered a seat on the shuttle jet for Jacksonville and a hover-cab there to take him to Astor, on the St. Johns River. And he’d requested to be wakened in ample time to get to the shuttle-port.

But it wasn’t the saccharine pleasant face of the Personal Service operator which confronted him when he grumpily answered the phone in the morning. In fact, the screen remained blank.

Larry decided that sweet long drinks were fine but that anyone who took several of them in a row needed to be candled. His mouth felt as though he had been eating dirty dish cloths, and he suspected he was bleeding to death through the eyes.

He grumbled into the phone, “All right. Who is it?”

A Teutonic voice chuckled and said, “You are going to have to decide whether or not you are on vacation, my friend. At this time of day, why aren’t you at work?”

Larry Woolford was waking up. He said, “What can I do for you, Distelmayer?” The German merchant of espionage wasn’t the type to make personal calls.

“Have you forgotten so soon, my friend?” the other chuckled. “It was I who was going to do you a favor.” He hesitated momentarily before adding, “In possible return for future favors on your part.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Larry said. He was fully awake now. “So the favor you’re doing me?”

The German said slowly, “You asked if any of your friends from, ah, abroad were newly in the country. Ilya Simonov has recently appeared on the scene.”

Simonov! In various respects, Larry Woolford’s counterpart. Chief hatchetman for the Chrezvychainaya Komissiya; right hand man of Minister Blagonravov. Woolford had met him on occasion when they had both been present at international summit meetings, busily working at counter- espionage for their respective superiors. Blandly shaking hands with each other, blandly smiling, blandly drinking toasts to peace and international coexistence, blandly sizing each other up and wondering if it’d ever come to the point where one would blandly treat the other to a hole in the head, possibly in some dark alley in Havana or Singapore, Leopoldville or Saigon.

Larry said sharply, “Where is he? How did he get into the country?”