Isle Of The Dead   ::   Zelazny Roger

Then I realized that I should have called ahead from the hotel for a reservation. It was crowded. I'd forgotten that the following day was a holiday on Driscoll. The hostess took my name and told me fifteen or twenty minutes, so I went into one of a pair of bars and ordered a beer.

I looked about me as I sipped, and across the little foyer in the matching bar on the other side, hovering in the gloom, I saw a fat face that looked somewhat familiar. I slipped on a pair of special glasses which act like telescopes, and I studied the face, now in profile. The nose and the ears were the same. The hair was the wrong color and the complexion darker, but that's easily done.

I got up and started to walk that way when a waiter stopped me and told me that I couldn't carry a drink out of the place. When I told him I was going to the other bar, he offered to carry the drink for me, smiling, right hand at waist-level. I figured it would be cheaper to buy another one, so I told him he could drink it for me, too.

He was alone, a tiny glass of something bright before him. I folded my glasses and tucked them away as I approached his table, and in a fake-falsetto said, "May I join you, Mister Bayner?"

He jumped, just slightly, within his skin, and the fat only quivered for an instant. He photographed me with his magpie eyes in the following second, and I knew that the machine that lay behind them was already spinning its wheels like a demon on an exercise-bike.

"You must be mistaken--" he began, and smiled then, and followed that with a frown. "No, _I_ am," he corrected himself, "but then it's been a long time, Frank, and we've both changed."

"... Into our traveling clothes, yes," I said in my normal voice, seating myself across from him.

He caught the attention of a waiter as easily as if he'd had a lariat, and he asked me, "What are you drinking?"

"Beer," I said, "any brand."

The waiter overheard me, nodded, departed.

"Have you eaten?"

"No, I was waiting for a table, across the way there, when I spotted you."

"I've already eaten," he said. "If I hadn't indulged a sudden desire for an after-dinner drink on my way out, I might have missed you."

"Strange," I said, then, "Green Green."

"What?"

"_Verde Verde. Gr_n. Gr_n_."

"I'm afraid I don't follow you. Is that some kind of code-phrase I'm supposed to recognize?"

I shrugged.

"Call it a prayer for th-e confoundment of my enemies. What's new?"

"Now that you're here," he said, "I've got to talk with you, of course. May I join you?"

"Surely.