"chap-24" - читать интересную книгу автора (Biggle Lloyd Jr. - All The Colours Of Darkness)

24

Ron Walker called for Darzek in a limousine.

"Have you gone off your rocker?" Darzek demanded, as the chauffeur closed the door. "I’ve heard of padding expense accounts, but this is ridiculous."

"I wish you and Arnold would stop harping on my expense account," Walker said. "You know I have to write a four-page memorandum before I can collect for a subway ride. This evening’s transportation was arranged by Thomas J. Watkins."

"What does he have to do with it?"

"He heard about the party’ and made himself first vice president in charge of finances and arrangements. You’ve got to admit that he has a certain style. He’s an awfully nice guy, and he pulls limousines and private dining rooms out of his sleeve with such a smooth touch that you forget he only does it with money. Incidentally, he’s also invited himself, and after we’d agreed to let him pick up the check we didn’t have the heart to turn him down."

"Who else is coming?"

"Watkins is bringing Ed Rucks. Arnold is bringing Jean. I’m bringing you. Just three happy couples."

"Did you know about Ted and Jean?"

"I knew it before they did. Your absence threw them together. It’s a good thing for both of them—I think."

"You’re probably right, but don’t quote me. Where are we going?"

"Some private club I never heard of. Watkins had that up his sleeve, too."

The chauffeur ceremoniously delivered them to a stately old mansion on Riverside Drive. A uniformed doorman prostrated himself and then handed them over to a monkey-suited butler, who escorted them to a small dining room on the second floor.

"The plate on the door said ‘Victorian Club’!" Darzek said with awe. "The furnishings are so modern they have to be clamped down to keep them from going into orbit, and I’ll swear that odd-shaped painting was specifically designed to cover a crack in the plaster."

Watkins greeted them smilingly, a waiter floated a tray of drinks within reach, and they found themselves gathered around a magnificent stone fireplace that housed an air conditioner. Ed Rucks pumped one of Darzek’s hands and managed to knock the drink from the other. The waiter calmly supplied another drink, and cleaned up the mess.

"Victorian Club?" Darzek said, glancing about the room.

"Named after the founders," Watkins said, eyes twinkling. "Six men named Victor. Originally membership was limited to Victors, but there was some difficulty in finding enough to fill the rolls, so the club was opened to Toms, Dicks, and Harrys. Ted and Jean—here they are. Shall we start?"

"Take the head of the table, Jan," Walker said. "And remember that a guest of honor has obligations, as well as privileges—such as leading the community singing and tipping the waiter. Jean—"

"Right beside Jan," Jean said. "I’m not letting him out of this room until I find out what’s happened to his hair, and why he’s going around telling barefaced lies."

The others regarded Darzek with interest. "What’s wrong with his hair?" Arnold asked.

"That’s what I want to know," Jean said.

"I mean—it looks all right to me."

"It doesn’t look all right to me, and you were standing right beside him this morning when he told that lie."

"If you must third-degree me," Darzek said, "you might at least have the courtesy to let me sit down first."

They arranged themselves around the table, Arnold and Jean Morris on one side, Walker and Rucks opposite them.

Arnold gallantly stood by to assist Jean with her chair—no minor operation, since the chair was backless—but she ignored him; and as Darzek seated himself at the end of the table she leaned over and snatched the wig from his head.

"There!" she exclaimed, waving it triumphantly.

While the others sat paralyzed with astonishment Darzek calmly regained possession of the wig and returned it to his head. "I’m glad this happened, Ted," he said. "I was much too polite to tell you what a hell-cat this female is, but since she has chosen to exhibit her fiendishness in the presence of witnesses, you can’t say you weren’t forewarned."

"What happened to your hair?" Jean demanded. The others continued to stare.

"Not only does she expose my most secret shame with calloused disregard for my feelings, but she has the colossal nerve to expect me—"

"What happened to your hair?"

"If you must know, I was smoking in bed, and I fell asleep. Happily my guard smelled the smoke and came to my rescue, but not before my beautiful hair was devastated. My captors did not want me to go around creating an impression that they had tested me with fire, so they took my passport photo and had this wig made. And a very good job it is, if I do say so myself."

"It looks better when you have it on straight," Jean said.

"Thank you," Darzek said, adjusting it.

Jean seated herself resignedly. "It doesn’t sound like him, but I suppose it could have happened that way, and if it didn’t I know that’s the only explanation I’ll ever get. What about the lie?"

"What lie?" Darzek asked, helping himself to a roll.

"You told me this morning, in the presence of witnesses, that you hadn’t been home yet."

"I’ll repeat it in the presence of witnesses. At that time I hadn’t been home yet."

"Then how do you account for the fact that you disappeared wearing a light tweed sport coat, dark gabardine slacks, a green-tinted shirt, and a bow tie—not to mention those atrocious Argyle socks and brown shoes; you were confined in Brussels all the time you were gone, and you came back wearing that old sharkskin suit you should have given away years ago, a white shirt, black shoes, a necktie you borrowed from my brother and never returned, and a pair of socks I gave you last Christmas. Just explain that. I dare you!"

"You’ll never make a wife of this woman, Ted. At best she’ll only be a married detective."

"Nevertheless, it seems like a very interesting question," Arnold said.

"Et tu, Brute! Very well. The tweed sport coat and gabardine slacks were subjected to trial by combat twice, on a cement floor yet, and I did not win either time. Between trials, and afterwards, I shared a small room with several tons of coal. By the time my relations with my hosts had taken a turn for the better my clothing was beyond salvage. During our negotiations a messenger had to make several trips to New York for instructions, and at my request he picked up a change of clothing from my apartment. His taste was atrocious, but I refuse to accept the responsibility for that. Any further questions?"

"Jean," Arnold said, "you owe him an apology."

"I doubt it," Jean said. "But there’s no point in spoiling a dinner party. I’ll apologize now, and tell him what I think of him when I write my resignation."

"Shall we begin?" Watkins asked, and nodded to the waiter, who wheeled a cart into the room and began to serve them.

The dinner proceeded with normal gaiety until they began to discuss desserts with the waiter. Darzek asked for the largest ice-cream sundae the establishment was capable of assembling, and Jean, after making her own selection, sweetly informed the waiter that Mr. Arnold was on a diet and could not eat desserts.

"I wish I’d known that this morning," Darzek said. "I wouldn’t have shared that blueberry pie with him."

"Ted!" Jean wailed. "You didn’t eat a piece of pie!"

"Not a piece," Darzek said. "A pie. Half of one, anyway."

"Mr. Arnold will not have any dessert," Jean said firmly, and the waiter moved on.

‘Traitor!" Arnold muttered.

Watkins chuckled, and said it seemed as good a time as any to be offering congratulations to Arnold. "She’ll make a new man of you," he said. "When’s the wedding?"

"We haven’t decided," Arnold said. "I don’t want to be a new man. By the way, Jan, we had a deuce of a mystery happen while you were gone. If you’d been here, I’d have put you to work on it."

"I gather that you managed without me," Darzek said with a grin. "Which means it couldn’t have been much of a mystery."

"Oh, we didn’t solve it. We’ll never solve it. It only happened day before yesterday at the new Moon base. Perrin went in to start the day’s operations, and found the transmitter sabotaged. The President and a mob of bigwigs were waiting at the Cape for a Moon excursion, and we couldn’t make contact. Talk about embarrassing moments!"

"Sabotaged how?" Darzek asked.

"That’s a mystery in itself. Circuits were switched around fantastically, and rewired, and unwired, and cross-wired, and generally hashed up. Perrin knew the President was due, and his only idea was to get it operating again—fast. I wish now he’d taken the time to draw a diagram of what had been done to it. A few of the things he remembered made sense, in a weird sort of way. It was almost as if someone with unorthodox ideas was trying to—well—improve the thing."

"That certainly would be an unorthodox motive for sabotage."

"But who could have done it? There were only two men at the base, besides Perrin, and both of them swore they hadn’t touched it. I believe them, because the person responsible had more than a rudimentary knowledge of electronics, and they haven’t. A few people would like to blame the Russians, which is absolutely ridiculous. Also, if someone wanted to sabotage a transmitter, you’d think he’d just swing a hammer and get out of there—not take the time to take it apart and rewire it. Perrin swears there was a mysterious stranger in the vicinity, which might be interesting if anyone could explain how he got there and where he went afterwards. Mysterious strangers on the Moon quickly become dead strangers, unless they have a well-established base of operations. No, this is one mystery that not even Darzek could solve."

"Thanks a lot, old man, but I couldn’t care less," Darzek said. "I get my full quota of mystery on Earth."

"Am I correct in assuming that this is not for publication?" Walker asked Arnold.

"You are."

"Damn you!"

"USSA may release something in a day or two. I told them they should change the name of that Abenezra crater to Crater of Mystery. First there’s an explosion that leaves no traces, and then our transmitter is sabotaged by a nonexistent mysterious stranger, and now they tell me things have started to disappear up there. Anyway, there won’t be any more tampering with the transmitter. We’ve put up a metal hut that can be locked."

"What’s that about an explosion?" Darzek asked.

"That’s ancient history. There wasn’t any, only several people saw it, and—Ron, dig up some old papers so Jan can read about the explosion."

"We have a file at the office," Jean said. "But he wouldn’t have read about it even if he’d been here. Current events on the Moon don’t interest him."

The waiter served the desserts, and Darzek, gloating over his enormous sundae, paused with his spoon in mid-air. "Oddly enough, the other night I did have a dream about the Moon. I was there, looking up at the Earth. It was very realistic. The Earth was a beautiful, glowing crescent. I wasn’t aware that the Earth had phases, just like the Moon."

"I don’t suppose there’ve been more than a million photographs of those phases published," Arnold said.

"Have there? I never paid any attention. Anyway, it struck me as a remarkable discovery."

"At least your astronomy has improved since the last time you dreamed you were on the Moon."

"How’s that?"

"You told me you dreamed you were looking down at the Earth. This time you say you were looking up. That’s a radical change for the better."

"If you say so. I don’t remember any other dream."

"Too bad you didn’t know about Ted’s Moon mystery," Jean said. "While you were dreaming you were on the Moon you could have solved it for him. Did you see anything else of interest up there?"

"As a matter of fact, I did. I met some Moon people. Men and women."

"Maybe he’s normal after all," Jean said. "What did the women look like?"

"They were enormous. Eight feet high, maybe ten, and broad as a barn door. They were wrapped up like an Egyptian mummy, and what I could see of their flesh was kind of blue-looking."

"There’s nothing unreasonable about that. The nights up there get pretty cold."

"These women weren’t cold. They were very warm, and more human than any human female I’ve ever met. They had four fingers on each hand, and their faces looked as if they’d been run over by a steam roller, and I thought they were beautiful. Don’t ask me why."

"My God!" Jean exclaimed. "No wonder he’s a bachelor. Who could compete with a vision like that?"

"Have you told your analyst about that dream?" Ron Walker asked.

"I haven’t got an analyst."

"You’d better get one fast. Ted—what’s the matter with Ted?"

Arnold was staring at Darzek, his face frozen in a look of utter stupefaction. His mouth worked futilely; finally he managed to speak. "Four fingers?"

"Right," Darzek said.

"Four webbed fingers?"

"Right."

"Dressed with some kind of cloth wrapped around and around her, and the whole face caved in, like, and fat from the front and skinny from the side, and eyes without any color, and—"

"So you know her, too," Darzek said.

"Same person?"

"Same person."

"You two are making this up," Jean said.

"We aren’t, Hon—honest we aren’t. We just must have had the same dream, except that I only saw one of them. Did she say anything to you?"

"I don’t think she did," Darzek said.

"She didn’t speak to me, but she showed me two formulas and a transmitter diagram, and I woke up right afterwards and wrote them down, and this morning—"

"Naturally she’d know better than to show me anything like that," Darzek said.

"This morning I looked at them, and they made sense." He turned to Watkins. "I’ve been thinking about all that red tape we had to go through to get a transmitter on the Moon, and all the trouble USSA has given us since we got it there. I think we should operate our own Moon projects."

"I agree. But how do we get our transmitters to the Moon without USSA’s help?"

"All we have to do is design a transmitter that will operate without a receiver. This one I dreamed about will do it. I’m sure of that. We can go anywhere on the Moon we want to go. We can go to Mars, or Saturn, or Pluto—anywhere in the Solar System, or outside of it, if there’s anywhere outside of it to go. We can double our capacity here on Earth by using all of our transmitters to transmit, rather than half of them to receive. Whoever your Moon woman is, Jan, I feel doggone grateful to her. This idea—"

"He’s still dreaming," Darzek told Jean. "Kick him."

She did—sharply—and Arnold winced and bent over to rub his shin. "Just the same, I’m going to build one. I know it will work."

"You have trouble ahead of you, Jean," Darzek said. ‘This Moon woman is evidently a fellow scientist. That, with her natural beauty, makes her a formidable rival. I see only one hope for you."

"What’s that?"

"Put him back on desserts. Then he won’t have such dreams."

"No one took you off desserts. How did you happen to have the same dream?"

"In every man’s inner life there is an area so intensely personal—"

"I’ll haul both of you to an analyst," Jean said, "and find out where those dreams came from."

Darzek blissfully took another spoonful of sundae. "What makes you so sure that you’d like to know?" he asked.

24

Ron Walker called for Darzek in a limousine.

"Have you gone off your rocker?" Darzek demanded, as the chauffeur closed the door. "I’ve heard of padding expense accounts, but this is ridiculous."

"I wish you and Arnold would stop harping on my expense account," Walker said. "You know I have to write a four-page memorandum before I can collect for a subway ride. This evening’s transportation was arranged by Thomas J. Watkins."

"What does he have to do with it?"

"He heard about the party’ and made himself first vice president in charge of finances and arrangements. You’ve got to admit that he has a certain style. He’s an awfully nice guy, and he pulls limousines and private dining rooms out of his sleeve with such a smooth touch that you forget he only does it with money. Incidentally, he’s also invited himself, and after we’d agreed to let him pick up the check we didn’t have the heart to turn him down."

"Who else is coming?"

"Watkins is bringing Ed Rucks. Arnold is bringing Jean. I’m bringing you. Just three happy couples."

"Did you know about Ted and Jean?"

"I knew it before they did. Your absence threw them together. It’s a good thing for both of them—I think."

"You’re probably right, but don’t quote me. Where are we going?"

"Some private club I never heard of. Watkins had that up his sleeve, too."

The chauffeur ceremoniously delivered them to a stately old mansion on Riverside Drive. A uniformed doorman prostrated himself and then handed them over to a monkey-suited butler, who escorted them to a small dining room on the second floor.

"The plate on the door said ‘Victorian Club’!" Darzek said with awe. "The furnishings are so modern they have to be clamped down to keep them from going into orbit, and I’ll swear that odd-shaped painting was specifically designed to cover a crack in the plaster."

Watkins greeted them smilingly, a waiter floated a tray of drinks within reach, and they found themselves gathered around a magnificent stone fireplace that housed an air conditioner. Ed Rucks pumped one of Darzek’s hands and managed to knock the drink from the other. The waiter calmly supplied another drink, and cleaned up the mess.

"Victorian Club?" Darzek said, glancing about the room.

"Named after the founders," Watkins said, eyes twinkling. "Six men named Victor. Originally membership was limited to Victors, but there was some difficulty in finding enough to fill the rolls, so the club was opened to Toms, Dicks, and Harrys. Ted and Jean—here they are. Shall we start?"

"Take the head of the table, Jan," Walker said. "And remember that a guest of honor has obligations, as well as privileges—such as leading the community singing and tipping the waiter. Jean—"

"Right beside Jan," Jean said. "I’m not letting him out of this room until I find out what’s happened to his hair, and why he’s going around telling barefaced lies."

The others regarded Darzek with interest. "What’s wrong with his hair?" Arnold asked.

"That’s what I want to know," Jean said.

"I mean—it looks all right to me."

"It doesn’t look all right to me, and you were standing right beside him this morning when he told that lie."

"If you must third-degree me," Darzek said, "you might at least have the courtesy to let me sit down first."

They arranged themselves around the table, Arnold and Jean Morris on one side, Walker and Rucks opposite them.

Arnold gallantly stood by to assist Jean with her chair—no minor operation, since the chair was backless—but she ignored him; and as Darzek seated himself at the end of the table she leaned over and snatched the wig from his head.

"There!" she exclaimed, waving it triumphantly.

While the others sat paralyzed with astonishment Darzek calmly regained possession of the wig and returned it to his head. "I’m glad this happened, Ted," he said. "I was much too polite to tell you what a hell-cat this female is, but since she has chosen to exhibit her fiendishness in the presence of witnesses, you can’t say you weren’t forewarned."

"What happened to your hair?" Jean demanded. The others continued to stare.

"Not only does she expose my most secret shame with calloused disregard for my feelings, but she has the colossal nerve to expect me—"

"What happened to your hair?"

"If you must know, I was smoking in bed, and I fell asleep. Happily my guard smelled the smoke and came to my rescue, but not before my beautiful hair was devastated. My captors did not want me to go around creating an impression that they had tested me with fire, so they took my passport photo and had this wig made. And a very good job it is, if I do say so myself."

"It looks better when you have it on straight," Jean said.

"Thank you," Darzek said, adjusting it.

Jean seated herself resignedly. "It doesn’t sound like him, but I suppose it could have happened that way, and if it didn’t I know that’s the only explanation I’ll ever get. What about the lie?"

"What lie?" Darzek asked, helping himself to a roll.

"You told me this morning, in the presence of witnesses, that you hadn’t been home yet."

"I’ll repeat it in the presence of witnesses. At that time I hadn’t been home yet."

"Then how do you account for the fact that you disappeared wearing a light tweed sport coat, dark gabardine slacks, a green-tinted shirt, and a bow tie—not to mention those atrocious Argyle socks and brown shoes; you were confined in Brussels all the time you were gone, and you came back wearing that old sharkskin suit you should have given away years ago, a white shirt, black shoes, a necktie you borrowed from my brother and never returned, and a pair of socks I gave you last Christmas. Just explain that. I dare you!"

"You’ll never make a wife of this woman, Ted. At best she’ll only be a married detective."

"Nevertheless, it seems like a very interesting question," Arnold said.

"Et tu, Brute! Very well. The tweed sport coat and gabardine slacks were subjected to trial by combat twice, on a cement floor yet, and I did not win either time. Between trials, and afterwards, I shared a small room with several tons of coal. By the time my relations with my hosts had taken a turn for the better my clothing was beyond salvage. During our negotiations a messenger had to make several trips to New York for instructions, and at my request he picked up a change of clothing from my apartment. His taste was atrocious, but I refuse to accept the responsibility for that. Any further questions?"

"Jean," Arnold said, "you owe him an apology."

"I doubt it," Jean said. "But there’s no point in spoiling a dinner party. I’ll apologize now, and tell him what I think of him when I write my resignation."

"Shall we begin?" Watkins asked, and nodded to the waiter, who wheeled a cart into the room and began to serve them.

The dinner proceeded with normal gaiety until they began to discuss desserts with the waiter. Darzek asked for the largest ice-cream sundae the establishment was capable of assembling, and Jean, after making her own selection, sweetly informed the waiter that Mr. Arnold was on a diet and could not eat desserts.

"I wish I’d known that this morning," Darzek said. "I wouldn’t have shared that blueberry pie with him."

"Ted!" Jean wailed. "You didn’t eat a piece of pie!"

"Not a piece," Darzek said. "A pie. Half of one, anyway."

"Mr. Arnold will not have any dessert," Jean said firmly, and the waiter moved on.

‘Traitor!" Arnold muttered.

Watkins chuckled, and said it seemed as good a time as any to be offering congratulations to Arnold. "She’ll make a new man of you," he said. "When’s the wedding?"

"We haven’t decided," Arnold said. "I don’t want to be a new man. By the way, Jan, we had a deuce of a mystery happen while you were gone. If you’d been here, I’d have put you to work on it."

"I gather that you managed without me," Darzek said with a grin. "Which means it couldn’t have been much of a mystery."

"Oh, we didn’t solve it. We’ll never solve it. It only happened day before yesterday at the new Moon base. Perrin went in to start the day’s operations, and found the transmitter sabotaged. The President and a mob of bigwigs were waiting at the Cape for a Moon excursion, and we couldn’t make contact. Talk about embarrassing moments!"

"Sabotaged how?" Darzek asked.

"That’s a mystery in itself. Circuits were switched around fantastically, and rewired, and unwired, and cross-wired, and generally hashed up. Perrin knew the President was due, and his only idea was to get it operating again—fast. I wish now he’d taken the time to draw a diagram of what had been done to it. A few of the things he remembered made sense, in a weird sort of way. It was almost as if someone with unorthodox ideas was trying to—well—improve the thing."

"That certainly would be an unorthodox motive for sabotage."

"But who could have done it? There were only two men at the base, besides Perrin, and both of them swore they hadn’t touched it. I believe them, because the person responsible had more than a rudimentary knowledge of electronics, and they haven’t. A few people would like to blame the Russians, which is absolutely ridiculous. Also, if someone wanted to sabotage a transmitter, you’d think he’d just swing a hammer and get out of there—not take the time to take it apart and rewire it. Perrin swears there was a mysterious stranger in the vicinity, which might be interesting if anyone could explain how he got there and where he went afterwards. Mysterious strangers on the Moon quickly become dead strangers, unless they have a well-established base of operations. No, this is one mystery that not even Darzek could solve."

"Thanks a lot, old man, but I couldn’t care less," Darzek said. "I get my full quota of mystery on Earth."

"Am I correct in assuming that this is not for publication?" Walker asked Arnold.

"You are."

"Damn you!"

"USSA may release something in a day or two. I told them they should change the name of that Abenezra crater to Crater of Mystery. First there’s an explosion that leaves no traces, and then our transmitter is sabotaged by a nonexistent mysterious stranger, and now they tell me things have started to disappear up there. Anyway, there won’t be any more tampering with the transmitter. We’ve put up a metal hut that can be locked."

"What’s that about an explosion?" Darzek asked.

"That’s ancient history. There wasn’t any, only several people saw it, and—Ron, dig up some old papers so Jan can read about the explosion."

"We have a file at the office," Jean said. "But he wouldn’t have read about it even if he’d been here. Current events on the Moon don’t interest him."

The waiter served the desserts, and Darzek, gloating over his enormous sundae, paused with his spoon in mid-air. "Oddly enough, the other night I did have a dream about the Moon. I was there, looking up at the Earth. It was very realistic. The Earth was a beautiful, glowing crescent. I wasn’t aware that the Earth had phases, just like the Moon."

"I don’t suppose there’ve been more than a million photographs of those phases published," Arnold said.

"Have there? I never paid any attention. Anyway, it struck me as a remarkable discovery."

"At least your astronomy has improved since the last time you dreamed you were on the Moon."

"How’s that?"

"You told me you dreamed you were looking down at the Earth. This time you say you were looking up. That’s a radical change for the better."

"If you say so. I don’t remember any other dream."

"Too bad you didn’t know about Ted’s Moon mystery," Jean said. "While you were dreaming you were on the Moon you could have solved it for him. Did you see anything else of interest up there?"

"As a matter of fact, I did. I met some Moon people. Men and women."

"Maybe he’s normal after all," Jean said. "What did the women look like?"

"They were enormous. Eight feet high, maybe ten, and broad as a barn door. They were wrapped up like an Egyptian mummy, and what I could see of their flesh was kind of blue-looking."

"There’s nothing unreasonable about that. The nights up there get pretty cold."

"These women weren’t cold. They were very warm, and more human than any human female I’ve ever met. They had four fingers on each hand, and their faces looked as if they’d been run over by a steam roller, and I thought they were beautiful. Don’t ask me why."

"My God!" Jean exclaimed. "No wonder he’s a bachelor. Who could compete with a vision like that?"

"Have you told your analyst about that dream?" Ron Walker asked.

"I haven’t got an analyst."

"You’d better get one fast. Ted—what’s the matter with Ted?"

Arnold was staring at Darzek, his face frozen in a look of utter stupefaction. His mouth worked futilely; finally he managed to speak. "Four fingers?"

"Right," Darzek said.

"Four webbed fingers?"

"Right."

"Dressed with some kind of cloth wrapped around and around her, and the whole face caved in, like, and fat from the front and skinny from the side, and eyes without any color, and—"

"So you know her, too," Darzek said.

"Same person?"

"Same person."

"You two are making this up," Jean said.

"We aren’t, Hon—honest we aren’t. We just must have had the same dream, except that I only saw one of them. Did she say anything to you?"

"I don’t think she did," Darzek said.

"She didn’t speak to me, but she showed me two formulas and a transmitter diagram, and I woke up right afterwards and wrote them down, and this morning—"

"Naturally she’d know better than to show me anything like that," Darzek said.

"This morning I looked at them, and they made sense." He turned to Watkins. "I’ve been thinking about all that red tape we had to go through to get a transmitter on the Moon, and all the trouble USSA has given us since we got it there. I think we should operate our own Moon projects."

"I agree. But how do we get our transmitters to the Moon without USSA’s help?"

"All we have to do is design a transmitter that will operate without a receiver. This one I dreamed about will do it. I’m sure of that. We can go anywhere on the Moon we want to go. We can go to Mars, or Saturn, or Pluto—anywhere in the Solar System, or outside of it, if there’s anywhere outside of it to go. We can double our capacity here on Earth by using all of our transmitters to transmit, rather than half of them to receive. Whoever your Moon woman is, Jan, I feel doggone grateful to her. This idea—"

"He’s still dreaming," Darzek told Jean. "Kick him."

She did—sharply—and Arnold winced and bent over to rub his shin. "Just the same, I’m going to build one. I know it will work."

"You have trouble ahead of you, Jean," Darzek said. ‘This Moon woman is evidently a fellow scientist. That, with her natural beauty, makes her a formidable rival. I see only one hope for you."

"What’s that?"

"Put him back on desserts. Then he won’t have such dreams."

"No one took you off desserts. How did you happen to have the same dream?"

"In every man’s inner life there is an area so intensely personal—"

"I’ll haul both of you to an analyst," Jean said, "and find out where those dreams came from."

Darzek blissfully took another spoonful of sundae. "What makes you so sure that you’d like to know?" he asked.