A Case of Conscience

What happened thereafter is confused — it depends on which reporter you believe. Insofar as I've been able to piece all these conflicting accounts together, Egtverchi himself didn't hurt anybody, and if his condottieri did, they got as good as they gave; one of them died. The major damage is to the countess, who is ruined. Some of the cells he broke into weren't on the serpentine's route at all, and contained public figures in private hells especially designed by the countess' caterers: The people who haven't themselves already succumbed to the sensation-mongers — though in some instances the publicity is no more vicious than they had coming — are out to revenge themselves on the whole house of Averoigne.

Of course the count can't be touched directly, since he wasn't even aware of what was going on. (Did you see that last paper from "H. O. Petard," by the way? Beautiful stuff: he has a fundamental twist on the Haertel equations which make it look possible to see around normal space-time, as well as travel around it. Theoretically you might photograph a star and get a contemporary image, not one light-years old. Another blow to the chops for poor old Einstein.) But he is already no longer Procurator of Canarsie and, unless he takes his money promptly out of the countess' hands, he will wind up as just another moderately comfortable troglodyte. And at the moment nobody knows where he is, so unless he has been reading the papers it is already too late for him to make a drastic enough move. In any event, whether he does or he doesn't, the countess will be persona non grata in her own circles to the day she dies.

And even now I haven't any idea whether Egtverchi intended exactly this, or whether it was all an accident springing out of a wild impulse. He says he will reply to the newspaper criticism of him on his 3-V program next week — this week nobody can reach him, for reasons he refuses to explain — but I don't see what he could possibly say that would salvage more than a fraction of the good will he'd accumulated before the party. He's already half-convinced that Earth's laws are only organized whims at best — and his present audience is more than half children! I wish you were the kind of man who might say "I told you so"; at least I could get a melancholy pleasure out of nodding. But it's too late for that now. If you can spare any time for further advice, please send it post haste. We are in well over our heads.

— Mike

P.S.: Liu and I were married yesterday. It was earlier than we had planned, but we both feel a sense of urgency that we can't explain — almost a desperation. It's as though something crucial were about to happen. I believe something is; but what? Please write. -M.

Ruiz groaned involuntarily, drawing incurious glances from his compartment-mates: a Pole in a sheepskin coat who had spent the entire journey wordlessly cutting his way through a monstrous and smelly cheese he had boarded the train with, and a Hollywood Vedantist in sandals, burlap and beard whose smell was not that of cheese and whose business in Rome in a Holy Year was problematical.

He closed his eyes against them. Mike had had no business even thinking about such matters on his wedding morning. No wonder the letter was hard to read.

Cautiously, he opened his eyes again. The sunlight was almost intolerably bright, but for a moment he saw an olive grove sweeping by against burnt-umber hills lined beneath a sky of incredibly clear blue. Then the hills abruptly came piling down upon him and the express shot screaming into a tunnel.

Ruiz lifted the letter once more, but the ant tracks promptly puddled into a dirty blur; a sudden stab of pain lanced vertically through his left eye. Dear God, was he going blind? No, nonsense, that was hypochondria — there was nothing wrong with him but simple eyestrain. The stab through the eyeball was pressure in his left sphereoid sinus, which had been inflamed ever since he left Lima for the wet North, and had begun to become acute in the dripping atmosphere of Lithia.

His trouble was Michelis' letter, that was plain. Never mind the temptation to blame eyes or sinuses, which were only surrogates for hands empty even of the amphora in which Egtverchi had been brought into the world. Nothing was left of his gift but the letter.

And what answer could he give?