Day After Tomorrow

XVIII

Driving back to the office, Larry let it pile up on him.

Ernest Self had been a specialist in solid fuel for rockets. Professor Voss had particularly stressed his indignation about Professor Goddard, the rocket pioneer, and how he had been treated by his contemporaries. Frank Nostrand had been employed as a technician on rocket research at Madison Air Laboratories. It was too damn much for coincidence.

And now something else that had been nagging away at the back of his head suddenly came clear.

Susan Self had said that she and her father had seen the precision dancers at the New Roxy Theater in New York and later the Professor had said they were going to spend the money on chorus girls. Susan had got it wrong. The Rockettes—the precision chorus girls. The Professor had said they were going to expend their money on rockets, and Susan had misunderstood.

But billions of dollars, counterfeit dollars at that, expended on rockets? How? But, above all, to what end? How could that possibly help the Movement?

As Ilya Simonov had said, Professor Voss and his people were hardly capable of bombing Greater Washington or whatever. Weirds they all might be but they weren’t homicidal maniacs.

If he’d only been able to hold onto Susan, or her father; or to Voss or Nostrand, for that matter. Someone to work on. But each had slipped through his fingers.

Which brought something else up from his subconscious. Something which had been nagging at him. He pondered it for awhile, coming up with semi-answers.

At the office, Irene Day was packing her things as he entered. Packing as though she was leaving for good.

“What goes on?” Larry growled, rounding his desk and seating himself. “I’m going to be needing you more than ever. Things are coming to a head.”

She said, a bit snippishly, Larry thought, “Miss Polk, in the Boss’ office said for you to see her as soon as you came in, Mr. Woolford. She also gave me instructions to return to the secretary’s pool for reassignment.”

“Oh?” he said mystified.

He made his way to LaVerne’s office, his attention actually on the ideas still churning in his mind.

She looked up when he entered and there was something in her face he didn’t quite understand.

“Hi, Larry,” she said, flicking off the phone screen, in her bank of phone screens, into which she had been talking.

Larry said, “The Boss wanted to see me?”

LaVerne ducked her head, as though embarrassed. “Well, not exactly, Larry.”

He gestured with his thumb in the direction of his own cubicle office. “Irene just said you wanted to see me. She also said she was being pulled off her assignment with me, which is ridiculous. I’m just getting used to her. I don’t want to have to break in another girl.”

LaVerne looked up into his face. “The Boss and Mr. Foster, too, are boiling about your authorizing that Distelmayer man to bill this department for information he gave you. The Boss hit the roof. Something about the Senate Appropriations Committee getting down on him if it came out that we bought information from professional espionage agents, particularly material that this department is supposed to ferret out on its own.”

Larry said, “It was information we needed and needed quickly, and Foster gave me the go ahead on locating Ilya Simonov. Maybe I’d better go in and see the Boss and explain the whole damned mess. I’ve got some other stuff I have to report to him, anyway.”

LaVerne said, and there was apology in her voice, “I don’t think he wants to see you, Larry. They’re up to their ears in this Movement thing. It’s in the papers now and nobody knows what to do next. The department is beginning to become a laughing stock, which is probably one of the things the Movement wanted to accomplish. The President is going to make a speech on Tri-Di, and the Boss has to supply the information for the speech writers. His orders are for you to resume your vacation and to take a full month off and then see him when you get back.”

Larry sank down into a chair. “I see,” he breathed. “And at that time he’ll probably give me an assignment to mop out the men’s room.”

“Larry,” LaVerne said, almost impatiently, “why in the world didn’t you take that job Walt Foster has now when the Boss offered it to you?”

“Because I’m stupid, I suppose,” Larry said bitterly. “I thought I could do more working alone in the field than at an administrative post tangled in red tape and bureaucratic routine. If I’d taken the job I could now be slitting Walt’s throat instead of his slitting mine.”

She said, “Sorry, Larry.” And she sounded as though she really meant it.

Larry stood up. “Well, tonight I’m going to hang one on, and tomorrow it’s back to Astor, Florida and the bass fishing.” He added, in a rush, “Look, LaVerne, how about that date we’ve been talking about for six months or more?”

She looked up at him, question in her eyes, wary question. “I can’t stand vodka martinis.”

“Neither can I,” he said glumly.

“And I don’t get a kick out of prancing around, a stuffed shirt among stuffed shirts, at some going-on that supposedly improves my culture status.”

Larry said, “At the house, I have every known brand of drinkable, and a stack of… what did you call it?… corny music. We can mix our own drinks and dance all by ourselves. I even know some old time swing steps.”

She tucked her head to one side and looked at him suspiciously. “Are your intentions honorable? A nice girl doesn’t go to a man’s home, all alone.”

“We can even discuss that later,” he said sourly. “How about it, LaVerne? You can help me drown my sorrows.”

She laughed. “It’s a date, Larry.”

He picked her up after work and they drove to his Brandywine district auto-bungalow, and both of them remained largely quiet the whole way.

He didn’t even comment when she said, “Walt Foster requested today that I locate him a new apartment in the Druid Hill section of Baltimore. It will double his rent, but I assume that he is expecting a raise.”

At one point she touched his hand with hers and said, “It’ll work out, Larry. Things have a way of always working out. It might even turn out for the best.”

“Yeah,” he said sourly. “I’ve put ten years into ingratiating myself with the Boss. Now, overnight, he’s got a new boy. I suppose there’s some moral involved.”

When they pulled up before his auto-bungalow, LaVerne whistled appreciatively. “Quite a neighborhood you’re in Larry. It must set you back considerably.”

He grunted. “A good address. What our friend Professor Voss would call one more status symbol, one more social label. For it, I pay about fifty percent more than my budget can afford.”

He ushered her inside and took her jacket.

“Look,” he said, indicating his living room with a sweep of his hand. “See that volume of Klee reproductions there next to my reading chair? That proves I’m not a weird. Indicates my culture status. Actually, my appreciation of modern art doesn’t go any further than the Impressionists. But don’t tell anybody. See those books up on my shelves? Same thing. You’ll find everything there that ought to be on the shelves of any ambitious young career man.”

She looked at him from the side of her eyes. “You’re really soured, Larry. As long as I’ve known you I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you so bitter.”

“Come along,” he said. “I want to show you something. An inkling of just how bitter I can be.”

He took her down the tiny elevator to his den. Off hand, he couldn’t remember twenty people being down here in the five or six years he had lived in this house.

He said, “You’re unique, LaVerne. You’re the only girl I’ve ever shown my inner secrets to.”

“Well, thank you,” she said, not knowing exactly what sort of response was expected of her. “What are you going to do, beat me with whips?”

He ignored her attempt at levity, as though he hadn’t heard it. “How hypocritical can you get?” he asked her. “This is where I really live. But I seldom bring anyone down here. Except a couple of poker-playing pals such as Sam Sokolski over on the Sun-Times. We went to college together. I’m afraid to have anybody down here, except people as close as Sam. I wouldn’t want to get a reputation as a weird, would I? Sit down, LaVerne. Ill make you a drink. How about a Sidecar?”

She said, “I’d love one. Hey, I like this room. It looks, well, lived in. Are you sure you’ve never had a woman down here before, young man?”

“Quite sure,” he said wearily. “When I have a woman in my home we go through the usual bit, upstairs. Everything is the latest, from wherever the latest is from. And we usually wind up on the waterbed up above, from Finland. Why waterbeds have a status symbol when they come from Finland, I don’t know. But they do. Frankly, I hate water-beds.”

She was laughing a bit. “You mean you act the cad when you seduce a young lady to come to your home?”

He said, “I don’t have to. It’s all the thing, these days, if you have status labels, and she has status labels of approximately the same level, to climb into bed with each other, after a few vodka martinis.”

His back to her, he brought forth brandy and Cointreau from his liquor cabinet, and lemon and ice from the tiny refrigerator. He also surreptitiously dropped a small white pill into one of the glasses.

She had kicked her shoes off and now tucked her legs under her, making a very attractive picture on the couch where she had sat herself.

“What?” she said accusingly. “No auto-bar? I thought an auto-bar was mandatory these days. How could an ambitious young bureaucrat get by without an auto-bar?”

Larry measured out ingredients efficiently and then stirred the drink briskly, until the shaker was frosted. “Upstairs with the rest of my status symbols,” he said, pouring carefully into the champagne-sized glasses. “Down here, I live, up there, I conform.” He took one of the drinks over to her, kept the other for himself.

He put his glass down on the cocktail table before her and went over to the tape recorder. She sipped the drink, appreciatively, and looked over at him. “My, you really can mix a cocktail. I haven’t had anything as good as this for ages.”

“These days bartenders don’t have to know how to make anything but vodka martinis,” he said bitterly. “That’s my own version of a Sidecar.” He looked at his collection of tapes. “In the way of corny music, how do you like that old timer, Nat Cole?”

“King Cole? I love him,” LaVerne said, taking another pull at her Sidecar.

He placed a tape in the recorder and activated it. The strains of “For All We Know” penetrated the room. Larry turned it low and then went over and sat down next to her. He picked up his drink from the cocktail table before them and finished half of it in one swallow.

“I’m beginning to wonder whether or not this Movement doesn’t have something,” he said.

She didn’t answer that. They sat in silence for a while, appreciating the drink and the music. Nat Cole was singing “The Very Thought of You,” now. Larry got up and made two more of the cocktails and returned with them. This time when he regained his seat next to her, he idly put an arm around her shoulders.

He said, “Did anyone ever tell you that you are a very pretty girl?”

LaVerne didn’t resist. In fact, her breath seemed to be coming in little pants. She looked at him, her eyes a bit wide. “Not for a long time,” she said. “It seems that in this day and age, men steer clear of girls who don’t conform.” Her voice trembled a little.

Larry put a finger under her chin and bent over and kissed her very gently. Her lips seemed hot. She responded enthusiastically. It hardly seemed like the prim, sharp-tongued LaVerne Polk. Evidently, the gentleness of his kiss wasn’t called for.

He continued to kiss her, and put his right hand over one of her breasts. He could feel through the clothing that the nipple was already hard. She had ample breasts. He wondered how she looked in a bathing suit—or out of one, for that matter. She was probably stacked like a brick outhouse. She squirmed, but not in rejection. In fact, she pressed her mouth to his more firmly and opened her lips.

He let his hand go down to her knee, received no protest, and slid it up under her dress. She pretended to ignore it, continuing the hotness of her kisses.

He stopped kissing her long enough to say, “You’re a virgin, LaVerne?”

She had her eyes closed. “Yes… yes, I am,” she managed to get out. “I… hope you don’t mind. Please, darling, don’t stop. Don’t stop now.”

He kissed her again, stretched her out on the king-size couch and reached up and flicked the light to very dim.

She lay there, panting, and evidently a bit apprehensive, in spite of her passion. He folded her skirt up to her hips, took off her shoes, and gently pulled down her briefs. She made no protest whatsoever, indeed moved to help him in the rearranging of her clothing.

He tossed the panties to the floor and bent over her expertly for a moment. She squirmed and her breath became a series of gasps.

He sat erect for a moment and unzipped his fly…

He performed with her three times in all, finally deciding that she had reached saturation. Surely, he had. If she was not now completely relaxed, there was nothing he could do about it.

He rearranged their clothing, pulling her skirt back over her knees, and sat there on the couch with her, his arm affectionately over her shoulders. He reached up and flicked the lamp back to greater intensity; not to full brightness, but enough that he would be able to study her face. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes.