Georgia On My Mind and Other Places Page 10

  No time to pursue them—Pharaoh Potter would be chomping at the bit. Anyway, Waldo could borrow shoes and socks before the match. He hurried into the building’s entrance foyer, which struck him as unusually somber, silent, and formal for a sports pavilion.

  There was just one person to be seen, a wizened individual standing at the other side of the room and apparently guarding the players’ entrance.

  Waldo padded to him across cold marble tiles. “I’m a beginner at this sort of event,” he said.

  The man, who according to Waldo had the air of someone wearing a previously owned body, stared at Waldo’s attire. “I can see that.”

  “So I wondered if there’s a special warm-up area, for people who don’t do this sort of thing regularly.”

  It was a natural enough question, but the man was more than unresponsive. He was eyeing Waldo with odd suspicion.

  “No,” he said. “Everybody has to go the same way. Right in there, and follow the line. Slowly now. No rushing about once you’re inside.”

  It was an odd injunction. How did you ever win a tennis match, if you didn’t do a certain amount of rushing about?

  Waldo went through the door and found himself facing an altogether excessive abundance of flowering plants. There were floral arrangements everywhere. The tennis courts, he decided, must be on just the other side of all the shrubbery.

  He pushed aside a great mass of greenery. He blundered through. As he emerged into subdued lighting and soft music, it crossed his mind for the first time that perhaps things were not quite what they seemed.

  Where was the net, where was the court? Where were all the other players?

  Not, he was fairly sure, anywhere near here. He was standing in the middle of a group of maybe twenty people. But it was difficult to accept them as participants in a tennis tournament, since every man was clad in a customary suit of solemn black, while the women were all hatted and veiled. The whole line was moving slowly toward a dais, on which stood an elaborately carved casket. Waldo, willy-nilly, moved with them.

  His present attire had made his flesh crawl, even in the privacy of his own bedroom. Now he realized what an overreaction that had been. All crawling of the flesh should have been saved for this moment, when every eye was on him and the moving line bore him irresistibly toward the dais. Soon he was approaching the coffin, wondering what to do next.

  Waldo is given to exaggeration. It may well have been, as he said, an open-casket ceremony. It is not, I am sure, true that the corpse of Carlo Moolman rolled its eyes in horror at Waldo as he walked to stand by the coffin.

  Carlo had been arranged to look his best for his final appearance. He was wearing a white shirt, a well-cut suit of subdued gray with a dark red pinstripe, and a maroon bow tie. Waldo stared down at those conservative clothes, and he coveted them. He was already dreading the return journey home, penniless, on public transportation. Just give him ten minutes alone with that corpse…

  It was pure wishful thinking. Already the line was moving on, past the open casket. And it was then that Waldo became aware of something else. Everyone was staring, but they were not all looking at him the same way. Two men, standing on the other side of Carlo Moolman’s open coffin, had in their eyes a strange and speculative gleam as he moved past them.

  Big men. Hard-eyed, tough-looking men. The sort of men who would cheerfully blow a large hole through Carlo Moolman, then attend his funeral in the hope of learning the whereabouts of the missing immortality serum.

  Waldo hadn’t listened to much of what Imre Munsen said, because the words seemed at the time to have little relevance to him. But he remembered this comment: “Of course, his enemies will attend—the people who killed him. They’re as keen to get their hands on the serum as we are.”

  It occurred to Waldo, with the force of revelation, that he and he alone knew exactly who those enemies were. They still didn’t have the serum, but it must be somewhere close by. Somewhere, probably, within this very funeral home.

  Then came what Waldo described as his finest moment; or possibly, depending on your point of view, his act of supreme folly. Inadequately briefed—in both senses of the phrase—he decided that he must pursue the investigation.

  Once the viewing line was past the coffin, it lost all cohesion and focus. Some people headed straight out of the door, back toward the entrance foyer. Others in the line broke into little groups, chatting together in low voices. Waldo waited for one of the rare moments when everyone did not seem to be staring at him. Then instead of going toward the exit he went on, through an unmarked door that led deeper into the funeral home.

  He at once found himself in what might be termed the business district. The walls were cement, the floor uncarpeted. Lights were unshaded and harsh, and no flowers were anywhere in sight. What Waldo did see were a number of metal tables, and a variety of most unpleasant-looking surgical implements. Needles and stout thread on one of the tables, plus elaborate makeup kits, did nothing to make him feel more comfortable.

  He hurried on, to still another door. As he passed through it, he heard the door through which he had come in beginning to open. Heavy footsteps sounded at the entrance.

  Waldo pushed the door shut behind him and stared around in panic. It was another room, severe, chilly, and dimly lit, with only a couple more doors and no cupboards or closets within which he might hide. The furnishings were just a half-dozen metal tables. Most of them bore suspicious-looking long lumpy objects, each covered with a white sheet.

  The footsteps in the other room were louder. Waldo could hear voices. He shuddered, climbed onto the one unoccupied table, and pulled a white sheet over himself. It was a little too short. He was able to cover his head, but then his bare feet remained uncovered.

  The door was opening.

  “Not here,” said a gruff voice, just the sort of voice Waldo expected a ruthless murderer to have. “It’s a bunch of stiffs.”

  “He must have come through here, though.” That was the other man. “Nowhere else he could have gone. You head back and tell the boys what’s happening. I’ll keep going.”

  Heavy feet clumped, closer and closer. Waldo tried to stop his heart beating. If they pulled back the sheet, and got one look at his face…

  Another door opened and closed. Before the echo died away, Waldo was off the table. They would be back, no doubt about it. Shivering, he scurried across to the only other door and hustled through.

  At least this little room was warm, for a change. And there was more. All along one wall was a broad shelf, about three feet wide. On it stood a dozen blue boxes, each one labeled with the notation, hold for pickup. Below that, each one bore a person’s name.

  Personal possessions, they had to be. Things that happened to be on a body when it was brought to the funeral home. Waldo moved along the line of boxes. Near the end he saw, to his excitement, the name that he was looking for: CARLO MOOLMAN.

  The blue box held a miscellany of objects: articles of clothing, cleaned and pressed; shoes; watch, wallet, keys, checkbook, pens, coins, comb. And then, the jackpot: a small phial, no bigger than Waldo’s thumb.

  Waldo picked it up. Three-quarters filled with a pale green liquid. This was the serum, it had to be. All he had to do now was find a way of getting out of the funeral home in one piece, and delivering the phial to Imre Munsen.

  Unfortunately, that could be a problem. The room he was in had only two doors. The one through which he had entered would not be safe to use. And the other one…

  Waldo went across, opened it, and recoiled. It led to the crematorium. A few feet beyond the sliding door lay the flames of hell. No wonder this room was pleasantly warm.

  He gripped the phial tighter and ran back to the other door. And again he heard the sound of footsteps and voices. Many footsteps. Coming closer.

  He was trapped. No matter how much he protested his innocence and insisted that he had just got lost inside the funeral home, they would not believe him. Not when he was carryin
g a phial of immortality serum.

  Waldo came to a desperate decision. He uncapped the phial and raised it to his lips. It did not taste like an immortality serum—quite the reverse, as a matter of fact—but he gulped down every disgusting drop. Then he took the phial and tossed it into the consuming flames of the crematorium.

  The fatal evidence was gone. Now it would be up to Imre Munsen and the United Space Federation to determine from an examination of Waldo just what the immortality serum contained. With luck, they would have a thousand years to do it.

  The door was opening. Waldo crossed his arms and stood defiant, prepared if necessary to sell his life dearly.

  The two hard-eyed uglies entered. “There he is!” one of them exclaimed. “I told you he had to be here. Come on in, chief, and take a look at him.”

  They stepped aside. Through the open door strode Imre Munsen. “Oh, he’s all right,” he said. And then, to Waldo, “Hello, Mr. Burmeister. I didn’t expect you’d be coming here, so the undercover boys didn’t have your description.”

  “Moolman’s k-k-killers!” The fluid that Waldo had drunk was puckering his mouth and throat, so that he could hardly talk.

  “No sign of them, I’m afraid. And the funeral’s over. I’m beginning to agree with you, the whole thing was a scam, just an attempt by Moolman to get money.”

  “No.” Waldo pointed to his mouth, then to the crematorium. “The phial was here. I found it. I swallowed what was in it, and I threw the empty container in there.”

  “You found it! Where, for heaven’s sake?”

  “In the blue box there. With Carlo Moolman’s personal effects.”

  “But we went through all those, as soon as he was killed. We didn’t find a thing. Can you describe what you found?”

  “Certainly.” Waldo’s stomach gave a premonitory rumble. “A little plastic tube, about this long. It was nearly full of green liquid. Tasted horrible.”

  “Oh, that.” Imre Munsen gave a casual laugh. “Sorry, Mr. Burmeister, but we already took a good look at that when we were going through his things. We put it back. It’s certainly not an immortality serum.”

  “Then what is it?” A terrible thought struck Waldo. “Is it poison?”

  “No, no. It’s medication. You see, when Carlo Moolman arrived here on the Moon, he developed an upset stomach. Change of food, change of water, the usual thing, it gave him awful diarrhea. So he went to a doctor and got something for it. He took a dose every morning, and he had no more problem.”

  “A dose. How big is a dose?”

  “Three drops a day of the green fluid. Four, for a really bad case. Mr. Burmeister, are you feeling all right? You’re looking a bit pale.”

  Well, all that was nine days ago. There has still been no sign of Carlo Moolman’s immortality serum. The Luna City rumor mill has shifted to another Elvis sighting, and this morning Imre Munsen called to thank me and Waldo, and tell us that he is going to change the Carlo Moolman case description to simple murder.

  The other good news is that Waldo’s relatives have gone. The bad news is that Waldo himself has not, despite the employment of a whole arsenal of powerful purgatives.

  He lives in hope. He says it could happen any day now. I am encouraging him to work at home.

  Afterword to “Fifteen-Love on the Dead Man’s Chest”

  In the late 1970s when I was just starting to write fiction, my young children (young back then, grown-ups now) ordered me to produce stories about every funny or disgusting thing in the world. They made the list for me. It had on it items of comic low appeal to them—sewage, visits to the dentist, mushrooms, fat aunts, opera singers, flatulence (I think they used a different word), comic Germans and Italians, fad diets, pigs, morticians, and head lice.

  Not an easy assignment, but I did my best. Over the years I have published ten politically incorrect stories tackling one or more of the listed topics. For the avid collector, I will mention that the stories are, in order of publication: “Marconi, Mattin, Maxwell”; “The Deimos Plague”; “Perfectly Safe, Nothing to Worry About”; “Dinsdale Dissents”; “A Certain Place in History”; “The Dalmatian of Faust”; “Parasites Lost”; “Space Opera”; “The Decline of Hyperion”; and “Fifteen-Love on the Dead Man’s Chest.” Together they form what I think of as my “sewage” series. They feature my two favorite lawyers, Henry Carver and Waldo Burmeister, and they are depressingly easy to write.

  Purists have argued that this tale makes tennis on the Moon sound just like tennis on the Earth, and that is implausible. I reply by asking them if that is the most implausible feature of the story.

  Deep Safari

  TRADITION CALLS FOR a celebration on the evening that the hunt is concluded.

  The hunters will be tired, some will be hurting, some may even have died. There will be a party anyway, and it will go on for most of the night. Tradition is the younger sister of ritual. Rituals are better if they do not make sense.

  I do not like to attend the parties. I have seen too many. The theory is that the hunters should be permitted to overindulge in food, in drink, in sex, in everything, but particularly in talk, because on hunt night they want to relive the glorious excitement of the chase, the shared danger, the deeds of valor, the climactic event of the kill.

  Sounds wonderful. But for every hero or heroine flushed with quiet or noisy pride there will be three or four others, drinking and talking as loud as any but glancing again and again at their companions, wondering if anyone else noticed how at the moment of crisis and danger they flinched and failed.

  I notice. Of course. I couldn’t afford not to notice. My job is to orchestrate everything from first contact to coup de grâce, and to do that I have to know where everyone is and just what he or she is doing. That is much harder work than it sounds, so when a hunt is over all I want is sleep. But that relief is denied to me by my obligatory attendance at the posthunt party.

  The morning that Everett Halston called, the hunt celebration the previous night had been even harder to take than usual. The group had consisted of a dozen rich merchants, neophytes to hunting but in spite of that—because of that?—determined to show their nerve by tackling one of the animal kingdom’s most efficient and terrifying predators.

  I had warned them, and been overruled. When we finally met the quarry, all but two of my group had frozen. They were too overwhelmed by fear to advance or even to flee. Three of us stepped forward, stood our ground, and made a difficult kill. A very difficult kill. Without a little luck the roles of hunter and prey could easily have been reversed.

  Perhaps because of that near-disaster the hunt party had been even noisier and wilder than usual. My group of twelve participants was augmented by an equal number of male and female partners, none of them the least tired and every one ready to dance ’til dawn.

  About four-thirty I managed to slip away and collapse into bed. And there I found not the calm and peaceful sleep that I had looked forward to for twelve hours, but a dream-reprise of the hunt finale as it might have been.

  I had managed to move the whole group to the bottom of the pit in good order, because they had not so far had a sight of the living prey. I anticipated trouble as soon as that happened. Before we entered Adestis mode we had studied the structure and actions of the spider, but I knew from previous experience that wouldn’t mean a damn during live combat. It’s one thing to peer at an animal that’s no bigger across the carapace than the nail on your index finger, to study its minute jaws and poison glands and four delicate tubelike spinnerets, and plan where you will place your shots for maximum effect; it’s another matter when you are linked into your Adestis simulacrum, and the spider that you are supposed to hunt and kill is towering ten paces away from you like a gigantic armored tank, its invincible back three times as high as the top of your head.

  Before I had the group organized to my satisfaction, our quarry took the initiative. The spider came from its hiding place in the side of the pit and in that first rush it c
ame fast. I saw a dark brown body with eight pearly eyes patterning its massive back. The juggernaut drove forward on the powerful thrust of four pairs of seven-jointed legs. Those legs had seemed as thin and fragile as flower stamens in our studies, but now they were bristly trunks, each as thick as a simulacrum’s body. The chelicerae, the pointed crushing appendages at the front of the spider’s maw, were massive black pincers big enough to bite your body in two.

  Without taking the time to see how my group was reacting, I did what I had explicitly warned them not to do. I lifted my weapon and sprayed projectiles at the three eyes that I could see. I think I got one of them, but the carapace itself was far too tough to be penetrated. Ricocheting projectiles flew everywhere. The spider was not seriously injured—I knew it would not be. But maybe it wondered if we were really its first choice for dinner, because it halted in its forward sweep. That gave me a little breathing space.

  I scanned my group. Not reassuring. For ten of them the sight of the advancing spider had been more than they could take. Their personal simulacra stood motionless, weapons pointed uselessly at the ground.

  These Adestis units were not furnished with sound generation or receiving equipment. Everything had to be signaled by our actions. We had rehearsed often enough, but unfortunately this was nothing like rehearsal. I ran forward waving at my group to lift their weapons and follow me, but only two of them did. They moved to stand on either side and just behind me.

  I glanced at their two helmet IDs as I turned to urge the rest to advance and deploy in a half-circle as we had planned. Even though I would never reveal the information to anyone, I liked to know who the cool ones were—they might play Adestis again some day. None of the others moved, but a second later the weapon of the simulacrum on my right was lifting into position, while his other arm reached to tap my body in warning.

  I spun around. Forget the half-circle. The spider was coming forward again, in a scuttling rush that covered the space between us at terrifying speed.