“Pleased, I’m sure, Mr. Devereaux,” said the other elderly lady. “’If you’ve been out on the grounds perhaps you could tell me where my husband is, so I wont have to look all over for him?”
“I saw only one other person,” Luke said. “A man with a spade beard?”
She nodded and Luke said, “Right near the northwest corner. Sitting on one of the benches, staring up into a tree.”
Mrs. Randall sighed. “Probably thinking out his big speech. He thinks he’s Ishurti this week, poor man.” She pushed back her chair. I’ll go and tell him coffee is ready.”
Luke started to push back his owns chair and opened his mouth to say that he’d go for her. Then he remembered that Spade-Beard could neither see nor hear him, so the carrying of a message would be embarrassingly ineffective. He refrained from offering.
When the door had closed, Mrs. Murcheson laid a hand on his. “Such a nice couple,” she said. “It’s too bad.”
“She seems nice,” Luke said. “l—uh—didn’t get to meet him. Are they both—uh—”
“Yes, of course. But each thinks that only the other is. Each thinks he is here just to stay with and take care of the other.” She leaned closer. “But I have my suspicions, Mr. Devereaux. I think they’re both spies, just pretending to be insane. Venusian spies! ” Both s’s hissed and Luke leaned back and under pretext of wiping coffee from his lips managed to wipe the spittle frown his cheek as well.
To change the uncomfortable subject he asked, “What did she mean by saying he thought he was shirty this week?”
“Not shirty, Mr. Devereaux. Ishurti.”
The word or name sounded familiar to him, not that he’d heard it repeated, but he couldn’t place it.
But he realized suddenly that it might be embarrassing if Mrs. Randall brought her husband to the table while he was there, so instead of asking more questions he finished his coffee quickly and excused himself, saying he wanted to go upstairs to see if his wife was awake for breakfast yet.
He made his escape just in time; the Randalls were coming in the back way.
Outside their room he heard Margie moving around inside, knocked lightly so as not to startle her, and then went in.
“Lukel” she threw her arms around him and kissed him. “Have a walk around the grounds?” She was partly dressed—bra, panties and shoes, and the dress she’d dropped onto the bed to free her hands would complete the ensemble.
“That and one cup of coffee. Put that dress on and we’ll be just in time for breakfast.”
He dropped into a chair and watched as she lifted the dress overhead and started the usual series of contortions, ungraceful but fascinating to watch, that women always go through in pulling a dress over their heads.
“Margie, who or what is Ishurti?”
There was a muffled sound from inside the dress and then Margie’s head came out of the collar of it, staring at him a bit incredulously as she smoothed the dress down her body. “Luke, haven’t you been reading the newspa- That’s right, you haven’t been. But from back when you were reading them, you ought to remember Yato Ishurti!”
“Oh, sure,” Luke said. The two names together reminded him now who the man was. “Has he been much in the news lately?”
“Much in the news? He’s been the news, Luke, for the past three days. He’s to make a speech tomorrow on the radio, to the whole world; they want everybody to listen in and the newspapers have been giving it top headlines ever since the announcement.”
“A radio speech? But I thought that Martians were supposed to—I mean, I thought Martians interrupted them.”
“They can’t any more, Luke. That’s one thing we’ve finally licked them on. Radio has developed a new type of throat mike, one that the Martians can’t cut in on. That was the big story about a week ago, before Ishurti’s announcement.”
“How does it work? The mike, I mean.”
“It doesn’t pick up sound at all, as such. I’m no technician so I don’t know the details, but it picks up just the vibrations of the speaker’s larynx direct and translates them into radio waves. He doesn’t even have to speak out loud; he just—What’s the word?”
“Subvocalizes,” Luke said, remembering his experiment in trying to talk to his subconscious that way, only minutes ago. Had it worked? He’d seen no indication of a Martian around. “But what’s the speech about?”
“Nobody knows, but everyone assumes it’s about Martians, because what else, right now, would he want to talk to the whole world about? There are rumors—nobody knows, whether they’re true or not—that one of them has finally made a sensible contact with him, propositioned him by telling him on what terms the Martians will leave. And it seems possible, doesn’t it? They must have a leader, whether it’s a king or a dictator or a president or whatever else they might call him. And he made contact; isn’t Ishurti the man he’d go to?”
Luke managed not to smile, even to nod noncommittally. What a letdown Ishurti was going to have. By tomorrow…
“Margie, when did you last see a Martian?”
She looked at him a bit strangely. “Why, Luke?”
“I—just wondered.”
“If you must know, there are two of them in the room right now.”
“Oh,” he said.
It hadn’t worked.
“I’m ready,” Margie said. “Shall we go down?”
Breakfast was being served, Luke ate moodily, not tasting the ham and eggs at all; they might as well have been sawdust. Why hadn’t it worked?
Damn his subconscious; couldn’t it hear him subvocalize?
Or didn’t it believe him?
He knew suddenly that he’d have to get away, somewhere. Here, and he might as well face it that here was an insane asylum even if one called it a sanitarium, here was no place to work out a problem like that.
And wonderful as Margie’s presence was, it was a distraction.
He’d been alone when he’d invented the Martians; he’d have to be alone again to exorcise them. Alone and away from everything and everybody.
Carter Benson’s shack near Indio? Of course; that’s where at had all started!
Of course it was August now and it would be hellish hot out there by day, but for that very reason he could be sure that Carter himself wouldn’t be using it. So he wouldn’t have to ask Carter’s permission and not even Carter would know that he was there and be able to give him away if there was a search for him. Margie didn’t know about the place; he’d never happened to mention it to her.
But he’d have to plan carefully. Too early to make his getaway now because the bank didn’t open until nine and that would have to be his first stop. Thank God Margie had opened their account as a joint account and had brought out a signature card for him to sign. He’d have to cash a check for several hundred so he’d have enough to buy a used car; there wasn’t any other way of getting out to Benson’s shack. And he’d sold his own car before he’d left Hollywood.
Got only two hundred and fifty dollars for it, too, although a few months before—while there was still such a thing as pleasure driving—it would have brought him five hundred. Well, that meant he’d be able to buy one cheaply now; for less than a hundred he’d be able to pick up something good enough to get him there and let him run into Indio for shopping—if what he had to do took him that long.
“Anything wrong, Luke?”
“Nup,” he said. “Not a thing.” And realized he might as well start preparing the groundwork for his escape. “Except that I’m a little dopey. Couldn’t sleep last night; doubt it I get more than a couple hours solid sleep all night.”