Chapter 3

About the only thing different about Friday was that they had a different command post and iced soft drinks in a bucket!

What a way to go to college! Lying around on the lawn, watching the girls go by. Well, it was Bang-Bang who did most of the girl watching. Heller was getting caught up on grammar school and high school and college. But Bang-Bang did enough girl watching for both of them. Still, what an idyllic scene. How pastoral! Disgusting!

Saturday, however, was different. Bang-Bang had disappeared somewhere, some muttering about drilling. But Heller reported to some hall and began to take “counselling examinations” to determine which subjects and what part of them he should be tutored on.

I had slept late and when I did the scan through, I simply ignored his rapid pen movements on the exams he was doing. He is always showing off. I sped straight through to an interview he was having with some assistant dean.

“Agnes,” the assistant dean was calling over his shoulder. “Are you sure that marking machine is in repair?”

A voice floated back. “Yes, Mr. Bosh. It has been flunking its quota all morning.”

Mr. Bosh, an intense-eyed young man, fiddled with the big stack of completed exam papers he had and then looked at Heller. “There must be some mistake here. Your grade transcript said these were all D average and these exams are A average.” A very severe glint came in his eye. “There is something unexplained here, Wister.”

“Sometimes students have been known to date the wrong somebody’s daughter,” said Heller.

Mr. Bosh sat up straight and then beamed. “Of course, of course. I should have thought of that. Happens all the time!”

Chuckling to himself, he bundled the exam papers up and marked them To be microfilmed for student’s file.

“Well, Wister, all I can say is, you’re off the hook. There are no weak spots here to be tutored, so we will simply mark that completed in your admission requirements. All right?”

“Thank you very much,” said Heller.

Mr. Bosh leaned forward and said in a low voice, “Tell me, just off the record, you didn’t knock her up, did you?”

Heller leaned over and whispered, “Well, I’m here for my senior year, aren’t I?”

Mr. Bosh went into howls of laughter. “I knew it, I knew it! Oh, priceless!” And with great camaraderie, he shook Heller’s hand and that was that.

There was something in Bosh’s attitude that irritated me. Possibly the way he was beaming at Heller. There was nothing that remarkable about Heller’s passing: he had had several days and several long evenings in the lobby to review those subjects and, to him, it must have been a sort of ethnological study of how some primitive might view these things. There was nothing remarkable at all about a postgraduate combat engineer of the Voltarian Fleet passing a few lousy kiddie subjects like perverted quantum mechanics. It made me quite cross, really. Spoiled my faith in these Earth people — not that I’d ever had any. Just riffraff.

I walked around the yard for a while. Two of the children were picking grapes and I accused them of eating more than they picked and after I’d gotten them crying real good, kicked them and felt better.

I called the taxi driver and wanted to know when the Hells he was going to complete delivery of Utanc and he told me it was all on schedule. That made me feel a lot better. Watching that (bleeper) Heller being whistled into his room every night by gorgeous women had been getting to me more than I had admitted. And that I never actually saw him doing anything with them made it even worse! One’s imagination runs riot sometimes!

Only the possible early arrival of Utanc gave me morale enough to go back and watch what was happening around Heller. But all he was doing was trotting around a track in a running suit, not even making good time. He stopped and watched a football squad being mustered up, apparently lost interest and resumed his running. How can anybody just run for a couple of hours? What do they think about?

I went outside again, and after a long delay in locating him, talked on the phone to the hospital contractor who said the earth-moving was almost finished, the water, electrical and sewage ready to place and he’d be into pouring foundations tomorrow. So I couldn’t find anything to rag him about beyond being at the building site working when I was trying to call him.

It was late evening, Turkish time, by now. There was a sort of fascination about watching Heller. I desperately longed for a time when I would see him curl up in a ball, preferably in agony, and die and yet, so long as I did not have the platen, he carried my life in his careless, brutal hands. So I hung on to the viewscreen and raced the strips forward to the present.

Heller was going down in the elevator. He was dressed in a casual dark suit but there was nothing casual about the way he was acting.

He rushed out of the elevator and burst into Vantagio’s office. “It’s here! It’s here! The car I want is here!”

Vantagio was in a tuxedo, apparently all ready for a Saturday night rush not yet started. “Well, it’s about time! Babe mentions it every day and ever since you spaghettied Grafferty she’s been insisting it be the best. Where is it? Out front or down in the garage?”

“Garage,” said Heller. “Come on!”

Vantagio needed no urging. He went rapidly out of his office, followed by Heller, and into the elevator they went and down to the garage.

“It better be a beauty,” said Vantagio. “I got to get this action completed so I can have some peace. Been over a week since Babe told me to buy you a lovely car!”

At the garage elevator exit, there stood Mortie Massacurovitch. Heller introduced him to Vantagio. “I been workin’ double shift,” said Mortie. “I couldn’t get here until this evening. But there she is!”

Standing in the middle of the vast pillared structure, surrounded by sleek limousines of the latest model, stood the old, shabby, paint-worn-off, cracked-window Really Red Cab of decades ago.

It looked like a piece of junk that had been shovelled in.

“Where’s the car?” said Vantagio.

“That’s the car,” said Heller.

“Oh, come off it, kid. A joke’s a joke but this is serious business. Babe will just about tear my head off if I don’t get you one.”

“Hey,” said Heller, “this is a great car!”

“This was built when they really built cabs!” said Mortie.

“Kid, this isn’t any joke? You mean you are really proposing I buy this piece of scrambled trash for you?”

“Hey,” said Mortie, “the company ain’t charging hardly anything!”

“I’m sure they wouldn’t dare!” said Vantagio. “You ought to give the buyer twenty-five smackers to get it towed to a junkyard!”

“Oh, come on,” said Mortie. “I’ll admit she don’t look like no limousine. But I had quite a time trying to get the company to agree to sell it. It’s sort of a keepsake.

Like old times. Tradition! Of course, you can’t keep it red or run it as a Really Red Cab in competition and you can’t have its taxi license — that’s expensive and stays with the company. But it’s a perfectly legal car and the title would be regular.”

Vantagio had looked inside. He backed off holding his nose. “Oh, my God.”

“It’s just the leather,” said Mortie. “They didn’t have vinyl in them days so it’s real leather. Of course, it’s kind of rotted and saturated a bit. But it’s real leather.”

“Please,” said Heller.

Vantagio said, “Babe would kill me. She would have me whipped for two or three hours and then kill me with her bare hands.”

“I got orders that you can have it cheap,” said Mortie. “One thousand dollars and that’s rock bottom.”

“Quit torturing me!” said Vantagio. “I got a tough night ahead. This is Saturday night and the UN is hotting up — in just two weeks it is reconvening! Kid, have you got any idea—”