Tea with the Black Dragon

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That she had been worried about something.

It was hardly a compelling story. It -carried the implication that Mrs. Macnamara had dropped out of sight to avoid him, and his call to the authorities further intimated that he was the sort of importunate busybody a person might well want to avoid.

The officer had told him that they would have to wait at least a day before they could regard the woman as missing. The policeman had taken down name and address.

He had realized the uselessness of the attempt then, and had tried no further to interest the police. He knew the disparity between his voice and person; if his words could not convince, then his face and form would be of no help.

Besides, if Martha Macnamara had been killed by whoever it was who snatched her up—no one in the bus, surely. The black Lincoln?—then she was dead, and neither police nor power could bring her back.

And if she was alive, spirited away somewhere, then she was kept alive for a purpose, and would doubtless remain that way until the purpose was fulfilled. In that case, the police were still not much help, but another power might be. Without conscious arrogance Mayland Long applied that title to himself. Another power.

And he was sure with a granite certainty that Martha Macnamara was not dead. He would know if she were.

For if she were dead, then hope was dead, and his own existence turned to ashes.

And, looking at the gray, waking city, the quiet mirror of the bay, the jangled mirror of the sea, he did not feel dead nor burnt out. He felt—he turned the unfamiliar emotion over in his mind with intellectual curiosity, trying to identify it—he felt angry.

He rose from the chair and brushed at the crumpled jacket without seeing it. He was trying to remember the last time he had felt anger. Three years in San Francisco. One in Kyoto. Before that, Taipei—two years. There came grief and loss. Even fear. Anger? No. No one to be angry at, that evening in Taipei. Not even himself.

And before Taipei there had been no need at all for anger.

He stopped this raking of memory No need. He knew what anger was. It was hot.

Like Carlo Peccolo, Floyd Rasmussen was a fair, stocky man, but there the resemblance ended. Peccolo kept his credentials under glass, while Rasmussen had a wall stuck full of clippings from the Sunday funnies, along with three Kliban cats. Peccolo was sober, but Rasmussen laughed. He rattled the windows with his laughter. He laughed when Long introduced himself. He chuckled at the name of Dr. Peccolo. He let loose gales of laughter when Mr. Long brought forward the subject of Liz Macnamara, and with his wiry yellow beard and wiry yellow hair spreading out from his face, Floyd Rasmussen was the image of some Aztec sun god, graved in gold.

“Liz? She’s done work for me. I hope she will again, though the money she’s asking now… Oh Lord, yes, I know Liz Macnamara. That’s like asking me how well I know Blanco, my cat. Liz is a warrior, bright, spunky, ambitious. She brought life to RasTech…”

Coolly Mayland Long wondered how much more life the company called RasTech could bear. Floyd Rasmussen seemed to fill all available comers with his own vital substance. Mr. Long pulled at the tiller of the conversation.

“Bright? Then you would say her level of technical ability was above average?”

“Average? You can hardly use that word in the same breath as Liz Macnamara. She’s original; Sound. Big systems, little systems, software, firmware, pc layout… Just give her a handful of bipolar visi chips and stand back. She can even, occasionally, meet a deadline. And I don’t say that for most of my friends!”

This last admission dissolved into dull rumbles. Floyd Rasmussen beamed at Mr. Long.

The office did not contain a desk. Rasmussen worked from a drafting table set against one wall. There was thus no barrier between the booming geniality of the president of RasTech and the fastidious composure of his guest. Mayland Long did not feel that the advantage was his.

“Then, it was not out of line for her to set herself up as a consultant—to go freelance?”

The big man snorted. “What else should she do? Give half her salary for a benefits package and insurance, and the other half to Uncle Sugar? She’s gone the smart way. consulting.”

Long prodded patiently. “Even at her age, without contacts? Dr. Peccolo believed…”

“… in Santa Claus. He doesn’t like knowing a young whippersnapper he was supposed to be teaching actually had more on the ball than he did.” Rasmussen’s furry eyebrows pulled together and his mouth pursed.

“Carlo’s a friend of mine. Hurts me to say it, but he’s not that good, technically.” His voice expressed no great pain.

Mayland Long digested this—both the words and the manner. “Tell me, Mr. Rasmussen. Just what did Elizabeth Macnamara do for you at FSS which convinced you to hire her services here, in your own company?”

“Eh?” Rasmussen stopped to think. A few moments of silence leaked into the office.

“She did lots of things. An interface board for teller’s terminals: Z80 based. An accounts receivable package in 6502 assembler. Half a bank security system…”

“Half a bank security system?”

Rasmussen grunted and shrugged. “We only got the contract for half. Works that way a lot. Maybe their guy quits in the middle of the job and they don’t want to train a programmer from scratch, or… Well, lots of things. Then, let’s see—she wrote a disk controller for our own use.” Rasmussen stopped. He crinkled little eyes behind sandy lashes. It was difficult to tell what color those eyes were.

“ ’Zat the kind of thing you want to know?”

Mayland Long detached his gaze from the man and swept it once around the square, unsubtle room. One wall was orange; that was the one dotted with comic clippings. One wall was stenciled with a single, diagonal black stripe, dipping left. Against that wall stood a model of a sailing boat, white, gleaming, intricate, its spiky rigging echoed in the tines of a set of deer antlers hung above. The carpet was looped in orange and green. The plastic chair he sat on was yellow.

Mayland Long, in his quiet gray suit, felt like a quote taken out of context.

“Yes, Mr. Rasmussen, that is part of it. And, since you do not have a current address or phone number for the lady, I shall have to be satisfied with that much.” He rose to his feet.

Rasmussen heaved his own bulk off the drafting stool. “She’ll call me once she’s settled in her new place. It always takes a month or so to let people know when you’ve moved. That’s a real problem when you’re self-employed. I know. Been there.”

He reached out to shake Mayland Long’s hand. Shaking hands was a ritual Floyd Rasmussen practiced whenever he could, and somehow his guest had begun their conversation without it. He succeeded in grabbing Long’s unresisting hand now, but there was something wrong in the gesture. This was not the usual wrongness which accompanies shaking hands: cold, wet palm, no strength in the grip, or too much. The hand he commandeered was dry and warm. It held his own securely, without squeezing the knuckles together. The wrongness was in the shape of it.

He dropped his eyes from the dusky face, but the hand had been withdrawn. Mayland Long was speaking.

“You have not asked what my interest is in Miss Macnamara. Aren’t you curious?”

Rasmussen looked up in surprise. “Your interest? You’re looking to use her, right? But you weren’t sure she was the engineer you needed. Peccola gave her sort of a lukewarm recommendation and you wanted a second opinion?”

Mayland Long smiled. It was not an English smile, but a Chinese smile. “Very close. I have need other, and am interested to know what she has been doing. I worry I may not find her in time.” He turned to leave.

“Well, I wouldn’t worry,” boomed Rasmussen down the hall. “Don’t… commit yourself to anything yet. She’ll show.”

Mr. Long found himself on Mathilda Avenue, feeling the even, flat, shadeless street and the reek of traffic as a relief after the force of Rasmussen’s joviality. He fingered the keys of his own car, a small green Citroen. He sifted among Rasmussen’s words. Gold and dross: how to tell one from the other? Turning the ignition key, his face meditative, he felt for the anger he had found within himself earlier.

It was still present, and it retained the same size and shape. Good. If he was to be angry, Mayland Long wanted that anger to de dependable.

Today there was no buzzing robot-car on the floor of Friendly Computers. Instead, Fred Frisch was involved in a lengthy discussion with a boy who appeared both too young and too poor to have business there. The subject of the dialogue was breadboards, a large assortment of which lay scattered across the counter. At least half the display machines along the wall were running, some throwing fantasies of color over their screens, while others flashed words. One unit emitted a monotonous beep, beep, beep as images of tiny rockets exploded into flame.

Mr. Long did not attempt to interrupt the conversation, but sat down in the same chair that Martha Macnamara had graced the previous morning. The repetitive, multi color display on the nearest video screen caught his interest. Mayland Long’s experience with computing was as extensive as the books in his library and existed on no other level. He pressed the return key tentatively.

The display vanished, leaving in its place a list of available games and instructions for invoking them. He conjured up something called simply Life.