of jolt—breathing was anything but uncommon in the Shelter state. The smokes had the reputation of being non- addicting, which for the most part they were—but they were certainly habit-forming, which is quite a different thing, and not necessarily less dangerous.
A hazy, formless curtain of pink at the far end of the corridor proved to be a pure free-serotonin antagonist in high concentration, a true ataraxic which washed his mind free of every emotion but contentment with everything in all the wide universe. What must be, must be… it is all for the best… there is peace in everything—
In this state of uncritical yea-saying, the passengers on the serpentine were run through an assembly line of elaborate and bestial practical jokes. It ended with a 3-V tape recreation of Belsen, in which the scenarist had cunningly made it appear that the people on the serpentine would be next into the ovens. As the furnace door closed behind them there was a blast of mind-cleansing oxygen; staggering with horror at what they had been about to accept with joy, the passengers were helped off the train to join a guffawing audience of previous victims. Michelis’ only impulse was to escape—above all he did not want to stay to laugh at the next load of passengers in shock—but he was too exhausted to get beyond the nearest bench in the amphitheater, and Liu could hardly walk even that far. They were forced to sit there in the press until they had made a better recovery.
It was fortunate that they did. While they were nursing their drinks Michelis, had been deeply suspicious of the warm amber cups, but their contents had proved to be nothing but honest and welcome brandy—the next train was greeted with a roar of delight and a unanimous surge of the crowd to its feet.
Egtverchi had arrived.
There was a real mob now in the cocktail lounge above ground, but Aristide was far from happy; he had already cut off quite a few heads down below on the catering staff. He had somewhere inside him a very delicate sense which told him when a party was going sour, and that sense had put up the red alarms long before this. The arrival of the guest of honor in particular had been an enormous fiasco. The countess had not been on hand, the creature’s sponsors had not been there, none of the really important guests who had been invited specifically to see the guest of honor had been there, and the guest himself had betrayed Aristide into showing, before all the staff, that he was frightened out of his wits. He was bitterly ashamed of his fright, but the fact was now beyond undoing. He had been told to anticipate a monster, but not such a monster as this—a creature well more than ten feet high, a reptile which walked more like a man than like a kangaroo, with vast grinning jaws, wattles which changed color every few moments, small clawlike hands which looked as though they could pluck one like a chicken, a balancing tail which kept sweeping trays off tables, and above all a braying laugh and an enormous tenor voice which spoke English with a perfection so cold and carefully calculated as to make Aristide feel like a thumb-fingered leather- skinned Sicilian who had just landed.
And at the monster’s entrance, nobody but Aristide had been there to welcome him…
A train rumbled into the atrium of the recovery room, but before it stopped, Senator Sharon tumbled out with a vast display of piano legs and black eyebrows. “Look at him!” she squealed, full of the five-fold revival Aristide had conscientiously arranged for her. “Isn’t he male!”
Another failure for Aristide: it was one of the countess’ standing orders that the Senator had to be put through her cell and fired out into the Shelter night long before the party proper could be said to have begun; otherwise the Senator would spend the rest of the evening, after her five-fold awakening, climbing from one pair of shoulders to another to a political, literary, scientific or any other eminence she could manage to attain at the expense of everyone else who could be bought with half an hour on a table top—and never mind that she would spend the rest of the next week falling down from that eminence into the swamps of nymphomania again. If Senator Sharon were not properly ejected this early, and with due assurances, in the warm glow of her aftermath, she was given to lawsuits.
The empty train pulled out invitingly into the lounge. The Lithian monster saw it and his grin got wider.
“I always wanted to be an engine driver,” he said in a brassy English which nevertheless was more precise than anything to which Aristide would be able to pretend to the end of his life.
“And there’s the major-domo. Good sir, I’ve brought two, three, several guests of my own. Where is our hostess?”
Aristide pointed helplessly, and the tall reptile boarded the train at the front car, with a satisfied crow. He was scarcely settled in before the rest of his party was pouring across the lounge floor and piling in behind him. The train started with a jerk, and rumbled to the elevator. It sank down amid tali wisps of steam.
And that was that. Aristide had muffed the grand entrance. Had he had any doubts about it, they would have been laid to rest most directly: less than ten minutes later, he was snooted egregiously by Faulkner. So much for being a dedicated artist with a loyal patroness, he thought dismally. Tomorrow, he would be a short-order cook in some Shelter commissariat, dossiers or no dossiers. And why? Because he had been unable to anticipate the time of arrival, let alone the desires or the friends, of some creature which had never been born on Earth at all. He marched deliberately and morosely away from his post toward the recovery room, kicking assistants who were green enough to stay within range. He could think of nothing further to do but to supervise personally the tapering- off of Dr. Martin Agronski, the unknown guest who had something to do with the Lithian.
But he had no illusions. Tomorrow, Aristide, caterer to the Countess des Bois-d’Averoigne, would be lucky to be Michel di Giovanni, late of the malarial plains of Sicily.
Michelis was sorry he had allowed himself and Liu aboard the serpentine the moment he understood the construction of the second level, for he saw at once that they would have virtually no chance of seeing Egtverchi’s arrival. Fundamentally, the second level was divided by soundproof walls into a number of smaller parties, some of them only slightly drunker and more unorthodox than the cocktail party had been, but the rest running a broad spectrum of frenetic exoticism. He and Liu were carried completely around the course before he was able to figure out how to get the girl and himself safely off the serpentine; and each time he was moved to attempt it, the train began to go faster in unpredictable spurts, producing a sensation rather like that of riding a roller coaster in the middle of the night.
Nevertheless, they saw the only entrance that counted. Egtverchi emerged from the last gas bath standing in the head car of the serpentine, and stepped out of the car under his own power. In the next five cars behind him, also standing, were ten nearly identical young men in uniforms of black and lizard-green with silver piping, their arms folded, their expressions stern, their eyes straight ahead.
“Greetings,” Egtverchi said, with a deep bow which his disproportionately small dinosaurian arms and hands made both comical and mocking. “Madame the Countess, I am delighted. You are protected by many bad smells, but I have braved them all.” The crowd applauded. The countess’ reply was lost in the noise, but evidently she had chided him with being naturally immune to smokes which would affect Earthmen, for he said promptly, with a trace of hurt in his voice:
“I thought you might say that, but I’m grieved to be caught in the right. To the pure all things are pure, however, did you ever see such upstanding, unshaken young men?” He gestured at the ten. “But of course I cheated. I stopped their nostrils with filters, as Ulysses stopped his men’s ears with wax to pass the sirens. My entourage will stand for anything; they think I am a genius.”
With the air of a conjurer, the Lithian produced a silver whistle which seemed small in his hand, and blew into the thick air a white, warbling note which was utterly inadequate to the gesture which had preceded it. The ten soldierly young men promptly melted. The forefront of the crowd gleefully toed the limp bodies, which took the abuse with lax indifference.
“Drunk,” Egtverchi said with fatherly disapproval. “Of course. Actually I didn’t stop their noses at all. I prevented their reticular formations from reporting the countess’ smokes to their brains until I gave the cue. Now they have gotten all the messages at once; isn’t it disgraceful? Madame, please have them removed, such dissoluteness embarrasses me. I shall have to institute discipline.”
The countess clapped her hands. “Aristide! Aristide?” She touched the transceiver concealed in her hair, but there was no response that Michelis could detect. Her expression changed abruptly from childish delight to infant fury. “Where is that lousy rustic—”
Michelis, boiling, shouldered his way into Egtverchi’s line of sight with difficulty.
“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” he said in a hoarse voice.
“Good evening, Mike. I am attending a party, just as you are. Good evening, dear Liu. Countess, do you know my foster parents? But I am sure you do.”
“Of course,” the countess said, turning her bare shoulders and back unmistakably on Michelis and Liu, and looking up at Egtverchi’s perpetually grinning head from under gilded eyelids.
