Then the door of the men's room opened.
He came out.
He looked lousy. Eyes all red-rimmed and his hair falling out-the poor bastard couldn't have been over twenty-nine. He shrieked: "You!" He called me a million names. He said: "Thieving rat, I'll teach you to try to cheat me out of my candy ration!"
He had a knife.
I didn't care. I didn't have anything and that was stupid, but it didn't matter. I got a bottle of beer from the next table and smashed it against the back of a chair. It made a good weapon, you know; I'd take that against a knife any time. I did. I ran toward him, and he came all staggering and lurching toward me, looking crazy and desperate, mumbling and raving-I could hardly hear him, because I was talking too. Nobody tried to stop us. Somebody went out the door and I figured it was to call the cops, but that was all right. Once I took care of him I didn't care what the cops did.
I went for the face.
He cut me first. I felt the knife slide up along my left arm but, you know, it didn't even hurt-only kind of stung a little. I didn't care about that. I got him in the face, and the bottle came away, and it was all like gray and white jelly, and then blood began to spring out. He screamed. Oh, that scream! I never heard anything like that scream; it was what I had been waiting for all my life. I kicked him as he staggered back, and he fell. And I was on top of him, with the bottle, and I was careful to stay away from the heart or the throat, because that was too quick-but I worked over the face, and I felt his knife get me a couple times more, and-- And- And I woke up, you know. And there was Dr. Santly over me with a hypodermic needle that he'd just taken out of my arm, and four male nurses in fatigues holding me down. And I was drenched with sweat.
For a minute I didn't know where I was. It was a horrible queasy falling sensation, as though the bar and the fight and the world were all dissolving into smoke around me.
Then I knew where I was.
It was almost worse.
I stopped yelling and just lay there, looking up at them.
Dr. Santly said, trying to keep his face friendly and noncommittal, he said: "You're doing much better, Byron, boy. Much better."
I didn't say anything.
He said: "You worked through the whole thing in two hours and eight minutes. Remember the first time? You were sixteen hours killing him. Captain Van Wyck it was that time, remember? Who was it this time?"
"Chowderhead." I looked at the male nurses. Doubtfully they let go of my arms and legs.
"Chowderhead," said Dr. Santly. "Oh-Roebuck. That boy," he said mournfully, his expression saddened, "he's not coming along nearly as well as you. Nearly. He can't run through a cycle in less than five hours. And, that's funny, it's usually you he. . . . Well, I better not say that, shall I? No sense setting up a counter impression when your pores are all open, so to speak." He smiled at me, but he was a little worried in back of the smile.
I sat up. "Anybody got a cigarette?"
"Give him a cigarette, Johnson," the doctor ordered the male nurse by my right foot. Johnson did. I fired up. "You're coming along splendidly," Dr. Santly said. He was one of these psych guys that thinks if you say it's so it makes it so. You know the kind? "We'll have you down under an hour before the end of the week. That's marvelous progress. Then we can work on the conscious level! Boy, you're doing extremely well, whether you know it or not. Why, in six months-say in eight months, because I like to be conservative-" he twinkled at me-"we'll have you out of here! You'll be the first of your crew to be discharged, you know that?"
"That's nice," I said. "The others aren't doing so well?"
"No. Not at all well, most of them. Particularly Dr. Gilvey, the run-throughs leave him in terrible shape. I don't mind admitting I'm worried about him."
"That's nice," I said, and this time I meant it.
He looked at me thoughtfully, but all he did was say to the male nurses: "He's all right, now. Help him off the table."
It was hard standing up. I had to hold onto the rail around the table for a minute. I said my set little speech: "Dr. Santly, I want to tell you again how grateful I am for this. I was reconciled to living the rest of my life confined to one part of the country, the way the other crews always did. But this is much better. I appreciate it. I'm sure the others do, too."
"Of course, boy. Of course." He took out a fountain pen and made a note on my chart; I couldn't see what it was, but he looked gratified.
"It's only what you have coming, Byron," he said. "I'm grateful that I could be the one to make it come to pass."
He glanced conspiratorially at the male nurses. "You know how important this is to me. It's the triumph of a whole new approach to psychic rehabilitation. I mean to say, our heroes of space travel are entitled to freedom when they come back to Earth, aren't they?"
"Definitely," I said, scrubbing some of the sweat off my face onto my sleeve.
"So we've got to end this system of designated areas. We can't avoid the tensions incident to space travel, no. But if we can help you work off the tensions through a few run-throughs, why, it's not too high a price to pay, is it?"
"Not a bit."
"I mean to say," he said, warming up, "you can look forward to the time when you'll be able to mingle with your old friends from the rocket, free and easy, without any need for restraint. That's a lot to look forward to, isn't it?"
"It is," I said. "I look forward to it very much," I said. "And I know exactly what I'm going to do the first time I meet one-I mean, without any restraints, as you say," I said. And it was true; I did. Only it wouldn't be a busted beer bottle that I would do it with.
I had much more elaborate ideas than that.
The Martian in the Attic
DUNLOP was short and pudgy; his eyelashes were blond and his hair was gone. He looked like the sort of man you see sitting way off at the end of the stadium at the Big Game, clutching a hot dog and a pennant and sitting with his wife, who would be making him explain every play. Also he stuttered.
The girl at the reception desk of LaFitte Enterprises was a blue-eyed former model. She had Dunlop catalogued. She looked up slowly. She said bleakly: "Yes?"
"I want to see Mr. LaF-F-F-" said Dunlop, and paused to clear his throat. "I want to see Mr. LaFitte."
The ex-model was startled enough to blink. Nobody saw Mr. LaFitte! Oh, John D. the Sixth might. Or President Brockenheimer might drop by, after phoning first. Nobody else. Mr. LaFitte was a very great man who had invented most of America's finest gadgets and sold them for some of America's finest money, and he was not available to casual callers. Particularly nobodies with suits that had come right off a rack.
The ex-model was, however, a girl with a sympathetic heart-as was known only to her mother, her employer and the fourteen men who, one after another, had broken it. She was sorry for Dunlop. She decided to let the poor jerk down easy and said: "Who shall I say is calling, sir? Mr. Dunlop? Is that with an '0,' sir? One moment." And she picked up the phone, trying to smile.
The reception room was carpeted in real Oriental wool-none of your flimsy nylon or even LaFitton!-and all about it were the symbols of LaFitte's power and genius. In a floodlighted nook, stood an acrylic model of the LaFitte Solar Transformer, transparently gleaming. On a scarlet pedestal in the center of the room was the LaFitte Ion-Exchange Self-Powered Water Still, in the small or forty-gallon-a-second model. (Two of the larger size provided all of London with sparkling clear water from the muddy, silty, smelly Thames.)
Dunlop said hoarsely: "Hold it a second. Tell him that he won't know my name, but we have a mutual friend."
The ex-model hesitated, struggling with the new fact. That changed things. Even Mr. LaFitte might have a friend who might by chance be acquainted with a little blond nobody whose shoes needed shining. It wasn't likely, but it was a possibility. Especially when you consider that Mr. LaFitte himself sprang from quite humble origins: at one time he had taught at a university.