Garrity's Annuities, David Mason [desktop ebook reader txt] 📗

trouble by saying a few words. The words were there, though, straining to get out. When he said, "Mary Collins," what I wanted to say was, "No, it isn't. It's Katha."

Because it was. After I watched the girl long enough, all the way through the marriage ceremony, then down in the elevator and out into the street, I became dead certain.

There was a brown mole on Katha's arm. Mary had it, too. And there was a look about the eyes—well, there could only be one Katha.

What I could not understand was why Garrity didn't see it. After all, he'd been married to Katha.

But when I tried to say something to him, he brushed it off.

"Sure, Mary looks a little like Katha," he agreed with me. "But there are all kinds of small differences. Things a man finds out as he goes along. Look, I'm very fond of both of them. I know the difference. You're just confused by the slight resemblance."

The clincher was the problem of how Katha had reached Terra City ahead of Garrity, to begin with, and whether there was still a Katha in Serco. I asked a man off a ship fresh from Serco and he told me Katha hadn't been there for some time. No one knew where she'd gone, but she had said she'd be back.

So Mary could be Katha, given a fast passenger ship.

And Arnel could be Katha, too. Arnel had a mole in the right place. So did Lillian. And Ruth. And Virginia.

Yes, Garrity married every one of them. Six girls, six planets. It took him a while, and by the time he got as far as Ruth, he was going to a lot of trouble to arrange his shipping runs so he could make the full circuit. But every so often I'd hear from him, or run into him, and there would always be a new one.

The Garrity plan was going fine, but it lacked that one ingredient he had counted on—variety. Every one of those girls was Katha.

He didn't think so. He could call off the differences between them by the hour. To listen to him, if you hadn't actually seen them, you'd have believed every word he said.

Each one of them gets a share of Garrity's pay—a big share, from the looks of it. Each one of them keeps a nice place for Garrity and, when he comes into port, he eats and sleeps as well as any honest groundwalker. And each one of them has a small fat baby boy, of whose exact age Garrity never seems to be quite sure. Two or three of the kids seem extremely advanced for their ages and they were all born fairly close together, which was enough to make Garrity as proud as a rooster.

And Garrity seems to be the only one who can't tell.

Thinking about it might make a man want to rush off to Serco and find a girl like Katha ... and Serco is full of them. I'd like having a girl like Katha. I'd like having six Kathas even better.

But I'm not going to.

I won't drive myself batty trying to figure out how she'd be keeping me fooled.

And especially why.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Garrity's Annuities, by David Mason