Free The Long Result by John Brunner Page B

shot of antalc each, will you?’ he rapped. He threw off his evening tweed jacket andreplaced it with a casual day cape, shrugging it into place with the same movement that served to press the caller button for his car and bring it from the garage to the front door.
    ‘For me as well, please,’ Helga called, disengaging herself from Marin van’t Hoff, who had taken a great fancy to her. ‘It sounds as though I might be able to make myself useful.’
    Madeleine brought three little glasses from the liquor console, brimming with anti-alcohol. I gulped mine down, and it felt in my guts as though I’d swallowed a cold breeze. Then I crossed the room to Patricia, who was ostentatiously ignoring me – gazing out into the garden with her lovely face set and expressionless.
    ‘Sweet, I hate to abandon you like this, but from what bin Ishmael said —’
    ‘Frankly,’ she cut in, ‘I don’t care.’
    ‘Patricia!’
    ‘Oh,
go
to your damned aliens if you must! Go and sublimate your feelings with them – or do they make you so much at home you don’t need to sublimate?’
    The tone in which she delivered that ugliest of insults was the same she might have used in ordering ten minutes’ rain over Oregon.
    I’d never imagined the day would come when I wanted to slap a woman’s face – least of all, that the woman would be Patricia. But I was raising my hand when Jacky’s sharp call from behind me broke in on my paralysing rage. The antalc gripped me, cleansing my mind, and I turned away, conscious only of an engulfing wave of despair.
    As the car streaked down the night-bright streets of the city, none of us said very much. Helga kept her eyes on the backs of her strong, capable hands, flexing them together. She put several questions to me, which I answered as well as myconfusion would let me. At first it was irritating; then I remembered with dismay that thanks to my study of the Bureau file on Tau Cetians earlier today, I probably knew as much as anyone on Earth about them. I was glad I didn’t have to face the task confronting Helga and the other biochemists who would be called in. The Starhomers weren’t equipped to provide proper data on the aliens’ metabolism; the Ark staff hadn’t had time yet to accumulate their usual exhaustive knowledge, and as for the Tau Cetians themselves, if they were at a twentieth-century level their medicine was probably still half superstition.
    In any case, according to bin Ishmael they were all five very ill indeed.
    Jacky kept the car in emergency top. The scattering of other traffic we met gave us clear passage on seeing the Bureau sign blinking on and off behind the weaving antenna. It seemed little more than moments before we arrived at the Ark.
    The confusion here was terrific. Lights had been slung on hastily-rigged poles around the entrance, and a police stop beacon brought us to a standstill among a crowd of running men and women. The noise of an emergency gas generator formed a humming background to the shouting of frantic orders. Either side of the entrance, police cars were parked; farther away, two rescue teams laboured in the glare of a lamp hung to a tree, stowing away oxygen equipment which had proved unnecessary.
    A sweating policeman switched off the stop beacon long enough for Jacky to back the car between an alien wagon and a human ambulance; then we all three jumped out and ran into the building.
    We weren’t challenged until I’d led the way to the airlock of Block G. There, a girl – by her voice, though her airsuit made her shapeless – demanded what we wanted. When I explained, keeping to whispers because red lights signalled EMERGENCY over the sealed door, she told us bin Ishmael was directing operations from his own office.
    At first he didn’t notice our arrival. He was completely absorbed in the scene depicted on a vision screen linked to the hospital’s chlorine ward: suited humans moving awkwardly around tables on which the naked Tau Cetians