they think,” he said. “To some degree.”
I nodded at the phone. I was not wholly sure the Master couldn’t detect that in some way. Changes in pressure, perhaps. The sound of my head moving in the air. After a second I said: “I’ll be waiting. We’ll arrange a meeting after you’ve both been around the block on this. I’ll give Robbin names and places—writing them down will give her something to do, and she can tell you, giving her something more.”
“You are learning, Gerald,” he said. Distant approval. I seldom got anything that warm and cozy from the Master. “When we spoke last, you would not have thought of that.”
“Thanks,” I said. I wanted to ask him once again if he were still sure he would not have his eyes restored, and decided against it. It would be badgering, a very bad thing.
“I will call you when we have—been around the block, Gerald, and we will all meet. It has been good to hear from you. Finished.”
The connection broke. I sighed yet again and put the phone away, and made myself a cheese sandwich (eight minutes) and a pot of coffee (twenty-two minutes, and worth it). I ate, drank, washed the dishes, and did a little light dusting while I waited for the phone to ring. There are times when I am just too busied, too frantic or too damned lazy, but, most days and weeks, I do my own housekeeping. It’s a bit like a hobby—restful, and a way to free the mind while the body occupies itself. Home or away, any Totum and Robbies I have around are just a tad underworked, I think. They don’t complain of it.
Forty-eight minutes later, dustrag stored away and an edge of boredom starting to set in, the phone rang. I got it on the first blip, and there she was, or her voice anyhow, after sixty-one months Standard, the Master’s figures, the usual breathless childish soprano bleat.
“Hello there, thank you so much for thinking of me, Sir, do you want me to help with your work? Master Higsbee says you do.”
I was always rethinking it, but I felt just then that I liked Sir a few hairs less than Gerald. “I do want your help, Robbin,” I said. “Do you know the situation, love?”
Robbin was thirty-two Standard years old. At times she very nearly looked as old as twenty. At times she very nearly acted as old as eighteen, but not often. “Of course I do, Master Higsbee told me about it,” she said. “We were on the phone for a long time.” She giggled. I don’t get to hear giggles very much, and prefer my life so arranged. “Sometimes I think he likes me,” Robbin Tress said in her teeny breathless voice.
“Well, good, I’m sure he does,” I said. The girl could reduce me to babbling banality in any twenty-second space of time. “Then you know you’re to take down names and places?”
“My pen is right here, Sir, all ready.” I gave her a list, from B’russ’r B’dige through Ping Boom (she giggled) to a few police officers male and female. The Master, I knew without thinking about it, was going to have to interview the females, and try to get Robbin what she needed from them.
And the few important places as far as I knew them: the room where the manuscript had been, the lawn outside, the Berigot perches for that building. There would of course be more. I had the sudden lost feeling you get when you’ve forgotten something important, and added just in time my apartment and the stretch of street near the portable-wall shop. “Do you want me to see your apartment while you’re in it?” the breathless little voice asked.
I stared at the phone. “Do you do that now?” I said.
“Sometimes,” Robbin said. “For people I know a long time. The Master would have to come too, though, if you don’t mind, Sir.”
I nodded, and then said: “Fine. When?”
“An hour and a half, Sir?” she said. “I will call him, and then wait for him here.”
Robbin had improved out of all belief. “An hour and a half,” I said, and began to give her directions.
“Oh, Sir, don’t bother about that, please don’t trouble yourself,” the breathless voice said. “The Master will know, he’ll take me. Closed car, Sir, I really have done it before.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll see you both then.”
“Goodbye, Sir,” Robbin said, “and thank you so much again for thinking of me.”
Finished. It might be that the Master’s way of ending a phone talk had a point. I said goodbye politely, put the phone away and thought about refreshments. Coffee of course. And—
I had time for one fairly speedy shopping trip. Nobody shot at me.
CHAPTER SIX
And thirty-five minutes after I came back weary and heavy laden, as the Bible says, there they were, actually sitting in my living-room. The Master took his coffee black. Robbin Tress took hers with cream and sugar, as I did, and if something as small as that could have made me doubt the habits of a lifetime, little Robbin’s taste in coffee would have. I’d settled on a sort of local fruit-cake, sticks of hard cinnamon bread, a few cheeses, and some fruit, which turned out to be a mistake: plums, from what were advertised as actual descendants of actual Earth plum trees. They might have been—who am I to argue with advertising?—but if so, a great deal had happened to the family in the intervening centuries, all of it terrible.
Robbin was delighted by the exotic plums, which didn’t make up for the look that crossed Master Higsbee’s face when he bit into one. But the cake was good, the cheeses acceptable, and the coffee Indigo Hill, the emperor of coffees, from my own stock. And the talk rapidly became helpful.
“The first question, of course,” the Master said while refilling his cup, “was why the forgery had not been detected earlier. This is, after all, Ravenal. These people can be expected to know their business, and indeed they usually do. One notes the occasional exception, but one does not note many.”
“Maybe it just cost too much to find out,” Robbin said dreamily. I remembered just in time not to object, or to wonder where she’d gotten such a notion from. “Dreamily” was the key, of course; Robbin in that sort of tone was being Robbin.
A long time ago, back when there was real science-fiction, there was also a place called Boston, which was supposed to be stiff with tradition of several sorts. Maybe it was—at this distance how can anybody tell tradition from random habit? At any rate, the traditional Boston ladies, if that’s what they were, wore some perfectly terrible traditional Boston hats, and one day (according to an old story) somebody asked one such lady where she got her hats.
“In Boston,” she said, “we do not get our hats. We have our hats.”
Robbin did not get her ideas. She had her ideas. I had once described my two guests to an interested lovely to whom I was spinning a tale, and hoping for Othello’s satisfactions, if you remember (and there is no good reason why you should): if my lovely would only love me for the dangers I had passed, I was more than willing to love her in return, for she did pity them. Master Higsbee (I told the lovely, who was indeed fascinated, and if not wholly loving toward me, certainly in frenzied like) knew everything that could possibly be known. (That was perhaps just a touch exaggerated. Not really very much.) Robbin Tress knew the things that couldn’t possibly be known.
The people on Cub IV, where she’d been born and, so far as the phrase was applicable, brought up, looked on her as a sort
