Part 14 (1/2)

”This is a new century,” she said, ”Or near as dammit, and who says women can't do magic? I saw every trick that old b.a.s.t.a.r.d ever did and I can do 'em just as good as him. But that's not enough, is it? Not these days. Not for me. Oh no. We have to prove ourselves, Mr. Rawlins, the old tricks won't cut it anymore. Why, just six months ago I met a man with an honest-to-goodness machine for making rain! What's the old b.a.s.t.a.r.d's card tricks next to that? That's what we need. The very latest science. The latest ideas. Like your piano, or what-have-you. A man who can do that can do just about anything, I reckon. My very own genius! You and me together, Mr. Rawlins. You and me, Hal, you and me.”

She tried to kiss me. I extricated myself as politely as I could, and shut myself away in my room.

Sometimes my words get away from me. I will say no more unkind words about Amaryllis. She did me a good turn when I was in a bad spot, and she had many admirable qualities, including grit and drive and a natural facility with the Gazzo Shuffle and the Log-Town Drop. And besides the lady is no longer able to defend herself, having perished in the Battle of Jasper.

The room was windowless, but from long habit of wandering I woke at first light anyhow. I shaved, and I washed, and I found a pair of clean pants in a wardrobe, thinking that clothing was implicit in my deal with Mr. Quantrill. Nothing could be done about the unruly black explosion that was my hair.

Theater-folk are late risers. If anyone else was there in the Ormolu at that hour, they were asleep. I wanted to make myself useful and show that I was a hard worker, and so I poked around in closets and dusty back rooms until I found a broom. I swept the stage and I polished the stage's gas lamps until each one of them gleamed.

Behind the stage I found a number of painted backdrops. One of them was painted like red rock, ornamented with designs that I guess were supposed to resemble the carvings of the Folk, except that they were neither beautiful nor meaningful. Another was painted like a forest, and another showed a starry night, and another was a lurid yellow desert scene, with more ziggurats than seemed plausible. Behind the backdrops there were chests and wardrobes and heaps of props. There were guns that were probably fake and guns that were probably real, there were mirrors that were really cabinets, there were mechanisms I could not identify that looked a little like mantraps. There was a sc.r.a.pyard's-worth of interlinked metal rings, and there were enough trick hats to start a trick department store. Amaryllis was not the only magician who worked the Ormolu. There was the Wise Master Lobsang, and there was Doctor Agostron, and there was Mr. Barnabas Busby Bosko, Wizard of the Western Rim. The big city had a boundless appet.i.te for magic at that time. I might speculate at length as to why but I will not, except to say that if they wanted the real thing all they had to do was head west. Anyhow in addition to magic the Ormolu boasted dancing girls and two nights a week it showed a hastily written play called The Story of John Creedmoor, which was a big hit, I am sorry to say.

I tinkered for a while but I could find no tools and I could only guess what anything was meant to do. I grew bored and restless.

The front doors were locked, and no-one had yet thought to give me a key, so I squeezed out through a window at the building's rear.

I walked north and over the bridge, toward Fenimore. I got kind of lost seeing the sights, which I will not recount here, and by the time I got there it was mid-day. The streets thronged with workers leaving their offices for lunch. The air buzzed with conversation about money, about business, about how the Old Man might be eased out of his position to make room for young blood, or about what was wrong with young people today- or about matters of state- there was speculation about what the fighting out on the Rim might mean for trade, or whether Jasper might get involved, or whether it was true what people were saying about this secret weapon the Line was afraid of, and if so whether there was any way of making money off it.

I pushed against the crowd until I found my way to the offices of the Baxter Trust. They were easy enough to find. Baxter's Tower was the tallest building in Jasper, taller even than the Senate, even including the pillar on the Senate's dome. I recalled that Mr. Baxter's first fortune had come from his invention of a newer and more efficient form of elevator- his Tower was a great advertis.e.m.e.nt for his invention. It occupied a full city block, though it was set back from the street by a high fence. There were a number of policemen at the gate.

I stood across the street and I watched the workers coming back from their mid-day meals. In many parts of Jasper there was lunchtime drunkenness, but Mr. Baxter's workers were notably sober. Perhaps it was because of the policemen.

I cannot easily describe what I felt standing there, before that place I had so long dreamed of.

I heard the hateful words of Mr. Baxter's letter over and over in my mind, until it seemed that every man in the busy street could hear them too, until it seemed like they boomed from loudspeakers behind the windows of Mr. Baxter's tower. I could not understand why he had slandered me so. I could not understand why he had betrayed me.

The obvious explanation, I told myself, was that Baxter wanted to crush a compet.i.tor. That was not just my pride talking. I knew from his letter that he owned the Northern Lighting Corporation. If my Apparatus were perfected and popularized it would render the NLC obsolete. That was reason enough for slander. But I could not accept that Mr. Baxter had acted from so petty a motive. The hero of the Autobiography was a sharp businessman, but he was not a cheat.

I considered another possibility. He was an old man, and a rich one, with much to lose. Perhaps he feared the rumors of Liv and Creedmoor's world-upending weapon- the world as it was had been good to him. But I could not accept that either. The hero of the Autobiography was not afraid of progress.

I recall that I watched two pigeons squabbling in the street, and I thought that perhaps Mr. Baxter's letter was a kind of joke, a rich man's whim, a game he had decided to play with me for some eccentric reason. If so, much might depend on how I responded. Perhaps I should show that I was a good sport. But no- I did not believe that, either. You heard of other rich men playing that sort of game, but not Mr. Baxter. He did not play games at all.

There was a darker possibility, one that I did not want to consider at all. I knew that Mr. Baxter owned the NLC, and I had heard that the NLC operated on the Western Rim in concert with the forces of the Line. It was possible- I could not deny that it was possible- that even Mr. Baxter had surrendered his pride and independence, and was acting in this matter as a servant of the Line. If so, he had slandered me only in pa.s.sing, the better to deny the existence of Liv and Creedmoor's weapon, and he had done it only at the orders of the Line. Perhaps he had not even read the letter before he signed it. Perhaps I was nothing to him, not a compet.i.tor, not a game- just a name on a letter written for him by some faceless Line attache.

I paced back and forth. Some part of me thought that if I could only speak to Mr. Baxter face to face, man to man, we could resolve our misunderstanding. If only I could somehow speak to him without the company of policemen and bodyguards. If I could ask him: Why?

I paced and paced. Crowds and pigeons came and went. Shadows lengthened and an evening chill crept into the air but I did not see Mr. Baxter himself emerge. It occurred to me that he might not look like he did in his pictures, and perhaps he had left without my noticing. Or perhaps he never left, preferring to work all night- there were electric-lights coming on in some of the upper windows of his fortress.

I say it was a fortress not only because of the high fence and the policemen, but because I recalled Mr. Baxter's Autobiography, in which he wrote: The future belongs to the tall buildings and the great cities! For the man of destiny there is no subst.i.tute for the hard work and the big ideas of Jasper or Gibson or the other pioneer metropolises that are a-grow today in this great land of ours. The man of business- if I may be excused a digression into the romantic- the man of business is the lord of this realm, is the questing knight, and the office-tower is his castle, his fortress on the borderlands.

The way these things are traditionally resolved on the Western Rim is by the duel. Matters of property and owners.h.i.+p, matters of pride of authors.h.i.+p, matters of insult, matters of honor- all come to the same resolution- ten paces and turn, gentlemen! But there were a number of things wrong with that plan. First, this was not the Rim, this was Jasper City, and the duel was illegal- second, I had no gun- third, there were too many policemen about- and fourth, Mr. Baxter could not be less than ninety years old, and even in the wildest and least civilized parts of the Rim it is not honorable to shoot a nonagenarian dead, regardless of what he has said about you.

The way these things were traditionally resolved in Jasper was by the lawsuit, which is all right for some people, but I had no money and my adversary was the richest man in the city. Besides I could hardly sign my name to papers in open court- I was a fugitive.

The sun fell toward the eastern horizon. One by one each window all the way down the side of the Tower flashed golden fire then went dark. Shortly after that the sky blushed with violet, and there was black not far behind. Mr. Baxter still did not emerge.

Hidden motors coughed and thrummed, drawing the Tower's gates slowly shut. Two policemen walked beside the gates as they curved inward like men leading cattle home to pasture of an evening. Both of them wore long coats and one of them held a bright cigarette in his hand.

Just as I was about to turn away there was the noise of a motor-car. Moments later a long black automobile emerged from between the closing gates.

I was suddenly sure that it contained Mr. Baxter himself. Who else? I ran toward it and on the way inspiration struck and when I stood beside the automobile and knocked on its black window I shouted, ”Mr. Baxter? Sir? I am a writer for the Jasper City Evening Post- sir, would you care to talk about what you wrote about the White Rock Miracle, sir, excuse me-”

I stumbled a little as the automobile turned and accelerated. In the blackness of the window I saw mostly my own face but also someone else looking out at me. It was a thin face with sharp eyes and a long nose that swam menacingly toward me out of the black.

I knocked on the gla.s.s again. The nose did not move.

One of the policemen from the gate tackled me to the ground. I hit the cobbles with my head and cried out in shock.

The automobile moved on a little way, then stopped, like it was thinking.

After a few moments the automobile started moving again. I was unaccountably relieved, even though the policeman was none too gentle in the way he pulled me to my feet and sent me staggering off with a blow to the stomach and a kick in the a.s.s. He did not trouble himself even to insult me as I limped away, he just lit his cigarette and slipped in between the gates as they closed.

Halfway down the block from the Baxter Tower there was a small hotel. A man stood on its steps, leaning against a wrought-iron rail and smoking. He wore a rumpled suit of red and green linen, and a sloppy bow-tie. He had an impressive black mustache, that was shaped somewhat like the cow-annihilating cowling of an Engine, or the design on an old-world knight's s.h.i.+eld that is called a cheveron. He had a nose that was probably eagle-like before it got broken, and he had very blue and very clever eyes, with which he had quite clearly been watching me watch the gate of the Baxter Tower for some time.

He was utterly unembarra.s.sed to be caught spying. As a matter of fact he smiled and waved me over, like we were friends.

”Your head's bleeding,” he said.

I touched it. ”So it is.”

”So,” he said, ”new in town?”

I saw no reason to deny it. ”It shows, huh?”

”It does. No harm in that. Everyone was new in town once. I myself was born down in the Deltas, more years ago than I care to remember.”

”Hamlin,” I said, naming the first Rim-town that popped into my head.

”Not familiar with it.”

”Rim-wards.”

”Uh-huh. Fleeing the fighting out there?”

”In a manner of speaking.”

”Too bad. Cigarette?”

”No thank you. You know, I was told that people in Jasper were unfriendly to strangers.”

”Well,” he said, and smiled. ”My motives are ulterior.”