The Menace From Earth ssc Read Free Page A

You'll see."
    He did see. Open-faced sandwiches with the meat married to toasted buns and the flavor garnished rather than suppressed by scraped Bermuda onion and thin-sliced dill, a salad made from things she had scrounged out of his refrigerator, potatoes crisp but not vulcanized. They ate it on the tiny balcony, sopping it down with cold beer.
    He sighed and wiped his mouth. "Yes, Meade, you can cook."
    '"Some day I'll arrive with proper materials and pay you back. Then I'll prove it."
    "You've already proved it. Nevertheless I accept. But I tell you three times, you owe me nothing."
    "No? If you hadn't been a Boy Scout, I'd be in jail."
    Breen shook his head. "The police have orders to keep it quiet at all costs — to keep it from growing. You saw that. And, my dear, you weren't a person to me at the time. I didn't even see your face; I —"
    "You saw plenty else!"
    "Truthfully, I didn't look. You were just a — a statistic."
    She toyed with her knife and said slowly, "I'm not sure, but I think I've just been insulted. In all the twenty-five years that I've fought men off, more or less successfully, I've been called a lot of names — but a 'statistic' — why I ought to take your slide rule and beat you to death with it."
    "My dear young lady —"
    "I'm not a lady, that's for sure. But I'm not a statistic."
    "My dear Meade, then. I wanted to tell you, before you did anything hasty, that in college I wrestled varsity middleweight."
    She grinned and dimpled. "That's more the talk a girl likes to hear. I was beginning to be afraid you had been assembled in an adding machine factory. Potty, you're rather a dear."
    "If that is a diminutive of my given name, I like it. But if it refers to my waist line, I resent it."
    She reached across and patted his stomach. "I like your waist line; lean and hungry men are difficult. If I were cooking for you regularly, I'd really pad it."
    "Is that a proposal?"
    "Let it lie, let it lie — Potty, do you really think the whole country is losing its buttons?"
    He sobered at once. "It's worse than that."
    "Huh?"
    "Come inside. I'll show you." They gathered up dishes and dumped them in the sink, Breen talking all the while. "As a kid I was fascinated by numbers. Numbers are pretty things and they combine in such interesting configurations. I took my degree in math, of course, and got a job as a junior actuary with Midwestern Mutual — the insurance outfit. That was fun — no way on earth to tell when a particular man is going to die, but an absolute certainty that so many men of a certain age group would die before a certain date. The curves were so lovely — and they always worked out. Always. You didn't have to know why; you could predict with dead certainty and never know why. The equations worked; the curves were right.
    "I was interested in astronomy too; it was the one science where individual figures worked out neatly, completely, and accurately, down to the last decimal point the instruments were good for. Compared with astronomy the other sciences were mere carpentry and kitchen chemistry.
    "I found there were nooks and crannies in astronomy where individual numbers won't do, where you have to go over to statistics, and I became even more interested. I joined the Variable Star Association and I might have gone into astronomy professionally, instead of what I'm in now — business consultation — if I hadn't gotten interested in something else."
    '"Business consultation'?" repeated Meade. "Income tax work?"
    "Oh, no — that's too elementary. I'm the numbers boy for a firm of industrial engineers. I can tell a rancher exactly how many of his Hereford bull calves will be sterile. Or I tell a motion picture producer how much rain insurance to carry on location. Or maybe how big a company in a particular line must be to carry its own risk in industrial accidents. And I'm right, I'm always right."
    "Wait a minute. Seems to me a big company would have to have insurance."
    "Contrariwise.