Marillyn didn’t want to keep them apart. She could adjust herself to a very pleasant life in a place like this, but Dale wouldn’t let her. As fast as he could save some money, he’d dream up some new scheme to get her cured.
Well, Marillyn reasoned, she wasn’t of any use to anybody. Why should she stay in Dale’s way? The Bryd was puzzled. What did she think she could do?
She had the little bottle under the blanket, she was thinking. A few drops of that and—the Bryd was positively flabbergasted. The girl was getting ready to kill herself. The Bryd probed into her mind for an instant and discovered that she wasn’t being a martyr and had no complexes; she was just trying to straighten things out for Dale and Ann.
Oh, beans, thought the Bryd. If humans weren’t the dumbest beings ever! It watched Marillyn raise the bottle to her lips. It simultaneously took the form of a nurse, standing there at Marillyn’s side, and Marillyn gasped and said, “Oh, nurse, I didn’t know you were there.”
“I am,” said the Bryd in its best contralto voice. “Did you wish something, Miss?”
The hand with the bottle of poison fell back under the blanket. “No, I didn’t call.”
“May I move your chair out of the sun, Miss?”
“It isn’t in the sun,” Marillyn said.
The Bryd raised its eyebrows. It did some quick work on the wind, and there was the sun, shining steadily through an opening in the magnolia trees.
“Perhaps it is too bright,” said Marillyn. “If you’d just move it over there—”
The Bryd was delighted. In the process of moving the chair, it got its figurative hands on the bottle and disintegrated it. Then it said, “Miss, don’t you think you will get well?”
Marillyn said calmly, resignedly, “There’s no chance. None whatever. When brain-tissue is gone, there is nothing medical science can do. They can’t build tissue, you know.”
“Oh?” said the Bryd.
“Only a miracle,” said Marillyn. “And miracles don’t happen in medical science.”
The Bryd almost snorted aloud. Oh, they didn’t, hey? It—
The head nurse came striding up, her leather heels clacking on the tile floor. “Miss—” She looked puzzled. “Who are you, anyway?” she demanded. “I’ve never seen you before.”
These women! Maybe the Bryd was getting peevish in its old age, but why couldn’t people mind their own business for a change?
It resolved itself into a doctor, and it was gratified to watch the head nurse’s eyes shoot open.
“Madam,” the Bryd said in its best baritone, “were you addressing me?”
“I—” The head nurse swallowed. “No, sir, I—I beg your pardon, sir.” She recovered slightly. “Have I seen you before, sir?”
Oh, bother! Details, details! Humans wouldn’t be happy if they weren’t tied up in details all the time. The Bryd dematerialized and went inside the sanatorium by the simple process of flowing through the spaces around the nuclei of the atoms in the wall. Then, on second thought, it went back and erased some memories from the mind of the head nurse; then it took Marillyn through the wall into the sanatorium. It went into her mind and did some repair work that would have amazed the finest brain surgeons on Earth. In a few months Marillyn’s paralysis would be gone and she would be well and happy. Miracles, did they say? Well, they’d asked for it.
The Bryd was somewhat irked with itself for having interfered—but it had been for the best.
It got on a tight beam and went back to sun-station No. 18. Dale Stevenson’s finger was just starting to move the button. There was maybe a fiftieth of a second left.
The Bryd carefully implanted the knowledge of Marillyn’s cure in a corner of Dale’s brain and sat back to await results. But in the next hundredth of a second there was no response. Dale still was about to turn the sun on Paris.
So the Bryd, now thoroughly disgusted, implanted the knowledge of Ann’s love in another corner of Dale’s mind and then to its astonishment had to jump fast to get out of the way.
Did that ever get results! Dale held his finger. He got up and rubbed his forehead a moment. Then he went to the radiophone. “Get me the U.N. police headquarters in London,” he said.
He stood there beating his brains to figure out what had gotten into him, so the Bryd just felt around and erased a few memories, and everything was all right. Then the Bryd climbed into its favorite cozy spot in Dale’s mind. The spot was still warm and snuggly. It began to settle down—but then it remembered something.
It got up. It went back to Earth and hunted up the minds of the men who were flying atom-bombs over France. The Bryd knew by now, of course, that France herself had never had any atom-bombs.
The Bryd went into the minds of the foreign fliers and sent them back to drop the atom-bombs on their own cities. After all, they had those bombs and they apparently were the kind who wouldn’t be satisfied until they could drop them. The Bryd dusted off its hands and headed wearily for sun-station No. 18. It hoped for many restful years ahead with Dale and Ann.
If it didn’t get them, the Bryd thought disgustedly, it had better try to hitch a ride back to Pluto. At least it had had rest and quiet there.
This was a warm day in August—a very warm day. Slim Coleman, my partner in detection work, says the sun is ninety million miles away, but this day it must have sneaked up pretty close. You could even see the heat waves coming up off the sidewalk. You can’t fry an egg on the pavement in Fort Worth, though, because you can’t stay out in the sun that long.
I mopped my brow, slung the water off my fingertips, and went into the lobby of the National Bank
