And Now the News (46 page)

“That's … ugly,” Loolyo said.

“ ‘That's … ugly,' “Fritz repeated, with completely accurate and completely insulting mimicry, then made his big roar of laughter and told Loolyo not to get mad. “You've just made a point for me, but wait a bit till I get to it.” He leaned back and went on with his speech. “Now, of all ‘dangerous' differences which incite the mob, the one that hits 'em hardest, quickest and nastiest is any variation in sex. It devolves upon every human being to determine which sex he belongs to and then to
be
that as loud as possible for as long as he lives. To the smallest detail men dress like men and women dress like women, and God help them if they cross the line. A man has got to look and act like a man. That isn't a right. It's a duty. And no matter how weird mankind gets in its rules and regulations—whether manhood demands shoulder-length hair for a Cavalier or waist-length for a Sikh or a crew-cut for a Bavarian, the rules must be followed or bloody well else.

“Now, as for you people,” Fritz said, sitting up and flipping his long index finger down and forward, like a sharpshooter practicing a snap shot, “you are what you are just like everybody else. But I'm
not talking about what you are—that's self-evident—only about how you're treated.

“The only big difference between you and normal people, in those terms, is that they must display their sex and insist on it, and you may not. But I mean, you one hundred percent by God
may
not, not in public. Among your own kind you can camp and scream and giggle to your heart's content, but don't let yourself get caught at it. It would be better not to do it at all.”

“Now wait, wait, wait,” Loolyo barked. “Hold on here. What has this got to do with me?”

Fritz opened his eyes big and round and then closed them and slumped into the cushions. He said in a very very tired voice, “Aw, now lookit. You're not going to bust into the middle of this and make me go all the way back to the beginning.”

“I just want to know what makes you think—”

“Sit down and shut up!” Fritz bellowed, and he was the man who could do it. “Do you or do you not want to know how to go about among human beings without getting your girlish face kicked down your throat?”

Loolyo stood for a while, pale, his bright eyes drawn down to angry slits. It was as if Fritz's question didn't reach him all at once, but had to percolate in. Slowly he sat down again. “Go ahead then.”

Fritz nodded approvingly. “I hate a bad liar, Louie, and you were about to try the one lie you could never get away with. Not with anyone who understands you.… All right then. My advice to you:

Be a man. Not any old man, not mankind, but manhood. To do this you don't need to play pro football and grow hair on your chest and seduce every third woman you meet long as she's female. All you have to do is hunt, fish (or talk sense about 'em as if you had) and go bug-eyed when the girls go by. If a sunset moves you so much you
have
to express yourself, do it with a grunt and a dirty word. Or you say, ‘That Beethoven, he blows a cool symphony.' Never champion a real underdog unless it's a popular type, like a baseball team. Always treat other men as if you were sore at something and will wipe it off on them if they give you the slightest excuse. I mean sore, Louis, not vexed or in a snit. And stay away from women. They
have an intuition that'll find you nine times out of ten. The tenth time she falls for you, and there's nothing funnier.”

“I think,” Loolyo said after a time, “that you hate human beings.”

“I understand 'em, that's all. Do you think I hate you?”

“Maybe you should. I'm not what you think I am.”

Fritz Rhys shook his head and quietly cursed. “All right. Wear your cellophane mask if it makes you feel better. I don't give a damn about you or what you do. Do what I tell you and you can live in a man's world. Go on the way you are and in that last split second before they kick your brains in, you'll admit I was right.”

“I'm glad you told me. It's what I came here to find out,” Loolyo said finally.

At the sound of a key in the lock Fritz sprang up and ran to the door. It was Alma. Fritz took her packages and kissed her. While he was kissing her she looked past him to the living room and Loolyo, and as soon as he was finished she went and stood in the doorway. Fritz stood behind her, watching. Loolyo raised his head slowly and saw her and started and smiled shyly.

Fritz stepped up and took her shoulder and turned her around because just then he had to see her face. When he saw it he gently bit his lower lip and said, “Oh,” and went back to his chair. He was a man who understood things real quick.

Alma ignored him, all eyes for Loolyo. “What has he been saying to you?”

He didn't answer. He looked at the carpet. Fritz jumped up and rapped, “Well, are you willing to tell the lady?”

“Why?”

“Promise me you will, every word, and I'll let her take the car and give you a lift out of town. You are from out of town? Yes. Well, I think you owe it to each other. What do you say, Louie?”

“Fritz! Have you gone cr—”

“You better persuade him to play it that way, honey. It's the last chance you'll have to see him alone.”

“Loolyo …” she whispered, “come on, then.”

Loolyo stared at the big man. Fritz grinned and said, “Every God damned word, mind. I'll quiz her when she gets back and take it out
on her if you don't. Alma, try not to make it more'n two, three hours. Okay?”

“Come on then,” she said stiffly, and they went out. Fritz went and got a beer and came back and flopped in the chair, drinking and laughing and scratching his chest.

In the car he said only “Uptown, over the bridge,” and then fell into a silence that lasted clear to the tollbooths. They turned north and at last he began to talk. He told her all about it. She said nothing until he had quite finished; then: “How could you let him suggest such a filthy thing?”

He laughed bitterly. “Let him?… When he understand something, that—is—it.”

There was nothing she could say to this; she knew it better than anything in life. He said, “But I guess I'm a green monkey anyhow. Well … I should be grateful. He told me where my kind can hide, and how to act when we're out in the open. I'd about given up.”

“What do you mean?” He would not answer her, but rode with his face turned away. He seemed to be scanning the roadside to the right.

Suddenly: “Here,” he said. “Stop here.”

Startled, she pulled off the pavement and stopped. There's a new parkway north of the bridge, and for miles it parallels the old road. Between them is a useless strip of land, mauled by construction machines, weedy and deserted. She looked at it and at him, and if she was going to speak again the expression on his face stopped her. It was filled with sadness and longing and something else, a sort of blue-mood laughter. He said, “I'm going home now.”

She looked at her hands on the wheel and suddenly could not see them. He touched her arm and said gently, “You'll have to get over it, Alma. It can't work. Nothing could make it work. It would kill you. Try to get back with your husband. He's better equipped for you. I'm not, not at all.”

“Stop it,” she whispered. “Stop it, stop it.”

Loolyo sighed deeply, put his arms around her and kissed her, rough, gentle, thorough, face, mouth, tongue, ears, neck, touching
her body hungrily while he did it. She clung to him and cried. He put her arms from him and pressed something into her hand and vaulted out of the car, ran across the shoulder, jumped over the retaining wall and disappeared. It was only a low wall. He didn't disappear behind anything or into anything or in the distance. He just disappeared. She called him twice and then got out and ran to the wall. Nothing—weeds, broken ground, a bush or two. She wrung her hands and became conscious of the object he had given her. It was a transparent disk, about like a plain flat flashlight lens. She turned it over twice, then impulsively looked through it.

She saw Loolyo crouched in a … machine.

She saw the machine leave, and when it was gone, her glass disc ceased to exist also, so that she had nothing of his any more. For a while she thought she could not survive that. And in its time came the thing known to everyone who has had grief enough: that no matter what you've lost, the lungs and the heart go on, and all around, birds fly, cars pass, people make a buck and lose their souls and get hernia and happy and their hair cut just like before.

When she came through the other side of this, it was quite a bit later. She was weak and numb but she could drive again, so she did, very carefully, and soon she was able to think again, so she did, just as carefully, and by the time she got home her rehearsed “Hel-
lo!
” was perfect and easy.

Maybe she forgot to rehearse her face. Fritz Rhys, shirtless, huge and understanding, came up out of the big chair like a cresting wave of muscles and kindliness. He took her hand and laughed quietly and brought her to the couch. She cowered back into the corner cushions and just sat, waiting for him to wash over her any way he wanted. He sat on the edge of the couch close to her, leaning forward to wall her away from the world, his heavy forearm and fist on the end table next to the couch; single-handedly he surrounded her. “Alma …” he whispered, and waited, waited, until at last she met his eyes.

“I'm not angry,” he told her. “Believe me, honey, I'm glad you can … love someone that much. It only means you're alive and … compassionate and—Alma.” He laughed the quiet laugh again. “Of
course I'll admit I'm glad he turned out to be a—one of the girls. I don't know what I'd do if you ever felt that way about a real man.”

Her eyes had been fixed on his all the while, and now she moved them, let them drop to the heavy naked forearm that lay across the polished wood of the end table. She watched it with increasing fascination as he talked. “So let's chalk up one for the statistical mind, namely me, versus feminine intuition which sort of let you down. What are you staring at?”

She was staring at the forearm. Almost in spite of herself she reached for it. She didn't answer. He said, “It could have been worse. Imagine living with him. Imagine getting right to the point, drunk on poetry and shiny hair, and just when you were … ah, why go on. It would be impossible.”

“It was impossible,” she said in a low voice. She put her hand on his forearm, looked up and saw him watching her, and snatched the hand away self-consciously. She couldn't seem to keep her eyes off his arm. She began to smile, looking at it. He was a big man, and his forearm was about seventeen inches long and perhaps five and a half inches thick. “Quite impossible,” she murmured, “and that's about the size of it.”
Damn near exactly the size of it
, she thought wildly.

“Good girl!” he said heartily. “And now I'll give you forty-eight hours mooning time and then we'll be—”

His voice trailed off weakly as he watched the wildness transfer itself from somewhere inside her to her face and turn to laughter, floods, arrows, flights, peals, bullets of laughter.

“Alma!”

Her laughter ceased instantly but left her lips curled and her eyes glittering. “You better go back to killing the green monkeys,” she said in a flat hard voice. “You've given them a beachhead.”

“What?”

“There's something awfully small about you, Fritz Rhys,” she said, and again the laughter, more and more of it, and he couldn't croon it down, he couldn't shout it down, and he couldn't stand it. He got dressed and packed his bag and said from the door, into the blare and blaze of her laughter, “I don't understand you. I don't understand you at all,” and he went back to Washington.

A
LOUSY MISSION
. Of course, it was a volunteer (i.e. suicide) mission, and for that you take what comes. They may wine you and dine you and honor you and your tribe for three generations coming and going, in the days before you start. But once you're on your way, you can't expect it to be a pleasure. Everything about suicide is death, not just the final part.

Potter pinched his nostrils and didn't know he was doing it, even while he was looking you straight in the eye, talking to you at the time. Try shipping out with that. That's what bothered me the most, anyway.

Most of the others seemed to be bugged by Donato. He had a psychosomatic cough that passed all the preflight medics for the simple reason that he had never had such a thing before, probably because he had never gone out to die before. Me, I guess I have soaked up enough of the “profound compassion” of the Luanae to defend me against that kind of annoyance. But Potter the Pincher now—that got to me, I admit it.

Little Donato was always trying to please. Some people are annoying because once in a while they just don't go out of their way to make things a little happier for anyone else. Donato hit the other extreme, always making way, never disagreeing, forever finding some way to help or get a cushion or move back or bring or say or not say whatever anyone else might want, until you wanted to scuttle the ship just so it would take him with the lot of you.

The main trouble was, he was so helpful he never gave you anything to complain about. Time after time, I would see one or the other of the crew suddenly wheel on him out of a dead silence and roar at him to get the hell out.

“Why, sure, friend,” Donato would always say, and smile, and get
the hell out, leaving whoever it was beating himself on the temples.

Potter was a specialist in field mechanics and Donato was a top ballistics man. England was an ugly man with big ears and wet eyes who kept to himself pretty much, only he ate loud. He was an expert in missile control. And I'm Palmer; I heard there was a man in Alpha Sigma IV once who knew more about trans-spatial stress than I do, but I don't believe it.