Memoirs Found In a Bathtub Read Online Free

rang—his hand came down on the button like a lion’s paw.
    “Plastic?” he shot at me.
    “Plastic?” I said. “Well, hardly… I’m just an ordinary—”
    Kashenblade stilled the rising din of phones with one quick slap and looked me over once more.
    “Operation Cyclogastrosaur… Ento-mo … pentacla,” he kept trying, unwilling to admit to any gap in his infallibility. When I failed to respond, he suddenly leaned forward and roared:
    “Out!!”
    And it really looked as if he himself were ready to throw me out bodily. But I was too determined—also too much a civilian—to obey that order. I held my ground and kept the pass under his nose. At last Kashenblade reluctantly took it and—without even examining it—tossed it into a drawer of some machine, which immediately began to hum and whisper. Kashenblade listened to the machine; his face clouded over and his eyes glittered. He gave me a furtive glance and started pressing buttons. The phones rang out together like a brass band. He silenced them and pressed other buttons: now the speakers drowned one another out with numbers and cryptonyms. He stood there and listened with a scowl, his eyelid twitching. But I could see the storm had passed.
    “All right, hand over your scrap of paper!” he barked.
    “I already did…”
    “To whom?”
    “To you.”
    “To me?”
    “To you, sir.”
    “When? Where?”
    “Just a moment ago, and you threw—” I began, then bit my tongue.
    Kashenblade glared at me and opened the drawer of that machine: it was empty, my pass had disappeared. Not that I believed for a moment that this was an accident; in fact, I had suspected for some time now that the Cosmic Command, obviously no longer able to supervise every assignment on an individual basis when there were literally trillions of matters in its charge, had switched over to a random system. The assumption would be that every document, circulating endlessly from desk to desk, must eventually hit upon the right one. A time-consuming procedure, perhaps, but one that would never fail. The Universe itself operated on the same principle. And for an institution as everlasting as the Universe—certainly our Building was such an institution—the speed at which these meanderings and perturbations took place was of no consequence.
    At any rate, my pass was gone. Kashenblade slammed the drawer shut and observed me for a while, blinking. I stood there, my hands at my side, uncomfortably aware of their emptiness. His blinking became more insistent as I stood there, then positively fierce, I blinked back. That seemed to pacify him.
    “Okay,” he muttered, pushing a few buttons. Computers churned, multicolored tapes snaked out onto the desk. He tore them off bit by bit, read them, absent-mindedly set other machines going, machines that made copies and destroyed originals. Finally a white folder emerged with INSTRUCTIONS B-66-PAPRA-LABL in letters so large I could read them from across the desk.
    “Your assignment … a Mission, a Special Mission,” General Kashenblade said with tremendous gravity. “Deep penetration, subversion—were you ever there?” he asked with a blink.
    “Where?”
    “There.”
    He lifted his head; once again the eyelids fluttered. I didn’t know what to answer.
    “And this is an agent,” he said with disgust. “An agent … a modern agent…” He grew morose. The word “agent” was stretched out of shape and became a taunt, it whistled through his teeth, every consonant and vowel was chewed and slowly tortured. Then he exploded: “Everything has to be spelled out, eh? Don’t you read the papers? Stars, for example—tell me about the stars! What do they do? Well?!”
    “They shine,” I said doubtfully.
    “They shine, he says! All right, how? How do they shine? Tell me how!”
    And he pointed to his eyelids.
    “Uh, they twinkle—they blink—they—wink,” I answered in an involuntary whisper.
    “How clever he is! At last! They wink! Yes,