Galaxy Science Fiction Super Pack #2. Edgar Pangborn
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shook my head. Then I faced an unhappy fact. It hurt, because I wanted my goddess to be perfect, and if she were made of weak, mortal flesh, I did not want to find it out by asking the man who knew her better than I did.
Still, I wanted her alive. So I turned to Frank Crandall.
“Do you?” I asked.
“Do I what?”
“Know of any scars or birthmarks?”
“Such as?”
“Oh, hell,” I snapped. “Such as an appendix scar that might be used to tell left from right.”
“Look, Tom, I’m not her physician, you know. I can only give you the old answer: ‘Not until they wear briefer swim suits.’”
My heart bounced lightly. That Holly was still in mortal danger was not enough to stop my elation at hearing Frank Crandall admit that he was not Holly’s lover, nor even on much better terms than I. It might have been better to face the knowledge that Holly was all woman and all human even though the information had to come from someone who knew her well enough to get her home.
Then I came back to earth. I had my perfect goddess—in deadly peril—instead of a human woman who really did not belong to any man.
*
I hadn’t seen Saul Graben leave, but he must have been gone because now he opened the door and came back. He was carrying a heavy rim gyroscope that was spinning in a set of frictionless gymbals. He looked most confused.
He said, “I’ve spent what seems like an hour. You can’t tell me that this gizmo is inseparable from the selfish, insular intellect of terrestrial so-called homo sapiens.”
He turned the base and we all watched the gymbal rings rotate to keep the gyro wheel in the same plane. “It should be cosmic,” he said. “But every time I start, I find myself biting myself on the back of the neck. Look. If you make the axle horizontal in front of you and rotate the gyro with the top edge going away from you, you can define a common reference. But motion beyond that cannot be explained. If the axle is depressed on the right side, the gyro will turn so the far edge looks to the right. But that’s defining A in terms of A. So I’m licked.”
Frank Crandall shook his head. “There’s probably an absolute to that thing somewhere, but I’m sure none of us know it. We haven’t time to find it. In fact, I think the cause is lost. Maybe we’d better spend our time figuring out a plausible explanation.”
“Explanation?” blurted Wallach.
“Let’s face it,” said Crandall. “Holly Carter’s life is slipping away. No one has yet come close to finding a common reference to describe right from left to this Harla creature.”
“So what’s your point?”
“Death is for the dying,” Crandall said in a monotone. “Let them have their hour in peace and dignity. Life is for the living, and for the living there is no peace. We who remain must make the best of it. So now in about five minutes Holly will be at peace. The rest of us have got to answer for her.”
“How do you mean?”
“How do you propose to explain this unfortunate incident?” asked Crandall. “Someone will want to know what happened to the remains of Holly Carter. I can see hell breaking loose. And I can see the whole lot of us getting laughed right off the Earth because we couldn’t tell right from left. And I can see us all clobbered for letting the affair take place.”
“You seem to be more worried about your professional reputation than about Holly Carter’s life!”
“I have a future,” he said. “Holly doesn’t seem to. Hell,” he groaned, “we can’t even gamble on it.”
“Gamble?”
“How successful do you think you’d be in getting this Venusian to risk his life by closing his eyes and making a fifty-fifty stab in the dark at one of those buttons?”
“Well—” started Wallach—“we’d be gambling too, you know. But—”
*
“Wait a moment,” I said. “I’ve got a sort of half-cracked theory. May I try?”
“Of course.”
“Not ‘of course.’ I’ll have to have quiet, with just Teresa to communicate through.”
“If you have any ideas, try them,” said Wallach.
“Do you really know what you’re doing?” demanded Frank Crandall.
“I think so,” I replied. “If it works, it’ll be because I happen to feel close to Holly.”
“Could be,” he said with a shrug. I almost flipped. Duels have been fought over less. But instead of taking offense, Crandall topped it off by adding, “You could have been a lot closer if you’d tried. She always said you had the alert, pixie-type mind that was pure relaxation instead of a dead let-down after a period of deep concentration. But you were always scuttling off somewhere. Well, go ahead and try, Tom. And good luck!”
I took a deep breath.
“Teresa?” I asked.
“Yes, Mr. Lincoln?”
“Tell Harla to concentrate on the buttons.”
“He is.”
“There is a subtle difference between them.”
“This he knows, but he does not know what it is.”
“There is a delicate difference in warmth. One button will be faintly warmer than the other.”
“Harla has felt them.”
I dropped the third-person address and spoke to Teresa as if she were but one end of a telephone line. “Harla,” I said, “only part of the difference lies in the warmth to physical touch. There should be another kind of warmth. Are you not affected by a feeling that one is better than the other?”
Harla’s reply came direct through Teresa: “Why yes, I am indeed drawn to the warmer of the two. Were this a game I would wager on it. But that is emotion and hardly suitable as a guide.”
“Ah, but it is!” I replied quickly. “This is our frame of reference. Press the warmer of the but—”
I was violently interrupted. Wallach shook me violently and hurled me away from Teresa. Frank Crandall was facing the girl, shouting, “No! No! The warm one will be the red one! You must press the green—”
And then he, too, was interrupted.
Displaced air made a near-explosive woosh! and the tunnel car was there on its pad. In it was a nightmare horror holding a limp Holly Carter across its snakelike tentacles. A free tentacle opened the door.
“Take her while I hold my breath,” said Harla, still talking through Teresa. “I’ll return the tunnel car empty. I can, now that I know that warmth is where the hearth is.”
Harla dropped the unconscious girl in my arms and snapped back into the car. It disappeared, then returned empty just as the doctor was bending over Holly.
*
So now I have my Holly, but every now and then I lie awake beside her in a cold sweat. Harla could have guessed wrong. Just as Wallach and Crandall had been wrong in assuming the red button would be warmer than the green. Their reaction was as emotional as Harla’s.
I hope Harla either forgives me or never finds out that I had to sound sure of myself, and that I had to play on his emotions simply to get him to take the fifty-fifty chance on his—hers—our lives.
And I get to sleep only after I’ve convinced myself that it was more than chance ... that somehow our feelings and emotions guided Harla where logic and definition fail.
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