it, Whitlow had taken it for his own. It was temperature controlled; it had lights and plumbing; and, as Forrester had already seen, it was provided with food storage facilities. All Whitlow had to do was furnish the food. Forrester leaned back, relaxed; trying to summon up the energy to eat a chocolate mousse and half listening to Whitlow’s stream of talk. “. . . So then when Ah got out of M. Ah. T. they weren’t vurry many jobs open for coal-mahning engineers, of course. So Ah went back and took mah master’s in solid-state electronics. Then Bell Labs sent they recruiter up to scout out prospects and he made me this offer, and Ah went into the labs at nahn thousand to start. Sweat, man, things looked good. Murry was puttin’ on weight, and the kids were fahn. But Ah’d had this little cough for some tahm, and—”
“Whit,” said Forrester, “hold off on that a minute, will you? I want to ask you something. Why did we hide from that reporter?”
Whitlow looked startled. “Ah’m sorry,” he apologized after a minute. “Ah keep forgetting what a greenhorn you are. You don’t know about these reporters.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, all you have to know is seeing one of them’s poison. Whah, that lahk a vulture hovering over a hill. You just know they’s going to be a corpse down below. See, they’ve got this Freedom of the Press thing, so when anybody takes out a killing lahcense he got to tell the reporters raht away. And he’s got to fahl a complete plan of action, see, so the reporters can be raht there when the blood starts flahing, because they tape it all and they put it on the view-walls. Specially if the killer’s in one of the tournaments. Fella from the National Open was here last week and, God, they was reporters hanging out of every cloud.”
“I think I understand,” said Forrester. “You mean if you can keep out of the way of the reporters, you can probably keep out of the way of the assassins, too.”
“Stands to reason, don’t it?”
“I don’t know what stands to reason,” Forrester said humbly. He was beginning to wish he had not been so quick to follow the advice of Adne’s children, so reluctant to wait and expose himself to more of Adne’s gentle scorn. He felt a quick surge of anger. How dare this world treat his life so lightly!
But if it had not been for this world he would not have a life at all; would have stayed dead with a lungful of smoke and fire, centuries before, his body now no more than a soft place in the ground. He leaned back and let himself be lulled by Whitlow’s continuing story of his own adventures.
“So then Ah went to the comp’ny doctor and he told me Ah had it, all rhat. The Big C. Well! Scared? But we had this comp’ny freezer plan at the labs, and Ah reported in to the medics. ‘Sheeoot,’ they said. ‘Lung cancer, hey? Well, you lay raht down here and we’ll freeze your bones—’ ”
Relaxing, half listening, Forrester found himself getting drowsy. It had been a very strange day, he thought; but then he stopped thinking and fell asleep.
In order to live successfully as a panhandler, you had to exercise special care in picking your “clients,” Whitlow said. The worst thing you could do was guess wrong. There was always the chance that you might sidle up to somebody and hit him for a touch—and then find out that he was some jet-set happy-boy looking for an economical murder to commit, one that might get him out of the problem of paying for the victim’s repairs, and one with double thrills, since there was always the chance that the victim would stay dead.
To avoid that, you had to study each prospective mark carefully. No one came down here on business. The best ones were the rubberneck tourists. They usually came in pairs; and, of any two, the one who was being shown around could safely be figured for a greenhorn—himself too fresh out of the freezers, or back from the starways, to be eager for murder as yet. The problem there was to make an accurate assessment of the one who was doing the showing. “That’s whah Ah picked you, Chuck. Ah wasn’t worried about the little boy. Though you can be vurry surprised sometahms.”
And, of course, everything they did was more or less illegal, so you had to watch out for the coppers.
The coppers would not trouble you unless they saw you actually breaking the law—or unless you were wanted for something. Then they would trouble you a lot. Forrester’s first contact with one of the coppers came as he was on the point of bracing a woman alone, Whitlow hiding behind a flowering lilac bush and coaching him in whispers. “See thur, Chuck, what she did? Threw away a cigarette butt. Well, that’s ten to one she’s from nahnteen eighty or earlier, so go get ‘er, boy!” But Forrester had taken no more than a single step before Whitlow’s piercing whisper stopped him. “Copper!”
The copper was seven feet tall, uniformed in blue, swinging what looked like a nightstick but was not Forrester had been warned: it was a sort of joymaker, full of anesthetic sprays and projectile weapons. And the copper had seen him.
It strolled right up to them, swinging the stick. It stopped and looked Whitlow in the eyes, right through the lilac blooms. “Good morning, Man Whitlow,” it said courteously and moved on to Forrester. It stared silently into his eyes. Then, “Nice day, Man Forrester,” it said, and moved away.
“How’d he know?” gasped Forrester.
“Retina pattern. Don’t worry about it; if he wanted you for anything he’d have you by now. Just give him a minute to get out of saht.”
The woman prospect was gone then. But there were plenty of others.
Keeping out of the way of coppers, trying to learn Whitlow’s skill at estimating the potentials of a mark, Forrester found that the time passed. Nor was it the most disagreeable way he had ever spent a day. The weather was warm and dry, the growing plants were scented, the people he hit up were no worse than the average run. Forrester took five dollars from a pretty girl in a sort of mirror-bright bikini, then fifty from a man who had brought his pet animal—it was a little silk-furred monkey—down to the underbuilding park to run free, and who seemed to accept Forrester’s touch as a form of rent for the use of the premises. Forrester paid back Whitlow’s outlay for the fake joymaker and found himself with cash money in his pocket. As he could see no particular need for spending much of it, he began to feel solvent again.
Then Whitlow’s hawk eyes brightened, and he whispered tautly, “Eeow! Look over thur, will you? We’ve got ourselfs a lahv one now!”
On the fringe of a bed of tall gladioli a man had stepped out of a hovercar and dismissed it. He seemed young, although you couldn’t really tell. He moved idly across the grass, like a sightseer. His gait was peculiar, and he wore an expression of grave joy as he minced toward them.
“Look how he walks!” exulted Whitlow.
