But a flood of intense living greenness washed through the control room, blotting out the walls and lapping against Herl's red tunic above the hip pockets, as if a strange sea rose about him to quench his anger.
He repeated his last words, vaguely, enthralled by the green waves, "Is that kind or just?"
The green waves changed to living blue and he heard her voice like a distant bell. "No."
Herl had a sensation as if the blueness washed completely through him with a tingling coolness. Suddenly the room cleared and she was sitting on the edge of the table still. In Herl's mind lay fresh and clear the method he had planned hours ... or was it minutes ... earlier for communicating with this glowing girl-thing, exact, detailed, perfect questions for a perfect mind. His overwhelming intent to embrace her was put neatly to one side as on a shelf; his anger was as if it had never been.
"Do you have a name?" he looked coolly at her as if helping her fill out a questionnaire.
"Yes."
"What is it please?" he asked, firm, polite.
"Abigail."
Herl smothered a grin. There could be something unexotic about a goddess. "Can you offer data as well as supply data and computation on demand?" he wanted to know.
"Yes."
"Will you be good enough to do so hereafter when I ask you questions?"
"If you will indicate the limitations you wish on additional data," she replied gravely.
"Do you mean that there is so great a correlation between all extant data that you would continue offering indefinitely if you were not arbitrarily limited?" he asked curiously, feeling an interior warmth of success. His method of communication was working indeed. Be explicit, he told himself.
"Yes."
Herl sneaked a mental look at his urge to kiss her. As when eating Crawford's steak, he found that he could forgive and forget a great deal when confronted with considerable pleasure in prospect.
He continued. "Will you decide and tell me what questions I ought to ask and what actions I ought to take and what limitations I should set on the data you have to offer?" Now he would have communication by the roots.
"No."
"Are you capable of doing so, Abigail?" A crucial question, asked almost in a whisper.
"No."
Grief more bitter than anger ran through his veins like corrosive poison. This was the wrong answer. She must be a machine-thing after all, he concluded ... limited, arbitrary, unhuman, incapable of loving him or being concerned for his welfare, incapable of sorting out good from bad or valuable from expedient.
He withdrew his eyes from her brightness and from her delicate features and from her rounded limbs and put his head in his hands. An agonized sigh burst from him. No human woman could keep from giving him good advice, particularly if she knew all the answers ... his mother never had avoided the responsibilities of knowledge. So she could have nothing human about her. She was just a thing.
"No ... no ... no," her music faded slowly away; and Herl looked up to catch the faintest after-image of the brilliance that had centered on the table. That, too, was gone in an instant; and no presence or effects of a presence other than his own was visible before him.
He sat motionless in his supporting chair, his eyes staring unseeingly at brown table and black film lockers and at the long blue chart roll hung behind the table and at the calculator keys in their neat meaningless ranks. In her absence, he felt compressed between the backward thrust of disillusion and emptiness and the forward pull of a tearing desire to be with her wherever she was. He would have done anything she wanted, gone anywhere, been anything ... and there was nothing she wanted of him. He remained slumped, drained of purpose. Drained, he reflected, by a shiny machine more bound than he to commands and limitations. At any rate he did have a few minor purposes of his own.
V
He got up stiffly and reached for the locker handles, squeezed the metal, felt the latches withdraw, swung the doors open. Mechanically he took down the reels of film and wire from their pegs and laid them in squat pillars on the table top. Another locker yielded two black rectangular carrying cases with handles. Herl loaded the reels carefully into one case, checked the power pack in the base of the other case with leads to a test-board in one drawer of the table. Lifting both heavy cases, he started for the door.
The slightest clue of remembrance ting-tinged in his mind, and he returned to his chair and phoned the control tower.
"Class M shipKryllaon the field calling control tower," he bit off the words tensely.
"Control tower toKrylla; come inKrylla." The voice was high-pitched and boyish, obviously not Saem Berry.
"Did you see what became of the cabter that landed me here," Herl referred to the chronometer on his instrument panel, "ten minutes ago?"
"Cabter KZ-351 returned to Delight City."
"Can you call me another cabter to take me to the city?" At any rate, Herl thought, she really was powerful to be able to return an empty cabter. He had an amusing mental image of Abigail stretching an extra shining arm through the miles of air between theKryllaand where a shining hand supported the waiting and unconscious Bill Haulwell. He might learn some tricks from her yet.
All he had to do was find out why she had rescued him and Bill. After all, if she had no knowledge of valid selection of purposes, she must be controlled by some command, some exterior compulsion, like the familiar robots of earth, so carefully constructed with arbitrary functions and prohibitions built in. Time to compute on that later. The thought was rapid, finished before the answer came from the tower.
"I'll have to see your hired vehicle permit, if you have one." The thin voice was sarcastic and a bit suspicious.
"I'll come right to the tower with it. Over."
Grasping a case in each hand he left the ship and headed for the tower entrance. Almost there, the hum of an incoming copter made him turn and look at the runway. The copter landed neatly and, even from that distance, Herl could recognize the fur-coated figure of Commissioner Crawford getting out.
The Commissioner raised an arm and hailed Captain Hofner. "Hey!"
"Hey, yourself," Herl turned from the tower and strode toward the copter. "Did you come for me?"
"Sure," yelled the Commissioner. Turning to look up and wave at the tower, he called, "It's all right, Alco. This is my guest." He halted and waited for Herl to come up with him.
"Bill phoned me," began Crawford apologetically, "that he'd had the word about Agnes and dashed back to straighten out the driving job so someone else could take over." The two men walked side by side to the copter. "That was a very decent thing for him to do, even if it did leave you stranded out here ... so I came out for you. Find everything?"
"Oh I found everything, all right," Herl grinned wryly. "Did Bill tell you about Abigail?"
"Abigail?" asked Crawford. "I don't seem to remember the name."
"She saved me from getting hurt during the landing. A goddess. Bill was probably embarrassed to mention it. It was my own stupid fault."
Herl went around the copter to get in.
Crawford edged in behind the controls. "Bill probably wanted you to keep out of trouble. He knows that we are apt to look with considerable suspicion on people who have to be saved from their own foolish mistakes by superhuman agencies. That doesn't apply to you, of course, unless you're planning to settle and raise kids here." The 'perish-the-thought' tone was obvious.
"Frankly, as an outsider," Herl said, "it seems to me that these gods and goddesses could be a very useful mechanism. I didn't mind missing a bad fall at all."
"And frankly, as a local citizen and an ordinary one at that, I think you were very lucky. You might even say that down underneath I'm just a bit jealous." The copter slid through the upper air. "I sometimes dream of having a chance to rescue some female not a tenth as luscious as a goddess."
Herl was surprised to hear the Commissioner snigger at his own remark. Surprised but not disgusted. Females less perfect than goddesses seemed to call for sniggers.
"Goddesses are only goddesses, but women are women," Herl commented dryly.
"Oh! You found that out already, did you?" Crawford looked admiringly at his companion. "You're a quick worker."
Hard bitterness surged through Herl. "I found out a lot of things. They're nothing, absolutely nothing but mechanism. I wonder you people haven't learned to use them in place of copters and television. They're probably even capable of sorting your population in infancy so you wouldn't have to go to the trouble of inventing a dozen new kinds of red tape a day which must annoy your normal citizens even while it screens the adults."
"No ... no ... no...." Crawford's descending cadence was oddly reminiscent of some other falling cadence of no's. "You've got both the gods and us all wrong, Captain Hofner. I don't know what you think you found out from this Abigail, but you must have misinterpreted it somewhere."
"Indeed?"
"Oh yes indeed. Mechanisms are made ... made for somebody's use. Our best minds have never been able to find any use for gods. We can even use natural phenomena like rain and heat and wind and gravity and such because those things are governed by observable natural laws ... but the gods? No. Absolutely random in appearance; absolutely unpredictable in action. Whatever they are, it's not machines. Although," he added curiously, "I shall be most interested to learn how and why you think we could use them."
"Maybe I should sell you the secret. Selling is my business," suggested Herl.
"The commissioners will be most willing to buy ... if you have anything to sell," Crawford replied smoothly.
"You could use that childhood or prenatal screening, couldn't you?"
"Yes and no," answered Crawford. "That's another mistaken idea you have about us. What you think of as red tape invented purely for screening purposes is not so at all. It's an integral part of civilized life and social responsibility. We'd all be pleased to spare a portion of our children the strains of such a life if we could, but we have no intention of reverting to savagery ourselves just to avoid filling out a few miserable blanks at a few stated times."
"Oh, you like it?" Herl asked facetiously.
"We like having cars and living in houses and driving in comparative safety and eating enough and not having people we've cheated or oppressed or maimed in unnecessary accidents whining around on our doorsteps making us feel guilty and miserable. We even like having occasional strangers like you around so we can tell them all about it and keep the beauties of civilization clear before our eyes, so to speak."
"You win," Herl laughed. "I don't know whether there's a galactic destiny ahead of your people, but as long as you're enjoying it so much, that hardly matters."
"I hoped you'd see it that way," the Commissioner said genially. "And as for the destiny, that'll take care of itself. Did you have quite a talk with the goddess?" he added curiously.
"Quite a talk, but brief. I've had some training in cybernetics ... that's how I was able to ask the right questions to find out that she was a machine."
Crawford smiled to himself. "Then," he said slyly, "our experts must have asked the right questions to find out that she wasn't."
Herl bit his tongue. "Maybe," he admitted. There was no object in telling Crawford all about his method or his discoveries, or he'd have nothing to sell. Not that he'd make the profit from such a sale but somebody in coordination would appreciate his cleverness in selling a planet something it already had and still being able to peddle the idea to somebody else. If he were really clever, he could take a few gods on with him to the places where they could do the most good. He certainly would enjoy looking at Abigail, for instance, for a few months before he unloaded her on a planet less fortunate than Delight. And, if he were sorry to leave her behind, she'd stay there the more gladly. If she wouldn't tell him what to do, obviously she would have to do what he told her.
The gray air of the planet seemed to be thickening as they landed and drove back toward the Civil Building. A few more heavy-coated pedestrians were hastening along the walks, and a solid stream of small, lighted vehicles poured along the street in the opposite direction. As Crawford's slowed automatically for an intersection, Herl noticed flakes of snow in the air.
"Is this early spring or late fall?" he asked without enthusiasm.
"This is the way it always is at this altitude," Crawford replied, surprised. "I've read about seasons, of course, but we don't have them here. Our foodstuff is mostly grown further south. Around here and to the north is mostly grazing and pelt land on the surface above the mines."
At this moment the vehicle pulled to a stop in the middle of a residential block; and Crawford growled, "What the...?"
Herl noticed that the opposing traffic had also halted. Then the air was split with the deafeningly raucous hooting of some great signal horn.
"Power's off! Emergency warning," Crawford shouted in Herl's ear. "Sit tight and see what happens!" He gestured to the line of opposing traffic from which passengers were popping out to run confusedly to the sidewalk. "They know better than that," he fumed.
Herl looked at the crowd gathering on his side of the carpter, then suddenly beyond it to the nearest house. Smoke was pouring out of two of the front windows. Some of the people from the vehicles were running toward the house, while the front door was flung open and two men and a woman came running out. Herl grabbed Crawford's arm. "Fire!" he yelled.
Crawford leaned across Herl to look. "Can't be serious," he bellowed. "Those places are practically fireproof. Inspected every two months."
Then he sounded puzzled and alarmed. "Where the devil are those three going?" and he pointed to the people who had run from the house and who were still running fleetly along the edges of lawns in the direction faced by Crawford's carpter.
Herl opened the door and leaned out to watch. People were coming out of houses further down the street, a few at a time, to follow or precede the first three in the direction of the heart of the city.
Cries of "Fire!" could be heard on down the street. Flames showed through the windows of other houses. The people who had got to the sidewalks from their abandoned vehicles were moving hesitantly toward the houses, apparently confused by the flight of those within.
A man appeared in the doorway of the house from which the first three had come. "Hey!" he shouted at those stragglers nearest him, "some of you come in here and help me put out the fire!" Several men ran into the house behind him.
A few more single individuals ran by in the direction of the business district. Herl turned to his companion.
"It looks as though those first three set the fire and ran off," he shouted, puzzled. "What's up?"
Crawford put his hand on the door and shook his head. "Don't know, but I recognized one of those fellows who just passed us. Eyefer named Hanston. Used to be a clerk of mine. I'm going on down the line and see what's doing."
"Not without me," Herl stated. "I can't operate one of these things," he waved his hand at the carpter, "and you may need help." Commissioner Crawford hardly looked in condition for a long run.
"What about your things? Don't you want to keep an eye on them?"
"They'll be all right," Herl said flatly, knowing that he should never let them out of his sight outside his own ship ... that they would be impossible to replace without returning to Earth.
The older man slid out of his seat and jogged off down the middle of the street till the younger caught up with him. Together they ran toward the city.
Between the lined-up cars they could see fires in many of the houses they passed, and groups of people standing helplessly on sidewalks and lawns. None of the houses appeared to be actually on fire, but window draperies or something near the windows were blazing merrily. Through some casements, people could be seen aiming fire extinguishers at the flames or throwing water on them.
Crawford lumbered along rather slowly. Herl matched his pace. A young man running rapidly passed them from behind.
"Going to the Civil Building to see the fun?" he panted out as he passed.
"Sure," returned Herl, speeding up a little. "What's it all about?"
The young man looked back at Herl, seeming to notice the red tunic and drum cap for the first time. "If you don't know ..." he gasped out, "you'd better stay back. It's the Eyefer Plan." He sprinted on and Herl turned back to wait for the Commissioner.
"It's something about the Eyefers," he told the trotting man as he fell into step beside him. "He said he was going to the Civil Building to see the fun, and he called it 'the Eyefer Plan.'"
"Can't imagine what ... that ... is," Crawford blurted out. "Keep going."
They passed dark shops and closed warehouses. The lines of cars were solid here and a tide of hurrying pedestrians on the sidewalks swept toward town. Runners threaded among them, men in shabby clothes, forlorn looking women pushing and stumbling ahead a little faster than the general pace. The center of the street where Herl and Crawford jogged on between the cars was almost deserted.
Crawford grasped Herl's sleeve and pulled him to a stop. "Look there!"
Herl looked where he pointed and saw the crowd milling about the door of a shop. A man and a woman stood in the doorway tossing fur coats out into the mob. Here and there a runner paused, grabbed up a coat where it fell on or near a pedestrian, and ran on.
Crawford climbed over the bumpers of a couple of cars and got to the sidewalk. Herl followed and joined him at the shop doorway in time to hear the Commissioner say, "See here, my man, those coats are not yours to give away. You're an Eyefer and you have no business at all here. Now get on home."
He grabbed the man's elbow to start him on his way ... and recognized him. "Good grief! Bill Haulwell!"
The woman in the doorway was Agnes. She laughed boisterously. "Get along home yourself, old man. We want coats so we take coats. Here, have one."
She threw a heavy fur coat over Crawford's head and as he tried to fight clear of its folds, Bill held it down like a bag and hoisted the small man along toward the edge of the crowd.
Herl caught him as he fell and pulled off the coat. Crawford threw it angrily on the ground. "You can't get away with this," he shouted. "The police will be here in a minute."
This time it was Bill who laughed. "They're all too busy at the Civil Building to bother with coats." Agnes threw out a couple more coats which had been handed to her by somebody within the shop.
"Besides, they already have coats," she added.
"We'd better get out of this," Herl told Crawford, starting back across the cars.
"Yes," agreed the latter as he clambered up and over. "Better see what's happening downtown. Sounds drastic."
The pair ran on faster now. From ahead grew a trembling roar which swelled to a steady gentle thundering above which the alarm yapped and blatted. A ruddy glow silhouetted the bodies of the cars they were passing, and the center of the street was filling with runners. A few hundred yards brought them to where Herl could see the shape of the Civil Building and recognize the glow as fire spurting from the windows of the two top storeys.
They stopped on the outskirts of an immense crowd circling the building. Great streams of water shot aloft from immense hoses; but the streams wobbled and wavered in a hundred directions as the nozzles shifted everywhere but at the building itself. Herl and Crawford were drenched twice before they could get close enough to see that the hoses were being battled for by gangs of Eyefers against the sturdy teams of firemen. The shouting and roar of the fire were so deafening that Herl and the Commissioner were well into the crowd before the words were comprehensible.
"Let 'em burn! Let the records burn! Let 'em burn up!"
"The records!" Crawford gave out a kind of spluttering screech that made Herl turn in astonishment. "The records! My God! There won't be any laws ... any Eyefers ... anycivilizationif we lose the records!"
Herl thought the little man was going to faint, he trembled so violently. Then, suddenly, Crawford took a great gulping breath, wrenched himself from Herl's supporting grasp and, pushing his way through the massed bodies, made for the cordon keeping the onlookers out of the danger zone. Herl pressed after him but reached the front line only in time to see Crawford jumping sidewise fifty feet ahead to elude a fireman and dashing for the gaping mouth of the vehicle tunnel through the building. Herl followed on the double, pointing ahead at the disappearing figure of the Commissioner without trying to yell out his destination to the hindering firemen.
A greater shout went up as a piece of the stone cornice fell from the top of the building to the pavement below with the crash of nearby blasting. Severed sections of hose blatted forth powerful torrents that swept firemen and mob along the street into a line of cars. Herl dodged among writhing pythons of hose toward the tunnel. Another surging shout heralded another cataclysmic deed of fire; and Herl looked up to see a piece of wall about twenty feet high falling slowly away from the building above him.
He closed his eyes and dashed forward. He felt the tremendous jar of the smashing stone force him to his knees, but no sound ... in fact all sound had faded to utter stillness.
"Struck deaf," he thought wonderingly and opened his eyes to find himself kneeling before the table in the silence of theKrylla. The bright warmth of Abigail shone before him where she sat several inches above the table top.
"Abigail," he shouted, scrambling to his feet. His voice rang through the small cabin, and he lowered it to suit his surroundings. "Why did you bring me here?"
"You were in danger," she replied pleasantly.
"So is Crawford. I've got to help him. Take me back!" he commanded.
"He's all right. No one will be hurt tonight who doesn't want to be hurt." Her voice was sweetly matter of fact.
"I don't believe it. The Eyefers have run wild! Crawford ran right into the building. He'll be killed. Take me back!" He pounded the table with his fist.
VI
He was back. The roar of the crowd and the fire and the hideous 'poot-poot-poot' of the alarm filled his consciousness. He was stumbling forward into the pitchy blackness of the tunnel under the building. He could see a man a hundred feet ahead scrambling up to the walkway, illumined only by the glare from the tunnel mouth. Suddenly brightness bloomed beside the man and the golden form of a god cradled the man's body like a child, rose four or five feet into the air, and faded abruptly into nothingness. The tunnel was dark and empty ahead.
Herl turned and strode back toward the mouth of the tunnel. Just under the sheltering edge he paused to look out at the mob and to judge whether another part of the building were about to fall.
The throng was now a series of rings of luridly red wild-faced beings linked together at the elbows, swaying this way and that, howling in unison, "Burn the records! No more Eyefers! Burn the records! No more Eyefers!"
Hovering over the heads of the chanters, Herl could see at least half a dozen great yellow lights which he took to be gods watching the doings.
"Some sense of humor," he said to himself, as he leaned out of the shelter to look up.
The searing redness of the fire faded before his eyes to the cooler radiance of Abigail; and he was looking up at her where she hung near the ceiling of theKrylla'scabin.
"They don't think it's funny at all," she replied reproachfully, as if he had addressed his last remark to her. "They are simply preventing accidents. Being trampled to death is not really a joke." This in a minor cadence of muted violins.
"But don't the Eyefers intend death and destruction to the non-Eyefers? That fire is no joke, either."
"No one will be hurt, as I told you. The Eyefer Plan calls only for the destruction of the records. They burned all the individual permits they could find before they left the houses. Now they burn the files. Nobody could tell an Eyefer from anybody else without the papers; and papers burn." She sounded quite pleased.
"Are you gods in on this?" Herl sat frustratedly on the edge of the desk. "Why didn't you just vanish the papers years ago?"
"We only help when people are sure they know what they want to do. The Eyefers had to be ready. After that they will do as they please and as they can and must."
"But you are involved in this revolt somehow," he frowned, "and why should this uprising come just when I arrive?"
"You are a catalyst," she giggled, a peal of tiny sleighbells, and drifted down toward the pilot chair. "And we are just preventing the Eyefers from being sorry for their plan as we prevented the civies from being sorry for theirs. The civies made a mistake and we are saving them from it." She laughed again. "They frown at people who are saved from their mistakes by 'supernatural agencies' so the Eyefers will save them."
Herl was ready to ask how he was a catalyst, but the words 'supernatural agencies' reminded him of Crawford and his own cases resting on the stalled carpter.
"My cases," he said. "I've got to get them back here. Take me back again, Abby." His thought continued that he would get a chance to see more of the fight, that had been brewing for decades.
"I'll bring them to you," she assented, resting lightly in the chair. "This isn't your squabble."
"But you said I was involved—as a catalyst at least."
"The reaction is self-sustaining now."
"But you don't know where the carpter is," he objected hopefully.
"You do ... so I do." The cases were on the table in front of him.
"What am I supposed to do now? Wait till Crawford calls to say all deals are off?" Herl remarked irritated. Who did the girl think she was, refusing like an over-solicitous mother to let him get back to the riot?
"Yes. Mr. Crawford won't be able to call you till the power is restored about noon tomorrow. And it will be months before he knows what he wants to order. What you do is your own will, of course. I can't penetrate that unless you can. I'm going back to the fire to help there. I'll see you again unless you decide to blast off before I come back."
Herl grabbed for her bare shoulders where they shone a mere yard in front of him. "You're not going back without me!" he stormed but she was quite gone before the sentence was complete, leaving him in the utter darkness of an unillumined cabin.
He found the back of the chair, seated himself, touched the light switch. He was indeed alone in the cabin. The heavy cases sat smug on the motionless table. He felt numb, aware only of an unwillingness to move and of the futility of trying to get back to the city if he was only to find himself back in theKryllaif he did. "Damned interfering female," he muttered disgustedly, "I'll show her!" All he had to do, she'd said, was blast off. Why not?
He switched on the phone, still set for the control tower.
"Class M shipKryllaon the field, calling control tower," he articulated crisply.
There was no response.
"Class M Ship," he repeated impatiently, "calling control tower. Come in tower!"
There was no carrier hum from his receiver. The thing seemed dead. He activated the viewscreen above the instrument panel and adjusted the angle for a full sight of the tower.
The tower was there, all right, a black hulk against the slightly luminous night sky, unlighted, solid, a mere chunk of construction.
"Hanh! Power's off, of course," Herl said aloud. Well, that meant nobody else would try to land here, so takeoff should be safe if he wanted to do his own manipulating out of the atmosphere.
But he'd have to leave some sort of message for Crawford, he realized. He swivelled the chair and regarded the cases of film and wire blankly. His job was coordination, not dashing off on a mad into space. He calculated quickly ... twenty-two, twenty-three hours till daylight; then maybe another ten hours or so till the power was restored and he could talk to Crawford ... if Crawford would talk to him ... if Crawford still had any power to negotiate extra-planetary purchases. And if Crawford didn't, he, Herl, would have to wait around till somebody did have the authority. Wait, wait, wait!
Every muscle in Herl's body seemed taut to the breaking point. He couldn't just sit and wait thirty-two hours for the privilege of waiting till the Eyefers formed a government and got ready to bargain! He jumped hopefully for an instant at the thought of walking the eighty miles to town. He could probably do that in thirty-two hours. Only to have that woman catch up to him when he was halfway there and plump him back in this ship.
A metallic clanging against the skin of the ship brought him to his feet. He moved to the inner lock door and opened it slowly, noiselessly. Maybe the Eyefers had got control of the tower already!
Bang! Bang! the hammering continued. Not power hammering, more like knocking.
Herl let the outer lock open a fraction of an inch toward him. The voice from outside filled the lock with its bellow. "Hey! Anybody in here? Hey, Captain."
It was the tower man of the first long wait.
"What d'you want?" Herl asked suspiciously, shoulder against the lock door.
"It's Saem Berry. I need help. Power's off, Joe Alco's gone, twenty-five hours mail is due in anytime. May try to land right on top of us! You got a radio!"
"Sure," Herl's suspicions faded. "Come in." He opened the lock wide and gave the heavy man a hand up. "Want me to try to contact the mail, huh?"
"Yeah. But you better let me talk to them." The towerman followed Herl to the chair, adding the necessary instructions for calling the mail ship.
Herl sat down and got to work.
Within five minutes the ship had been re-routed back to its last port of call and Herl and Saem were relaxing over cups of haffy Herl had opened in the galley. Saem tipped back in the pilot chair to reflect on the state of things in the city, which Herl had given him in bits and pieces as he relayed it to the oncoming mail ship.
"Well, Captain, I might as well get back to the tower and wait it out unless you're willing to have me here for company, that is. There's no other ship due till about morning."
"I'd be glad to have you stay," Herl said hesitantly, "but I haven't decided just what to do myself. I don't suppose Crawford and the commissioners will be in any position to trade now; and I'm not too hopeful about trying to deal with an irresponsible gang like those Eyefers. I could probably get back this way in, say, a couple of years when things have settled down and they know what they need." His voice was nonchalant, but with an undercurrent of eagerness for an excuse to be gone.
"I wouldn't be in any hurry, son," Saem assured him, taking a deep swig of haffy. "I don't think the Eyefers will try to run things at all. Not only out of the habit, but they don't want to. They'd have everything to lose by not using the present trade and power set-ups. All they want is jobs and justice."
"And no questions asked?" Herl frowned. "You sound as if you approved of this revolt."
"Why not?" Saem demanded truculently. "I had a kid all trained to take over the second day shift ... best radioman I ever had. When his mother went Eyefer they jerked him out of here to a bobbin job in the mills so fast I had to work twenty-two hours a day for a month before I got a replacement. I approve of anything that'll put a stop to such stupidity."
Herl squirmed, pursed his lips. "You think I'd better stay, then?"
"Well, why not wait for that goddess to come back? She'll have a report on what's going on and you can make up your mind then. She can give you better advice than I could." The shock-headed Saem set his empty cup down on the desk with a smack. "Got another of those?" he gestured at the cup.
"Blast the haffy, man! This calls for something better than that." Herl jumped down from the table. "I've got a bottle of bonded thiska for medicinal purposes. That'll shorten the wait!" He bounded past Saem through the galley door.
The towerman looked after him bewildered, watched him reach into a locker and bring out the plastic flask, saw him take down two small plastic beakers and come back past the doorway to perch jubilantly on the desk again holding out the flask invitingly. Saem looked at him questioningly.
"She said she wouldn't leave us as long as we're not sorry," Herl announced. "So let's get just as unsorry as this bottle will let us."
Saem approached the desk hesitantly. "What is that stuff," he asked, "something like beer?"
"Something like beer, the man says!" chuckled Herl. "Yes, boy, something like beer. Here." He poured out a beaker full of amber thiska and handed it to Saem. "One for me." He poured out another beaker full. "To not being sorry," he raised his beaker and drained it.
Saem tasted his, then gulped also. "Whooeee! Something like beer, the man says," he echoed and passed back his beaker. "Did you offerthisstuff to the commissioners?" he wanted to know.
"Silly old commissioners," Herl remarked archly, slopping out two more drinks. "Didn't want girlie shows ... don't like people to get mixed up with goddesses ... couldn't possibly appreciate bonded thiska. Didn't even offer them any." He drew a deep breath. Thiska couldn't work this fast on only one drink unless he were tired or upset. It must be thinking about Abigail that made him feel he had an antigravitor attached to his ears. Abigail!
"Here's to Abigail. May she never be sorry either!" he announced.
"Here's to Abby ... knows all, sees all, tells 'em nothing!" Saem downed his drink and moved over to the swivel chair, sat, held out his beaker.
"Say, Saem," Herl filled the extended beaker with deliberate care, "what kind of a wife would a girl make if a man never knew where she'd be next?"
"I dunno, son. Maybe you could anchor her at home with a pair of electro-magnets." Saem laughed longer and louder than Herl expected, downed his beaker and held it out again.
Herl looked at the proffered container, narrowed his eyes and looked at Saem suspiciously. "That's about enough for you, Saem. You're beginning to get blurry."
Saem looked down at his extended arm. Sure enough, a golden haze was starting to form around the limb, a naked, ripplingly muscular arm. He set his beaker with exaggerated precision on the edge of the desk and slapped at the offending haze. "Get back in there," he commanded. The haze cleared, the brown shirt sleeve regained complete opacity. "Nothing wrong with me," he announced firmly. "You must be seeing things. Give me another." He held up the beaker.
Herl shook his head and poured himself another. "I need this worse than you do. I'm the one that I ... need Abigail not to leave me ... myself and not you. You can get just as sorry as you like because then when she comes back she'll leave you and not me and that means she'll put you somewhere else. If I don't give you another drink, you'll be sorry and I'll have her all to myself ... do you follow me? Hurry up, Abigail!"
A flare exploded brilliantly by the galley door and it was Abigail. Her cloud of golden haze was forming into swirling tendrils which snapped into sparks at the ends.
Herl widened his eyes at the frequent revelation of thigh, of bosom.
Her voice was an angry pizzicato of steel strings. "Saem Berry! Dad! You're drunk! Get out of that matter this instant! The idea, Herl Hofner, getting Saem drunk when he was supposed to be keepingyouout of trouble!"
Her slender arm pointed accusingly at Saem. "Out of it!" she jangled, "or I'll leave you to do all the explaining."
Herl's gaze followed her gesture and he watched, trancelike, as the clothes of the transfiguring towerman disintegrated into wreaths of shining golden smoke which clung around a superb sculptured torso and swirled to leave a benign and thoughtful face regarding him with sympathetic, almost regretful amusement.
Saem's voice was the pedal tones of a great organ improvising in a minor key. "All that alcohol wasted when I put off the flesh," he sang at Abigail. "A new sensation, and you take it from me."
"You can go back to your tower and re-materialize with all that poison inside you, as soon as you've explained us and the rebellion to Herl. He doesn't trust me very much, yet," she chimed.
Herl shook his head and looked at Abigail and back at Saem. He blinked and straightened his spine and breathed deeply; but they didn't change or go away.
Saem looked at him intently and, to Herl, the interior of the room was filled with the liquid blue of his first tete-a-tete with Abigail ... blue and green waves of coolness washing through him and then complete clarity and sharpness of outline of everything about him.
"I'll synthesize you another flask of thiska," Saem apologized, "later."
Abigail relaxed her accusatory attitude, crossed her perfect legs and sat in the air at the level of the desk. "Now tell him quickly," she requested, "so he can leave if he wants to."
"Abby took one look at you and made up her mind," Saem said matter-of-factly, "partly because she'd like to travel and partly because most of us god-boys are younger than she and not ready to materialize and settle down ... and partly because ... well, she can tell you that herself."
"Oh?" Herl's clarity of mind did not prevent bewilderment at this sudden revelation. He looked at Abigail who smiled seraphically back.
"But she didn't want to miss the fun of the Eyefer revolution she'd been conniving at for years, so she had to precipitate that at once and get it over with."
"I see," said Herl, "what kind of catalyst I was." And he was beginning to.
"She was being quite literal when she told you she couldn't tell you what you ought to do. Your own morals and ethics are so far inside that she couldn't get at them without your full consent or hypnosis. But of course, like any other gal, she knew perfectly what she wanted you to do; and she did it."
"Aha," said Herl, whose grasp of the idea was sudden and complete.
"We can read formulated thoughts, of course, but not basic postulates unstated ... as long as we are composed of space, time, and energy and don't dabble in the slow stuff you call matter too much."
Herl looked at the shimmering Abigail keenly. "You mean to tell me that you can take on a matter body and give up sliding through my mind?" he demanded.
Abigail straightened her already straight posture. "If I want to," she replied coolly.
Saem chuckled in bull-fiddle tones. "If she wants a family she'll have to," he informed Herl. "The best babies are like the worst ... they all have to be made out of matter."
Abigail's sodium haze deepened toward the neon. "Dad!"
Her father's look became affectionate. "I don't know where you'd be if Mother and I hadn't settled down long ago with faked papers by the ream and started raising little pre-goddesses."
To Herl he said, "Mother's a somatic surgeon, specializing in the reversal of sterilization operations. That's one reason why they won't be able to tell Eyefers from anybody else when the smoke clears. Oh," he added, remembering, "I forgot to ask about the little insurrection and whether you think Delightites will want to buy anything from this sears-monkey."
"You're a dear old Eyefer, Dad," Abigail laughed. "The excitement is still on, but Hanner and Treece are smoothing things down." She turned to Herl. "I hope it isn't a disappointment to you, but Delight won't need to buy anything for years. They're just about to find out that they can do anything they want to. You'll have to peddle your planets and your calculators and your dancing girls somewhere else ... where they're really needed."
And back to Saem, "You can go see the fire for yourself now, if you like."
"I guess that's my cue," Saem stood up a foot or so above the floor, extended his glowing hand. "Take care of my little girl and drop back this way sometime soon."
Not knowing what else to do, Herl reached for the hand and saw his own vanish into the cloud, felt nothing. "Good-bye, sir," he fumbled.
He withdrew his hand and said, "But...."
But Saem was just not there.
Abigail laughed, sweet, musical.
Herl turned and saw her, a woman in a silky blue gown. A woman with red hair, not amber flames, a woman surrounded by a faint flowery scent, not incandescent sodium vapor. A woman standing shyly on the floor, not proudly seated on an airy throne.
He sprang down from the table and took her into his arms for a long long moment.
She drew away for an instant and laughed. "I thought I'd given up telepathy, dear, but I still seem to know just what you're thinking."
"And I know what I ought to do," he replied and did it.