“Your face ups and falls off!” She laughed again. “That’s the kind of thing you Stuffed-Shirts would expect me to say! Beautiful! Yes, I’m sure I like you.”
The Underclass Watcher was confused. He looked about in confusion, feeling distinctly as though he had come in during the middle of a conversation. “I—I’d better be going. I don’t think I want to meet your—”
“All right, all right. Suppose I fix your stupid box so it keeps right on recording; recording things that are happening, in your voice, without your being here, then would you leave it and come with me?”
“Are you out of your mind?” he yelled in a hushed tone.
“Certainly,” she said, smiling broadly.
He turned once more to leave, angry and annoyed at her making fun of him. Again she stopped him.
“No, I’m sorry. Please, I can do it. Honestly. Here, let me have it.”
“Look, I can’t give you my dictobox. That’s about the most terrible thing a Watcher can do. I’d be—I’d be—they’d hang me, shoot me, starve me, kill me, then send the ashes of my cremated stump to our Mines to be used for feeding the slave-apes. Leave me alone!” The last was a rising note, for the girl had lifted her skirt and drawn a curved knife from her garter-belt and was determinedly prying off the top of the dictobox, still attached to Themus’s chest.
The Watcher fought down a mad impulse to ask her why she was wearing a garter-belt when she wasn’t wearing hose, and tried to stop her.
“Wait! Wait! They’ll throw me out of the Corps. Stop! Here, let go there, wait a minute, I say waitaminute-forgod’ssake, if you won’t stop, at least let me take it off so you don’t slice my throat. Here.”
He slipped the shoulder-straps off and unbuckled the belt. The dictobox fell into the girl’s hand and she set to work fumbling about in the machine’s intricate innards.
Finally she stood up, her feet lost in a pile of wirespools, vacuum tubes, metal separators, punch-circuits and plastic coils. The box looked empty inside, except for a strangely flotsamlike construction in one corner.
“Look what you’ve done now!”“Stop whining, man! It’s all right.”“If it’s all right, make it record and play back for me.” He was terrified,
indignant, furious and interested, all at once. “I can’t.” “Whaaaaaaat!” “Why should I? I’m crazy, remember?”
Themus felt his face turn to lava. “Damn you! Look what you’ve done to me! In five minutes you’ve taken me from my Corps and sentenced me to a life that may be no longer than all the brains you have, stretched end to end!”
“Oh, stop being so melodramatic.” She was smiling, tinkling again. “Now you can come with me to meet my uncle. There’s no reason why you should stay here. There is a chance the box will play, if you come back to it later, as I said it would. But even if it doesn’t, staying here is no help, since it isn’t functioning. I’ll get a mechanic to fix it, if that will make you any happier.”
“No Crackpot mechanic can fix that, you fool! It’s a masterpiece of Kyben science. It took hundreds of men thousands of hours to arrive at this—Oh, what’s the use!” He sat down in the doorway, head in his hands.
Somehow, her logic was sound. If the box was broken, there was no reason for his refusing to go with her, for staying there could only bring him trouble sooner. It was sound, yes, but only sound on the muggy foundation of her ruining the machine in the first place. He was beginning to feel like a tompora-snake—the kind that swallows its own tail. He didn’t know which end was which.
“Come with me.” Her voice had suddenly lost its youthful happiness. It was suddenly strong, commanding. He looked up.
“Get on your feet!”
He arose slowly.
“Now, come with me. If you want to come back to your box, it will be here, and it will work. Right now it will do as well if you believe I’m mad and ruined your dictobox.” She jerked her head sharply toward the street. “Come on. Perhaps you can reinstate yourself by finding the man named Boolbak.”
It was hopeless there among the remnants of the dictobox. There was a chance the girl wasn’t as totally insane as she seemed and she actually might be Boolbak’s niece. And, somehow, against all his better, stricter, reasoning to the contrary, her logic was queerly sound. In a fugitive sort of way.
He went with her.
(Wondering if he was insane, himself.)
Themus followed the girl through sections of the city Superior Furth had missed during his guided tour of inspection. They passed under a beautifully filigreed arch into a gardened street lined with monstrous blossoms growing to heights of eight and nine feet on either side of the road, casting twin shadows from the bright suns above.
Once he stopped her, in the shadows of a towering flower, and asked, “Why did you decide you wanted me to meet your uncle?”
“I’ve been watching you all day,” she said simply, as if prepared to leave that as a total explanation.
“But why me?”
“I like you,” she said, as though being purposely repetitious to impress him. Themus distinctly got the idea she was treating him as she would a very young child.
“Oh. I see,” he said, more baffled than before. They continued down the street through an area covered by long, low structures that might have been factories were it not for the impossibly tall and spindly looking towers that reared from the roof of each one. Themus shaded his eyes from the glare of the twin suns as he sought to glimpse what was at the top of each tower. He could see nothing.
“What are those?” he asked. He was surprised to hear his own voice. It sounded like that of an inquisitive little boy.
“Quiet, you.”
That was the last thing Darfla said till they came out of nowhere and grabbed her and Themus.
Before the Watcher knew what was happening, a horde, more men than he could count, had surrounded them. They were dressed in everything from loincloth and top hat to burnoose and riding boots. Darfla gave one sharp, tiny squeal and then let her hands fall limply to her sides.
“All right, you want your say, so say!” Anger and annoyance fluttered in her voice.
A short, pockfaced man wearing a suit that appeared to be made from ropes of different colors stepped forward.
“We thought negative (Click-click!) and wanted to talk on this at Cave (Click-click!).” Themus listened with growing amazement. Not only did the man intersperse every few words with a metallic, unnerving tongue-clacking, but he said the word “Cave” with a low, mysterious, important tone totally unlike the rest of his speech which was quite flat and uninflected.
Darfla raised her hands, palms upward, in resignation. “What can I say, Deere, after I say I’m sorry?”
The man addressed as Deere shook his head and said, “(Click-click!) we before talked and him not now never never never! Nothing to say against the (Click!) but he’s def but def a stuffed one at least well now for a time (Click!). Cave.” Same clucking, same cryptic tone when speaking of the Cave. Themus began to worry in direct proportion to the number of surrounders.
“Let’s go,” Darfla said over her shoulder to Themus, not taking her eyes from Deere.
“W-where?” trembled Themus.
“Cave. Where else?”
“Oh, nowhere—I guess.” He tried to be lighthearted about it. Somehow, he failed miserably.
They started off, the surrounders doing a masterful job of surrounding; cutting Themus and the girl off from anyone who might be looking. They were a walking camouflage.
Darfla began to needle Deere with caustic and, to Themus, cryptic remarks. Deere looked about to turn and put his pudgy fist in her face, and Themus nudged the girl to stop.