And Now the News (23 page)

“Pshaw,” said Hurensohn surprisingly. “Dammit, Phillipso, you've gone and made me concentrate, and I've let go the warp-matrix and fused my omicron. Take a minute or two to fix. I'll be back.” And he disappeared. He didn't go anywhere; he just abruptly wasn't.

Josephus Macardle Phillipso moved like a sleepwalker across the round room and stood against the plexiglas, staring up and out at the shining ship. It was balanced and beautiful, dusty-textured and untouchable like a moth's wing. It was lightly phosphorescent, flaring in the orange glow of the slashing searchlight, dimming rapidly almost to blackness just as the light cut at it again.

He looked past the ship to the stars, and in his mind's eye, past them to the stars again, and stars, and whole systems of stars which in their remoteness looked like stars again, and stars again. He looked down then, to the ground under the Temple and down again to its steep slope, its one narrow terrace of a highway, and down and down again to the lamp-speckled black of the valley bottom. And if I feel from here to there, he thought, it would be like falling from crest to trough in the whorls of a baby's fingerprint.

And he thought, even with help from Heaven, I couldn't tell this truth and be believed. I couldn't suggest this work and be trusted. I am unfit, and I have unfit myself.

He thought bitterly, it's only the truth. The truth and I have a like polarity, and it springs away from me when I approach, by a law of nature. I prosper without the truth, and it has cost me nothing, nothing, nothing but the ability to tell the truth.

But I might try, he thought. What was it he said:
The core of a human being, a part which is not afraid, and which understands and is understood
. Who was he talking about? Anybody I know? Anybody I ever heard of? (“How are you?” you say, when you don't care how they are. “I'm sorry,” you say, when you're not. “Goodbye,” you say, and it means God be with you, and how often is your goodbye a blessing? Hypocrisy and lies, thousands a day, so easily
done we forget to feel guilty for them.)

I see it now
, he said, though. Did he mean me? Could he see the core of me, and say that?… if he can see such a marrow, he can see a strand of spider-silk at sixty yards.

He said, Phillipso recalled, that if I wouldn't help, they'd do nothing. They'd go away that's all—go away, forever, and leave us at the mercy of—what was that sardonic phrase?—the World Destroyers.

“But I never lied!” he wailed, suddenly and frighteningly loud. “I never meant to. They'd ask, don't you see, and I'd only say yes or no, whatever they wanted to hear. The only other thing I ever did was to explain the yes, or the no; they didn't start out to be lies!” No one answered him. He felt very alone. He thought again, I could try … and then, wistfully, could I try?

The phone rang. He looked blindly at it until it rang again. Tiredly he crossed to it and picked it up. “Phillipso.”

The phone said, “Okay, Swami, you win. How did you do it?”

“Who is that? Penfield?” Penfield, whose original Phillipso spread had started his rise from Sunday feature writer; Penfield, who, as district chief of a whole newspaper chain, had of course long since forsworn Phillipso …

“Yeah, Penfield,” drawled the pugnacious, insulting voice. “Penfield who promised you faithfully that never again would these papers run a line about you and your phony space war.”

“What do you want, Penfield?”

“So you win, that's all. Whether I like it or not, you're news again. We're getting calls from all over the country. There's a flight of F-84s on the way from the Base. There's a TV mobile unit coming up the mountain to get that flying saucer of yours on network, and four queries already from INS. I don't know how you're doing it, but you're news, so what's your lousy story?”

Phillipso glanced up over his shoulder at the ship. The orange searchlight set it to flaming once, once again, while the telephone urgently bleated his name. Around came the light, and—

And nothing. It was gone. The ship was gone. “Wait!” cried Phillipso hoarsely. But it was gone.

The phone gabbled at him. Slowly he turned back to it. “Wait,”
he said to it too. He put down the instrument and rubbed water out of his eyes. Then he picked up the phone again.

“I saw from here,” said the tinny voice. “It's gone. What was it? What'd you do?”

“Ship,” said Phillipso. “It was a spaceship.”

“ ‘It was a spaceship,' ”
Penfield repeated in the voice of a man writing on a pad. “So come on, Phillipso. What happened? Aliens came down and met you face to face, that it?”

“They—yes.”

“ ‘Face … to … face' Got it. What'd they want?” A pause, then, angrily, “Phillipso, you there? Dammit, I got a story to get out here. What'd they want? They beg for mercy, want you to lay off?”

Phillipso wet his lips, “Well, yes. Yes, they did.”

“What'd they look like?”

“I—they … there was only one.”

Penfield growled something about pulling teeth. “All right, only one.
One what?
Monster, spider, octopus—come
on
, Phillipso!”

“It … well, it wasn't a man, exactly.”

“A girl,” said Penfield excitedly. “A girl of unearthly beauty. How's that? They've threatened you before. Now they came to beguile you, and so on. How's that?”

“Well, I—”

“I'll quote you. ‘
Unearthly
 … mmm … 
and refused
 … mmm,
temptation
.' ”

“Penfield, I—”

“Listen, Swami, that's all you get. I haven't time to listen to any more of your crap. I'll give you this in exchange, though. Just a friendly warning, and besides, I want this story to hold up through tomorrow anyhow. ATIC and the FBI are going to be all over that Temple of your like flies on a warm marshmallow. You better hide the pieces of that balloon or whatever else the trick was. When it reaches the point of sending out a flight of jets, they don't think publicity is funny.”

“Penfield, I—” But the phone was dead. Phillipso hung up and whirled to the empty room. “You
see?
” he wept. “You see what they make me do?”

He sat down heavily. The phone range again. New York, the operator said. It was Jonathan, his publisher. “Joe! Your line's been busy. Great work, fella. Heard the bulletin on TV. How'd you do it? Never mind. Give me the main facts. I'll have a release out first thing in the morning. Hey, how soon can you get the new book done? Two weeks? Well, three—you can do it in three, fella. You have to do it in three. I'll cancel the new Heming—or the—never mind, I'll get press time for it. Now. Let's have it. I'll put you on the recorder.”

Phillipso looked out at the stars. From the telephone, he heard the first sharp high
beep
or the recording machine. He bent close to it, breathed deeply, and said, “Tonight I was visited by aliens. This was no accidental contact like my first one; they planned this one. They came to stop me—not with violence, not by persuasion, but with—uh—the ultimate weapon. A girl of unearthly beauty appeared amidst the coils and busbars of my long-range radar. I—”

From behind Phillipso came a sound, soft, moist, explosive—the exact reproduction of someone too angry, too disgusted to speak, but driven irresistibly to spit.

Phillipso dropped the telephone and whirled. He thought he saw the figure of a sandy-haired man, but it vanished. He caught the barest flicker of something in the sky where the ship had been, but not enough to really identify; then it was gone too.

“I was on the phone,” he whimpered. “I had too much on my mind, I thought you'd gone, I didn't know you'd just fixed your warp-whatever-you-call-it, I didn't mean, I was going to, I—”

At last he realized he was alone. He had never been so alone. Absently he picked up the telephone and put it to his ear. Jonathan was saying excitedly, “… and the title.
The Ultimate Weapon
. Cheesecake pic of the girl coming out of the radar, nekkid. The only thing you haven't used yet. We'll
bomb
'em, boy. Yeah, and you resisting, too. Do wonders for your Temple. But get busy on that book, hear? Get it to me in fifteen days and you can open your own branch of the U.S. mint.”

Slowly, without speaking or waiting to see if the publisher was finished, Phillipso hung up. Once, just once, he looked out at the stars, and for a terrible instant each star was a life, a crippled limb,
a faulty heart, a day of agony; and there were millions on countless millions of stars, and some of the stars were galaxies of stars; by their millions, by their flaming megatons, they were falling on him now and would fall on him forever.

He sighed and turned away, and switched on the light over his typewriter. He rolled in a sandwich of bond, carbon, second-sheet, centered the carriage, and wrote

Facile, swift, deft, and dedicated, he began to write.

W
HEN HE SAW HER AGAIN
, he all but yelled—a wordless, painful bleat, one concentrated syllable to contain five years of loneliness, fury, self-revilement and that agony peculiar to the victim of “the other man.” Yet he controlled it, throwing it with a practiced reflex to a tensing of his abdomen and the transient knotting of thigh muscles behind the desk, letting the impact strike as it should, unseen.

Outwardly, he was controlled. It was his job to know the language of eyelids, jaw muscles, lips, and it was his special skill to make them mute. He rose slowly as his nurse ushered her in and while she took the three short paces to meet him. He studied her with an impassive ferocity.

He might have imagined her in old clothes, or in cheap clothes. Here she was in clothes which were both. He had allowed, in his thoughts of her, for change, but he had not thought her nose might have been broken, nor that she might be so frighteningly thin. He had thought she would always walk like something wild … free, rather … but with stateliness, too, balanced and fine. And indeed she still did so; somehow that hurt him more than anything else could.

She stopped before the desk. He moved his hands behind him; her gaze was on them and he wanted her to look up. He waited until Miss Jarrell discreetly clicked the door shut.

“Osa,” he said at last.

“Well, Fred.”

The silence became painful. How long did that take—two seconds, three? He made a meaningless sound, part of a laugh, and came around the desk to shift the chair beside it. “Sit down, for heaven's sake.”

She sat down and abruptly, for the first time since she had entered
the office, she looked directly at him. “You look—you look well, Fred.”

“Thanks.” He sat down. He wanted to say something, but the only thing that would come readily to his lips was, “You're looking well, too”—such a patent lie that he couldn't tell it. And at last he found something else to say: “A lot has happened.”

She nodded and her gaze found a corner of the tooled leather blotter frame on the desk. She studied it quietly.

“Five years,” she said.

Five years in which she must have known everything about him, at first because such a separation is never sharp, but ragged, raveled, a-crackle with the differed snaps of different threads at different times; and later, because all the world knew what he was, what he had done. What he stood for.

For him, five years at first filled with a not-Osa, like a sheet of paper from which one has cut a silhouette; and after that, the diminishing presence of Osa as gossip (so little of that, because anyone directly involved in gossip walks usually in a bubble of silence); Osa as rumor, Osa as conjecture. He had heard that Richard Newell had lost—left—his job about the time he had won Osa, and he had never heard of his working again.

Glancing at Osa's cheap clothes now, and the new small lines in her face, he concluded that whatever Newell had found to do, it could not have been much. Newell, he thought bitterly, is a man God made with only one victory in him and he's used it up.

“Will you help me?” Osa asked stridently.

He thought: Was I waiting for this? Is this some sort of reward, her coming to me for help? Once he might have thought so. At the moment, he did not feel rewarded.

He sat looking at her question as if it were a tangible object, a box of a certain size, a certain shape, made of some special material, which was not to be opened until he had guessed its contents.

Will you help me?
Money? Hardly—Osa may have lost a great deal, but her towering pride was still with her. Besides, money settles nothing. A little is never enough and helps only until it is gone. A little more puts real solutions a bit further into the future. A whole
lot buries the real problem, where it lives like a cancer or a carcinogen.

Not money, then. Perhaps a job? For her? No, he knew her well. She could get her own jobs. She had not, therefore she didn't want one. This could only mean she lived as she did for Newell's sake. Oh, yes, he would be the provider, even if the illusion starved her.

Then a job for Newell? Didn't she know he couldn't be trusted with any responsible job and was not constituted to accept anything less? Of course she knew it.

All of which left only one thing. She must be sure, too, that Newell would accept the idea or she would not be asking.

He said, “How soon can he start therapy?”

She
flickered
, all over and all at once, as if he had touched her with a high voltage electrode—the first and only indication she had evinced of the terrible tensions she carried. Then she raised her head, her face lit with something beyond words, something big enough, bright enough, to light and warm the world. His world. She tried to speak.