Narabedla Ltd by Frederik Pohl

worst that could happen? I might miss my train, of course, but that would be only an annoyance, not a tragedy. No one was expecting me at any particular time in Madrid. I would very possibly get thrown out of the hotel. I might even get punched out, by either the porter or the doorman in the organ-grinder hat. But the Negresco would probably prefer to avoid violence, and besides, in a pinch I could ask them to look up that old card-file to show that, once anyhow, I had been on their protected-species list myself.
    What the hell, I said to myself courageously.
    So I pulled two hundred-franc notes and my business card out of my wallet and handed them to the Senegalese, patiently standing by the open door of his cab. In my very best French I said, “I must go inside the hotel for ten minutes. If I am not back by then, go to the police.”
    It turned out I was in error, on at least two counts.
    The man I thought was Senegalese said in unaccented Harlem: “Shit, man, you just don’ learn.” And what he hit me with I never found out.
     
    And that is how I came to travel to the second moon of the seventh planet of the star Aldebaran.
    When Irene Madigan said you could hide anything at all on a yacht the size of Henry Davidson-Jones’s she was absolutely right. She just didn’t go far enough. She hadn’t imagined what the limits of “anything” might include.

 
CHAPTER

8
     
     
    I guess I’d better try to say what the second moon of the seventh planet of the star Aldebaran was.
    It was disorienting. In fact, it was very, very disorienting.
    I woke up with a lump on my head (but it didn’t hurt) and a funny feeling that I’d lost some weight. I had. I was (as I discovered later) in the outermost shell of the cylindrical, far-from-natural moonlet that had started out as the second moon of the seventh planet of the star Aldebaran, but even there the gravity, or the rotation of the thing that I felt as gravity, was only about 80 percent of what I had experienced all my previous life.
    One would think—I damn sure would have thought—that somebody who’d been knocked out, lugged aboard a yacht, shoved into one end of a black box, and dragged out of the other a million zillion miles away—I mean, you’d think that anybody like that would be hopelessly befuddled, if not blown entirely away. It wasn’t like that. It was disorienting, sure, but I knew right away what had happened. I mean, all but the details. It could have been Mars or the moon or the fourth dimension or the year 2275 A . D . —but I knew right away, no question at all, that what had happened was weird.
    Of course, at that point I didn’t see any of the really weird ones. What I saw was a redheaded hippy-looking middle-aged man whose name (I found out) was Sam Shipperton, standing over me while he read the note that had been tied around my neck. “Aw, shit,” he moaned, “they’re going crazy back there. What the hell am I supposed to do with you?”
     
    He did, after a while, figure that out.
    What Sam Shipperton decided to do with me was weird enough in itself. In my opera days I knew a Canadian voice coach named Daisy, who had worked for British intelligence back in World War II. She was twenty-two years old when she finished her training, not very worldly; on her first assignment they slipped her into Naples just ahead of the Salerno landings, and something went wrong with the arrangements. The safe house she was supposed to stay in wasn’t safe anymore.
    The chief of the partigiarti who was her control had a real-life career as a stage magician. He improvised; and that night young Daisy found herself on the program at the Teatro Reale, doing a strip-tease before eight hundred howling members of the S.S. Panzer Division “Heimat.” It was, she told me, very drafty.
    It was not quite the same for me when I arrived on the second moon. I didn’t have to take my clothes off for the audience Sam Shipperton put together for me. On the other