Collected Stories Page 6

  Suffice it to say that my escape was largely a matter of luck, a physical wreck fleeing something oblivious to pain or fatigue; but that, beyond mere luck, I had been impelled by an almost ecstatic sense of dread produced by his last words to me, that last communication from an alien face smiling inches from my own, and which I chose to take as his final warning:

  “Sometimes we forget to blink.”

  You can read the rest in the newspapers. The Hunterdon County Democrat covered most of the story, though its man wrote it up as merely another lunatic wife-slaying, the result of loneliness, religious mania, and a mysteriously tainted well. (Traces of insecticide were found, among other things, in the water.) The Somerset Reporter took a different slant, implying that I had been the third member of an erotic triangle and that Sarr had murdered his wife in a fit of jealousy.

  Needless to say, I was by this time past caring what was written about me. I was too haunted by visions of that lonely, abandoned farmhouse, the wails of its hungry cats, and by the sight of Deborah’s corpse, discovered by the police, protruding from that hastily dug grave beyond the cornfield.

  Accompanied by state troopers, I returned to my ivy-covered outbuilding. A bread knife had been plunged deep into its door, splintering the wood on the other side. The blood on it was Sarr’s.

  My journal had been hidden under my mattress and so was untouched, but (I look at them now, piled in cardboard boxes beside my suitcase) my precious books had been hurled about the room, their bindings slashed. My summer is over, and now I sit inside here all day listening to the radio, waiting for the next report. Sarr-or his corpse-has not been found.

  I should think the evidence was clear enough to corroborate my story, but I suppose I should have expected the reception it received from the police. They didn’t laugh at my theory of “possession”-not to my face, anyway-but they ignored it in obvious embarrassment. Some see a nice young bookworm gone slightly deranged after contact with a murderer; others believe my story to be the desperate fabrication of an adulterer trying to avoid the blame for Deborah’s death.

  I can understand their reluctance to accept my explanation of the events, for it’s one that goes a little beyond the “natural,” a little beyond the scientific considerations of motive, modus operandi, and fingerprints. But I find it quite unnerving that at least one official-an assistant district attorney, I think, though I’m afraid I’m rather ignorant of these matters-believes I am guilty of murder.

  There has, of course, been no arrest. Still, I’ve been given the time-honored instructions against leaving town.

  The theory proposing my own complicity in the events is, I must admit, rather ingenious-and so carefully worked out that it will surely gain more adherents than my own. This police official is going to try to prove that I killed poor Deborah in a fit of passion and, immediately afterward, disposed of Sarr. He points out that their marriage had been an observably happy one until I arrived, a disturbing influence from the city. My motive, he says, was simple lust-unrequited, to be sure-aggravated by boredom. The heat, the insects, and, most of all, the oppressive loneliness-all constituted an environment alien to any I’d been accustomed to, and all worked to unhinge my reason.

  I have no cause for fear, however, because this affidavit will certainly establish my innocence. Surely no one can ignore the evidence of my journal (though I can imagine an antagonistic few maintaining that I wrote the journal not at the farm but here in the Union Hotel, this very week).

  What galls me is not the suspicions of a few detectives, but the predicament their suspicions place me in. Quite simply, I cannot run away. I am compelled to remain locked up in this room, potential prey to whatever the thing that was Sarr Poroth has now become-the thing that was once a cat, and once a woman, and once… what? A large white moth? A serpent? A shrewlike thing with wicked teeth?

  A police chief? A president? A boy with eyes of blood that sits beneath my window?

  Lord, who will believe me?

  It was that night that started it all, I’m convinced of it now. The night I made those strange signs in the tree. The night the crickets missed a beat.

  I’m not a philosopher, and I can supply no ready explanation for why this new evil has been released into the world. I’m only a poor scholar, a bookworm, and I must content myself with mumbling a few phrases that keep running through my mind, phrases out of books read long ago when such abstractions meant, at most, a pleasant shudder. I am haunted by scraps from the myth of Pandora, and by a semantic discussion I once read comparing “unnatural” and “supernatural.”

  And something about “a tiny rent in the fabric of the universe…”

  Just large enough to let something in. Something not of nature, and hard to kill. Something with its own obscure purpose.

  Ironically, the police may be right. Perhaps it was my visit to Gilead that brought about the deaths. Perhaps I had a hand in letting loose the force that, to date, has snuffed out the lives of four hens, three cats, and at least two people-but will hardly be content to stop there.

  I’ve just checked. He hasn’t moved from the steps of the courthouse; and even when I look out my window, the rose spectacles never waver. Who knows where the eyes beneath them point? Who knows if they remember to blink?

  Lord, this heat is sweltering. My shirt is sticking to my skin, and droplets of sweat are rolling down my face and dripping onto this page, making the ink run.

  My hand is tired from writing, and I think it’s time to end this affidavit.

  If, as I now believe possible, I inadvertently called down evil from the sky and began the events at Poroth Farm, my death will only be fitting. And after my death, many more. We are all, I’m afraid, in danger. Please, then, forgive this prophet of doom, old at thirty, his last jeremiad: “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.

  Renaissance Man

  Everyone cheered when the little man told them he was a scientist.

  Theoretical physicists danced beside their computers; electronics technicians whooped and hollered, abandoning their instrument panels. The huge laboratory rang with the applause of the assembled journalists, and Salganik of the Herald was moved to describe the scene as “reminiscent of the jubilation NASA workers demonstrated years ago during the Apollo space shots.”

  “Thank God!” said Dr. Bazza, an Italian biochemist.

  “Thank God he’s not a janitor!”

  The reporter looked up from his notes. “Pardon me, sir. You were saying . . .?”

  “Thank God we pulled back a man who’ll be able to tell us something.”

  “Was there really that much doubt?” asked Salganik, his pencil poised, prepared to take it all down.

  “But of course there was,” replied the Italian. “We knew we’d pull back someone from the Harvard Physics Department, because we’re here in the building right now.

  But it could have been just anyone. We might have found ourselves questioning a college freshman... Or a scrubwoman... Or even a tourist visiting the lab. We couldn’t be sure exactly where our ATV would appear—”

  “ATV,” said the reporter, feverishly writing in his notebook. “That’s ‘area of temporal vacuity,’ of course?”

  “Correct. Rather like those devices you Americans used back in the 1970s, on your interplanetary probes, to collect random samplings of soil. Only this time we’ve scooped up a living human being, and from our own world. The man is simply—how shall I say it—a random sampling.”

  “But not completely random, I hope...”

  “Oh, no, of course not. We knew that our ATV would appear somewhere in the vicinity of this physics lab; we assumed that it would remain a site for advanced research for years to come. But our notion of locality was really quite vague—just a building. And as for time, we simply knew that our visitor—” he gestured toward the little man, who was smiling and shaking his head in wonder—”would come from somewhere three to four hundred years in the future.”

&nb
sp; Salganik stared across the room at the new celebrity, now surrounded by cameras and lights. He could have gotten a better view, of course, by watching the television screen on the wall nearby—for the scientist’s six-hour sojourn in the present was being televized, in its entirety, around the world —but he preferred to watch the little man with his own eyes.

  I was there, he’d be able to tell his grandchildren. I was right there in the room when we plucked a man out of the future.

  Some idiot journalist had yelled out the traditional “how does it feel?” question (“How does it feel to be the first man on the moon?” they used to ask. “How does it feel to win seven gold medals? How does it feel to know that your wife and family have been wiped out by a meteor? How does it feel to be elected President?”), and the little man was attempting a reply.

  “Well,” he was saying, blinking at the lights, “it was all pretty unexpected, this happening to me and all. I mean, I’ve never won anything in my life, and I never could have imagined that I, of all people, would be the one to... You know. Be here like this. And I want to say that it’s certainly a great honour and all, and that I’m certainly as proud as can be to find myself here with you, even if it’s only for so short a time... Umm...” He bit his lip, blinking at the lights.

  “I’m happy to say that my era is a really, um, advanced one— at least we think it is, ha ha! ‘A Third Renaissance of Learning and Scientific Achievement,’ that’s the motto of the World’s Fair over in Addis Ababa... A renaissance rivalling the one in the early 2200s—but of course you wouldn’t know about that, would you? Hmmm... I’m not really a very good speaker, you see, but, um... I sure hope I’ll be able to provide you with knowledge that will maybe interest you and, um, help a bit, maybe?”

  He smiled bashfully.

  “It’s remarkable!” muttered Dr. Bazza. “You’d think the language might have changed over the centuries, but this man speaks English better than I do! Perhaps it was cinema that stabilized the language...”

  “And a good thing, too,” whispered Salganik. “If this project turned out to be a fiasco—if you guys had materialized a three-year-old baby, or some moron with nothing to say—the government would pull its money out so fast you’d get dizzy.”

  He remembered how hard NASA had tried to persuade Congress that the lunar explorers were carrying back valuable scientific information—that half a dozen bags of moon rubble were worth all those billions of dollars. In the end Congress had deemed the missions “impractical” and had discontinued them. The men in this lab had been under the same kind of pressure...

  But it looked as if they’d made a lucky catch. “Oh, yes,” the man was saying, “I’ve been a professor of plasmic biophysics for almost... Let me see... Nearly twenty-eight years.”

  “Could you tell us what that means?” shouted one of the reporters who had crowded his way toward the front.

  Immediately a storm of abuse broke over his head: Hush! Please! Expel this man! Ssshh! We’ll get to that later! Quiet!

  Reporters were supposed to remain silent, leaving all questions to a panel of scientists who, it was hoped, could make better use of the limited time. That other reporter’s question had wasted enough time already...

  “Professor,” asked Dr. Sklar, the Nobel Prize-winning pathologist, “let’s start with the most vital issues first.” He spoke solemnly, aware that the world was listening to every word. “I shall not even pause to ask you your name—”

  “Modesto 14X Goodyear,” interrupted the little man.

  “—or to find out anything about yourself. Those of us gathered here are interested in solving some of our most pressing problems. To begin with—”

  He paused portentously, allowing the drama to grow.

  “—have men in your time found a cure for cancer?”

  The visitor smiled. “Oh my gosh yes,” he replied. “We hardly even talk about cancer any more. I mean, the only ones who come down with it these days are men in deep space, and...”

  Sklar cut him off. “Can you explain to us how it is cured?”

  There was urgency in his voice.

  “Whew!” said the little man, puffing out his cheeks and glancing toward the ceiling. “Hmmm, let’s see. That is a toughie, I’m afraid.” He looked blank for several seconds.

  “You see, I’ve never had cancer myself, and few people I know have... But if we got it, we’d ring for a physician, and he’d come and, um...”

  “What would he do?”

  “Well, he’d give us this drug, and then we’d just ... sleep it off, I guess you’d say.”

  “This drug?” demanded Sklar.

  “Yes, well, I’m afraid I only know the brand name—Gro-Go-Way, it’s called. But I suppose that’s not much help to you ...”

  Dr. Sklar looked disappointed.

  “You see, that’s not really my field,” explained the visitor, with an embarrassed shrug.

  “A moment ago you spoke of ‘ringing for a physician,’ ” said another panelist. (Dr. Sklar was now busy writing down new questions.) “I’m a communications engineer and I wonder if you might tell us something about communications in your day.”

  “Delighted.”

  “For example, what exactly happens when you ring for the doctor?”

  “Why, he comes immediately. Or at least he’s supposed to. But I don’t mind telling you, quite often you get rude and shoddy treatment, he’ll tell you he’s too busy right now and —”

  “Please, sir! How does the thing work? Do you have instruments like this?” The engineer pointed toward a nearby table. “Telephones?”

  “Oh, telephones! Yes, sure we have them, only they don’t look like that. My, oh my, what an antique that would make... No, ours fit behind your ear.” He reached back behind his own. “Oh, dear, I’ve left mine off today, otherwise I’d show you... But anyway, it’s different when we ring for a physician. Then we press a red button in the bathroom, right by the bed, and we describe our—But you look confused.”

  “No, no, go on.”

  “We just say, in effect, ‘I feel sick, send somebody over.’ ”

  “And who’s on the other end?”

  “Well... people. And they hear me and send help.” He paused, looking a little doubtful. “Of course, it takes a few minutes.”

  “And how does all this work? Explain the mechanism.”

  “Gee,” said the scientist from the future, “I’m sure I don’t know. I never really bothered to find out. I mean, it’s always been there on the wall, and I just... I feel guilty as hell, but I mean, it’s just not my field. I deal almost exclusively with a type of chromosomatic plant nodule, they’re called Phillips’ bodies, and . . . Well, let me say this about communications: those people on the other end of the line are by no means the most efficient in the world, believe me, the service is atrocious these days and they’re forever going out on strike for one reason or another, so . . .”

  “Weapons!” spoke up a general. “What are the most sophisticated weapons in your military’s arsenal?”

  “Well, we have no military per se, but . . . Oh, yes, we do have some horrible weapons at our disposal, oh my yes. There’s one called a VRV—I’m not sure what the letters stand for—that can leave a fourteen-meter deep crater where a city used to be, and the neighbouring towns won’t even be touched. One was actually used—on San Juan, Puerto Rico.”

  “How does it work?”

  “Hmmm . . . You got me. I’m afraid I’m stumped.” He paused, looking downcast—and then brightened. “You know, you want to talk to a nuclear engineer about that. Your best bet would be a fellow named Julio 6X Franklin, an old friend . . . Though of course that’s impossible right now, isn’t it? Hmmm . . . I think I read somewhere that it uses the same principle as the moon pulling on the tides—moon on the tides, does that sound right?—but I’m really not the man to see.”

  Salganik leaned toward his companion. “I hate to say it,” he whispered, “but this guy doesn’t know anythi
ng about anything. What gives?”

  But Dr. Bazza only shook his head. He looked as if he were about to cry.

  The little man was attempting to explain the construction of the anti-gravity belt his son wore when walking on lakes.

  “It broke down once and we had to have the repairman over. He . . . Let me see, he told me it had a battery, yes, and a triangular chunk of this spongy substance . . . Levia, I think it’s called, but I don’t know exactly what it’s made of. Zinc, maybe?”

  The scientists had stopped taking notes long ago.

  Dr. Bazza turned to Salganik. “Listen,” he pleaded, his voice edged with desperation, “how much do you think you’d know if you went back into the Dark Ages? Could you tell them how to build an airplane? Or perform an appendectomy? Or make nylon? What good would you be?”

  Salganik shrugged. “I guess . . .” he ventured. “I guess that, even during the Renaissance, there weren’t many Renaissance Men.”

  The cameras and tape-recorders continued to whir.

  “I recall looking over the repairman’s shoulder when he replaced the battery,” the little man was saying, “and there was this little bundle of wires . . .”

  S.F.

  S.F. n., abbrev. Geog.: San Felipe, city, Chil.; San Fernando, city, Chil., U.S., Philip., Argent.; Santa Fe, city, riv., U.S.; prov., Argent.; San Francisco, earthquake site, U.S. Other: Sinn Fein (Jr., lit. 'we ourselves'), Ir. pol. movement, early 20th cent.; sacrifice fly (baseball); sinking fund (econ.); survival factor (ecol); science fiction; selective for-getfulness.

  -Oxford English Dictionary, Fourth Supplement (2002)

  Thursday 17 Sept '39

  Willie, precious:

  How's my little snookums? How's my snookums today? As happy as I am? I hope so, because I'm sure there's never been such a wonderful day! I woke up this morning feeling like a young girl again, and when I looked at your picture above my bed, and the sun shining outside my window, there were tears of happiness in my eyes.