“You see?” said Tandy, in a voice colder than the four miles of ice overhead. “Now would you like to apologize to me?”
“I apologize,” I said in a voice that hardly got past my lips. “I-” I stopped and swallowed. I begged, “Please, Tandy, what is it?”
She lit a cigarette unsteadily. “Well, I don’t rightly know. I’m kind of glad you’re here, Howard,” she confessed. “Maybe I shouldn’t have tried to get rid of you.”
“Tell me!”
She glanced at the Bug. “All right. I’ll make it fast. I got a call from this, uh, fellow. I couldn’t understand him very well. But. . . .”
She looked at me sidewise.
“I understand,” I said. “You thought he might be a mark.”
She nodded.
“And you wouldn’t cut me in!” I cried angrily. “Tandy, that’s mean! When I found old Buchmayr dead, didn’t I cut you in on looting his place? Didn’t I give you first pick of everything you wanted-except heatpumps and machine patterns, of course.”
“I know, dear,” she said miserably, “but-hush! He’s coming out.”
She was looking out the window. I looked too.
And then we looked at each other. That fellow out of the strange Bug, he was as strange as his vehicle. He might be a mark or he might not; but of one thing I was pretty sure, and that was that he wasn’t human.
No. Not with huge white eyes and a serpentine frill of orange tendrils instead of hair.
At once all my lethargy and weariness vanished.
“Tandy,” I cried, “he isn’t human!”
“I know,” she whispered.
“But don’t you know what this means? He’s an alien! He must come from another planet-perhaps from another star. Tandy, this is the most important thing that ever happened to us.” I thought fast. “Tell you what,” I said, “you let him in while I get around the side shaft-it’s defrosted, isn’t it? Good.” I hurried. At the side door I stopped and looked at her affectionately. “Dear Tandy,” I said. “And you thought this was just an ordinary mark. You see? You need me.” And I was off, leaving her that thought to chew on as she welcomed her visitor.
I took a good long time in the stranger’s Bug. Human or monster, I could rely on Tandy to keep him occupied, so I was very thorough and didn’t rush, and came out with a splendid supply of what seemed to be storage batteries. I couldn’t quite make them out, but I was sure that power was in them somehow or other; and if there was power, the heatpump would find a way to suck it out. Those I took the opportunity of tucking away in my own Bug before I went back in Tandy’s place. No use bothering her about them.
She was sitting in the wing chair, and the stranger was nowhere in sight. I raised my brows. She nodded. “Well,” I said, “he was your guest. I won’t interfere.”
Tandy was looking quiet, relaxed and happy. “What about the Bug?”
“Oh, lots of things,” I said. “Plenty of metal! And food-a lot of food, Tandy. Of course, we’ll have to go easy on it, till we find out if we can digest it, but it smells delicious. And-”
“Pumps?” she demanded.
“Funny,” I said. “They don’t seem to use them.” She scowled. “Honestly, dearest! You can see for yourself-everything I found is piled right outside the door.”
“What isn’t in your Bug, you mean.”
“Tandy!”
She glowered a moment longer, then smiled like the sun bursting through clouds on an old video tape. “No matter, Howard,” she said tenderly, “we’ve got plenty. Let’s have another Martini, shall we?”
“Of course.” I waited and took the glass. “To love,” I toasted. “And to crime. By the way, did you talk to him first?”
“Oh, for hours,” she said crossly. “Yap, yap. He’s as bad as the feds.”
I got up and idly walked across the room to the light switch. “Did he say anything interesting?”
“Not very. He spoke a very poor grade of English, to begin with. Said he learned it off old radio broadcasts, of all things. They float around forever out in space, it seems.”
I switched off the lights. “That better?”
She nodded drowsily, got up to refill her glass, and sat down again in the love seat. “He was awfully interested in the heatpumps,” she said drowsily.
I put a tape on the player-Tchaikovsky. Tandy is a fool for violins. “He liked them?”
“Oh, in a way. He thought they were clever. But dangerous, he said.”
“Him and the feds,” I murmured, sitting down next to her. Clickclick, and our individual body armor went on stand-by alert. At the first hostile move it would block us off, set up a force field-well, I think it’s called a force field. “The feds are always yapping about the pumps too. Did I tell you? They’re even cutting in on the RDF channels now.”
“Oh, Howard! That’s too much.” She sat up and got another drink-and sat, this time, on the wide, low sofa. She giggled.
“What’s the matter, dear?” I asked, coming over beside her.
“He was so funny. Ya-ta-ta-ta, ya-ta-ta-ta, all about how the heatpumps were ruining the world.”
“Just like the feds.” Click-click some more, as I put my arm around her shoulders.
“Just like,” she agreed. “He said it was evidently extremely high technology that produced a device that took heat out of its surrounding ambient environment, but had we ever thought of what would happen when all the heat was gone?”
“Crazy,” I murmured into the base of her throat.
“Absolutely. As though all the heat could ever be gone! Absolute zero, he called it; said we’re only eight or ten degrees from it now. That’s why the snow, he said.” I made a sound of polite disgust. “Yes, that’s what he said. He said it wasn’t just snow, it was frozen air- oxygen and nitrogen and all those things. We’ve frozen the Earth solid, he says, and now it’s so shiny that its libido is nearly perfect.”
I sat up sharply, then relaxed. “Oh. Not libido, dear. Albedo. That means it’s shiny.”
“That’s what he said. He said the feds were right. . . . Howard. Howard, dear. Listen to me.”
“Ssh,” I murmured. “Did he say anything else?”
“But Howard! Please. You’re-”
She relaxed, and then in a moment giggled again. “Howard, wait. I forgot to tell you the funniest part.”
It was irritating, but I could afford to be patient. “What was that, dearest?”
“He didn’t have any personal armor!”
I sat up. I couldn’t help it. “What?”
“None at all! Naked as a baby. So that proves he isn’t human, doesn’t it? I mean, if he can’t take the simplest care of himself, he’s only a kind of animal, right?”
I thought. “Well, I suppose so,” I said. Really, the concept was hard to swallow.
“Good,” she said, “because he’s, well, in the freezer. I didn’t want to waste him, Howard. And it isn’t as if he was human.”
I thought for a second. Well, why not? You get tired of rabbits and mice, and since there hasn’t been any open sky for pasturing for nearly fifty years, that’s about all there is. Now that I thought back on it, he was kind of plump and appetizing at that.
And, in any case, that was a problem for later on. I reached out idly and touched the button that controlled the last light in the room, the electric fireplace itself. “Oh,” I said, pausing. “Where did he come from?”
“Sorry,” her muffled voice came. “I forgot to ask.”
I reached out thoughtfully and found my glass. There was a little bit left; I drained it off. Funny that the creature should bother to come down. In the old days, yes; back when Earth was open to the sky, you might expect aliens to come skyrocketing down from the stars and all that. But he’d come all the way from-well, from wherever-and for what? Just to make a little soup for the pot, to donate a little metal and power. It was funny, in a way. I couldn’t help thinking that the feds would have liked to have met him. Not only because he agreed with them about the pumps and so on, but because they’re interested in things like that. They’re very earnest types, that’s why they’re always issuing warnings and so on. Of course, nobody pays any attention.