The young secretary smiled at him again and he did not feel so bad. 'So, we're even,' she said. 'Now, would you like to start again at the beginning?'
Spence only nodded.
'Fine. Is this personal business or official?' 'Well, personal.'
'See? That wasn't hard. I'll put you down for an appointment Friday morning first thing. His assistant will call you.'
'You mean you're not his assistant? I thought-'
'You thought I was, I know. No, I'm only filling in while they are away. Mr. Wermeyer is his assistant.'
Now Spence felt doubly the fool. He wished only to be allowed to melt into the carpet and slink away. 'Thank you,' he muttered and backed away slowly. The partition slid closed, terminating the episode in the director's office. He sighed and made his way back to his quarters more hopelessly tired than ever.
3
… THE OLD HEAD CAME up slowly. Lizard-like. The large oval yellow eyes gazed outward from under half- closed lids. Yellowed skin, the color and texture of ancient parchment, stretched tautly over a smooth, flat skull and hung in folds around the sagging neck. Not a hair remained in the scalp; not a whisker, not an eyelash.
A thin, slightly rounded band stretched across the smooth brow. This circlet pulsed with a purplish light of its own, throbbing as waves of energy flashed and dimmed.
Hocking could see him as if wreathed in smoke-clearly in the center of his field of vision, but shimmering and indistinct on the periphery. The face regarded him with a steady glare, the expression beyond contempt or malice though traces of both were there, beyond weariness or simple age. Cold. Reptilian. It was an expression utterly alien to any assignable human emotion.
In a lesser being the face and its mysterious scowl would have created at least a sense of dread, if not outright fear, but Hocking was used to it.
'Ortu.' He said the name softly, distinctly. 'We are ready to proceed with the final experiment. I have found a subject especially receptive to the stimulus.' Hocking licked his lips and waited for a reply.
For a moment he doubted whether the image before him had heard, but he knew it had. The reply would come in time.
'Proceed, then, as I have instructed.' The words were spoken evenly, but with an unusual coloring-the faintest suggestion of a foreign accent, but indecipherable.
'I thought you would be pleased, Ortu. We can begin at last.' Hocking's upper lip twitched enthusiastically. 'At long last…'
'Pleased? For what reason should I be pleased? Oh, there are so many.' There was no mistaking the venom in the voice. 'Pleased that it has taken so long? That even my inexhaustible patience has been tried time and time again to no result? That my plans should rest on the feeble efforts of a creature too stupid to comprehend the smallest fraction of the work?' The circlet on his forehead flashed brightly.
Hocking endured the sarcasm bravely. 'I have been particularly careful in my choice of a subject this time. He is a sleep scientist named Reston, and he's quite malleable. We will not be disappointed again, I assure you.'
'Very well, begin at once.' Ortu closed his eyes and his ancient head sank once more.
'It shall be done.' Hocking, too, closed his eyes and when he opened them again the glimmering image had vanished. He sat in his chair in the center of his darkened quarters. The whisper of a smile flitted across his skeletal features. Now, at last, all was ready. The final test could begin. …
SPENCE STEPPED FROM HIS sanibooth actually whistling. He felt better than he had in weeks. Rested, alert, and happy. He had slept the whole night long, the sleep of the dead. And not one dream had intruded upon his slumber-at least not the dreams he had learned to fear of late: those without color, without form, which seemed born of some alien, sterile intelligence, which came into his mind and left him shaking and drained, but without memory.
Whatever had been bothering him was now gone, or so he hoped. Perhaps it had only been the strain of adapting to the confines of the station. GM was the largest of the orbiting advancement centers; it was also the highest. Actually, it was the world's first self-sustaining space colony, maintaining an orbit three hundred and twenty thousand kilometers above the earth around a point astrophysicists called libration five. That distance, or rather the thought of that distance, sometimes had a strange effect on newcomers. Some experienced symptoms of claustrophobia; others became nervous and irritable and had difficulty sleeping, or had bad dreams. Often these problems were not immediately apparent; they developed slowly over the first weeks and months of the rookie jumpyear and had very little in common with the allied problem of space fatigue, which only seasoned veteransthose in their fifth or sixth jumpyear-seemed to contract. That was something else entirely.
So Spence, feeling very pleased with himself that he had weathered the worst and had come through, rubbed his body with a hot, moist towel to remove the fine, blue powder of the personal sanitizer and then tossed the towel into the laundry port. He dressed in a fresh blue and gold jumpsuit and made his way into the lab to reweave the dangling threads of his project.
He slipped into the lab quietly and found Dr. Tickler hunched over a worktable with an array of electronic gear and testing equipment spread out around him.
'Good morning,' said Spence amiably. There was no real day or night, but the Gothamites maintained the illusion, and the station flipped slowly over on its axis on a twelve-hour cycle to help in the deception.
'Oh, there you are! Yes, good morning.' Tickler bent his head around to observe Spence closely. He wore a magnifying hood which made his eyes bug out absurdly, like two glassy doorknobs splotched with paint.
'Anything serious?'
'One of the scanners is fritzing. Nothing serious. I thought I would take the opportunity to set it in order.'
Spence detected a slight rebuff in Tickler's clipped tone. Then he remembered he had missed the work assignment he made for last night.
'I'm sorry. I-I wasn't feeling very well yesterday.' That was true enough. 'I fell asleep. I should have let you know.'
'And the days before that?' Tickler tilted his head forward and raised the hood to look at him sharply. Before Spence could think of a suitable reply, his assistant shrugged and said, 'It makes no difference to me, Dr. Reston. I can always get another assignment-not with so prestigious a colleague, perhaps, but one where my services will be taken seriously.
'You, on the other hand, I suspect, would find it somewhat difficult to secure an assistant at this late date. You would be forced to postpone your project, would you not?'
Spence nodded mutely.
'Yes, I thought so. Well, the choice is yours, but I will put up with no more of this. I respect your work, Dr. Reston, and I will have mine so respected. Now'-he smiled a stiff little smile devoid of any warmth-'now that we understand one another I am sure there will be no further problems.'
'You are correct,' returned Spence woodenly. He felt like a schoolboy who had been tardy once too often and now had been properly scolded. That was bad enough, but he hated being reminded that he was only on GM by way of a generous grant and could not chart his own course beyond the narrowly defined limits of the grant. He had no money of his own, at least not the kind needed to pay for a berth aboard even the smallest space lab, let alone GM. By sheer brainpower alone he was here; that and the goodwill of the GM Advancement Board.
'I can assure you that there will be no further misunderstandings. Now, we will begin where we should have last evening.'
As they worked together, readying the lab for the next battery of experiments, the happy inner glow rekindled Spence's spirits. He did feel better than he had in weeks. And, after all, it could have been worse for him: Tickler could have requested reassignment. That would have really bollixed up the works and made him look bad before the Board.
In the end he came around to feeling fairly grateful to Tickler for the reprimand. He had it coming, maybe even needed it to settle his mind on his work once more. And he felt a little sorry for Tickler-an older man, himself a C-level Ph.D., reduced to playing lab assistant and watching younger men advance in his place. One had to feel
