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His last comment had been too much. "It would be worth it." What could I say to that?
I laughed.
He turned bright red.
"You're laughing at me!"
He stood up and glared down.
"No, I'm not," I said, "I'm laughing at me. I shouldn't have been bothered by what you said, but I was. That tells me something fu
"What?"
"I'm getting sentimental in my old age, and that's fu
"Oh." He turned his back on me and walked over to the window and stared out. Then he jammed his hands into his pockets and turned around and looked at me.
"Aren't you happy?" he asked. "Really, I mean? You've got money, and no strings on you. You could pick up and leave on the next I-V that passes, if you wanted to."
"Sure I'm happy," I told him. "My coffee was cold. Forget it."
"Oh," again. He turned back to the window in time to catch a bright flash full in the face, and to have to compete with thunder to get his next words out. "I'm sorry," I heard him say, as in the distance. "It just seems to me that you should be one of the happiest guys around..."
"I am. It's the weather today. It's got everybody down in the mouth, yourself included."
"Yeah, you're right," he said. "Look at it rain, will you? Haven't seen any rain in months..."
"They've been saving it all up for today."
He chuckled.
"I'm going down for a cup of coffee and a sandwich before I sign in. Can I bring you anything?"
"No, thanks."
"Okay. See you in a little while."
He walked out whistling. He never stays depressed. Like a kid's moods, his moods, up and down, up and down...And he's a Hell Cop. Probably the worst possible job for him, having to keep up his attention in one place for so long. They say the job title comes from the name of an antique flying vehicle--a hellcopper, I think. We send our eyes on their appointed rounds, and they can hover or soar or back up, just like those old machines could. We patrol the city and the adjacent countryside. Law enforcement isn't much of a problem on Cyg. We never peek in windows or send an eye into a building without an invitation. Our testimony is admissible in court--or, if we're fast enough to press a couple buttons, the tape that we make does an even better job--and we can dispatch live or robot cops in a hurry, depending on which will do a better job.
There isn't much crime on Cyg, though, despite the fact that everybody carries a sidearm of some kind, even little kids. Everybody knows pretty much what their neighbors are up to, and there aren't too many places for a fugitive to run. We're mainly aerial traffic cops, with an eye out for local wildlife (which is the reason for all the sidearms).
S.P.C.H. is what we call the latter function--Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Us--Which is the reason each of my hundred-thirty eyes has six forty-five caliber eyelashes.
There are things like the cute little panda-puppy--oh, about three feet high at the shoulder when it sits down on its rear like a teddy bear, and with big, square, silky ears, a curly pinto coat, large, limpid, brown eyes, pink tongue, button nose, powder puff tail, sharp little white teeth more poisonous than a Quemeda Island viper's, and possessed of a way with mammal entrails like unto the way of an imaginative cat with a rope of catnip.
Then there's a _snapper_, which _looks_ as mean as it sounds: a feathered reptile, with three horns on its armored head--one beneath each eye, like a tusk, and one curving skyward from the top of its nose--legs about eighteen inches long, and a four-foot tail which it raises straight into the air whenever it jogs along at greyhound speed, and which it swings like a sandbag--and a mouth full of long, sharp teeth.
Also, there are amphibious things which come from the ocean by way of the river on occasion. I'd rather not speak of them. They're kind of ugly and vicious.
Anyway, those are some of the reasons why there are Hell Cops--not just on Cyg, but on many, many frontier worlds. I've been employed in that capacity on several of them, and I've found that an experienced H.C. can always find a job Out Here. It's like being a professional clerk back home.
Chuck took longer than I thought he would, came back after I was technically off duty, looked happy though, so I didn't say anything. There was some pale lipstick on his collar and a grin on his face, so I bade him good morrow, picked up my cane, and departed in the direction of the big washing machine.
It was coming down too hard for me to go the two blocks to my car on foot.
I called a cab and waited another fifteen minutes. Eleanor had decided to keep Mayor's Hours, and she'd departed shortly after lunch; and almost the entire staff had been released an hour early because of the weather. Consequently, Town Hall was full of dark offices and echoes. I waited in the hallway behind the main door, listening to the purr of the rain as it fell, and hearing its gurgle as it found its way into the gutters. It beat the street and shook the windowpanes and made the windows cold to touch.
I'd pla
I ran.
The next day the rain let up for perhaps an hour in the morning. Then a slow drizzle began; and it did not stop again.
It went on to become a steady downpour by afternoon.
The following day was Friday, which I always have off, and I was glad that it was.
Put dittoes under Thursday's weather report. That's Friday.
But I decided to do something anyway.
I lived down in that section of town near the river. The Noble was swollen, and the rains kept adding to it. Sewers had begun to clog and back up; water ran into the streets. The rain kept coming down and widening the puddles and lakelets, and it was accompanied by drum solos in the sky and the falling of bright forks and sawblades. Dead skytoads were washed along the gutters, like burnt-out fireworks. Ball lightning drifted across Town Square; Saint Elmo's fire clung to the flag pole, the Watch Tower, and the big statue of Wyeth trying to look heroic.
I headed uptown to the library, pushing my car slowly through the countless beaded curtains. The big furniture movers in the sky were obviously non-union, because they weren't taking any coffee breaks. Finally, I found a parking place and I umbrellaed my way to the library and entered.
I have become something of a bibliophile in recent years. It is not so much that I hunger and thirst after knowledge, but that I am news-starved.
It all goes back to my position in the big mixmaster. Admitted, there are _some_ things faster than light, like the phase velocities of radio waves in ion plasma, or the tips of the ion-modulated light-beams of Duckbill, the comm-setup back in Sol System, whenever the hinges of the beak snap shut on Earth--but these are highly restricted instances, with no application whatsoever to the passage of shiploads of people and objects between the stars. You can't exceed lightspeed when it comes to the movement of matter. You can edge up pretty close, but that's about it.
Life can be suspended though, that's easy--it can be switched off and switched back on again with no trouble at all. This is why _I_ have lasted so long. If we can't speed up the ships, we _can_ slow down the people--slow them until they stop--and _let_ the vessel, moving at near-lightspeed, take half a century, or more if it needs it, to convey its passengers to where they are going. This is why I am very alone. Each little death means resurrection into both another land and another time. I have had several, and _this_ is why I have become a bibliophile: news travels slowly, as slowly as the ships and the people. Buy a newspaper before you hop aboard a ship and it will still be a newspaper when you reach your destination--but back where you bought it, it would be considered an historical document. Send a letter back to Earth and your correspondent's grandson may be able to get an answer back to your great-grandson, if the message makes real good co