Pan SF

1971

To Breton — trapped in his nexus of boredom, like a seahorse still alive inside a plastic key tab — the sound of the telephone was almost beautiful. He got to his feet and walked across the living room towards the hall.

“Who would that be, darling?” Kate Breton frowned slightly as she spoke, annoyed at the interruption.

Breton ran a mental eye over the quiver full of sarcasms which immediately offered itself, and finally — in deference to their guests — selected one of the least lethal.

“I don’t quite recognize the ring,” he said evenly, noting the sudden faint compression of Kate’s chalk-pink lips. She would remember that one, for discussion, probably at 3:00 a.m. when he was trying to sleep.

“Good old John — still sharp as a razor.” Gordon Palfrey spoke quickly, in his stand-back-and-let-me-be-tactful voice, and Miriam Palfrey smiled her bland Aztec smile beneath eyes like nail heads. The Palfreys were two of his wife’s latest acquisitions and their presence in Breton’s home usually caused a fretful, burning pain in his stomach. Smiling numbly, he closed the living room door behind him and picked up the phone.

“Hello,” he said. “John Breton speaking.”

“We’re calling ourselves John now, are we? It used to be Jack.” The male voice on the wire had a tense, controlled quality about it, as though the speaker was suppressing a strong emotion — fear, perhaps, or triumph.

“Who is this?” Breton tried unsuccessfully to identify the voice, uneasily aware that the phone line was a portal through which anybody anywhere could project himself right into his house. When he opened the channel to alien ideas he was placing himself at a disadvantage unless the caller announced his name, and the idea seemed completely unfair. “Who is this speaking?”