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Door with no baggage, not even such comforters as Job had, no, not even
burdened by belief. For Egtverchi would surely pass. He was as good as
free--and closer to being a citizen in good standing than Ruiz himself.
XII
Egtverchi's coming-out party was held at the underground mansion of Lucien le
Comte des Bois-
d'Averoigne, a fact which greatly complicated the already hysterical life of
Aristide, the countess'
caterer. Ordinarily, such a party would have presented Aristide with no
problems reaching far beyond the technical ones with which he was already
familiar, and used to drive the staff to that
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A Case Of Conscience, by James Blish frantic peak which he regarded as the
utmost in efficiency; but planning for the additional presence of a ten-foot
monster was an affront to his conscience as well as to his artistry.
Aristide--born Michel di Giovanni in the timeless brutal peasantry of
un-Sheltered Sicily--was a dramatist who knew well the intricate stage upon
which he had to work. The count's New York mansion was many levels deep. The
part of it in which the party was being held protruded one storey above the
surface of Manhattan, as though the buried part of the city were coming out of
hibernation--or not quite finished digging in for it. The structure had been a
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carbarn, Aristide had discovered, a dismal block-square red brick building
which had been put up in 1887 when cable street cars had been the newest and
most hopeful addition to the city's circulatory system. The trolley tracks,
with their middle division for the cable grips, were still there in the
asphalt floor, with only a superficial coating of rust--steel does not rust
appreciably in less than two centuries.
In the center of the top storey was a huge old steam elevator with a
basketwork shaft, which had once been used to tower the trolley cars below
ground for storage. There were more tracks in the basement and sub-basement,
whose elaborate switches led toward the segments of rail in the huge elevator
cab. Aristide had been stunned when he first encountered this underlying
blueprint, but he had promptly put it to good use.
The countess' parties, thanks to his genius, were now confined in their most
formal phase to the uppermost of these three levels, but Aristide had
installed a serpentine of fourteen two-chair cars which wound its way sedately
along the trolley tracks, picking up as passengers those who were already
bored with nothing but chatter and drinking, and rumbled onto the elevator to
be taken down--with a great hissing and a cloud of rising steam, for the
countess was a stickler for surface authenticity in antiques--to the next
level, where presumably more interesting things were happening. As a
dramatist, Aristide also knew his audience: it was his job to provide that
whatever was seen on the next levels was more interesting than what had been
going on above.
And he knew his dramatis personae, too: he knew more about the countess'
regular guests than they knew about themselves, and much of his knowledge
would have been decidedly destructive had he been the talkative type.
Aristide, however, was an artist; he did not bribe; the notion was as
unthinkable to him as plagiarism (except, of course, self-plagiarism; that was
how you kept going during slumps.) Finally, as an artist, Aristide knew his
patroness: he knew her to the point where he could judge just how many parties
had to pass by before he could chance repeating an
Effect, a Scene or a Sensation.
But what could you do with a ten-foot reptilian kangaroo? From where he stood
in a discrete pillared alcove on the above-ground entrance floor, Aristide
watched the early guests filtering in from the reception room to the formal
cocktail party, one of his favorite anachronisms, and one which the countess
seemed prepared to allow him to repeat year after year. It required very
little apparatus, but the most absurd and sub-lethal concoctions, and even
more absurd costumes on the part of both staff and guests. The nice rigidity
of the costumes provided a pleasant contrast to the
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A Case Of Conscience, by James Blish of the psyche which the drinks quickly
induced.
Thus far, there were only the early comers: here, Senator Sharon, waggling her
oversize eyebrows in wholesome cheeriness at the remaining guests,
ostentatiously refusing drinks, secure in the knowledge that her good friend
Aristide had provided for her below five strong young men no one of whom she
had ever seen before; there, Prince William of East Orange, a young man whose
curse was that he had no vices, and who came again and again to ride the
serpentine in hopes of discovering one that he liked; and, nearby, Dr. Samuel
P. Shovel, M. D., a jovial, red-
cheeked, white-haired man who was the high priest of psichonetology, "the New
Science of the
Id," and a favorite of Aristide's, since he was easy to provide for--he was
fundamentally nothing more complicated than a bottom-pincher.
Faulkner, the head butler, was approaching Aristide stiffly from the left.
Ordinarily, Faulkner ran the countess' household like an oriental despot, but
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he was no longer in control while Aristide was on the premises.
"Shall I order in the embryos in wine?" Faulkner said.
"Don't be such a blind, stupid fool," Aristide said. He had learned his first
English from sentimental 3-C 'casts, which gave his ordinary conversation
decidedly odd overtones; he was well aware of it, and these days it was one of
his principal weapons for driving his underlings, who could not tell when he
said these things dispassionately from when he was really angry. "Go below,
Faulkner. I'll call you when I need you--if I do."
Faulkner bowed slightly and vanished. Fuming mildly at the interruption,
Aristide resumed his survey of the early comers. In addition to the regulars,
there was, of course, the countess, who had posed him no special problems yet.
Her gilded make-up was still unmussed and the mobiles in the little caves
Stefano had contrived in her hair spun placidly or blinked their diamond eyes.
Then there were the sponsors of the Lithian monster into Shelter society, Dr.
Michelis and Dr.
Meid; these two might present special problems, for he had been unable to find
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