A Case of Conscience

Michelis was sorry he had allowed himself and Liu aboard the serpentine the moment he understood the construction of the second level, for he saw at once that they would have virtually no chance of seeing Egtverchi's arrival. Fundamentally, the second level was divided by soundproof walls into a number of smaller parties, some of them only slightly drunker and more unorthodox than the cocktail party had been, but the rest running a broad spectrum of frenetic exoticism. He and Liu were carried completely around the course before he was able to figure out how to get the girl and himself safely off the serpentine; and each time he was moved to attempt it, the train began to go faster in unpredictable spurts, producing a sensation rather like that of riding a roller coaster in the middle of the night.

Nevertheless, they saw the only entrance that counted. Egtverchi emerged from the last gas bath standing in the head car of the serpentine, and stepped out of the car under his own power. In the next five cars behind him, also standing, were ten nearly identical young men in uniforms of black and lizard-green with silver piping, their arms folded, their expressions stern, their eyes straight ahead.

"Greetings," Egtverchi said, with a deep bow which his disproportionately small dinosaurian arms and hands made both comical and mocking. "Madame the Countess, I am delighted. You are protected by many bad smells, but I have braved them all." The crowd applauded. The countess' reply was lost in the noise, but evidently she had chided him with being naturally immune to smokes which would affect Earthmen, for he said promptly, with a trace of hurt in his voice:

"I thought you might say that, but I'm grieved to be caught in the right. To the pure all things are pure, however, did you ever see such upstanding, unshaken young men?" He gestured at the ten. "But of course I cheated. I stopped their nostrils with filters, as Ulysses stopped his men's ears with wax to pass the sirens. My entourage will stand for anything; they think I am a genius."

With the air of a conjurer, the Lithian produced a silver whistle which seemed small in his hand, and blew into the thick air a white, warbling note which was utterly inadequate to the gesture which had preceded it. The ten soldierly young men promptly melted. The forefront of the crowd gleefully toed the limp bodies, which took the abuse with lax indifference.

"Drunk," Egtverchi said with fatherly disapproval. "Of course. Actually I didn't stop their noses at all. I prevented their reticular formations from reporting the countess' smokes to their brains until I gave the cue. Now they have gotten all the messages at once; isn't it disgraceful? Madame, please have them removed, such dissoluteness embarrasses me. I shall have to institute discipline."

The countess clapped her hands. "Aristide! Aristide?" She touched the transceiver concealed in her hair, but there was no response that Michelis could detect. Her expression changed abruptly from childish delight to infant fury. "Where is that lousy rustic — "

Michelis, boiling, shouldered his way into Egtverchi's line of sight with difficulty.

"Just what the hell do you think you're doing?" he said in a hoarse voice.

"Good evening, Mike. I am attending a party, just as you are. Good evening, dear Liu. Countess, do you know my foster parents? But I am sure you do."

"Of course," the countess said, turning her bare shoulders and back unmistakably on Michelis and Liu, and looking up at Egtverchi's perpetually grinning head from under gilded eyelids.

"Let's go next door — there's more room, and it will be quieter. We've all seen enough of these train riders. After you, their arrivals will seem all alike."

"I cultivate the unique," Egtverchi said. "But I must have Mike and Liu by my side. Countess. I am the only reptile in the universe with mammalian parents, and I cherish them. I have a notion that it may be a sin; isn't that interesting?"

The gilded eyelids lowered. It had been years since the countess' caterers had come up with a new sin interesting enough to be withheld from the next evening's guests for private testing; that was common knowledge. She looked as if she scented one now, Michelis thought; and since she was, in fact, a woman of small imagination, Michelis was not in much doubt as to what it was. For all his saurian shape and texture, there was something about Egtverchi that was intensely, overwhelmingly masculine.