of UN bills. “If it distresses your neurotic mind I’ll pay in advance. For six days. I’m surprised they didn’t ask for it at the desk when I registered.” “Aw,” Gus Swenesgard said, accepting the bills and counting them, “we trust you.”
“I can see that.” She wanted to get on her way; what did this old idiot have in mind, really?
“Come on, miss. We know you’re aNeeg-lover.” The man reached out and gave her an overly familiar pat on the head. “We’ve watched your shows, my family and me. Always a lot of Neegs on it, aren’t there? Even my six- year-old, feddie; he said it. ‘That lady’s a Neeg-lover.’ I’ll just bet you’re on your way up to the hills to visit Percy X. Isn’t that right, miss?” After a pause Joan said,“Yes.”
“Now I’ll tell you what.” Gus Swenesgard pocketed the bills; they bulged, wadded-up, in his uncreased trousers’ pocket. The pants had to be at least ten years old; nobody made clothes with pockets in them anymore. “You may be a Neeg-lover but that don’t mean they feel the same about you. Those ’parts, they’re insane. Like African savages. They’ll mutilate you.” He nodded his red, near-bald head emphatically, with great earnestness. “Up in the North you don’t realize that; all your Neegs have missed.”
“‘Missed’?” She did not know the term; it was obviously one of local use, and pejorative.
“Miscegenated. You know; mixed their blood in with you whites so you’re all contaminated. But down here it’s different; we know how to treat our Toms; we know where they belong.”
“For their own good?” Joan said caustically. “They’re happy. They got security. They don’t have to worry about being commandeered for Gany work camps.”
Uneasily, Joan said, “I didn’t know that the conquerors had work camps.”
“They didn’t take over this planet for nothing, miss. They haven’t begun to requisition labor crews yet. But they will. They’ll take ’em back to Ganymede and make them into what they call ‘creeches.’ I got inside dope on it. But we mean to protect our Toms; they’ve worked for us good and we owe that to them.” Gus Swenesgard’s voice was unwavering, tough with harshness.
“It’s pointless, Mister Swenesgard,” came a soft but professionally commanding voice form behind the two of them. Gus turned rapidly, startled, to face the newcomer. So did Joan.
“What .?” began Gus.
“She has her mind made up,” the stranger continued quietly. “If you are really so interested in Miss Hiashi’s welfare, it seems to me that the only thing you can do is offer to go along with her. To protect her.”
“I don’t know who you are or think you are,” Gus said emphatically, “but you, mister, are out of your mind.”
“My name is Paul Rivers.” He extended his hand and Gus, with reluctance, shook it. “I sense you’re afraid, sir.” “Any man with an ounce of intelligence would be,” Gus snapped. “Those Neegs—”
‘‘The Greeks believed, in their more philosophical moments,” Paul Rivers said, “that there was only one blessing greater than a short life, and that was never to have been bom at all. In times like these, one can see a great deal of wisdom in this.”
“If you’re so damn philosophical,” Gus said angrily, “you go with her.”
Turning to Joan, Paul Rivers said, “If you’ll allow me.
Joan looked at him and felt suspicion. Lean, probably in his late thirties, with touches of gray in his close- cropped, well-groomed black hair, he seemed so calm, so self-confident; he seemed, in fact, perfectly sincere, and yet it struck her as incredible that someone would put his life in jeopardy for nothing, no matter how philosophical he might be. Still “All right,” Joan decided. “If you’re nutty enough to come I’m nutty enough to let you.” No use questioning him, she thought. He could probably lie himself blue and I’d never know it.
“If you’ll wait a moment,” Paul Rivers said, moving toward the door, “I’ll go to my room and get a needle gun.” He departed.
And the moment he left the room she changed her mind—violently. The air of confidence which Rivers possessed could come from only one thing. Obviously, he never expected to arrive at the point, the place, where danger would threaten him. She thought, Rivers must be someone hired to stop me from reaching Percy. Perhaps to kill me.
“Can I leave now?” she asked Gus. “My taxi says its meter is on.” Without waiting for an answer she crossed lightly through the open window and into the ionocraft.
“That Percy X,” Gus Swenesgard called after her, “is a psychopath, descended from psychopaths, back to the first Black Muslims. You think to him you’re going to be cute little Joan Hiashi, the TV darling? You’ll be” —he followed to the window, gesturing with his cigar agitatedly <as the taxi door shut— “one of those whites who lynched civil rights demonstrators back in 1966. You weren’t even born then, but what’s that matter to a fanatic like Percy X? I ask you; what’s that mean to him—and how many yards of video tape you think you’re going to groove before he—”
As the taxi door shut Joan shouted, ‘‘Percy X and I went to college together. Comparative Religion One and Two at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. We intended to be preachers, Mister Swenesgard. Isn’t that crazy?” She gave the pedal signal to the cab and it uncoupled from the window.
Joan could not hear what Gus shouted after her in answer to that. The whoosh of the ionocraft climbing swiftly toward the sun drowned it out. Strange, she thought, that Percy and I are going to meet again under such changed conditions. I’ve been studying Buddhism and he the religion of Mohammed, but somehow, during all the excitement, we have both gotten a long way from where we had intended to go.
“He doesn’t want you to go,” the cab said sourly. “But I don’t care. If he revokes my license I’ll just switch over to another plantation. Like Chuck Pepitone’s. It’s big there; I’ll bet I’d do six times the business.”
“Business is business,” Joan said, and settled back against the sagging imitation sea otter pelt seat.
“I’ll say one thing for him,” the cab said. “He does take an interest in what’s going on around him. Most of the Burgers are too loftly to do anything but sip bourbon sours and ride horses. Gus, though; he takes the trouble to get me vital parts, hard to get parts. I’m sort of out of date, you know, and parts for me aren’t easy to come by. And I always felt he sort of liked me.”
“He likes me, too,” Joan said, “in his own knee- patting way. But I’m not turning back now, just to please him.” Nor that other man who showed up, she said to herself. That Paul Rivers.
In his hotel room Paul Rivers spoke hurriedly into his scrambler-equipped pocket vidphones. “I’ve made contact with Joan Hiashi and she has agreed to let me accompany her into the mountains.”
“Good,” Dr. Choate said. “Now, as you know, her analyst in New York has informed us that she is a collaborator out to supply the Gany Military with information leading to Percy’s capture. As I explained in your briefing, this is something which we, of the World Psychiatric Association, cannot permit. Percy is a symbol for the human race now, an important ego-identification figure. As long as he continues to resist, so will the mass ego of humanity. Thus, it is vitally important that he continue, or at least seem to continue.”
“What if he doesn’t?” Paul Rivers asked.
“The latest psycho-comptiter findings indicate that this would lead to a massive increase in schizophrenia throughout the world, a thorough group insanity impossible to control. However, there is one way to avoid this.”
“How?” Paul Rivers asked. He checked over his needle gun expertly and carefully as he spoke.
“Martyrdom. If he must die, it has to be a hero’s death. The worms know this as well as we do. Our therapists attached to the office of Military Administrator Koli reports that Koli plans to capture Percy alive and have him skinned. The humiliation to the human ego were Percy to be skinned like a mere animal, for some sort of wall hanging, would constitute a traumatic incident of a magnitude difficult to overestimate. This, above all else, must not be allowed to happen.”
“Hmm,” Paul Rivers said, pocketing his needle gun.
“It’s up to you, Rivers.” Choate then rang off; the miniature screen faded into an odd little slot of dark ness.
Retracing his steps back down the hotel corridor, Paul Rivers reached Joan Hiashi’s room; he pushed open the door and stepped inside.
Only Gus stood there. By the window, smiling. The smile alone told Paul Rivers an additional unpleasant fact.
“Mister Swenesgard,” he said in a low, level voice, “you really wanted her to go. Didn’t you?” The smile on the fat man’s moon-like face increased. “Why, how you talk,” Gus said. “And,” he added with satisfaction, “there ain’t no use you trying to chase after her. That broken-down old ionocraft taxi she’s in is the only one
