The Ambassador, Sam Merwin [no david read aloud .TXT] 📗

drink barely seventeen hours before. He began to wish he had not bet so thoughtlessly.

The second set went to deuce twice before Yamato-Rau broke O'Ryan's service to run it out at eight-six. This was two games more than the computer had calculated and caused considerable uproar in the crowd.

"I hear you had some trouble last night," Anderson told him.

"Nothing serious," said Lindsay, wondering how much the senator knew. Dammit, he thought, he wished he didn't like the power-hungry politician.

He wondered if Anderson were behind the attempt of the morning—and if he were behind it, why? There could, he decided, be all sorts of Machiavellian motives hidden beneath that smiling face. Then the match got under way once more, and Lindsay concentrated on the play.

Once again O'Ryan seemed to be in command—just as the computer had foretold. Games went to five-two in his favor. Then, as the players changed courts once more, the tall Irishman paused to towel off—and paid special attention to rubbing his eyes.

At that his string ran out. Four straight times his swiftest drives hit the top of the net and bounced back into his own court. He blew his service thanks to a pair of double-faults and three minutes later Yamato-Rau had taken the set while the crowd sat in stunned silence.

The fourth set was pitiful. O'Ryan played like a blind man and the Indonesian ran it out with the loss of exactly one point per game. The red line on the computer-board yawed wildly toward the bottom instead of following the white line as it should have.

"Keep your credits," Lindsay told Senator Anderson. "You were right. As it turned out I did know something after all."

"It's impossible!" cried the senator. "But it's cheap at the price—here!" He withdrew his wallet and began pulling out crisp hundred-credit notes.

"Look out!" cried Lindsay. Around them the stands had erupted into violence. While the players were shaking hands at the net, angry—and, Lindsay suspected, frightened—bettors and spectators leaped the low barriers and swarmed out onto the dark court. They hemmed the players in, driving them toward the wall directly under the UW box in which Lindsay and Anderson were sitting.

Someone threw something and Yamato-Rau stumbled and fell to his hands and knees. Swinging his racquet like one of his ancestors' shillalehs, O'Ryan charged to his rescue, pulled him to his feet, covered his retreat to the wall. There Lindsay was able to pull first the Indonesian, then the Irishman, up into the box.

"Damned fool!" said Anderson. "Getting us into a riot." But a moment later Lindsay saw the senator swinging hard at an angry customer with a fist in which his wallet was still clenched. The man made a grab for it as someone else hit Anderson over the head with a plastic bottle. He dropped across a contour-chair, letting his wallet fall from unconscious fingers.

UW police formed a protective wall around them and Pat O'Ryan, recognizing Lindsay, said, "Thanks, Ambassador. I guess I owe you a couple. If my eyes hadn't gone bad on me...."

Lindsay was tempted to admit his guilt in that matter but decided against it. He had no desire to be caught in another riot. He picked up Anderson's wallet, put it back in the still unconscious senator's breast pocket. A white-clad interne was brought through the police cordon, knelt beside Anderson and began to make repairs.

"You'd better leave now, Ambassador," said one of the boss policeman respectfully to Lindsay when the senator had been carted away on a stretcher. Lindsay nodded. Then he noticed a slip of paper lying beneath the chair across which Anderson had fallen. It read: rec. 10,000 cdt. 1 em. & di. neck. It was from Zoffany, the jeweler.

"What the hell!" Lindsay discovered he was speaking aloud. He stuffed the paper in his pocket and followed the officer through a maze of underground passages out of the Colosseum. He still thought, What the hell! What could Nina have reported about him that was worth that sort of money to the senator?

Spy, slattern or not, Nina was efficient, as he realised when a bowing motley-clad waiter captain smilingly ushered him to a secluded table for two in a banquet niche of the Pelican. It was Lindsay's first visit to an Earthly after-dark cafe and he instinctively compared it with certain of its imitations in the comparatively small cities of his native planet.

It was sleeker, better run, far more beautiful. Its general color scheme was darkly opalescent, subtly glowing, flattering to its clients. And, of course, most of them needed flattering, at least to Lindsay's alien eyes. He noted here a pair of scimitar-shaped spectacles whose turquoise-studded rims caught the light like a pair of small lemon pies, there a harmopan-covered female face that glowed pale green in the darkness.

But even more numerous and decorative than at the stadium, the gladiators and courtesans were present, reinforced by a larding of vidar stars visiting or entertaining in the capital. And these, Lindsay admitted to himself with awed reluctance, outshone in sheer beauty and handsomeness any group of Martian humans.

They ought to, he thought. Direct descendants, figuratively if not actually, of the advertising-Hollywood beauty fetish of the previous century, they were selected almost from birth for their callings and trained rigorously from childhood on, the males to become athletes or actors, the females courtesans or actresses.

There was no race among them, for their only standards were beauty and physical fitness, no creed but achievement in their lines of individual entertainment. He caught sight of a lissome Euro-African, the classic exoticism of her flower-petal face illumined by joyous laughter beneath a glossy neo-Watusi hairdo, as she glided gracefully over the dance-floor in the arms of a hunch-harnessed and bespectacled partner.

The gladiators and courtesans alone seemed to find joy in living. Lindsay, who had seldom been unhappy in his active existence, felt his sympathies and heart go out to them. He followed the progress of a tiny Oriental model whose face was alive with good-humor as she swept past his table, her exquisite figure stressed by a glittering jeweled sheathe.

"You really should wear glasses—or else learn not to stare," said Maria, appearing from nowhere and sitting down at the table. She made amends by extending a warm soft hand to grip one of his. Though she wore her glasses and her hair was severely pulled back, he had no difficulty in recalling the fact that, unclothed, she was lovely.

"Why don't you get in on the act?" he suggested, nodding toward a pair of models emerging from the harmopan room. "All you'd have to do would be to remove your specs and harness and let your hair down."

"You're sweet, Zale," she said, pleased. Then, with a sigh, "But there's a lot more to it than that."

"You do all right that way too," he told her boldly.

She slapped the back of his hand and then, growing quickly serious, said, "Zale, I didn't ask you to meet me for that. I've got so much to ask you—so much to tell. Did you really find an assassin waiting for you when you got home last night? And did you kill him?"

"Yes and no," said Lindsay. "I did find one and I didn't kill him. In fact we parted good friends."

"You Martians...." She sighed, then said, "And I understand you have already broken two computers—this afternoon at the psychiatrist's and this evening at the Colosseum. It's the most marvelous news, darling. I've got to know how you did it."

"I'm damned if I know how I fouled up Dr. Craven's computer," he told her, "I'm still trying to figure it out."

Her face fell. She said, "I was hoping you had something.... But never mind." Then, brightening, "But you're driving them crazy. They ran Dr. Craven's results through Elsac late this afternoon and got the same answer. The records checked that you didn't kill your mother and I know you're not an invert." She laughed softly.

Spurred by the erotic atmosphere, plus the dizzying speed of recent events and Maria's nearness, he said, "Let's get out of here and go to my place."

Her hand covered his again atop the table. "I wish we could," she said wistfully. "I like you very much, Zale darling. But this is too important. We haven't time. But what about the tennis tonight? There's going to be an investigation, of course. Won't you tell me how you did it?"

"Not until I've figured out both," he said. "I may be on the track of something or it may be sheer chance. Until I understand what happened at Dr. Craven's I'm simply not sure of my facts."

"But there simply isn't time, darling," Maria told him. "This is really what I must talk to you about. We got word today that President Giovannini is going to unveil Giac any day now."

"Decided against your sabotage plan?" he asked her.

She wrinkled her pert little nose. "What's the use? They'd simply repair it. Besides, it's much too well guarded. Zale, you're our only hope now."

He said "If I'm right, and I'm beginning to hope I am, it won't matter whether Giac is unveiled or not. In fact, it might be more effective if it were."