There was a long silence while he looked at her. “Allie, you know something. Tell Uncle Ed.”

“The stars tell me, Ed.”

Ed made a suggestion astronomically impossible and added, “All right, if you won’t, you won’t. Mmm . . . I never did have sense enough to stay out of a crooked game. Mind if I ride along with you on it, Allie?”

“Not at all, Ed, as long as you don’t go heavy enough to let it show. This is a delicate special situation, with Saturn just balanced between Virgo and Leo.”

“As you say, Allie.”

Mrs. Douglas got busy at once, happy that Allie had confirmed all her judgments. She gave orders about the campaign to destroy the reputation of the missing Berquist, after sending for his dossier and looking it over; she closeted herself with Commandant Twitchell of the Special Service squads for twenty minutes—he left her looking thoughtfully unhappy and immediately made life unbearable for his executive officer. She instructed Sanforth to release another of the “Man from Mars” stereo-casts and to include with it a rumor “from a source close to the administration” that Smith was about to be transferred, or possibly had already been transferred, to a sanitarium high in the Andes, in order to provide him with a climate for convalescence as much like that of Mars as possible. Then she sat back and thought about how to nail down the Pakistan votes for Joseph.

Presently she got hold of him and urged him to support Pakistan’s claim to the lion’s share of the Kashmir thorium. Since he had been wanting to do so all along but had not, up to now, convinced her of the necessity, he was not hard to persuade, although a little nettled by her assumption that he had been opposing it. With that settled, she left to address the Daughters of the Second Revolution on Motherhood in the New World.



10

While Mrs. Douglas was speaking too freely on a subject she knew too little about, Jubal E. Harshaw, LL.B., M.D., Sc.D., bon vivant, gourmet, sybarite, popular author extraordinary, and neopessimist philosopher, was sitting by his swimming pool at his home in the Poconos, scratching the thick grey thatch on his chest, and watching his three secretaries splash in the pool. They were all three amazingly beautiful; they were also amazingly good secretaries. In Harshaw’s opinion the principle of least action required that utility and beauty be combined.

Anne was blonde, Miriam was red-headed, and Dorcas was dark; in each case the coloration was authentic. They ranged, respectively, from pleasantly plump to deliciously slender. Their ages spread over fifteen years but it was hard to tell off hand which was the eldest. They undoubtedly had last names but Harshaw’s household did not bother much with last names. One of them was rumored to be Harshaw’s own granddaughter but opinions varied as to which one it was.

Harshaw was working as hard as he ever worked. Most of his mind was occupied with watching pretty girls do pretty things with sun and water; one small, shuttered, sound-proofed compartment was composing. He claimed that his method of literary composition was to hook his gonads in parallel with his thalamus and disconnect his cerebrum entirely; his habits lent some credibility to the theory.

A microphone on a table at his right hand was hooked to a voicewriter in his study but he used the voicewriter only for notes. When he was ready to write he used a human stenographer and watched her reactions. He was ready now. “Front!” he shouted.

“Anne is ‘front,’” answered Dorcas. “But I’ll take it. That splash was Anne.”

“Dive in and get her. I can wait.” The little brunette cut the water; a few moments later Anne climbed out, put on a towel robe, dried her hands on it, and sat down on the other side of the table. She said nothing, nor did she make any preparations; Anne had total recall, never bothered with recording devices.

Harshaw picked up a bucket of ice cubes over which brandy had been poured, took a deep swig. “Anne, I’ve got a really sick-making one. It’s about a little kitten that wanders into a church on Christmas Eve to get warm. Besides being starved and frozen and lost, the kitten has—God knows why—an injured paw. All right; start: ‘Snow had been falling since—’”

“What pen name?”

“Mmm . . . better use ‘Molly Wadsworth’ again. This one is pretty icky. And title it The Other Manger. Start again.” He went on talking while watching her closely. When tears started to leak out of her closed eyes he smiled slightly and closed his own eyes. By the time he finished, tears were running down his cheeks as well as hers, both bathed in a catharsis of schmaltz.

“Thirty,” he announced. “You can blow your nose. Send it off and for God’s sake don’t let me see it or I’ll tear it up.”