That was the evening that Manning violated her first rule of editor-author relationships.
They were having martinis in the same bar in which Norbert had, so many years ago, successfully said unsuccessfully.
“They’ve been good years,” he remarked, apparently to the olive.
There was something wrong with this evening. No bounce. “That’s a funny tense,” Manning confided to her own olive.
“I’ve owed you a serious talk for a long time.”
“You don’t have to pay the debt. We don’t go in much for being serious, do we? Not so dead-earnest-catch-in-the-throat serious.”
“Don’t we?”
“I’ve got an awful feeling,” Manning admitted, “that you’re building up to a proposal, either to me or that olive. And if it’s me, I’ve got an awful feeling I’m going to accept—and Raquel is never going to forgive me.”
“You’re safe,” Norbert said dryly. “That’s the serious talk. I want to marry you, darling, and I’m not going to.”
“I suppose this is the time you twirl your black mustache and tell me you have a wife and family elsewhere?”
“I hope to God I have!”
“No, it wasn’t very funny, was it?” Manning felt very little, aside from wishing she was dead.
“I can’t tell you the truth,” he went on. “You wouldn’t believe it. I’ve loved two women before; one had talent and a brain, the other had beauty. I think I loved her. The damnedest curse of Ouroboros is that I’ll never quite know. If I could take that tail out of that mouth . . .”
“Go on,” she said. “Talk plot-gimmicks. It’s nicer.”
“And she is carrying . . . will carry . . . my child—my children, it must be. My twins . . .”
“Look, Holt. We came in here editor and author— remember back when? Let’s go out that way. Don’t go on talking. I’m a big girl but I can’t take . . . everything. It’s been fun knowing you and all future manuscripts gratefully received.”
“I knew I couldn’t say it. I shouldn’t have tried. But there won’t be any future manuscripts. I’ve written every Holt I’ve ever read.”
“Does that make sense?” Manning aimed the remark at the olive, but it was gone. So was the martini.
“Here’s the last.” He took it out of his breast-pocket, neatly folded. “The one we talked about at FWA—the one I couldn’t end. Maybe you’ll understand. I wanted somehow to make it clear before . . .”
The tone of his voice projected the unspoken meaning, and Manning forgot everything else. “Is something going to happen to you? Are you going to— Oh my dear, no! All right, so you have a wife on every space station in the asteroid belt; but if anything happens to you . . .”
“I don’t know,” said Norbert Holt. “I can’t remember the exact date of that issue. . .” He rose abruptly. “I shouldn’t have tried a goodbye. See you again, darling—the next time round Ouroboros.”
She was still staring at the empty martini glass when she heard the shrill of brakes and the excited upspringing of a crowd outside.
She read the posthumous fragment late that night, after her eyes had dried sufficiently to make the operation practicable. And through her sorrow her mind fought to help her, making her think, making her be an editor.
She understood a little and disbelieved what she understood. And underneath she prodded herself. “But it isn’t a story. It’s too short, too inconclusive. It’ll just disappoint the Holt fans—and that’s everybody. Much better if I do the damnedest straight obit I can, take up a full page on it . . .”
She fought hard to keep on thinking, not feeling. She had never before experienced so strongly the I-have-been-here-before sensation. She had been faced with this dilemma once before, once on some other time-spiral, as the boys in FWA would say. And her decision had been . . .
“It’s sentimentality,” she protested. “It isn’t editing. This decision’s right. I know it. And if I go and get another of these attacks and start to change my mind . . .”
She laid the posthumous Holt fragment on the coals. It caught fire quickly.
The next morning Raquel greeted her with, “Manningcita, who’s Norbert Holt?”
Manning had slept so restfully that she was even tolerant of foolish questions at breakfast. “Who?” she asked.
“Norbert Holt. Somehow the name popped into my mind. Is he perhaps one of your writers?”
“Never heard of him,” said Manning.
Raquel frowned. “I was almost sure . . . Can you really remember them all? I’m going to cheek those bound volumes of Surprising.”
“Any luck with your . . . what was it? . . . Holt?” Manning asked the girl a little later.
“No, Manningcita. I was quite unsuccessful.”
. . . unsuccessful. . . Now why, in Heaven’s name, mused Manning Stern, should I be thinking of martinis at breakfast time?
Conquest
The cat was the first one out of the airlock—the first creature from Earth to touch the soil of a planet outside our system.
Laus was all against it, of course. He wanted out himself—not to get his name in the books for the Big Moment in History, but because it was his cat, and he’d sooner take a chance with his own body.
But Mavra made sense. “Eccentricity, yes,” she said. “Stupidity, no. Bast’s going.” And Bast went.
She liked it, too. We could see that from the port. Hydroponic-cycle air is OK, and Bast has seemed as used to it as the rest of us; but lots of loose fresh oxygen hit her like a dose of catnip. Something too small for us to make out flew by just above her. She leaped and missed; but the leap was so pleasingly high (“Slightly less than Earth-gravity,” Laus observed) that she kept repeating it, bouncing among the flowers of the meadow and into the dusty path.
Then abruptly she sat down and inspected herself. The ship was so automatically clean that she’d been spotless for weeks. I guess she was glad
