His Brother's Weeper

The Deserializing Room at Cincinnati Spaceport was, Peter Martlett thought, a little on the bleak side. It was no more than twenty feet square, illuminated by a single hooded fluorobulb, and was bare of all ornament. In the center of the floorspace stood the awesome bulk of the Henderson Deserializer. Two white-smocked technicians flanked staring eagerly at Martlett, who had just entered. Behind him sounded the noisy hum of the waiting room he had quitted. There was a lot of deserializing going on today.

“Mr. Martlett?”

Martlett nodded tensely. He was more than a little leery of submitting himself to the Deserializer, especially after what had happened to his brother Michael. But the travel-agency people had assured him that that had been a fluke, one-in-a-million, one-in-a-billion—

“May we have your passport?” said the thinner and more efficient looking of the two technicians. Martlett surrendered it, along with his accident claim waiver, his identification ticket, his departure permit, and the pre-stamped entrance visa that would allow him to visit Marathon, where his brother had gone to a hideous death the month before.

Heads almost touching, the pair of them riffled quickly through Martlett’s papers, nodded in agreement, and gestured for him to take a seat in the Deserializer. One of the technicians produced a dark enameled square bn a foot on each side and proceeded to attach Martlett’s documents to it with stickons. Moistening his lips, Martlett watched. In a very few minutes, he knew, he himself would be inside the box.

The other deserializing technician strapped Martlett firmly into the Deserializer and lowered a metal cone over his head. In a soothing voice he said, “Of course you understand the approximate nature of the Deserializei, sir—”

“Yes, I—”

Ignoring the outburst, the technician continued what was obviously a memorized speech delivered before each departure. “The Henderson Deserializer makes possible instantaneous traffic between stars. The deserializing field induces distortion of the four coordinate axes of your worldline, removing you temporarily from contact with the temporal axis and—for convenience in storage—somewhat compressing you along the three spatial axes.”

“You mean I’ll be put in that little box?”

“Exactly, sir. You and your luggage will enter this container and you will be placed aboard a spaceship bound for the planet of your destination. Ah—Marathon, I believe. Although the journey to Marathon requires two hundred eighty-three objective years, for you it will be a matter of seconds—since, of course, on your arrival you will enter another deserializing field that will restore you to your temporal axis at a point only seconds after you had left t on Earth!”

“In short,” the other technician chimed in, “you enter a box here, are shipped to Marathon, and are unpacked there—total elapsed time, ten seconds. If you choose to return to Earth immediately on arrival, you could do that. If you felt like it, you could make nearly thirty round trips a minute, eighteen hundred an hour—”

“If I could afford it,” Martlett said dryly. The round trip fare was nine hundred units, and it was making a considerable dent in his savings. But, of course, the Colonial Government of Marathon had asked him to make the trip, to settle his brother’s unfinished affairs. And the shock of Michael’s tragic death had been such that he had agreed at once to make the trip.

“Heh heh,” chuckled the technician. “To be sure, eighteen hundred round trips would be on the costly side! Heh heh heh—”

The two technicians chuckled harmoniously, all the while bustling round Martlett and making adjustments in the complex network of dials and levers that hemmed him in on all sides. He was just beginning to get annoyed at all the laughter when—

Whick!

—he found himself lying on a plush, well-padded couch in a room walled mostly with curving glass. The sun was in his eyes—bluish-purple sunlight. Green-tinted clouds drifted lazily in the auburn sky. Two smiling technicians in sheen-gray coveralls were nodding at him in smug satisfaction.

“Welcome to Marathon, Mr. Martlett.”

Martlett licked his lips. “I’m here?”

“You are. Transshipped from Cincinnati Spaceport, Earth, aboard the good ship Venus. Today is the 11th of April, 2209, Galactic Standard Time.”

“The same day I left Earth!”

“Of course, Mr. Martlett, of course! The Henderson Deserializer—”

“Yes, yes, I know,” Martlett interjected hastily, forestalling yet another rendition of the Information for Travelers Speech. “I fully understand the process.” He looked around. “I’m here on request of your Secretary for Internal Affairs, Mr. Jansen. It’s about my brother—”

The word was ill-chosen. It triggered a strong reaction in the two deserializer men. They coughed and reddened and glanced obliquely over Martlett’s head as if they were very embarrassed. Martlett pressed on undisturbed. “My brother Michael, who was a colonist here until his unfortunate death in a Deserializer accident last month. Do you know where I can find the secre—”

“He’s waiting outside to see you,” said the short technician with the swerving nose.

“And we wish to assure you that this office has been cleared of all responsibility in the matter of your brother’s—ah—disappearance,” put in the tall one with the unconvincing yellow toupee.

Martlett stared at them sourly. “I’m not here to press charges,” he said. “Just to settle my late brother’s affairs.”

He rose, feeling a bit stiff around the knees. Not surprising, he thought, considering he had just spent two hundred eighty-three objective years in an enameled box one foot square. Gathering up his papers, he stepped out into the antechamber, discovering as he walked that Marathon’s gravity was only about two-thirds that of Earth. It was all he could do to keep himself from skipping. Skipping, he thought, would hardly look decorous on a man whose beloved brother had gone to an untimely death only five Galactic Standard Weeks before.

The Marathonian Secretary for Internal Affairs introduced himself as Octavian Jansen, a fact Martlett already knew. He was a tall, stoop-shouldered man of dignified appearance and middle age. His office, he said, was within walking distance of the Arrivals Center, and so they walked there. Martlett enjoyed the springy sensation of walking at two-thirds gray. He threw his head back, breathing in the clean, fresh air. Overhead, colorful birds wheeled and screeched playfully. Swaying palmoid trees lined the streets. Marathon, Michael had often written to him, was nothing more or less than a paradise. Fertile soil, extravagantly satisfactory climate, no native carnivorous life forms bigger than caninoids and felinoids, and the women!

Yes, the women! Michael had always had a good eye for the women, Martlett reflected.

Jansen’s office was handsomely furnished. A brace of hunting trophies loomed on one wall, great lowering massive purple-skinned trihorned heads: Marathon’s largest life form, the ponderous, herbivorous, harmless hippopotamoids. Sleek freeform chairs faced the freeform onyx-topped desk. Martlett pulled one up.

Jansen said, “May I remark that you look astonishingly like your late brother, Mr. Martlett?”

“Many people thought we were twins.”

“You are the older brother?”

“By three years. I’m 30. Michael is—was—27.”

For a moment Jansen’s eyes dropped respectfully. “Your brother was very popular here, Mr. Martlett. From the day he joined our colony two years ago, he was a leader of the community. And I needn’t tell you how much we admired his music! Only next month our local symphony orchestra was to have presented an all-Martlett concert: the Second Symphony, the Theremin Concerto, and a piece for strings and synthesizer called simply Amor.”

Martlett nodded. Michael’s success here was part of an old story. Michael, no more handsome than he, no taller and no more muscular, had always been the gregarious brother, surrounded by admirers and adored by women. While he, Peter, the older brother and presumably the wiser, was instead regarded as a sort of bumbling foster uncle, not too clever, who needed help in all he undertook. And so it had gone. In a world where a serious composer stood no chance at all against the symphonic computers, Michael had won indelible musical fame at the age of twenty-three. Two years later, he had pocketed a fat fellowship and departed for the pleasant world of Marathou to continue his composing, far from the jarring dissonances of Terran life.

And now, at twenty-seven, he was dead. The older brother, shy, uncertain Peter, had the task of gathering together the reins Michael had abruptly dropped, collecting his belongings, settling his debts.

“Has the concert been cancelled?” Martlett asked.

“Oh, no,” Jansen said. “It’s being done as a memorial. Your brother was to have conducted himself, but we’ve hired someone else. It’s to be given on the fifteenth of May. I do hope you’ll attend.”

“Sorry,” Martlett said brusquely. “I wasn’t planning to stay on Marathon more than a week or two—just long enough to do whatever needs to be done about Michael’s affairs. By the middle of May I’ll be back on Earth, I’m afraid.”

“As you wish, of course.” Jansen shrugged mournfully. “I’ve taken the liberty of assembling a portfolio of bills that your brother left unpaid at the time of his death.”

Martlett took the bulky folder from him and opened it. The uppermost bill was from the Marathon Deserialized Instantaneous Transportation Corporation: 110 units charged for a journey from Marathon to the neighboring world of Thermopylae, ten units down and six months to pay.

“I hardly think this bill needs to be paid,” Martlett said, nudging it across the desk to Jansen.

The secretary looked at it, flushed, and said quickly, “Ah—of course not—an error, Mr. Martlett—”

An error indeed, Martlett thought. That journey had never been completed. Michael had entered the Deserializer on Marathon, and ostensibly was to have arrived on Thermopylae, ninety million miles away, almost at once. But the Deserializer box had been empty when it reached Thermopylae. Somewhere in mid-journey Michael had disappeared, his compressed and deserialized body shunted off irrevocably into some parallel continuum, into that dark bourn from which no traveler returns.

The law in such cases—they were one-in-a-billion occurrences—was plain. The missing party was to be considered legally dead. No one had ever returned who had disappeared in mid-jaunt via Deserializer.

Martlett thumbed through the rest of the bills. They were small ones, but there were plenty of them—a heavy liquor tab, five florists’ bills, an invoice from a men’s clothier and a larger one from a woman’s outfitter, and so on. Evidently Michael had not lost his old touch with the women, Martlett thought.

The total, he computed roughly, was in the vicinity of three thousand units. He could afford the outlay; the royalties from Michael’s music, whose performance rights he had automatically inherited, would reimburse him soon enough.

“Very well,” Martlett said. “I’ll take care of all these matters right away. Now, if there are any other—”

“Yes,” Jansen said gravely. “I believe you should know there was a woman. A—well—ah—your brother’s—fiancée.”

“His what? Why, Michael used to swear day and night he’d never let himself get trapped into marrying!”

“Be that as it may, this woman claims he made a definite promise to her. I think you ought to pay a call on her—ah—in the interests of good form, you know.”

Her name was Sondra Bullard. Martlett went to visit her that evening, after he had finished installing himself in his brother’s palmoid-ringed fourteen-room villa. She lived half a continent away—Marathon was somewhat on the sprawling side—and Martlett found it necessary to charter an aircab to get there.

Sondra Bullard’s dwelling was modest compared to I chael’s—a ranch-type affair that rambled over a few acres of grassy meadow at the foot of a handsome plunging waterfall. A gleaming jetcar jutted from the open garage. Martlett wondered in passing if Michael had bought her these things. He had always been extravagant.

Feeling a little uneasy, Martlett strode up the flagstoned walk and stepped into the green scanner field that glowed round the door. A chime sounded within, calling Miss Bullard’s attention to the fact that she had a visitor; a moment went by, and then a piercing shriek was distinctly audible.

Martlett felt perspiration begin to bead his forehead. Before he could give way completely to alarm and turn to run, the front door opened and Miss Sondra Bullard peered out at him. She was dressed unsurprisingly in black, and her face was astonishingly pale. She was also, Martlett noted, quite lovely. Michael’s taste had always been impeccable.

“You’re—Michael’s—brother?”

“That’s right. Peter Martlett. I called earlier, you remember.”

“Yes. Won’t you come in?” She spoke mechanically, chopping each word off into an individual sentence.

Once he was inside she said, “You—look very much like your brother, you know.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“I was frightened when I saw your image in the scanner field.” She laughed in self-deprecation. “I guess I thought it was Michael at the door. Silly of me, but you two did look so much alike. Were you twins?”

“I was three years the elder.”

“Oh.”

After a few lame moments of silence the girl said, “Drink?”

“Yes, please. Something mild.”

She dialed a filtered rum for him and a stiff highball for herself. While he sipped, Martlett surreptitiously looked around. A lot of cash had been tossed into these furnishings, and it seemed to him he recognized his brother’s fine hand—and money—in the decorating scheme. He felt a momentary current of anger; this girl, he thought, had been milking Michael!

Oh, no, came the immediate inner denial. Michael had been nobody’s fool. He wasn’t susceptible to gold-digging.

Hesitantly Martlett said, “Secretary Jansen was telling me you knew Michael quite well.”

“We were engaged,” she said immediately.

Since he had been warned, Martlett was able to avoid the double take. “Odd, Michael never wrote to me about it. Had you know him long?”

“Six months. We became engaged nine weeks ago. We were supposed to be married the first week in June.” Her lower lip trembled a bit. “And then—I got the phone call—they told me—”

A tear rolled down her lovely cheek, and she dabbed at it. Martlett felt uncomfortable. Why, this was almost like paying a call on a new widow! She was in mourning and all.

He said, “I know how you must feel, Miss—ah—Miss Bullard. Michael was a wonderful person—so dynamic, so full of life—”

“And now he’s gone!” she wailed. “Poof! Vanished off into some other continuum, they told me! Living on some horrible world without air somewhere, maybe!”

“They say it’s a quick and painless way to die,” Martlett ventured. The words did not soothe her.

The single tear became a torrent; her well-equipped bosom heaved with convulsive sobs. Watching her, Martlett’s lips twitched in dismay. Open display of emotion had always been a tribulation for him to witness. He himself felt grief at his brother’s passing, certainly, but he had never given way to—to this—

But the sobbing became contagious. “I loved him,” she moaned. “And he’s gone! Gone!” She groped out blindly, fumbled her way onto his shoulder, and let her emotions go. Martlett felt his eyes growing misty at the thought of this girl who had built her whole life around his undeniably remarkable brother, and who now faced nothing but emptiness. Before he knew it, he was crying too.

They sobbed on each other’s shoulders for a few moments; then, the fit passing, they straightened up and looked at each other. Her gray eyes were red-rimmed.

“You’re so much like him,” she murmured. “So tall, so handsome, so—understanding.”

He felt his face reddening, and nervously moistened his lips. The grief had seemed to fade from her features, and now some other emotion took its place—an emotion Martlett, in thirty years of bachelorhood, had come to recognize with an expert’s skill.

Disengaging himself from her, he rose. “I’ll have to leave you now, Miss Bullard. It’s been a difficult day for me, you understand. But I’ll try to see you again before I return to Earth. We’ve both lost someone very dear to us. Good night, Miss Bullard.”

“Why don’t you call me Sondra.”

He smiled uneasily. “Good night—Sondra.”

“Good night, Peter.”

Martlett slept that night in his brother’s bed, which was a palatial triple-size monstrosity with a pink velvet canopy and a soothing built-in tranquilophone. Martlett found the murmuring wordless sounds of the tranquilophone distracting, but there was no way to shut the thing off, and finally he fell asleep despite it. He dreamed odd dreams and woke feeling unrefreshed in the morning.

Michael’s robot butler had prepared a meal for him, Martlett discovered. He wondered whether the robot was aware that the person in the house was not his master. Probably not; so far as the robot was concerned, the human of the house looked like Mr. Martlett, answered to the name, and therefore was Mr. Martlett. That he was the wrong Mr. Martlett did not seem to matter. Robot brains were not geared to such niceties.

Martlett ate thoughtfully, taking his meal on the veranda overlooking Michael’s private lake. Sweet-smelling morning breezes drifted toward him. Michael had written that “it is springtime all the year round on Marathon,” and he had been telling the truth. Although this was the first time Martlett had visited one of the colony worlds, or indeed had left Earth for any reason at all, he found it hard to imagine a planet more lovely than this one. It would almost be a pity, once he had concluded his business here, to have to return to crowded, untidy Earth once again and go back to the weary business of constructing mindless video jingles.

Better, he thought, to stay here in this eternal springtime—

No.

He shut off the thought promptly. Whatever he did, he did not intend to become a colonist on Marathon. His place was on Earth. Let escapists like Michael flee to this Utopian planet; doubtless laziness and indolence triumphed here, and in a few short generations decadence would be rampant.

The butler came slithering out on the veranda, rolling noiselessly on its treads. “There is a phone call for you, master.”

“For me? Can I take it out here?”

The robot registered confusion for an instant. “Surely you know that there is no pickup connection out here, Mr. Martlett?”

“Of course. Silly of me to forget that!”

He followed the robot inside and, tugging his dressing gown tight around himself, entered the camera field of the vidphone. There was a woman’s face on the screen—a rather attractive face, Martlett observed, blue-eyed and framed in lustrous blonde hair.

“Good morning,” he said, in a flat, noncommittal voice.

“Oh—you look so much like him!”

“Yes. We almost looked like twins,” Martlett said, a trifle edgily. “But I was three years his elder.”

“You must be Peter, then. He told me so much about you!”

“Did he? How kind of him. May I ask who it is that I am—

“Didn’t he send you my photo?”

Martlett frowned. “Not that I recall—and I’m sure that I would recall, if he had. I’m afraid he didn’t.”

“Strange,” the girl said. “He said he was mailing you a tridim of me. I’m Joanne Hastings.”

“Pleased to meet you, Miss Hastings,” Martlett said blankly, wondering who Joanne Hastings might be.

She furrowed her forehead prettily. “I said, Joanne Hastings. You mean Michael didn’t tell you that either? Obviously he didn’t, because you don’t seem to recognize my name at all.”

An ominous premonition clogged Martlett’s throat. In a hushed voice he said, “I’m afraid Michael didn’t tell me anything about you, Miss Hastings.”

“Call me Joanne. I am—was—Michael’s fiancée. We were going to be married in June, you see.”

“Oh. Oh, yes. Yes, I see, Miss Hastings. You and he—were going to get married—in June—”

Martlett closed his eyes briefly, and the image of Sondra Bullard wandered unbidden across the inside of his eyelids. Sondra was a brunette. This girl was a blonde. And Michael had been engaged to both of them.

Suddenly Martlett understood many things he had not been cognizant of before. He realized why Michael had abruptly taken that ill-fated journey to Thermopylae. That it had ended tragically was unfortunate, Martlett reflected—but the Deserializer accident had saved Michael from a devilishly nasty dilemma, anyway. Both Joanne and Sondra seemed the predatory kind. Had Michael reached Thermopylae safely, they no doubt would have pursued him there—and from there to Mycenae, and from Mycenae to Thebes, and from there to any other world to which he might flee. Poor Michael! Some of Martlett’s grief abated. Had Michael lived, he would never have escaped the clutches of the two females to whom he had so inadvisedly pledged his troth.

With tenderness Martlett said, “I understand, Miss Hastings. His death must have been a dreadful blow to you. As it was to all of us, of course; I loved my brother dearly.”

Before he had finished his conversation with Joanne Hastings, he found himself accepting a dinner invitation to her ranch eight hundred miles southward, for the next night. She wanted to talk to him about Michael, and it would have been churlish of him to refuse. He tactfully resolved not to mention to her the matter of Michael’s other fiancée who called in midmorning, while Marlett was busily wading through the backlog of Michael’s unpaid bills and scribbling checks on the veranda. He had dealt with about half of them already; the expenditure so far had been nearly twenty-five hundred units. His rough estimate of three thousand altogether had clearly been inaccurate. But Michael’s symphonies would bring royalties forever, Marlett told himself consolingly, as he crossed the veranda and headed for the nearest vidphone at the robot’s beck.

Sondra was inconsolably lonely, she sobbed to him, and wanted him to visit her for lunch that day. “You remind me so much of Michael,” she confided. “When you were with me last night I almost felt as though he were here!”

Obligingly, Martlett chartered a jetcar once again and flew to her villa for lunch. The visit dragged on until evening, and when Marathon’s single big golden moon had spiraled into the sky she insisted he stay for dinner as well. He began to sense that getting Michael’s bills paid might take longer than he had expected, at this rate.

He succeeded in disentangling himself by midevening, and flew home deep in brooding thought. The girl seemed perfectly willing to accept him as a substitute for Michael. Most remarkable, he thought. True, there was a physical resemblance so great as to be uncanny, considering the difference in their ages, but as far as personality went they were vastly different. Michael had been flamboyant, witty, spectacular and even a trifle sensational; his older brother tended more toward introspection and sobriety, and most of Michael’s women had accordingly shown little interest in Peter’s existence. But things seemed to be different with Sondra Bullard, Martlett reflected.

And with Joanne Hastings as well, he discovered the following night, when he kept his dinner engagement with her. He had spent the day in conference with a few of Michael’s creditors, people who had neglected to present bills to Secretary Jansen and who now hastened to offer them to Peter.

There was a matter of four hundred units for piano repairs, and three hundred more for music paper. A liquor and wine merchant had sold Michael five magnums of champagne, imported from Earth, fifty units apiece. And so on and so on. The tab was mounting; Martlett estimated he had paid out nearly five thousand units to the creditors of his late brother in these two days, and he was a long way from finished. He wondered how long it would be before Michael’s estate earned back five thousand units in royalties, not to mention the nine hundred more it had cost him to come out here.

He was in a morbid frame of mind when he reached Joanne Hastings’ ranch, but she soon dispelled his mood. She greeted him dressed in a gay and skimpy plasti-spray outfit that belied her recent loss, and there were cocktails waiting on a tray in the sunken living room.

“You are so much like Michael,” she told him. “You have the same dark eyes, the same untidy hair, the same way of smiling—”

“Thank you,” Martlett said uncertainly. He re: zed such a situation, but he admitted bleakly to himself that he was not Michael, no matter what these strange women seemed to think.

“It’s odd Michael didn’t tell you he was planning to marry,” she said.

“He never confided much in me,” Martlett replied. “Not about such matters, anyway.”

“June eighth, it would have been.” She sighed. “Well, now it’s never to be. Mrs. Michael Martlett—you know, I used to spend hours practicing signing my name that way! But—well—”

A lump was beginning to form in Martlett’s throat. She seemed so poised, so resigned now to Michael’s being dead, and yet behind the outward mask he could plainly see how deeply she felt her loss. He said, “I wish there were something I could do for you, Miss Hastings—”

“Joanne.”

“Joanne. But I can’t bring Michael back, can I?”

“No,” she agreed, after a moment’s solemn thought. “No, you can’t. All that talent lost in a moment! What a waste!”

“Yes,” he said sadly. “What a waste.”

She moved a bit closer to him on the couch, and he decided it would be impolite to edge away. She said, “You’re so much like Michael, dear.”

Dear? he wondered. What next?

He said, “You’re upset, Miss—Joanne. Let me pour you another drink.”

“Yes, do.” She moved closer still. “And pour one for yourself.”

Somehow it was not at all surprising when he discovered she had her arms around him, and was maneuvering toward him in a way that left him no alternative but to kiss her.

In the next few days, Martlett discerned a clear pattern taking shape, and it frightened him. Not a day went by without a call from one or both of Michael’s fiancees, inviting him for dinner. And he was too innately polite to be able to decline their offers.

But, as he spent his days paying Michael’s bills (the figure had mounted to seven thousand five hundred units now, and still the creditors arrived in fresh troops) and his evenings sipping cocktails with Michael’s betrotheds, he realized what was happening. Both girls—each unaware of the other’s presence in the scheme of things—had evidently resolved that if they could not have Michael, they very well were going to have Michael’s brother. Martlett was an acceptable substitute to them. Each was spinning a web for him, hoping to trap him into the matrimony he had successfully avoided for thirty consecutive years.

The thought frightened him.

He had come to Marathon to bury Michael, not to inherit his fiancées. It has been his plan to settle Michael’s financial affairs, not his romantic ones. He fondly expected to return to Earth in a week or two, still a single man. But yet these girls seemed to be pinning their hopes on snaring him. With each passing day they took less care to hide their true intent.

“Do you still insist on going back to Earth when you’ve tidied up Michael’s bills?” Sondra wanted to know.

“My leave was only for two weeks. I—”

“You could tell your employers you weren’t coming back. There must be some advertising agency you could work for on Marathon. And we could live in Michael’s villa—”

“We?”

She reddened. “Sorry, darling. Slip of the tongue. Have another martini, Peter. This Denebian vermouth is delightful.”

Eight hours later he was a thousand miles away, consuming cognac in Joanne Hastings’ marbled atrium. He had put off Sondra’s increasingly more urgent proposals with vague delayers and demurs, but now Joanne was saying, “Peter, dear, you aren’t really going back to Earth, are you?”

“As soon as I’ve finished what I came here to do,” he said as stolidly as he could considering the amount of alcohol he had ingested that day.

“Which was?”

“To tidy up the loose ends of Michael’s fabric of existence, so to speak,” he said.

Her delicate eyebrows lifted a fraction of a millimeter. “But—I’m one of Michael’s loose ends, darling!”

Martlett sighed wearily. “Let’s not talk about it now, Joanne. Play that tape of Michael’s symphony, would you?”

By midday of his ninth day on Marathon, Peter Martlett had at last concluded the job of settling the late Michael Martlett’s affairs. All the bills were paid, including three-thousand-unit mortgage payment on Michael’s villa; the total damage had been just under fourteen thousand units, which had wiped out Martlett’s savings entirely. Michael’s banker had given him the comforting news that he could expect an income of from ten to fifteen thousand units annually from Michael’s musical compositions; the fame of a composer always increased immediately after his death, and in Michael’s case the tragic circumstance was sure to create a Galaxywide demand for his works.

There was merely the matter of Michael’s fiancées to be settled before he left.

Martlett’s ethical soul recoiled at the thought of ducking out and popping back to Earth via the Deserializer without even a good-by, but he knew that was the only possible solution. If he risked calling either or both of them that he was leaving, he could be sure they would artfully ply their wiles and see to it that he remained on Marathon a while longer.

Women, he thought sourly. They bait their hooks with emotion and watch us wriggle when we’re caught.

If he spoke to them, they would surely be able to make him stay. And if he stayed, the question of matrimony would inevitably come up. And—the premise followed in rigorous logical sequence—one or the other of the girls would suffer disappointment, while he himself would undergo the equally grave loss of his freedom.

He saw clearly why Michael had decided to bolt to Thermopylae. Lucky Michael had vanished enroute, though! He had escaped both forever. And, as had happened so often in the past, it was Big Brother who had to stay around to face the music.

He considered the situation a while. The gentlemanly thing to do—well, there was no gentlemanly thing to do. He had both of his brother’s women on his hands, and all he could do under the circumstances was run, and fast. Better to jilt both than one, he thought; that way neither would learn that there had been a rival for her affections all along.

After due consideration he phoned Secretary Jansen and announced, “I’m finished with the job. Every debt of Michael’s has been paid and I’ve arranged for the disposition of his personal belongings.”

“Glad to hear that. We’re pleased you could make the trip, and I hope you enjoyed your stay on Marathon.”

“Certainly,” Martlett replied. “A wonderful planet. But my work on Earth awaits me. How soon can I have accommodations on the outward journey?”

“You’re in luck—a ship leaves for Earth at midnight.

You can show up any time, as late as eleven, to be deserialized and placed on board.”

“I’ll be there,” Martlett said.

He broke the contact, feeling an abiding sense of guilt. So I’m a cad, he thought. So what? I didn’t ask them to fall in love with me. They aren’t in love with me, anyway. Just with Michael’s image.

He was half finished with the task of packing his meager belongings when the phone chime sounded. Activating the controls, he was dismayed to see the blonde tresses of Joanne Hastings in three dimensions and natural color.

“Peter—I hear you’re leaving!”

“Where did you get that idea?”

“Don’t try to pretend it isn’t so! I—I have my sources of information. Peter, darling, why are you going?”

“I told you,” he said, trying with only moderate success to put a flinty edge on his voice. “I’m an Earthman, not a colonist. I’m going home.”

“Then I’ll go with you! Darling, wait for me! Take me to Earth—I’ll be your slave! I’m leaving now. I’ll be at your villa in half an hour. Don’t refuse me, Peter. I can’t bear to lose you.”

Martlett goggled and tried to reply, but before words would come out she had blanked the screen. He stared blearily at the sleek surface of the dead screen a moment, stunned. Coming here? In half an hour? But—

The phone chimed again.

With numbed fingers he activated it and watched the features of Sondra Bullard come swirling out of the electronic haze. She had heard he was leaving, she told him, and she implored him to change his mind. “Don’t go,” she begged him. “Stay right where you are. I’m on my way now. I have to see you again in person. I’ll be there in half an hour. I love you, Peter.”

“Half an hour? Aiee! Sondra—”

Too late. The screen was dead again.

Martlett remained quite still, sorting out the rush of thoughts that rippled through his chilled mind. They had both heard that he was leaving; that meant that most likely both, anticipating another runout a la Michael, had arranged with some underling of the secretary to be notified the moment he announced his intention to depart.

And they were on their way here to persuade him to change his mind. Joanne would be here in half an hour. Sondra would be here in half an hour. That meant—

He knew what that meant. They would both be here in half an hour. They were traveling on a collision orbit. And when they got together, critical mass would be reached rapidly.

Well, he thought in desperation, there was a clear path to safety still. All he had to do was report to the deserializing office now, and have them tuck him away in the Henderson Field until the midnight departure time. So far as it would matter to him, the elapsed time would be the | same—hardly any at all—and he would be safely out of the reach of those grasping altar-eager females.

Martlett smiled. Yes, he thought. That’s what I’ll do!

He ordered the butler to get the jetcar ready for an immediate trip downtown. And in the meanwhile, he thought, there still is time for a drink. Something to calm my nerves. I paid two thousand units to settle Michael’s liquor bills; I might as well enjoy some of it.

There was a liquor cabinet and dial bar at the opposite end of the living room. Martlett half skipped to it j and quickly punched out an order for a double bourbon. Nothing happened; and then he recalled he had ordered the bar fixtures disconnected that morning.

Shrugging, he tugged open the paneled door of the liquor cabinet and groped inside for one of the bottles. It was dim and dusty in there; he fumbled for a handhold, finally catching something—

He pulled.

What came out was not a bottle. He had been grasping a lever attached to a square black enamel box, and now box and lever both came out of the cabinet suddenly. He let go of the lever and jumped back. The box had popped open. “Damn,” an oddly familiar voice said. “So soon?”

The box expanded abruptly. Martlett edged further back, and in the same moment a man stepped out of the box, stretching as if he had been crouching on his knees a long while and at last was standing up. He was tall—about Martlett’s own height. He had unruly brown hair and a roguish smile, and a fine network of laugh wrinkles around his eyes.

He might almost have been Martlett’s twin. He was, in point of fact, his younger brother.

He chuckled amiably and said, “Well, Peter—you’re the last person I expected to see at this moment!”

Martlett backed up feebly. “Michael! You’re—alive?”

“Extremely, dear brother. Would you mind telling me what year this is?”

Weakly, Martlett said, “2209. April 20th.”

“Ha! The little vixens! Not even two months, and they’ve forgotten me already! Pfoo, it’s dusty in here! What are you doing on Marathon, old man?”

In a chilly voice Martlett said, “After you were pronounced legally dead I was called here to serve as executor of your estate, Michael. I paid out some fourteen thousand units you owed. And now to find you’re still alive! What—how—”

“I dare say you think it’s ungrateful of me to come back to life, eh?” Michael smiled cozily. “Well, it was good of you to take care of the debts, Peter. This job did cost me a penny or two, and I’m afraid I rather neglected the tradesmen the while.”

“What job? What are you talking about?”

“Why, the private Deserializer I had built, of course!”

Martlett put his hands to his head. He felt close to madness; the sudden arrival of his brother, the importuning of those girls, the fourteen thousand units, all seemed to swirl wildly around him. In a dark voice he said, “Will you explain yourself, Michael?”

“Certainly. There were these girls, you see—Joanne was the blonde, and Sondra the brunette.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Lovely, weren’t they? Anyhow, with my usual carelessness I contrived to get myself engaged to both of them. It was an awkward situation; they both vowed to follow me to the ends of the universe, et cetera, the usual stuff. Damned tenacious lasses, both.”

“I know that too,” Martlett said.

“Do you, now? Well, to make the matter short,” said Michael, “I found it expedient to disappear. I hired a person to arrange things for me, at a fee. He caused it to seem as if I had vanished in some awful way en route to Thermopylae or some such place in this system, when actually I hadn’t even made the trip! I was deserialized and locked away in my own liquor closet, y’see, in cold storage, not conscious of the passage of time. There was a timer on the thing which would release me in five objective years—but you surely must know all about this?”

“On the contrary. It’s quite new to me.”

“But the arrangement was that my fellow would keep an eye on those two girls, and if they both got married before the five years were up he’d come around to let me out of the deserializer field right away. And since you’ve released me, then obviously—”

“No,” Martlett said. “I pulled you out of the closet by accident. I thought you were dead.”

“But I was only in there two months. And the girls—?”

“Still single. Both of them.”

Michael’s face turned paper white and he nibbled at his lips. “You mean they’re both on the loose and you’ve released me? Oh, Peter, you incorrigible bungler! You—”

“Worse than that,” Martlett interrupted. “They’re both on their way here right now. They’ve decided to marry me, as long as you weren’t available. They’ll be here in—” he consulted his watch—“about four minutes, unless they happen to arrive early.”

Michael was galvanized suddenly into frantic exertion. “Quick, then! I’ve got to leave here! If they ever find me alive they’ll rip me to shreds!”

The butler suddenly rolled into the living room. It darted a confused glance from one Martlett brother to the other, and, its gears meshing and clanking in bewilderment, it announced, “Two ladies have just arrived to see Mr. Martlett.”

“Tell them I’m not home!” Martlett and his brother shouted simultaneously.

“They insist on entering,” the robot said.

Michael clutched at his brother’s sleeve in panic. “What will we do?”

The outer doors were opening. The sound of agitated feminine conversation was audible outside. “Don’t let them in,” Michael ordered the butler. But the shock of seeing duplicate masters had put the robot out of commission; it drooled quietly to itself without obeying.

Martlett said in a voice heavy with defeat, “I guess we’ll have to marry them, I suppose. Explain things first—we’ll say you miraculously popped back into the continuum—and then marry them. We can’t escape, Michael. And we could do worse for women, you know.”

The voices were coming closer. “I guess you’re right,” Michael said. Lines of strain showed on his boyish face. “But—good grief, Peter!—who marries which one?”

Martlett shrugged. “Does it matter? I suppose we can toss for it.”

Sounds reached them: “Peter, darling, are you in there?” And “Who is this horrible woman, Peter?”

Peter looked at his brother. It was the first time he had ever seen Michael actually quaking with fear. “Stiff upper lip, boy,” he muttered. “It shouldn’t be so bad once you’ve explained.”

“You explain,” Michael said. “I don’t dare.”

“You’d better dare,” Peter retorted. “You got us into this in the first place. You and your private Deserializer.”

And there was no getting out, he thought, looking toward the door through which the girls were about to burst. They were trapped for fair. Might as well make the best of it.

Shoulder to shoulder, the Martlett brothers stood their ground and waited resignedly for the enemy to storm the battlements.