“Fine.” Bedford nodded. “When you two get the carcass butchered and hung to age in the coldhouse, Juan can come back to the kitchen and slice the liver and make up a big meal of it fried with lots of onions, mashed potatoes, gravy, the works. Cook enough for Drs. Stekowski, Marberg and me, possibly Dr. Baronian, and you two, of course. We can have the tongue tomorrow, then start on the hump ribs. Okay?”
Showing every gold inlay in a grin that seemed to stretch literally from ear to ear, Juan nodded, “It will most assuredly be done, Jefe.”
“Uhh, Mr. Bedford, sir …” Joe Skywalker asked, diffidently. “Uhh, please sir, do you want the robe and the head and all?”
Bedford chuckled. “Hardly, Joe. If you do, you take them with my blessings, unless Juan fancies some or all of them, in which case you two will just have to draw straws or cards or roll dice for them, I guess. Now get to it, you two, before those buzzards get to it first.”
Proceeding back up the hallway from the shop areas, Bedford halted before the door of Hazel’s office, rattled the knob, then knocked. When there was no whisper of a response, he rapped harder, at last pounding with the side of his clenched fist at the firmly locked portal, while shouting at it, “Damn you, Dr. Harel, get off that phone.”
After waiting a few more moments in silence, he nodded grimly to himself and spun on his heel to stride purposefully back up the hallway, past the conference room, to the entry foyer. From a box set in the wall, he took a key and unlocked the door marked “KEEP OUT! HIGH VOLTAGE! DANGER!”
Once within the ground-floor room at the base of the brick tower, Bedford knew exactly what to pull, exactly where it was located on the wall. He had been there when it was first installed and had asked lots of questions of the installers; now he was very glad he had done so.
Relocking the door behind him, he went back to the conference room to await the now-certain arrival of Dr. Harel.
Nor did they have long to wait. Bedford had but just filled a cup with fresh coffee and sugared and stirred it when the door crashed open and an obviously thoroughly enraged Dr. Harel stomped in, blackthorn stick in hand.
“Mr. Bedford,” he snapped peremptorily, “that videophone is defective. You must obtain us a new one, immediately. I was in the midst of a most important conversation with Dr. Piotr Ivanov, in Beloretsk. Suddenly, poof, the screen was black and no sound, nor would the stupid American-Japanese abortion respond to any more commands. Order a Russian-made videophone this time; true, they are not so smooth and sleek and fancy, but they are always and completely reliable. Well, do you hear my orders, Mr. Bedford?”
“Perfectly, Dr. Harel. I doubt not but that you were heard as far away as Boise,” James Bedford replied, shoving aside his cup and arising from his chair. “But as for ordering any new v-phone, much less one of those cast-iron clunkers the Russians turn out, it will not be necessary, not necessary at all. By the way, just how long did you and your Russian friend chat this time?”
Harel sneered and sniffed. “That information is none of your affair, Mr. Bedford; you own no need to know it.”
“On the contrary, Dr. Harel,” snapped Bedford, “at one hundred and fifteen dollars and fifty-five cents the minute for that kind of hookup to that part of the world at this time of day on a v-phone, it is very much my business to know just how much your irresponsible long-windedness has cost us this time around. After all, it is I who am trying desperately to keep this project afloat financially, and with damn-all cooperation from you. sir. I’m told you’d been on that phone for at least an hour—over nine thousand dollars’ worth, including taxes, Dr. Harel!—and after you refused to respond to my knocks on your office door, I simply went into tile tower and disconnected the v-phone cable. Furthermore, the next time I catch you in such a wastrel act of selfishness, I’ll do it again! We are going to be on a very tight budget here for the next year or so, thanks to your dumb, lackluster latifrons project. The only way I could beg any money at all was to promise that we’d drop the ongoing project and start something with more appeal.”
“Such as … ?” grated Harel, his big hand gripping the stick as if it were a sword, gripping it so hard that his knuckles shone out white as new-fallen snow. “Or need I ask at all, Mr. Bedford?”
“Such as,” answered Bedford with not a little satisfaction in the words, “a project aimed at replication of Panthera feethami or something similar to it, Dr. Harel. I can get real, large-scale funding if we work on such a project for the next year and I can take out tangible proof of a reasonable amount of progress on it.”
His broad, big-featured face become a livid purple, his thick lips skinned back to show his large teeth, Harel swept his stick up above his head and brought its length crashing down on the table, roaring, “Never! Do you hear me? Never! Never will anyone here do such a thing! No flesh-eater of any description will be replicated or reproduced in my project here!” He punctuated each short shout with yet another slamming of the length of his stick on the tabletop.
Coolly. Bedford said, when Harel had paused for breath, “When you’ve finished this tantrum, Dr. Harel, we can then perhaps carry on a civilized and reasonably civil discussion, eh? For there are no available options, you see; no one will fund Project Latifrons any further. I gave at least one tug to every possibility and no approach produced anything, the—”
“Tantrum?” growled Harel. “I’ll show you who is your master for good and all, you impudent capitalist pig!” So saying. he whirled the stick of dense, tough wood up above his head yet again, but this time it was clearly not aimed at the table.
That blow never fell, however. Thinking, “Goddammit, enough is enough! No way is that fat fucker going to beat me with that cane,” Bedford gave the threatening man his left fist with all his force behind it squarely in the solar plexus.
With a wheezing grunt, Harel doubled, gasping. The raised stick dropped from his fingers and both hands sought the place that hurt, covered it.
Fists cocked and ready, should more force be needed, Bedford half crouched on the balls of his feet. Stekowski just sat and stared, looking as stunned as Harel; the old man had paled, and although his lips moved, no sound emerged from them. Between them, Ruth Marberg and Zepur Baronian took Harel’s elbows and got him into a chair, the elder woman then picking up the blackthorn stick and tucking it out of sight behind the coffee console.
Gradually, the adrenaline began to drain from Bedford and he was able to ask in almost-normal tones, “Where the hell is Dr. Singh, anyway?”
Dr. Baronian shrugged. “Probably in his quarters, upstairs, meditating. He turns everything off when he meditates, the intercom, included. Want me to see if I can find him, Jim?”
He nodded. “Yes, if you would be so kind. I’d really like to have us all in here when I tell the full story of this last trip and lay out what we are going to have to do to survive, to get as much as one more dollar of funding.”
They all sat down to wait for Drs. Singh and Baronian to come. Bedford stirred absently at his cooling coffee and kept a wary eye on the big man, who had begun to breathe more easily. Bedford sensed that unlike many bullies, there was beneath all the bluster and the histrionics a potential for real and dangerous violence.
(“If only I had known there and then just how right my intuition concerning Dr. Harel truly was,” he later was to record in his journal, “how different things might have been for us all. Who was it who said that ‘if only’ are the saddest words in the English language? They are.”)