Meanwhile, a barman touched Frank's and Gimp's shoulders. "Hines and
Nelsen? She has spotted you two. She wants to see you in her quarters."
"Hi, lads," she laughed. "Beer for old times?... You look like hell,
Frank. Brief me on the missing chapter. You had everybody scared."
"Uh-uh--you first, Your Majesty," Nelsen chuckled in return.
She wrinkled her nose at him. "Well, I got here. There was a need.
Somebody decided that I was the best available talent. This is the first
step. Maybe I'll have my own spot--bigger and better. Or get back to my
own regular self, working Out There with the men."
Maybe it was bad taste, but Nelsen felt like teasing. "Ever hear of a
person named Miguel Ramos?"
That didn't bother her. She shrugged. "Still around, though I hope not
for long, the buffoon! Who could ever put up with a show-off small boy
like that for more than ten minutes? Besides, he's wasting himself. Why
should he pick me for a bad influence...? Now, your chapter, Frank."
He told her the story, briefly.
At last she said, "Frank, you must be spiritually all jammed up. Gimp is
set, I know..."
In a few minutes more, Eileen introduced him to a girl. Jennie Harper
had large dark eyes, and a funny, achy sort of voice. Gimp disappeared
discreetly with his date. Frank and Jennie sat at a table in a private
booth, high up in the arches of _The First Stop_, and watched Eileen do
another number.
Jennie explained herself. "I'm another one. I've got to go where the
heroes go. That's me--Frankie, is it? So I'm here..."
She had a perfume. While he was Rodan's prisoner for two and a half
months, there were special things that had driven him almost wild. Now
he made hints, inevitably.
"I don't need Eileen to tell me you're a good guy, Frank," she said with
a small, warm smile. "We're just entertainers. They wouldn't let us be
anything else--here..."
It hardly mattered what else they said. Maybe it was fifteen hours later
that Frank Nelsen found himself walking along a stellene-covered
causeway, looking for Left Foot Gimp Hines. He had memories of a tiny
room, very neat and compact, with even a single huge rose in a vase on
the bed table. But the time had a fierce velvet-softness that tried to
draw him to it forevermore. It was like the grip of home, and the lost
Earth, and the fear that he would chicken out and return.
He found Gimp, who seemed worried. "You might get stuck, here, on
account of Rodan," he said. "Even I might. We'd better go see."
Nelsen had bitter, vengeful thoughts of Rodan being set at liberty--with
himself the culprit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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