Who Goes Here?

6

The foyer in which Peace found himself standing featured textile carpets and antique tubular chrome furniture, and he knew at once that all the warnings he had received had been justified. Even the air in the Blue Toad had an expensive smell to it. He began to doubt if the ten monits remaining in his pocket would buy anything more than a cup of coffee, which meant that his time in the place would be sharply limited unless he thought of a way of stalling.

“Was there something sir wanted?” The head waiter who had appeared from behind an ornamental grille was dressed in the full old-world regalia of denims and polo-neck sweater. He had pale blue eyes which stared coldly from the centre of a pink and puffy face, making it clear that he had no misconceptions about Peace’s social or financial status. Peace instinctively covered the rip in the sleeve of his paper suit, then realized he was—as the maitre de had intended—getting off on the wrong psychological footing. A man, he decided, who had successfully fought off a pack of enraged multichews had no business letting himself be cowed by an elderly waiter, no matter how spendidly attired that waiter might be.

The head waiter cleared his throat. “Was there something that sir wanted?”

Peace donned a look of mingled surprise and irritation. “Food, of course. You don’t get many people coming in here to buy surgical trusses, do you?” He glanced around with a critical eye.

“Or have I come to the wrong place?”

The waiter’s face stiffened. “The main dining room is on your left, sir.”

“I know that.” Peace took the plastic blue toad from his pocket and flicked it in the air. “Don’t you remember me?”

The head waiter examined Peace’s face. “No, sir,” he said, looking somewhat relieved.

“Should I?”

“Never mind.” Hiding his disappointment, Peace walked towards the restaurant. “Table for one—near the windows.”

A floor waiter, a younger man who was also wearing formal denims, showed him to a seat and provided him with a menu.

“I don’t think we need bother with a menu,” Peace said, giving the waiter a democratic nudge.

“Just bring me my usual.”

The waiter blinked several times. “Your usual what, sir?”

“You know.” Peace nudged him again, more forcibly. “My usual—what I always have when I come here.”

The waiter moved out of range of Peace’s elbow. “I know all my regulars, and sir isn’t one of them. If sir would like to consult the menu I’m sure…”

“I don’t want to consult the menu,” Peace whispered fiercely. “Look, there must be somebody out in the kitchen who knows me. Tell them I want my usual.”

The waiter gazed at Peace in perplexity for a moment, then comprehension dawned in his eyes. “I’m with sir, now,” he said.

“Good! I’m glad about that.” Peace stared hopefully at him, wondering exactly what he had achieved.

“Sir can rely on me, of course.” The waiter leaned close to Peace, opened the menu and lowered his voice to an oily conspiratorial murmur. “There’s no disgrace in not being able to read— many quite intelligent people suffer from word-blindness—but if sir will pretend to study the menu I’ll tell sir what each item means, and that way…”

“I can read it myself, you fool.” Peace snatched the heavy booklet away from him, temporarily abandoning his quest, and scanned the printed pages. His heart sank as he saw that the tariff, instead of being quoted in the common contraction of monits, was given in monetary units—the sort of traditional touch usually associated with exorbitant prices. His worst fears were confirmed when he looked at the figures themselves and found that coffee was thirty monits a cup, with a minimum cover charge of a hundred. He broke into a gentle sweat. All his hopes for the future, and for his past, were based on spending as long a time as possible in the restaurant and being seen by the maximum number of regular customers and staff. This meant that, regardless of ethics, he would have to order a sizeable meal in the full knowledge that he was unable to pay for it, and not think about the consequences until they came. The decision, though not an easy one, was influenced by the fierce gnawing in his stomach, which for a full month had known nothing but gruel and leathery strips of jerky.

Taking a deep breath, Peace ordered one of the most expensive meals possible—a seven-course affair centered around a specialty dish of Aspatrian lobster cooked in imported champagne. He eagerly swallowed three aperitifs and had downed most of a generous serving of soup when he remembered that his main objective was to prolong his stay in the establishment and be on the alert for contacts. Slowing his spoon action to a more leisurely pace, he looked around the room and gave the other people present a good chance to see his face. It was early in the afternoon and the scattering of other customers seemed too absorbed in their lunches to pay him any attention. He began to wonder if it would have been better to hide out in the city all day and visit the Blue Toad at night when it was likely to be much busier.

His deliberations were interrupted by the arrival of the waiter, who was wheeling a trolley upon which sat a small glass-sided aquarium. The tank was surrounded by a curious framework of glittering metal rods, forming a kind of cage, and in it—placidly scooting backwards and forwards in the water—was a pink crustacean about the size of Peace’s little finger. He gazed at the tiny creature in bafflement for some time, then raised his eyes to the waiter, hoping to be enlightened.

“Your lobster, sir,” the waiter announced. “Say when.” He pressed a switch which was connected to the cage by silvery wires and the entire assembly began to emit a faint humming sound.

“Hold on,” Peace said, pointing at the inhabitant of the tank. “That thing’s more like a shrimp.

A baby shrimp, at that.”

“It’s a baby Aspatrian lobster, sir.”

“But I want a grown-up one. A big one.”

The waiter smiled condescendingly. “You can have it any size you want, sir—I’m growing it for you right now—but it’s better not to let them get too old. It’s a question of flavour.”

Peace watched in astonishment as the volume of space within the gleaming cage began to flicker in a disturbing way and the movements of the lobster in the tank abruptly speeded up.

Suddenly he realized that the peripatetic shellfish was growing larger with every second. It was also becoming more complicated in shape, sprouting legs, pincers, feelers and eye-stalks in a profusion which would have shamed or terrified any Earth-type lobster.

“It’s about two years old now, sir,” the waiter said helpfully. “Some of our customers think that’s when an Aspatrian lobster is at its peak, but others prefer them at three and even four years old. Just say when.”

“What’s the…?” Peace swallowed noisily as he transferred his gaze to the cage surrounding the tank and saw that the gleaming rods of which it was built met at strange angles. They produced an odd wrenching sensation in his eyes when he tried to follow their geometries, almost as though they passed into another dimension. A bizarre idea was born in his numbed brain.

“That thing,” he said feebly. “Is it a sort of time machine?”

” Of course, sir—all part of our gourmet service. Haven’t you seen one before?”

“I don’t think so,” Peace said. “It was just that I noticed the way the rods meet at strange angles and create a wrenching sensation in my eyes when I…”

“I do beg your pardon,” the waiter said, looking concerned. He stepped back, studied the time machine with a critical eye, then grasped the framework in both hands and twisted it until it had assumed a conventional shape made up of square corners and rectangles. It continued humming away, quite unperturbed by the casual manhandling.

“The chef sat on it last week,” the waiter explained, “and it hasn’t been the same since.”

Peace wondered briefly if time machine technology was another significant area of his ignorance. “I never expected to see a gadget like that.”

“Oh, this type—the single-acting introverter— is quite legal on Aspatria. Very useful for ageing whisky, but if you’ll take my advice, sir, you won’t let the lobster get any older.” The waiter switched off the time machine and, using a pair of tongs, hoisted the now enormous lobster up out of the tank. It eyed Peace malevolently, waving feelers and snapping its pincers.

“I’m not eating that thing,” Peace cried. “It’s a monster—take it away.”

“It will be killed, sir, and cooked to your…”

“I don’t care! Take it away and bring me a steak.”

The waiter dropped the lobster back into the water and, mouthing silently as he did so, trundled the tank away in the direction of the kitchens. Peace made use of the extra time to study and be seen by the lunchtime customers and staff, but there were no visible flickers of recognition, no stirrings of his own memory, and he developed a gloomy certainty that he should have delayed his visit until the evening. The trouble was that, barring some kind of near-miracle, he would never be allowed inside the Blue Toad again.

When the steak came he ate it very slowly and, playing for time, became increasingly fastidious about every detail of the meal and the accompanying wines and liqueurs. The tactic had had an unfortunate side effect in that, somewhere around Peace’s third demand for a different flavour of toothpick, the m aitre de correctly divined what was going on and stationed waiters at every doorway. To Peace’s eyes these individuals seemed larger and more muscular than was strictly necessary for their calling. They gazed fixedly at him while the restaurant slowly emptied of customers, and inevitably there came the moment when he was alone with them in the large room. The floor waiter who had been serving him for the past two hours approached with an air of grim expectancy. He was carrying a tray of antique bakelite, in the centre of which was Peace’s bill.

The waiter bowed stiffly. “Will that be all, sir?”

“No.” Having given the only answer open to him, Peace tried to think of a suitable follow-up.

“No, that isn’t all. Not by a long chalk. By no means is that all.”

The waiter raised his eyebrows. “What does sir wish now?”

“Bring me…” Peace’s brow prickled as he strove for inspiration. “Bring me … the same again.”

“I regret that’s impossible, sir.” The waiter placed the bill in front of Peace and folded his arms.

Peace turned the slip of paper over, saw that he had just spent the best part of a year’s pay for a legionary, and experienced a chill sensation in his bowels. The feeling, while highly unpleasant, suggested a possible means of escape.

“Please,” he said, getting to his feet, “direct me to the toilets.”

The waiter sighed loudly and indicated a panelled door at the opposite side of the room. Peace sauntered to it and, although he did not look back, received the impression that the covey of outsize waiters was closing in behind him. He went through the door, slamming it shut in his wake, and found himself in a small ante-room whose sole occupant was a dispenser robot which had about twelve gleaming arms, each one ending in a roll of toilet paper.

“I trust you have enjoyed an excellent meal, sir,” the robot said in an obsequious drone. “My exhalation analyzers tell me you dined on steak, and to complete your enjoyment I suggest a pliant but not unassertive paper such as our Superexec triple-ply pulped Lebanese cedar with the outer coating of…”

“Shove it,” Peace snarled, brushing aside the roll of pink tissue which zoomed towards him on the end of a telescopic arm. He opened another door and ran through into the toilets proper.

There were cubicles on each side, and the opposite wall was spanned by a row of wash basins, above which was a single window. He started towards it eagerly, then saw that it was protected by massive bars which looked as though they had been designed to imprison angry gorillas.

Sensing that there was little time to spare, he dashed into the furthermost cubicle on the right hand side and locked the door. He removed his shoes and set them on the floor with their toes projecting a short distance under the door, and then—with an agility born of desperation—swarmed up the cubicle wall. He sprinted along the precarious stepping stones of the other partitions, not daring to think what would happen if he missed his footing, and dropped down into the cubicle nearest the toilet entrance. Its door was partly open and he crammed himself into the triangular hiding place behind it. A few seconds later multiple footfalls sounded outside, followed by an angry hammering on the cubicle door he had locked.

As soon as he judged that all his pursuers had passed him by, Peace darted out of cover and ran for freedom. There was an immediate outcry which had the effect of supercharging his muscles. He flitted past the dispenser robot, which was waving all its arms in a kind of mechanical palsy, burst out into the restaurant and headed for the exit. In the lobby he collided with the head waiter who, with a speed of reflex surprising in one of his age, grabbed a double handful of Peace’s jacket. “Got you!” he shouted triumphantly. Peace kept on running, leaving the other man clutching a substantial area of blue paper suiting, and got safely into the street. The panorama of shuttling traffic and the footpaths crowded with shoppers was totally unfamiliar to him, but an instinct prompted him to turn left and he saw the entrance to an alley a short distance away. He reached it in several effortless bounds, almost as though propelled by his wayward Sevenleague boots, and glanced back.

“You won’t get away with this,” the head waiter shouted from beneath the Blue Toad’s entrance marquee. “The police will get you. The Oscars will.

Snuffling with increased dread, Peace sprinted along the alley, turned several corners and saw a different street ahead. He slowed to a normal pace, stepped out into the late afternoon sunlight and did his best to mingle with the stream of passers-by—a difficult task in view of the fact that he had no shoes and a gaping hole in his jacket. It came to him that he needed to find a place where he could remain in concealment until darkness fell, and then take up a vantage point near the Blue Toad from which he could study the evening patrons. The best place for his purpose, he realized, would be a cinema, assuming that the ten monits still in his pocket would be enough to pay for an admission ticket.

The decision made, he walked cautiously southwards along the block, crossed to a lesser street on the opposite side and saw a cinema only about a hundred metres from the corner.

Peace blinked several times, wondering how he had managed to find one so unerringly, and for the first time that day felt a glimmer of renewed hope. If he had known Touchdown City well in his previous life, it might be that exposure to the sight of his old haunts was beginning to rekindle his memory. Somewhat cheered by this notion, he approached the cinema and scanned its multifarious signs, looking for some indication of the admission charges. He quickly learned that it would cost him all of his ten monits to go inside, but other information presented on the placards seemed contradictory and confusing.

“GRAND FAMILY SHOW,” one sign read. “THE VIOLENT VIRGINS—strictly for adults; with a fun-feast for the kiddies—FLUFFO IN RAINBOW LAND.”

The building did not look big enough to contain two separate auditoriums, and yet every sign plugged the same message about a family entertainment which featured both adult and juvenile films. Peace was frowning at the bright lettering when he was approached by a blue-eyed cherubic boy of about twelve. The boy was neatly dressed in coppery shirt and hose, was shining with cleanliness and radiated an impression of having been carefully brought up in good surroundings. A pater-nalistic concern about the child hanging around a dubious movie house pushed Peace’s own problems into the back of his mind.

“It will be dark soon,” he said, smiling. “Why don’t you run home to mum and dad?”

“Why don’t you?” the cherub replied, “mind your own bloody business?”

Peace’s mouth fell open. “Who taught you words like that?”

“Who asked you to butt in?” The boy examined Peace from head to foot, and his expression changed to one of crafty appraisal. “How’d you like to make fifty monits?”

“Don’t be impertinent,” Peace said, affronted.

“It would buy you a pair of shoes—and all you have to do is go into the show with me.”

“You’re a nasty little whelp, and I wouldn’t be…” Peace’s tongue went numb as he glanced further down the street and saw a police car cruising slowly and watchfully near the curb.

“Let’s go inside, sonny.” He walked into the cinema foyer and jiggled nervously while he and the boy bought tickets and were handed steribags containing what looked like outsize sunglasses, a grey pair for him and a yellow pair for the boy. The nose of the police car was coming into sight as he pushed open the inner door, anxious to reach the anonymous dimness beyond. Finding his way to a seat was easier than he had expected because the screen was so brilliantly lit that it cast a strong glow over the entire auditorium.

As he was walking down the central aisle Peace was puzzled to note that the too-bright screen displayed nothing but a meaningless confusion of images and that there was absolutely no sound track. Undeterred by what, to him, were serious flaws in the presentation, a hundred or more patrons were sitting in attitudes suggestive of rapt enjoyment. Peace began to get an inkling of what was happening when he realized that everybody, young or old, was wearing the same kind of peculiar sunglasses. Intrigued in spite of himself, he sat down beside his small companion and began to open the steribag given to him at the box office. The boy plucked it from his grasp and replaced it with the bag containing his yellow glasses.

“What’s the idea?” Peace whispered.

“That’s the deal.” The boy dropped a ten-monit bill into Peace’s hand. “I’ll pay you ten an hour to a maximum of five hours.”

“But I don’t…”

“Shut up and watch the pictures,” the boy said. He put on the gray glasses and settled back into his seat with a look of fierce concentration.

Peace stared at him resentfully for a second, then donned the yellow glasses. The screen instantly assumed a normal degree of brightness, showing a cartoon image of a fluffy kitten chasing a butterfly, and an appropriate sound-track was fed into his ears via the side frames of the glasses. He watched the antics of the kitten for perhaps a minute, by which time intense boredom had set in, then he touched a miniature switch he had discovered on the bridge of the glasses. The cartoon film immediately changed with accompanying sound, to one in which an orange-coloured hound was unsuccessfully trying to scale a greased pole. Peace clicked the switch back and forth, and found that his choice was limited to the two equally depressing films he had already sampled. When he thought about it for a moment he realized that the lenses of his glasses were serving as stroboscopes, alternately becoming opaque and transparent at a frequency of perhaps a hundred cycles a second. Moving the switch altered the strobe timing, re-phasing it and allowing the wearer to see a different film of the several which were being projected onto the screen at once.

He nodded in appreciation of the gadgetry involved—in an old-style cinema the audience was actually in darkness fifty percent of the time, in between frames, and it was logical to use that time to project a different film. This explained the intense brightness of the screen when he had viewed it directly, without the filtering effect of the strobe glasses. Or did it? The screen had been very bright, with maybe four times the normal brilliance, and where were the violent virgins promised by the signs outside? At that moment cherub-face, seated beside Peace, gave a low moan of pleasure.

Peace regarded the boy suspiciously, then snatched the gray glasses away from him and crammed them on to his own nose. He was assailed by an orgiastic panorama of heaving flesh, plus sound effects which made it clear that if any of the participants really were virgins their departure from that blessed state was imminent. A feeling of warmth spread over Peace’s face.

The boy tugged at his arm. “Give me back my glasses.”

“I will not.” Peace took the glasses off and folded them up.

“But I paid you for them.”

“I don’t care,” Peace said firmly. “There ought to be a law against showing that sort of thing to minors.”

“There is, poop-head. Why do you think I’m paying you? Come on—hand them over.”

“Nothing doing.” Peace offered the boy the yellow glasses. “You’ll have better fun watching Fluffo.”

“Balls to Fluffo,” the boy retorted. “Look, mister, hand over the glasses or I’ll make trouble for you.”

Peace sneered at him. “After what I’ve been through, you think you can make trouble for me!”

“Leave me alone,” the boy screamed. “Stop touching me! Go away!”

“Just a minute,” Peace said, alarmed, “perhaps we can…”

“No, I don’t want to look in your grown-up glasses—they show awful things happening.

Please don’t make me look.” The boy’s voice grew even louder, convincingly hysterical. “I just want to see Brown Houn’ and Fluffo. Take your hand away! What are you doing to me?”

“If you don’t keep quiet,” Peace whispered, brandishing his fist. “I’m going to smash your evil little face.”

“Is that a fact?” a gruff voice said close behind him. Powerful hands lifted Peace right out of his seat and suddenly he was being propelled up the aisle with his arms twisted behind his back. Women in the end seats he passed hissed abuse at him and made painfully accurate swings with their handbags. Peace tried to break free, but his captor was too strong for him and seemed to have had training in physical combat, Ie. opened the heavy swing doors by the simple expedient of bouncing Peace against them, and the both men were out in the foyer. A managerial-looking woman with silver-blue hair and a pince-nez came out of a side office, drawn by the sounds of commotion.

“Got one, Miz Harley,” Peace’s captor announced. “Child molester. Caught him in the act.

Now can I have a bonus?”

Peace wagged his head earnestly. “This is ridiculous. I never touched the boy. I was only…”

“Shut up, you.” The big man shook Peace reprovingly, giving him a mild case of whiplash. “I saw him, Miz Harley. Caught him in the act. About my bonus, Miz Harley, do you think…?”

“Perhaps we ought to hear what the gentleman has to say about it,” Miz Harley said in reasonable tones which were music to Peace’s ears. She came nearer, adjusting her pince-nez.

Her eyes focused on Peace’s face and the colour abruptly fled from her cheeks.

“It’s you,” she said in a scandalized voice, taking a step backwards. “Up to your old tricks! Is no child safe from you?”

“What is this?” Peace protested, too shocked to feel any satisfaction at apparently having found a link with his past. “I wouldn’t dream of…”

Miz Harley pointed an accusing finger into his face. “You’ve tried to disguise yourself! The beard makes you look different, but not different enough. You’ve been here before, interfering with children. You’re a monster!”

Not again, Peace thought, as the familiar words echoed in his mind. He put on what he hoped was a smile, and said, “Look, can’t we talk this over quietly in your office?”

Miz Harley shook her head. “It’s people like you who give simultaneous cinemas a bad name.” She transferred her gaze to the big man behind Peace. “Blow your whistle, Simpkins.”

A large hand carrying a subetheric whistle appeared at the edge of Peace’s field of view, and a moment later there came a piercing warble which he sensed to be loaded with all kinds of ultrasonic frequencies. People on their way into the cinema paused to whisper to each other and to examine Peace with obvious distaste. His shoulders drooped as he realized that his spell of freedom was drawing to a close. The police were on their way, and in a matter of minutes he would be handed back to the Legion, having learned no more about himself than that, apparently, he had a history of molesting children. Perhaps he was a monster, after all—in which case he deserved everything that was coming to him.

“There are quite a few Oscars in town today,” Miz Harley said comfortably. “I’ll bet they get here first.”

“Hope they do—the police is too soft.” Peace’s captor gave him another shake. “We should’ve thrown all these Earthie Blue-asses off the planet altogether in ‘83. I blame the Government, of course. What was the point in us beating the tripes out of them in the war, and then letting them walk all over the place terrifying innocent kiddies?”

“Innocent kiddy!” Peace was stung to protest, although the mention of Oscars had chilled his blood. “That little swine was… Wait a minute! We won the war in ‘83.”

“Oh, yeah?” The big man gave a rumbling laugh. “It looks that way, doesn’t it? You don’t see our boys going about with no shoes. You don’t see our boys going around dressed in trampy fourth-rate gear.” Warming to his subject, he transferred his hold to the shoulders of Peace’s jacket. “Look at this stuff, Miz Harley. Why it’s no better than … paper!”

The break in the big man’s rhetoric was occasioned by the fact that Peace, on the instant of feeling the restraints transferred from his person to his clothing, had begun to run for the cinema exit. There was a loud ripping sound and his jacket, already seriously weakened by the day’s escapades, disintegrated entirely. Clad in only a half-sleeved shirt and lightweight hose, he darted out into the street and, with a curious feeling that all this had happened to him before, turned left and ran like a gazelle, scarcely feeling the ground beneath his feet. He made ready to fend off busy-bodies who might try to interfere with his escape, but his progress along the narrow thoroughfare was strangely unimpeded. The late afternoon shoppers, who would normally have been intrigued by the sight of a partially clad man fleeing through the city had drawn close to the walls and were staring at something further along the street in the direction in which Peace was running. He narrowed his eyes against the low-slanting rays of the sun, and promptly skidded to a standstill, his mouth contorted by shock.

Coming towards him, the light glinting on the enormous bronze muscles of their shoulders, were two Oscars.

Peace had no recollection of having seen similar beings in the past, but neither had he any difficulty in matching them to Dinkle’s description. The hairless domes of their heads and overall metallic sheen of their nude bodies were unmistakable, as were the massive torsos which tapered down to lean hips and powerful thighs. They paused in their effortless loping run, appeared to confer for a second or two, and then—as if they truly were telepathic and could see into Peace’s soul—ran towards him, glaring with terrible ruby eyes.

“Oh, God,” Peace quavered. He remained transfixed with terror for what seemed an eternity before leaping sideways into an alley which emerged between two stores. The adrenalin-boosted fleetness he had shown earlier was as nothing compared to the superhuman speed he now developed within a few windmilling strides. Aware that he had to be breaking the galactic sprint records, Peace risked a backwards glance and saw that the long stretch of alley was still deserted. He was beginning to feel a glow of self-congratulation when the wall just behind him burst asunder in a shower of bricks and the two Oscars, who had cheated by taking a diagonal shortcut through the building, appeared at his heels.

Peace emitted a falsetto scream and went into a kind of athletic overdrive which took him beyond the reach of grasping metallic fingers. He caromed around a corner and saw, a short distance ahead of him, an oddly familiar doorway above which was a faded sign reading: ACME RAINCOAT CO. He flew to it, burst open the door and ran up a dark flight of stairs.

He paused on a shabby landing and saw before him yet another door which was labelled in barely decipherable letters, “Female Toilets— Acme Employees Only”.

I refuse to hide in any more lavatories, he thought, but at that instant the outer door to the building crashed open with a splintering sound and the two bronze figures came pounding up the stairs, their eyes glowing redly in the dimness.

Peace shouldered his way into the toilets, and realized at once that he was trapped. The tiny room in which he found himself was filthy and disused, obviously a century old or more, and had no other exits. Its sole illumination came from a cobwebbed skylight which, even had he been able to reach it, was too small to clamber through. He turned, clutching at a last straw, to bolt the door—but discovered he was too late.

The Oscars were already standing in the doorway, stooping to peer at him below the lintel.

Peace backed away from them, dumbly shaking his head. His heels encountered a projection on the floor and he sat down with bone-jarring force on the ancient toilet seat.

A curious humming noise filled the room and— before Peace’s petrified, disbelieving eyes—the menacing figures of the Oscars became transparent and faded into thin air.