The First Science Fiction MEGAPACK®. Fredric Brown
has to be done.”
“What is that?” Tel asked again.
Suddenly Geryn whirled. “Drinks!” he called. “Drinks all around!” The quiet amusement and general lethargy disappeared as the people moved to the bar. “Drink up, friends, my fellows!” cried Geryn.
“Your plan?” Tel asked again, puzzled.
“I’ll tell you,” answered the old man, almost in a whisper. “I’ll tell you. But not just yet. Not just…” He turned back again. “Drink up!” Three men who already had their glasses gave a cheer.
“Are you with me, friends?” Geryn demanded.
“We’re with you,” six more cried, laughing, clinking their glasses hard on the table top as Tel looked from Alter to Rara and back.
“My plan…” began Geryn. “Have you all had a glass? All of you? Another round for everybody. Yes, a second round!”
There was a solid cheer, now. Glass bottoms turned toward the ceiling, then whammed on the counter top again.
“My plan is to—you understand it’s not just my plan, but only a small part in a great plan, a plan to save us all—my plan is to kidnap Prince Let from the palace. That’s the part that we must do. Are you with me, friends?” A yell rose, and somebody had started a friendly fight at the end of the bar. Then Geryn’s voice suddenly broke through the sound, low, in a grating whisper that silenced them for seconds. “Because you must be with me! The time is tonight. I have…I have it planned.” The voices halted, and then heaved to a roar. “Tonight,” repeated Geryn, though hardly anyone could hear him. “I have it planned. Only you’ve got to be…be with me.”
Tel frowned and Alter shook her head. The old man had closed his eyes for a moment. Rara was beside him, her hand on his shoulder. “You’re going to get yourself sick with all this yelling. Let me get you up to your room.”
As she turned him toward the stairs, the scarred giant who had been given a drink, now rose from the table, looked straight at Geryn, then drained his glass.
Geryn nodded, drew a breath through his teeth, and then allowed Rara to lead him up the stairs as Tel and Alter watched.
The noise among the drinking men and women at the bar increased.
CHAPTER IV
She made a note on her pad, put down her slide rule, and picked up a pearl snap with which she fastened together the shoulder panels of her white dress. The maid said, “Ma’am, shall I do your hair now?”
“One second,” Clea said. She turned to page 328 of her integral tables, checked the increment of sub-cosine A plus B over the nth root of A to the nth plus B to the nth, and transferred it to her notebook.
“Ma’am?” asked the maid. She was a thin woman, about thirty. The little finger of her left hand was gone.
“You can start now.” Clea leaned back in the beauty-hammock and lifted the dark mass of her hair from her neck. The maid caught the ebony wealth with one hand and reached for the end of the four yards of silver chain strung with alternate pearls and diamonds each inch and a half.
“Ma’am?” asked the maid again. “What are you figuring on?”
“I’m trying to determine the inverse sub-trigonometric functions. Dalen Golga, he was my mathematics professor at the university, discovered the regular ones, but nobody’s come up with the inverses yet.”
“Oh,” said the maid. She ceased weaving the jeweled chain a moment, took a comb, and whipped it through a cascade of hair that fell back on Clea’s shoulder. “Eh…what are you going to do with them, once you find them?”
“Actually,” said Clea. “Ouch…”
“Oh, pardon me, I’m sorry, please…”
“Actually,” went on Clea, “they’ll be perfectly useless. At least as far as anyone knows now. They exist, so to speak, in a world that has little to do with ours. Like the world of imaginary numbers, the square root of minus one. Eventually we may find use for them, perhaps in the same way we use imaginary numbers to find the roots of equations of a higher order than two, because cosine theta plus I sine theta equals e to the I sine theta, which lets us…”
“Ma’am?”
“Well, that is to say they haven’t been able to do anything like that with the sub-trigonometric functions yet. But they’re fun.”
“Bend your head a little to the left, ma’am,” was the maid’s comment.
Clea bent.
“You’re going to look beautiful.” Four and five fingers wove deftly in her hair. “Just beautiful.”
“I hope that Tomar can get here. It’s not going to be any fun without him.”
“But isn’t the King coming?” asked the maid. “I saw his acceptance note myself. You know it was on very simple paper. Very elegant.”
“My father will enjoy that a good deal more than I will. My brother went to school with the King before…before his Majesty’s coronation.”
“That’s amazing,” said the maid. “Were they friends? Just think of it? Do you know whether they were friends or not?”
Clea shrugged.
“And, oh,” said the maid, continuing, “have you seen the ballroom? All the hors d’oeuvres are real, imported fish. You can tell, because they’re smaller than the ones your father grows.”
“I know,” smiled Clea. “I don’t think I’ve ever eaten any of Dad’s fish in my life, which is sort of terrible, actually. They’re supposed to be very good.”
“Oh, they are, ma’am. They are. Your father is a fine man to grow such great, good fishes. But you must admit, there’s something special about the ones that come from the coast. I tasted one on my way up through the pantry. So I know.”
“What exactly is it?” Clea asked, turning around.
The maid frowned, and then smiled and nodded wisely. “Oh, I know. I know. You can tell the difference.”
* * * *
At that moment, Jon Koshar was saying, “Well, so far you’ve been right.” He appeared to be more or less standing (the room was dim, so his head and hands were invisible), more or less alone (“Yeah, I trust you. I don’t have much choice,” he added.) in the pantry of his father’s mansion.
Suddenly his voice took a different tone. “Look, I will trust you; with part of me, anyway. I’ve been caged up for nearly five years, for something stupid I did, and for something that no matter how hard I try, I can’t convince myself was all my fault. I don’t mean that Uske should be blamed. But chance, and all the rest…well, all I mean is it makes me want out that much more. I want to be free. I nearly got myself killed trying to escape from the mines. And a couple of people did get killed helping me. All right, you got me out of that stainless steel graveyard I wandered into back at the radiation barrier, and for that, thanks. I mean it. But I’m not free yet. And I still want out, more than anything in the world.
“Sure, I know that you want me to do something, but I don’t understand it yet. You say you’ll tell me soon. Okay. But you’re riding around in my head like this, so I’m not free yet. If that’s what I have to do to get free, than I’ll do it. But I’m warning you. If I see another crack in the wall, another spot of light getting in, I’ll claw my hands off trying to break through and to hell with what you want. Because while you’re there, I can’t be free.”
Suddenly the light in the pantry flipped on. His sudden face went from the tautness of his last speech to fear. He had been standing by the side of a seven-foot porcelain storage cabinet. He jumped back to the wall. Whoever had come in, a butler or caterer, was out of sight on the other side. A hand came around the edge