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sorrowful limpid eyes with long feminine eyelashes, like a camel; their noses are splayed from one cheek
to the other; and they've got these wide lipless mouths stretched into a permanent silly-looking grin, like a
dolphin. No teeth at all. They eat nothing but liquids. Got long tongues, like some insects, which might
be great for sex if they had any, but they don't, and, anyway, they usually keep their tongues rolled up
inside a special pouch in their cheeks so they don't startle any of us earthlings. How they talk with their
tongues rolled up is beyond me.
Anyway, Jazzbow was half in the tank, as I said. He needed the water's buoyancy to make himself
comfortable in earthly gravity. Otherwise, he'd have to wear his exoskeleton suit, and I couldn't see
putting him through that just so we could have a face to-face with Professor Schmidt.
The professor was fidgeting unhappily in his chair. He didn't give a rat's ass about baseball, but at
least he could tell Jazzbow from the other Martians. I guess it's because he was one of the special few
who'd known the Martians ever since they had first crash-landed in New Mexico back in '46.
Well, Williams socked his home run and the Fen way Park fans stood up and cheered for what
seemed like an hour and he never did come out of the dugout to tip his cap for them. Good for him! I
thought. His own man to the very end. That was his last time on a ball field as a player. I found I had
tears in my eyes.
"Now can we see the president?" Schmidt asked, exasperated. Normally he looked like a young
Santa Claus, round and red-cheeked, with a pale blond beard. He usually was a pretty jolly guy, but just
now his responsibilities were starting to get the better of him.
Jazzbow snaked one long, limber arm out of the water and fiddled with the controls beneath the
inverted triangle of the interociter's screen. JFK came on the screen in full color, in the middle of his
speech to the joint session of Congress:
"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of
landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. I believe we should go to the Moon."
Jazzbow sank down in his water tank until only his big eyes showed, and he started noisily blowing
bubbles, his way of showing that he was upset.
Schmidt turned to me. "You're going to have to talk him out of it," he said flatly.
I had not voted for John Kennedy. I had instructed all of my employees to vote against him, although
I imagine some of them disobeyed me out of some twisted sense of independence. Now that he was
president, though, I felt sorry for the kid. Eisenhower had let things slide pretty badly. The Commies
were infiltrating the Middle East and of course they had put up the first artificial satellite and just a couple
weeks ago had put the first man into space: Yuri something-or-other. Meanwhile young Jack Kennedy
had let that wacky plan for the reconquest of Cuba go through. I had told the CIA guys that they'd need
strong air cover, but they went right ahead and hit the Bay of Pigs without even a Piper Cub over them.
Fiasco.
So the new president was trying to get everybody's mind off all this crap by shooting for the Moon.
Which would absolutely destroy everything we'd worked so hard to achieve since that first desperate
Martian flight here some fifteen years earlier.
I knew that somebody had to talk the president out of this Moon business. And of all the handful of
people who were in on the Martian secret, I guess that the only one who could really deal with the White
House on an eye-to-eye level was me.
"Okay," I said to Schmidt. "But he's going to have to come out here. I'm not going to Washington."
It wasn't that easy. The president of the United States doesn't come traipsing across the country to
see an industrial magnate, no matter how many services the magnate has performed for his country. And
my biggest service, of course, he didn't know anything about.
To make matters worse, while my people were talking to his people, I found out that the girl I was
grooming for stardom turned out to be a snoop from the goddamned Internal Revenue Service. I had
had my share of run-ins with the Feds, but using a beautiful starlet like Jean was a low blow even for
them. A real crotch shot.
It was Jazzbow who found her out, of course.
Jean and I had been getting along very nicely indeed. She was tall and dark-haired and really lovely,
with a sweet disposition and the kind of wide-eyed innocence that makes life worthwhile for a nasty old
SOB. like me. And she loved it, couldn't get enough of whatever I wanted to give her. One of my
hobbies was making movies; it was a great way to meet girls. Believe it or not, I'm really very shy. I'm
more at home alone in a plane at twenty thousand feet than at some Hollywood cocktail party. But if you
own a studio, the girls come nocking.
Okay, so Jean and I are getting along swell. Except that during the period when my staff was
dickering with the White House staff, one morning I wake up and she's sitting at the writing desk in my
bedroom, going through my drawers. The desk drawers, that is.
I cracked one eye open. There she is, naked as a Greek goddess and just as gorgeous, rummaging
through the papers in my drawers. There's nothing in there, of course. I keep all my business papers in a
germ tight fireproof safe back at the office. But she had found something that fascinated her. She was
holding it in front of her, where I couldn't see what was in her hand, her head bent over it for what
seemed like ten minutes, her dark hair cascading to her bare shoulders like a river of polished onyx.
Then she glanced up at the mirror and spotted me watching her.
"Do you always search your boyfriends' desks?" I asked. I was pretty pissed off, you know.
"What is this?" She turned and I saw she was holding one of my safari photos between her forefinger
and thumb, like she didn't want to get fingerprints on it. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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