Seventeen

After leaving the Negotiating Committee’s palace, Bray and Kirk took an Irsk taxi, which, Kirk explained, would deposit them on a street in “modern” New Naples. There Kirk would meet his prostitute of the evening, a good-looking Diamondian named Marian. She would have another girl with her for Bray. Her name was Maria.

He warned Bray, “You will have a problem with Maria. She will be angry, like most Diamondian prostitutes.” Marian (he continued) had been like that the first Thursday. That’s who she was: his Thursday night girl. Naturally he didn’t want her to learn that he had other girls in other parts of the city for the remaining six evenings. If she found out, she might become difficult again.

“That first Thursday night,” he said, “she gave me what I paid for. Availability but no tenderness.” He continued, “The second Thursday, my first night’s energetic courtship and my innuendo about my wealth paid off. She was friendly. Tonight we should have a complete surrender.”

Bray had become progressively uneasy as the other man developed his thesis. That’s all I need, he thought. To the tension he was already under, add one hostile girl.

Like innumerable young men growing up in Man’s galaxy, he had spent his most stimulated years confronting a closed shop, female union. The system had barred him from all but three jittery young females and half a dozen older women. Each of these nervously offered him a one-time association, in every instance a consequence of chance: for the necessary two hours, Big Sister was not watching. Under the tense circumstances, five of his nine performances, including all of the last three, had been partial disasters. The memory had faded with the passage of five months (since the last time). In accepting Kirk’s invitation, he had taken it for granted that since there was no women’s union on Diamondia, he would not be affected by any girl’s attitude.

Suddenly he was not so sure. Suddenly he was appalled by the possible outcome. If he failed with Maria, she’d tell Marian, who would inform Kirk. Somehow it might spread to the staff of the Negotiating Committee. Certain people would be very happy to hear of his difficulties.

His brain raced anxiously over the possibilities and came up first with a temporizing question. “Why are Diamondian prostitutes angry?” he asked.

“It’s a one up thing,” said Kirk: “Just imagine, they get all the sex and all the men a girl could ever dream of having. And get paid for it. But they can blame the men for being the kind of beasts they are. It’s a perfect setup for a girl—you’ll agree?”

Bray was startled. Kirk’s was an attitude he had never run into before. No time to consider it now. Now he had a thought of his own. He said, “Why don’t we play a little game on Marian and tell her that I’m you and you’re me?”

“What’s that for?” The sensuous, slightly bulgy face looked puzzled.

“Will she then feel compelled to turn her friendship toward me?” urged a hopeful Bray.

Kirk said, “Hey, that’s brilliant.”

Bray waited, trying to appear modest. But he had to fight an inner battle against excessive self-admiration.

“I can see,” grinned Kirk, “you’re as cynical about women as I am—” He broke off, “Sounds like the greatest little game I’ve heard recently.”

Bray, who had in his brief years of maturity reaped his share of the whirlwind of earlier generation male con games against women, had never had an opportunity to become cynical.

But a game player he was. He said, “I’ll be Kirk, and you be Bray. We’ll act as if so far you’ve been sort of my agent.” He urged, “It might be interesting.”

“It will make the evening,” said Kirk, grinning.

He drew out his billfold and quickly handed over a large sum of money. “Remember,” he said generously, “this whole evening is on me. But you appear to pay for everything and give me back later what’s left over.”

Moments after the transaction was concluded, Kirk pointed ahead, “There they are.” Bray followed his finger and saw two girls standing near the curb. Both were rather suggestively dressed in short overalls, one in blue and one in red. The taxi pulled up, and the two men bounced youthfully out. Kirk introduced Bray.

Marian was the one in blue. She was an exceptionally good-looking girl of about nineteen and a half. Her friend Maria was a slightly plumper specimen, but she was also good looking and appeared to be only a few minutes older than her companion. As Kirk had predicted, the principal difference between the two girls was that Maria was hostile and unsmiling, whereas Marian lovingly kissed Kirk.

The two men had agreed that the switchover would be attempted about midevening. They paired off accordingly and headed to begin with to the Restaurant Corsica, where the cover charge was the equivalent of eight federation dollars per person, and the dinners started at twelve federation dollars. The entertainment was provided by well-known opera singers.

Until Kirk, Marian had cleverly never been taken to the Corsica. It was apparent to Bray that, being little more than a child, she was already having fantasies about this member of the Negotiating Committee finding her charms more than ordinarily attractive; and she might even be visualizing herself as the future Mrs. David Kirk.

It was evident that the somewhat plump con man Kirk, who had the money and the leisure to work for effects like that, thus received from normally antimale, Diamondian prostitutes a sincere affectionate response, with the warmth of real feeling and a total desire to please. All seven of his prostitutes—one for each night of the week—had already bought the same bill of goods. At least he had told Bray that they had. So, as Bray watched, Kirk was spontaneously kissed, erotically touched and inspired and in several ways prepared for a night of physical delight.

After the gourmet dinner, the two couples went to the San Carlo Theater, because Kirk—over and above his fleshly wants—was a connoisseur. And in his eyes the San Carlo was a reproduction of an old Neapolitan theater so breathtakingly beautiful that in a flash the garbage outside the door, casually dropped by a passing Diamondian, became of no importance. He whispered to Bray that Diamondians had undoubtedly been creating beauty next to garbage from time immemorial, while they lived their dark inner lives.

The San Carlo Theater was ornate, yes; and its shows were somewhat garishly aimed to provide Earth federation forces with a kind of pop opera. But still the music and the performance had the distinctive Diamondian touch; and that was good enough for Kirk and his prostitute of the night. Even Maria showed animation and several times deposited herself happily in Bray’s lap.

It was during the intermission in the San Carlo that Kirk made the announcement: “Girls, my friend and I have a confession to make.”

He thereupon told the story exactly as Bray had outlined it.

It took a while for the meaning to sink in. The two girls both frowned and twisted their faces, as they struggled with the concept. “You mean—” It was Maria who spoke first to Bray, “You are he?” She indicated Kirk.

Marian protested to Kirk, “But—I have known you for three weeks.”

“Yes, but I’m not me,” said Kirk. “I’m him.” He pointed at Bray.

Suddenly it must have penetrated. The girl got a stunned look on her face. She had been sitting on the older man’s lap. Now she walked over and slumped into her own chair. She gave Bray a stricken look. “You are David Kirk?”

Bray nodded cheerfully. “I usually send Bray here,” He indicated Kirk, “to look over a new city for me. He told me about what a wonderful girl you are. So I hope you don’t mind switching over to me, because I’m the one that’s paying his way, and I’ll be paying for the evening, too, of course—okay?”

There was a silence—broken by Maria. “Of course, it’s okay. We are girls of the street, Marian and I; and we sleep with who pays. That’s right, isn’t it, Marian?”

Marian was visibly bracing herself. She glanced at the real Kirk. “It is all right with you?”

“That’s what I was out here for,” he answered cheerfully, “looking for a girl that, uh, my boss, David here, would really go for.”

The evening was visibly not quite as great for Marian after that. She tried. She laughed a lot. She stroked Bray’s cheek and kissed him just as lingeringly as, earlier, she had kissed Kirk. But her eyes didn’t look normal.

The slightly less than gay celebrants arrived a few minutes after eleven at the apartment building in which Marian and Maria shared rooms with another prostitute. Bray paid the driver of the taxi. It was as he turned to accompany his companions that he saw Kirk squeeze his eyes hard. He was instantly startled. There had been no previous sign in Kirk to indicate that he also had Morton’s malady.

The truth was that the plump young man himself thought nothing of the phenomenon until five minutes later, after they had walked up to the fourth floor, the same blackness and the same eye-squeezing reflex brought a sudden recall of the memorandum of that morning from Colonel Morton on this very subject

The shock was terrific, for the implication in Morton’s memo had been that the affliction was a kind of disease. Kirk was not a man to let mere illness spoil his night. But it was disconcerting to have the darkness move like a pulse wave through his brain every five minutes while he was trying to perform the sex act upon a cooperative Diamondian girl.

Still, like Morton and Bray before him, he was adjusting to the inconvenience when suddenly a somewhat longer wave of blackness struck.

Maria had already in her brief career had an aged customer die on top of her of a stroke; and so the sudden dead weight of the man brought a sharp fear. “Mr. Bray—” she whispered.

No answer.

It cost the girl an enormous effort to shove him off. But finally he rolled limply over. Yelling, the girl ran out into the living room. There was a long pause; finally sounds of movement from the other two bedrooms. The first to emerge was a naked male of middling age and somewhat paunchy appearance. Next, Bray came out with his shorts on. And then the two girls.

“Ssshh!” they said uneasily.

Maria hushed and explained that she had another dead man on her hands.

The five of them crowded into her tiny bedroom with her. It was Bray who, relieved, established that Kirk was still breathing.

“You’ll have to call a doctor,” the older male admonished, “but wait until my young friend and I have left.”

Being a practical Diamondian, he clearly took the attitude that Bray and he were not involved in the matter. Whereupon he returned to the bedroom with his own girl, presumably completed the act for which he had paid her, dressed and departed.

Bray went down and phoned Struthers. The two men laboriously carried the body of Kirk down the four flights and into the station wagon and so back to the palace.

Once again the pretense of drunkenness got them past the lackadaisical door guards. They “walked” the limp body to Kirk’s own room, used Kirk’s key to get in, undressed him, and put him into bed.

“Whatcha gonna do with him?” asked the highly disturbed Struthers.

That, as Bray wearily explained, was a problem that he intended to confront with the coming of dawn.

“But we’ll do something positive,” he assured the older man.

Bray waited until the disconsolate Struthers had vanished into the distances of the hallway; then he himself emerged from Kirk’s room. Since he still had Morton’s keys, he now headed upstairs to Morton’s bedroom. And it was there that he undressed and crawled deliciously into the splendid, large bed.

The previous night he had slept unthinkingly on the floor in his own room, having surrendered his bed to the unconscious Morton. Bray urged upon some doubting part of his Self that remembering to come up to this magnificent room was a positive sign. It proved that he was in good enough shape and so had recovered from all that had happened. Yet even as he persuaded the reassuring thoughts to move through his mind, he was aware of a hollow feeling in the pit of his being; aware also of a continuing numbness that seemed to pervade his whole body.

He could guess emptily what the matter was. There was nothing to do; no way to turn; not a single thought that made real sense. The three possibilities that he did dredge up, as he lay there in old style Earth luxury, were not able to budge the doubts by more than a few inches: Marriott… the Diamondian peace committee… Lositeen—

Investigate Marriott (how was not clear), get some answers about the Diamondian peace group (that wouldn’t be easy)… and find Lositeen, of course.

Sleep came somewhere in the wee hours and quieted all those jumpy neural impulses, while Bray caught a few blessed winks.

Meaning, he slept like a log.