The President frowned. Roger’s interpreters immediately changed the image: Dash was still Santa Claus, but ebony black and with enormous fangs. “You’re not overconfident, are you?” he asked.
“Well, how would I know if I was?” Roger asked reasonably. “I don’t think so. Ask the staff here; they can tell you more about me than I can.”
He managed to terminate the conversation a few exchanges later, knowing that the President was unsatisfied and vaguely troubled, but not caring much. There was less and less that Roger really cared about, he thought to himself. And he had been truthful: he really was looking forward to the launch. He would miss Sulie and Clara. He was, in the back of his mind, faintly worried about the danger and the duration of the trip. But he was also buoyed up with anticipation of what he would find when he got there: the planet he was made to inhabit.
He picked up the guitar and started again on the Segovia, but it did not go as well as he would like. After a time he realized that the gift of absolute pitch was also a handicap: Segovia’s guitar had not been tuned to a perfect 440 A, it was a few Hertz flat, and his D string was almost a quarter-tone relatively flatter still. He shrugged — the bat wings flailed with the gesture — and put the guitar down.
For a moment, he sat upright on his guitar chair, straightbacked and armless, inviting his thoughts.
Something was troubling him. The name of the something was Dorrie. Playing the guitar was pleasant and relaxing, but behind the pleasure was a daydream: a fantasy of sitting on the deck of a sailboat with Dorrie and Brad, and casually borrowing Brad’s guitar and astonishing them all.
In some arcane way all the processes of his life terminated in Dorrie. The purpose of playing the guitar was to please Dorrie. The horror of his appearance was that it would offend Dorrie. The tragedy of castration was that he would fail Dorrie. Most of the pain had lifted from these things, and he could look at them in a way that had been impossible a few weeks before; but they were still there buried inside him.
He reached for the phone, and then drew back his hand.
Calling Dorrie was not satisfactory. He had tried that.
What he really wanted was to see her.
That, of course, was impossible. He was not allowed to leave the project. Vern Scanyon would be furious. The guards would stop him at the door. The telemetry would reveal at once what he was doing; the closed-circuit electronic surveillance would locate him at every step; all the resources of the project would be mobilized to prevent his leaving.
And there would be no point in asking permission. Not even in asking Dash; the most that would happen would be that the President would give an order and Dorrie would be delivered, coerced and furious, in his room. Roger did not want Dorrie to be forced to come to him, and he was sure he would not be allowed to go to her.
On the other hand…
On the other hand, he reflected, why did he need permission?
He thought for a minute, sitting perfectly still in his straightbacked chair.
Then he put the guitar carefully away in its case and moved. The first thing he did was bend down to the wall, pull a baseboard plug out of its moorings and stick his finger into it. The copper nail on his finger was as good as a penny any day. The fuses blew. The lights in the room went out. The whickawhicka and gentle whisper of the reels of the recording machines slowed and stopped. The room went dark.
There was still heat, and that was light enough for Roger’s eyes. He could see quite well enough to pull the telemetry leads out of his body. He was out of the door before Clara Bly, pouring cream into a cup on her coffee break, looked around at the buzzing readout board.
He had done better than he planned with the fuses; the hall lights were out as well. There were people in the corridor, but in the dark they could not see. Roger was past them and taking the fire stairs four at a time before they knew he was gone. He settled into the workings of his body with ease and grace. All of Kathleen Doughty’s ballet training was paying off; he danced down the stairs, plie-ed through a door, leaped along a corridor and was out into the cold night air before the security man at the door looked around from his TV set.
He was in the open, racing down the freeway toward the city of Tonka at forty miles an hour.
The night was bright with kinds of light he had never seen before. Overhead there was a solid layer of clouds, stratocumulus scudding along from the north and thick middle-level clouds above them; even so, he could see dim glows where the brightest stars filtered some of their radiation through. The Oklahoma prairie on either side was somberly glowing with the tiny residual heat retained from the day, punctuated with splotches of brilliance where there was a home or a farm building. The cars on the freeway were tailed by great plumes of light, bright where they left the exhaust pipe, reddening and darkening as the clouds of hot gas expanded into the chilling air. As he entered the city itself he saw and avoided an occasional pedestrian, each a luminous Halloween figure, dully glowing in his own body heat. The buildings around him had trapped a little heat from the end of the day and were spilling more from their own central heating; they glowed like fireflies.
He stopped at the corner of his own home street. There was a car with two men inside it parked across from the door. Warning signals flashed in his brain, and the car became a tank, howitzer pointed at his head. They were no problem. He changed course and ran through the backyards, scaling fences and slipping through gates, and at his own home he extruded the copper nails in his fingers for purchase and climbed right up the outside wall.
It was what he wanted to do. Not just to avoid the men in the car outside, but to act out a fantasy: the moment when he would burst in on Dorrie through the window, to catch her at — what?
In the event itself, what he caught her at was watching a late movie on television. Her hair was sticky with coloring compound, and she was propped up in bed eating a solitary dish of ice cream.
As he slid the unlocked window open and crawled through, she turned toward him.
She screamed.
It was not just a cry, it was instant hysterics. Dorrie spilled her ice cream and leaped out of bed. The TV set toppled and crunched to the floor. Sobbing, Dorrie pressed herself against the far wall, eyes squeezed tight and fists pressed against them.
“I’m sorry,” Roger said inadequately. He wanted to approach her, but reason prevented. She looked very helpless and appealing, in her see-through butcher-boy smock and tiny bikini-ribbon panties.
“Sorry,” she gasped, looked at him, averted her eyes and fumbled her way into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.
Well, thought Roger, she was not to be blamed; he had a clear notion of what a grotesque sight he had been, coming through a window without warning. “You did say you knew what I looked like,” he called.
There was no answer from the bathroom; only, a moment later, the running of water. He glanced around the room. It looked exactly as it had always looked. The closets were as full of her clothes and his as they had always been. The spaces behind the couches were as empty of lovers as ever. He was not proud of himself for searching the apartment like any medieval cuckold, but he did not stop until he was certain she had been alone.
The phone rang.
Roger’s instant reflexes had him grabbing the earpiece out of its cradle almost before the first brrr sounded, so quickly and brutally that it was deformed into scrap in his hand. The vision screen flickered and then went dark again, its circuitry linked with the sound. “Hello?” Roger said. But there was no answer; he had made sure that nobody would ever speak on that instrument again.