“They could go on that way indefinitely,” said Ebor.
“I know,” said Darquelnoy gloomily. “And here we sit.”
Ebor nodded, studying his friend. “You don’t suppose this is all a waste of time, do you?” he asked, after a minute.
Darquelnoy shook a tentacle in negation. “Not at all, not at all. They’ll get around to it, sooner or later. They’re still boasting themselves into the proper frame of mind, that’s all.”
Ebor rippled in sympathetic amusement. “I imagine you sometimes wish you could give them a little prodding in the right direction,” he said.
Darquelnoy fluttered his tentacles in horror, crying, “Don’t even think of such a thing!”
“I know, I know,” said Ebor hastily. “The laws—”
“Never mind the laws,” snapped Darquelnoy. “I’m not even thinking about the laws. Frankly, if it would do any good, I might even consider breaking one or two of the laws, and the devil with my conditioning.”
“You are upset,” said Ebor at that.
“But if we were to interfere with those creatures up there,” continued Darquelnoy, “interfere with them in any way at all, it would be absolutely disastrous.”
The orderly returned at that point, with two steaming cups of restno. Darquelnoy and Ebor accepted the cups and the orderly left, making a sloppy tentacle-cross salute, which the two ignored.
“I wasn’t talking necessarily about attacking them, you know,” said Ebor, returning to the subject.
“Neither was I,” Darquelnoy told him. “We wouldn’t have to attack them. All we would have to do is let them know we’re here. Not even why we’re here, just the simple fact of our presence. That would be enough. They would attack us.”
Ebor extended his eyes in surprise. “As vicious as all that?”
“Chilling,” Darquelnoy told him. “Absolutely chilling.”
“Then I’m surprised they haven’t blown themselves to pieces long before this.”
“Oh, well,” said Darquelnoy, “you see, they’re cowards, too. They have to boast and brag and shout a while before they finally get to clawing and biting at one another.”
Ebor waved a tentacle. “Don’t make it so vivid.”
“Sorry,” apologized Darquelnoy. He drained his cup of restno. “Out here,” he said, “living next door to the little beasts day after day, one begins to lose one’s sensibilities.”
“It has been a long time,” agreed Ebor.
“Longer than we had originally anticipated,” Darquelnoy said frankly. “We’ve been ready to move in for I don’t know how long. And instead we just sit here and wait. Which isn’t good for morale, either.”
“No, I don’t imagine it is.”
“There’s already a theory among some of the workmen that the blow-up just isn’t going to happen, ever. And since that ship went circling by, of course, morale has hit a new low.”
“It would have been nasty if they’d spotted you,” said Ebor.
“Nasty?” echoed Darquelnoy. “Catastrophic, you mean. All that crowd up there needs is an enemy, and it doesn’t much matter to them who that enemy is. If they were to suspect that we were here, they’d forget their own little squabbles at once and start killing us instead. And that, of course, would mean that they’d be united, for the first time in their history, and who knows how long it would take them before they’d get back to killing one another again.”
“Well,” said Ebor, “you’re underground now. And it can’t possibly take them too much longer.”
“One wouldn’t think so,” agreed Darquelnoy. “In a way,” he added, “that spaceship was a hopeful sign. It means that they’ll be sending a manned ship along pretty soon, and that should do the trick. As soon as one side has a base on the Moon, the other side is bound to get things started.”
“A relief for you, eh?” said Ebor.
“You know,” said Darquelnoy thoughtfully, “I can’t help thinking I was born in the wrong age. All this scrabbling around, searching everywhere for suitable planets. Back when the Universe was younger, there were lots and lots of planets to colonize. Now the old problem of half-life is taking its toll, and we can’t even hope to keep up with the birth rate any more. If it weren’t for the occasional planets like that one up there, I don’t know what we’d do.”
“Don’t worry,” Ebor told him. “They’ll have their atomic war pretty soon, and leave us a nice high-radiation planet to colonize.”
“I certainly hope it’s soon,” said Darquelnoy. “This waiting gets on one’s nerves.” He rang for the orderly.
The Spy in the Elevator
He was dangerously insane. He threatened to destroy everything that was noble and decent — including my date with my girl!
I
When the elevator didn’t come, that just made the day perfect. A broken egg yolk, a stuck zipper, a feedback in the aircon exhaust, the window sticking at full transparency — well, I won’t go through the whole sorry list. Suffice it to say that when the elevator didn’t come, that put the roof on the city, as they say.
It was just one of those days. Everybody gets them. Days when you’re lucky if you make it to nightfall with no bones broken.
But of all times for it to happen! For literally months I’d been building my courage up. And finally, just today, I had made up my mind to do it — to propose to Linda. I’d called her second thing this morning — right after the egg yolk — and invited myself down to her place. “Ten o’clock,” she’d said, smiling sweetly at me out of the phone. She knew why I wanted to talk to her. And when Linda said ten o’clock, she meant ten o’clock.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean that Linda’s a perfectionist or a harridan or anything like that. Far from it. But she does have a fixation on that one subject of punctuality. The result of her job, of course She was an ore-sled dispatcher. Ore-sleds, being robots, were invariably punctual. If an ore-sled didn’t return on time, no one waited for it. They simply knew that it had been captured by some other Project and had blown itself up.
Well, of course, after working as an ore-sled dispatcher for three years. Linda quite naturally was a bit obsessed. I remember one time, shortly after we’d started dating, when I arrived at her place five minutes late and found her having hysterics. She thought I’d been killed. She couldn’t visualize anything less than that keeping me from arriving at the designated moment. When I told her what actually had happened — I’d broken a shoe lace — she refused to speak to me for four days.
And then the elevator didn’t come.
Until then, I’d managed somehow to keep the day’s minor disasters from ruining my mood. Even while eating that horrible egg — I couldn’t very well throw it away, broken yolk or no; it was my breakfast allotment and I was hungry — and while hurriedly jury-rigging drapery across that gaspingly transparent window — one hundred and fifty-three stories straight down to slag — I kept going over and over my prepared proposal speeches, trying to select the most effective one.
I had a Whimsical Approach: “Honey, I see there’s a nice little Non-P apartment available up on one seventy-three.” And I had a Romantic Approach: “Darling, I can’t live without you at the moment. Temporarily, I’m madly in love with you. I want to share my life with you for a while. Will you be provisionally mine?” I even had a Straightforward Approach: “Linda. I’m going to be needing a wife for at least a year or two, and I can’t think of anyone I would rather spend the time with than you.”