Free Narabedla Ltd by Frederik Pohl Page A

some sleep. There’s a vacant house you can use; I’ll get a Kekkety guide to take you over, and— Now what? No more complaints about being kidnapped, you hear me?”
    “Not about my being kidnapped. I just want to know what happened to the woman I was with. Is Irene Madigan here?” 
    “No, you were the only one to come through lately. She isn’t here. And, Jesus, I hope it stays that way.”

 
CHAPTER

10
     
     
    W hat Shipperton called a “Kekkety guide” turned out to be a silent, slim little person who looked more than anything else like one of the deckhands from Henry Davidson-Jones’s yacht. He didn’t speak. He just led me along some pleasant little streets with occasional pedestrians nodding to us as we passed. All very homelike, in an Andy Griffith kind of way, and all the time I was trying to get a handle on the terrible crazy confusion that had replaced my dull, pleasant, normal life.
    I knew that I wasn’t exactly unique.
    I knew that in the history of the human race many, many millions of people have been snatched without warning out of their normal lives into some strange new captivity—college professors taken by terrorists in Beirut, farm girls abducted into the brothels of the big cities, Africans captured for the slave trade, Europeans shanghaied onto Moorish galleys. Well, sure. Such things happened. But they didn’t happen to me. Although I’d worried about a lot of things in my life, I’d never worried about the right one, because it had never occurred to me that I might someday become a simple export commodity with nothing to say about it.
    I still had plenty of worries. I worried about what had happened to Irene Madigan. I worried about what Marlene was going to do when I didn’t show up. I worried about how my clients would survive without me.
    I worried a lot, too, about myself. I didn’t want to become a member of Narabedla Ltd.’s large clientele of touring artists dedicated to presenting Earthly performing arts to entertain the cognoscenti of the Fifteen (alien) Peoples and their twenty-two inhabited planets. All the same, I didn’t like having failed the audition.
    Before Shipperton sent me off with the Kekkety guide he let me run sketchily down the artists’ list. It was formidable. Not counting Norah Platt, the ancient pianist. Woody Calderon, the cellist, and Irene Madigan’s cousin, Tricia, the baton-twirling one, there were six sopranos, three mezzos, eleven tenors, four other baritones or bass-baritones, two basses, and a boyishly slight, pale-skinned castrato, all of whose pictures were on Shipperton’s walls. That was just the singers. There were also violinists, pianists, harpists, percussionists, sitarists, harpsichordists, and a scrawny ebony-black man who played the djidjeraboo. There were jugglers, acrobats, gymnasts, unicyclists, half a dozen black guys who had once been a kind of generic imitation of the Harlem Globe Trotters, and a man who drew in chalk on sidewalks; a glassblower specializing in instant animals; two heavy-metal and one punk rock group (but their war paint, dreadlocks, and Mohawks were wasted on the audiences here); there was a lion-tamer with six lions and a man with a flea circus; and a man who imitated bird calls; and two mimes; and a small but otherwise first-rate ballet company; two break dancers, and a Jamaican who played steel drums.
    Obviously Narabedla Ltd. had been doing a lot of business over a long, long time.
    And those were just the artists who, being human, had originated on the planet Earth, Shipperton explained. He told me that his office didn’t handle the nonhuman others. He said he was really glad of that.
     
    The Kekkety guide got me nearly to where I was going before I came out of my fog long enough to look around.
    “Hold on a second,” I ordered, pausing. We were in a quiet kind of intersection in what almost might have been a small town back on Earth. There were four different streets leading away from the