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as I can spare only a few minutes.
Mervyn Alien, Chateau d'lf."
Mario waited a moment till Slade looked up from his writing. "Type that out,"
he said. "Hand it to
Roland Mario at about nine-thirty tonight"
CHAPTER X
New Bodies for Old
Restlessly Mario paced the floor, pudgy hands clasped behind his back. Tonight
would see the fruit of a year's racking toil with brain and imagination.
Tonight, with luck, he would shed the hateful
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identity of Ralston Ebery. He thought of Louis Correaos. Poor Louis, and Mario
shook his head.
What would happen to Louis' Airfarer? And Letya Arnold? Would he go back out
into Tanagra Square to lurk and hiss as Ralston Ebery sauntered pompously
past?
He called the Aetherian Block, got put through to Louis Correaos. "How's
everything, Louis?"
"Going great We're all tooled up, be producing next week **
"How's Arnold?"
Correaos screwed up his face. "Ebery, you'll think I'm as crazy as Arnold. But
he can fly faster than light," "What?"
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"Last Thursday night he wandered into the office. He acted mysterious, told me
to follow him. I
went. He took me up to his observatory-just a window at the sky where he's got
a little proton magniscope. He focused it, told me to look. I looked, saw a
disk-a dull dark disk about as large as a full moon. 'Pluto,' said Arnold. 'In
about ten minutes, there'll be a little white flash on the left-hand side.'
"How do you know?"
"I set off a flare a little over six hours ago. The light should be reaching
there about now."
"I gave him a queer look, but I kept my eye glued on the image, and sure
enough-there it was, a little spatter of white light "Now watch,' he says,
'there'll be a red one.' And he's right.
There's a red light." Correaos shook his big sandy head. "Ebery, I'm
convinced. He's got me believing him."
Mario said in a toneless voice, "Put him on, Louis, if you can find him."
After a minute or so Letya Arnold's peaked face peered out of the screen.
Mario said leadenly, "Is this true, Arnold? That you're flying faster than
light?"
Arnold said peevishly, "Of course it's true, why shouldn't it be true?"
"How did you do it?"
"Just hooked a couple of electron-pushers on to one of your high-altitude
aircars. Nothing else. I
just turned on the juice. The hook-up breaks blazing fury out of the universe.
There's no acceleration, no momentum, nothing. Just speed, speed, speed,
speed. Puts the stars within a few days' run, I've always told you, and you
said I was crazy." His face wrenched, gall burnt at his tongue. "I'll never
see them, Ebery, and you're to blame. I'm a dead man. I saw Pluto, I wrote my
name on the ice, and that's how I'll be known."
He vanished from the screen. Correaos returned. "He's a goner," said Correaos
gruffly. "He had a hemorrhage last night. There'll be just one more-his last."
Mario said in a far voice, 'Take care of him, Louis. Because tomorrow I'm
afraid maybe things will be different."
"What do you mean-different?"
"Ralston Ebery's disposition might suffer a relapse."
"God forbid."
Mario broke the connection, went back to his pacing, but now he paced slower,
and his eyes saw nothing of where he walked....
Mario called a bellboy. "See that young man in the tan jacket by the Cambodian
Pillar?"
"Yes, sir."
"Give him this note."
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"Yes, sir."
Ralston Ebery had put loose flesh on Mario's body. Pouches hung under the
eyes, the mouth was loose, wet. Mario sweated in a sudden heat of pure anger.
The swine, debauching a sound body, unused to the filth Ebery's brain would
invent!
Ebery read the note, looked up and down the lobby. Mario had already gone.
Ebery, following the instructions, turned down the corridor toward the
air-baths, moving slowly, indecisively.
He came to a door marked Private, which stood ajar. He knocked.
"Alien, are you there? What's this all about?"
"Come in," said Mario.
Ebery cautiously shoved his head through the door. Mario yanked him forward,
slapped a hand-hypo at Ebery's neck. Ebery struggled, kicked, quivered,
relaxed. Mario shut the door.
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"Get up," said Mario. Ebery rose to his feet, docile, glassy-eyed. Mario took
him through the back door, up in the elevator, up to Level 900, the Chateau
d'lf.
"Sit down, don't move," said Mario. Ebery sat like a barnacle.
Mario made a careful reconnaissance. This time of night Mervyn Alien should be
through for the day.
Alien was just finishing a transposition. Mario watched as he pushed the two
recumbent forms into the outer waiting room, and then he trailed Alien to his
living quarters, watched while he shed his clothes, jumped into a silk jerkin,
ready for relaxation or sport with his flower-pretty blonde girl.
The coast was clear. Mario returned to where Ebery sat "Stand up, and follow
me."
Back down the secret corridors inside the ventilation ducts, and now the
laboratory was empty.
Mario lifted a hasp, pulled back one of the pressed-wood wall panels.
"Go in," he said. "Lie down on that couch." Ebery obeyed. Mario wheeled him
across the room to the racked putty-colored brainmolds, wheeled over another
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