Read Online The Long Result by John Brunner - Free Book Online Page A

suggestion Klabund had made – last night’s rocket crashmight have been sabotage – with knowledge of the fact that I’d come to the attention of the League which might well be responsible.
    Might!
I stressed the word to myself savagely. I’d be scared of shadows next.
    I got out of the tub in a depressed mood and went for fresh clothes. Just as I was dressed, the phone went, and it was Patricia calling. At once I forgot my worries – except that she might be annoyed at me for breaking our lunch date, unavoidable though that was.
    But she smiled at me and puckered her lips in a mock kiss close to the camera at her end, then drew back to reveal that she was wearing nothing but an enormous towel.
    ‘How are you, sweet?’
    ‘Better for seeing you,’ I said. ‘Look, about lunch —’
    ‘Oh, you don’t have to say sorry!’ Her eyes widened. ‘Jacky told me you had an urgent call away – out to the spaceport, I think he said.’
    ‘Yes, that’s right. I had to go and meet the Tau Cetians, and this wildcat of a female courier from Starhome.’
    ‘Running around with another woman, hey?’
    ‘She called me a damnfool Terran bureaucrat, if you
must
know.’
    Patricia burst out laughing and almost lost control of the towel. ‘Did you say you were meeting Tau Cetians? I thought they weren’t here yet – surely they’re the race the Starhomers found before we did?’
    ‘That’s right.’ I summarized the day’s events.
    ‘Well, I’m glad you didn’t have any worse trouble,’ she said finally. ‘Did you manage to find room in the Ark for these aliens?’
    ‘Oh yes, there was no problem there.’
    ‘I’ll look out for them, then. I pass the Ark on my way to work. Would I see them from the road?’
    ‘No, they’re in G Block, round the back of the site. Tonight I shall think of them all snug in bed or whatever they do, and I shall say, “There but for a kindly Mother Nature go I”’.
    ‘Wouldn’t you like to be a Tau Cetian?’ Patricia teased.
    ‘Of course not. I’d hate to be any kind of alien – principally because if I was an alien I’d find you repulsive, and that would be ridiculous.’
    ‘You say the nicest things, Roald – when you remember. Are you coming here to pick me up before we go to Jacky’s?’
    ‘I’d love to. Maybe you hadn’t better bother getting dressed …?’
    ‘If that was how you wanted to spend the evening, you ought not to have let Jacky invite us.’ She was chuckling. ‘No, come around at nineteen-fifteen and you’ll find me party-smart.’
    ‘Pity,’ I sighed. ‘Well – there’s always afterwards, isn’t there?’

9
    As things turned out, when I’d finished saying hullo she had to make herself smart all over again – not that she seemed to object to the extra trouble – and we eventually got to the party half an hour late. Madeleine Demba met us at the door: a slender, very pretty woman older than Jacky, of Dutch and Indonesian extraction. They had folded back most of the ground-floor walls, so that Jacky, mixing drinks at a liquor console the far side of the living area, caught sight of us as we came in.
    ‘You’re late!’ he shouted. ‘But don’t worry, you’re not thelast. Anovel hasn’t arrived – I told him to come at twenty, give everyone else a chance to get acquainted before he turns up to monopolise our attention. Drink?’
    As he’d promised, this was a fairly small gathering. I knew two of the others already: one was Helga Micallef, who worked in the Bureau’s biochemical section, and the other was Jack’s ten-year-old daughter Janna, busy being on her best behaviour with a pale young man in the far corner.
    Then, while Jacky was fussing around Patricia as he always did with attractive women guests, I realized that there was someone else here I ought to recognize. A man in a formal evening tweed suit.
    Suddenly the tweeds melted in imagination into the red of spacecrew uniform, and I identified him as the navigation officer