She talked to him straight and McClintic kept cool. While she told him about who she was, about Stencil and Fausto - even a homesick travelogue of Malta - there came to McClintic something it was time he got around to seeing: that the only way clear of the cool/crazy flipflop was obviously slow, frustrating and hard work. Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care. He might have known, if he'd used any common sense. It didn't come as a revelation, only something he'd as soon not've admitted.
'Sure,' he said later, as they headed into the Berkshires. 'Paola, did you know I have been blowing a silly line all this time. Mister Flab the original, is me. Lazy and taking for granted some wonder drug someplace to cure that town, to cure me. Now there isn't and never will be. Nobody is going to step down from heaven and square away Roony and his woman, or Alabama, or South Africa or us and Russia. There's no magic words. Not even I love you is magic enough. Can you see Eisenhower telling Malenkov or Khrushchev that? Ho-ho.'
'Keep cool but care,' he said. Somebody had run over a skunk a ways back. The smell had followed them for miles. 'If my mother was alive I would have her make a sampler with that on it.'
'You know, don't you,' she began, 'that I have to -'
'Go back home, sure. But the week's not over yet. Be easy, girl.'
'I can't. Can I ever?'
'We'll stay away from musicians,' was all he said. Did he know of anything she could be, ever?
'Flop, flip,' he sang to the trees of Massachusetts. 'Once I was hip . . .'
Chapter Thirteen
In which the yo-yo string is revealed as a state of mind
I
The passage to Malta took place in late September, over an Atlantic whose sky never showed a sun. The ship was Susanna Squaducci, which had figured once before in Profane's long-interrupted guardianship of Paola. He came back to the ship that morning in the fog knowing that Fortune's yo-yo had also returned to some reference-point, not unwilling, not anticipating, not anything; merely prepared to float, acquire a set and drift wherever Fortune willed. If Fortune could will.
A few of the Crew had come to give Profane, Paola and Stencil bon voyage; those who weren't in jail, out of the country or in the hospital. Rachel had stayed away. It was a weekday, she had a job. Profane supposed so.
He was here by accident. While weeks back, off on the fringes of the field-of-two Rachel and Profane had set up, Stencil roamed the city exerting 'pull,' seeing about tickets, passports, visas, inoculations for Paola and him, Profane felt that at last he'd come to dead center in Nueva York; had found his Girl, his vocation as watchman against the night and straight man for SHROUD, his home in a three-girl apartment with one gone to Cuba, one about to go to Malta, and one, his own, remaining.
He'd forgotten about the inanimate world and any law of retribution. Forgotten that the field-of-two, the twin envelope of peace had come to birth only a few minutes after he'd been kicking tires, which for a schlemiel is pure wising-off.
It didn't take Them long. Only a few nights later Profane sacked in at four, figuring to get in a good eight hours of Z's before he had to get up and go to work. When his eyes finally did come open, he knew from the quality of light in the room and the state of his bladder that he'd overslept. Rachel's electric clock whined merrily beside him, hands pointing to 1:30. Rachel was off somewhere. He turned on the light, saw that the alarm was set for midnight, the button on the back switched to ON. Malfunction. 'You little bastard'; he picked the clock up and heaved it across the room. On hitting the bathroom door the alarm went off, a loud and arrogant BZZZ.
Well, he got his feet in the wrong shoes, cut himself shaving, token he had wouldn't fit into the turnstile, subway took off about ten seconds ahead of him. When he arrived downtown it was not much south of three and Anthroresearch Associates was in an uproar. Bergomask met him at the door, livid. 'Guess what,' the boss yelled. It seemed an all-night, routine test was on. Around 1:15, one of the larger heaps of electronic gear had run amok; half the circuitry fused, alarm bells went off, the sprinkler system and a couple of CO2 cylinders kicked in, all of which the attendant technician had slept through peacefully.
'Technicians,' Bergomask snorted, 'are not paid to wake up. This is why we have night watchmen.' SHROUD sat over against the wall, hooting quietly.
Soon as it had all come through to Profane he shrugged. 'It's stupid, but it's something I say all the time. A bad habit. So. Anyway. I'm sorry.' Getting no response, turned and shuffled off. They'd send him severance pay, he reckoned, in the mail. Unless they intended to make him cover the cost of the damaged gear. SHROUD called after him:
Bon voyage.
'What is that supposed to mean.'
We'll see.
'So long, old buddy.'
Keep cool. Keep cool but care. It's a watchword, Profane, for your side of the morning. There, I've told you too much as it is.
'I'll bet under that cynical butyrate hide is a slob. A sentimentalist.'
There's nothing under here. Who are we kidding?
The last words he ever had with SHROUD. Back at 112th Street he woke up Rachel.
'Back to pounding the pavements, lad.' She was trying to be cheerful. He gave her that much but was mad with himself for going flabby enough to forget his schlemiel birthright. She being all he had to take it out on,
'Fine for you,' he said. 'You've been solvent all your life.'
'Solvent enough to keep us going till me and Space/Time Employment find something good for you. Really good.'
