COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 305
'Stranger, hardly. I lived eight years in this town. I came here from a New York rag, and people read my column. So it wasn't Winchell or Pyle or Dan Walker. I never pretended to be anything more than a second-string columnist. I was read at breakfast, over the coffee, and people got a bang out of the muck I raked.
'I'm Dave Tenning, and for years or centuries I've been locked up in a comfortable little prison with a Shangri-La library and a cat named Shan who didn't give a hoot about anything except a cat named Shan. The ghost walks. Just where he's bound I don't know, but he's looking for some threads to pick up. The date, for example.'
The newsstand had regular papers and it also had small, thick disks of plastic or glazed cardboard. Tenning stopped to stare. The date—
Fish decem 7. And so what?
"Paper, mister?" the man in the booth said. "Sheet or roto?"
"Look," Tenning said. "What's the date?"
"Decem."
He wanted to ask another question, but he didn't. He turned and went on, wondering about Seven. Year Seven? Not Anno Domini. So?
The little things, like this, would be the hardest to pick up. People don't change, they just grow older. But fads and gadgets and trivia alter fast, even to the point of becoming unrecognizable. And he still didn't know what year it was.
The heck with it. This was Gardner Street, and he knew where the Star building was. He hopped one of the robot buses when it stopped and wanted a cigarette. He was inactive for the first time since his escape, but his nerves weren't.
Nobody in the bus was smoking. He hadn't Been anybody smoking.
The Star building was still there, big, old and, surprisingly, dark. The electric banner on the roof was gone. Tenning walked up the steps and rattled the ancient doors. They were locked. He stood, hesitating.
This time he was really scared. A chased fox goes to earth, but if he finds his burrow blocked up, that's bad. Tenning automatically reached into his pockets, one after another. They were all empty.
-
A HEAVY-SET man strolling along the street paused to look up at him. Diamond-points of light showed under overhanging brows.
"That place closes at tilth," the man said.
Tenning glanced back at the locked doors.
"When?"
"Tilth."
"It—does?"
"Government offices," the man said, shrugging. "They run by schedule. No use trying to get in. Not till fen in the morning, anyway."
Tenning came down the steps.
"I thought this was the Star building."
"No," the assured, quiet voice said. "Not any more. We thought you'd come here, though."
Tenning's poised, singing nerves went wham. His fist made a similar sound as it hit the man's jaw, and Tenning followed up that one good blow with several others. He struck with panic and hysteria. The sound of alarmed voices made him realize that his opponent was down, and that figures were closing in.
He knew the streets and alleys and got away easily. That relieved him a bit. His pursuers were simply casuals. If they'd been men from D'If, he wouldn't have escaped without a lot more trouble.
So they knew, and they were on his track. Fine. He wanted a gun. He wanted a big bludgeon with spikes in it. He wanted poison gas and block-busters and flame-throwers. Most of all he wanted a hideout.
It was the familiarity of the city that was dangerous. The little things were different, and they were the ones that could betray him. He might find himself taking too much for granted, because this alley he was in looked just like the Poplar Way he used to know, and as he walked along, a paving-stone might suddenly fly away with him and take him back to D'If and the cat.
He went down to Skid Row, and that hadn't changed. The people had. He didn't know any of them. Maybe, in a different social setup, different people would be hanging on the ropes. But was this another set-up?
There was a cheesy sort of beer-garden in back, and he went there and wondered about things. Customers were paying for their drinks with tokens of some sort. Under a bedraggled potted tree a girl was sitting alone at a table, nursing a highball.
They looked at each other. The waiter appeared, and Tenning hastily got up and went to the telephone booth. But it held gadgets and no directory, so he came out again and stood helplessly hesitating.
He went over to the girl. She looked lost,
"Look," Tenning said, "can I sit down?"
"Never ... works out," she said. "I can't keep up with it. You're not the man, you know."
She was drunk, plenty drunk. But she held it well and managed to look pretty.
"Sit down," she said after a while. "Are you lost too?"
"Yeah. Lost and broke. I want a nickel to make a phone call."
Her blue eyes went wide. She laughed, not pleasantly. And she called the waiter.
"Two highballs."
Tenning waited. The drink tasted good, but it lacked schmaltz. Non-intoxicating alcohol, he theorized.
"What about it?" he asked. "Thanks for the drink. But what I really want—"
"You can't make a phone call that far back," she said, and Tenning's spine jammed itself together and felt cold. His fingers tightened on the glass. He said gently,
"What do you mean?"
"I miss it too. I grew up in the wrong time. Some people just can't adjust. We're a couple of them. I'm Mary. You?"
"Dave," he said, waiting for a reaction. But there was none.
She didn't know, then. How could she? The whole world wasn't spying on him. The whole world wasn't in league with D'If. That cat strolling across the bricks wasn't really in telepathic touch with Shan, reporting the whereabouts of the escaped prisoner.
"Why can't you make a phone call?" he asked.
"It wouldn't be worth it. Building phones just for people like us. We'll die, Dave. We can't propagate. They don't try to harm us, because we're not in the way. If you don't fit in—okay. Get drunk and think about Andy. You don't know Andy."
"Who—"
She laughed.
"He died, and I didn't. Or vice versa. I've never seen you around here before."
"I've been—out of town. For a long time." "I never bothered to go." "The telephone—"
"You know how they work nowadays," she said, "and what they call 'em."
Tenning was looking at a clock, high on the wall. He couldn't make much of the numerals. They weren't numerals. They were arbitrary signs.
"Sela plus," Mary said, "so we've plenty of time. Andy won't come. I told you he was dead."
-
THE little things are important. They made up their own dates, their own hour-names. Why? So people would be just a bit unsure, perhaps. Or, maybe, because time-names were a common denominator, and by changing those, the people were gradually turned into a different path.
There would be no sudden, tremendous metamorphosis. Tall cities would not spring skyward overnight. Ships would not fly to the planets. Because people change more slowly than things. Chaos and revolution follow renaissance. If the people have power.
In 1945 there had been power to waste. There had been a hundred plans for rebuilding a new world. And each had its own backers, many of them fanatical.
Harding was elected because he promised normalcy. After war, men were tired. They wanted to crawl back into a 1912 womb. They didn't want experiments that might upset their lives further.
Even before Japan went down, the road to the future was clear—a hundred plans, and a hundred fanatics. And weapons of power. If one plan had been chosen, there would have been opposition, and deadly danger to civilization. Because, by 1945, technology had developed weapons that were too perilous to be used—except by fanatics.
On one point everyone agreed—the Harding platform. Pre-war security. The good old way of life. It was easy to turn propaganda in that direction. Men wanted to rest.
So they rested, and Utopia did not come. But there were signs.
Streamlining was not functional for surface vehicles. It wasn't used.
Alcoholic drinks were, after a while, intoxicating, but without toxic effects.
Fish, decem 7.
Sela plus.
But in the open—nothing. People were contented and secure. They had their old, safe way of life. Perhaps subconsciously they were being conditioned otherwise. They took it for granted now that this was Fish decem 7.
A few misfits, who couldn't get used to the psych-phones—
He'd been a reporter, so he picked the scoop out of Mary after a while. It took quite a few drinks. And he had to keep turning the subject away from Andy, who was dead, but who used to do a lot of things in the old days, when telephones were still used.
"People are different," Mary said. "It's like ... I don't know. They've got something on their minds. But I don't know what it is. I remember in school everybody was tremendously excited one time about beating Tech High in the big game.
"I didn't care. But everybody else did. There was a sort of undercurrent. They were all working for that, deep inside of them, and I couldn't see it. Suppose we didn't win? What about it?"
"Antisocial," Tenning said.
"There's something in the air now. Everybody's working to beat Tech High. Except me, and—" She made a gesture. "People like us aren't even in the way."
"I used to work on the Star," he said. "It moved, didn't it?"
"All the papers moved, of course. They're published from somewhere. Only nobody knows where."
"Do you—read the Star?"
"I don't want to read anything."
"I was thinking about a columnist ... Tenning."
She shrugged.
"I know about him. He isn't with the Star now. He spotcasts."
"That's ... a radio—"
"Not any more. Tenning's a hot shot now, Dave. Everybody listens to him."
"What does he talk about?"
"Gossip. And politics. People listen—"
-
YEAH, people listen to that dirty ringer, and he moulds public opinion. He moulds it the way the big boys want. That's why they grabbed me in nineteen forty-five. I wasn't at the top then, but I had the public ear. I was getting good audience reactions. Spotting key men to work out their plan for them—
Ringers, doppelgangers, in the right places. Painless psychology, sugar-coated propaganda. And a world moving, leaving Dave Tenning behind, a simply immense sphere beginning to turn from its course, gathering momentum as a thousand doppelgangers shoved it along.
Okay. Maybe the plan itself was good. But Dave Tenning had been the prisoner of Chillon for a long time.
"I've got friends—or I used to have 'em," he said. "Mary, how can I get in touch with a guy named Pelham?"
"I don't know."
"Royce Pelham. He used to publish the Star."
"Have another drink."
"This is important."
She stood up.
"Okay, Dave. I'll fix it"
And she went to the psych-phone booth. Tenning sat and waited.
It was a warm night. His glass, cooled by induction, felt pleasant in his palm. A Skid Row beer-garden, smelly, not too clean, with moribund potted trees looking dissipated in the moonlight.
Welcome home, Dave Tenning. Welcome back to life. No brass band, but so what? The brass band is out serenading Dave Tenning II. The pseudo-man who made good. Offbeat music swung crazy, boogie rhythms somewhere, hitting the blue chord hard.
Mary reappeared, looking pale.
"I kept thinking of Andy," she said, "before he died. He got to liking those psych-phones. I never can get to."
After 1945, did people really want the old-style life? Or was the social growth, the evolutionary trend, still stirring? The superficialities came back. But people seemed to like new things—if they weren't too new, if they didn't seem to point the way to Change. Before a baby can run, it must be taught to walk, its fears overcome.
"Pelham?" Tenning said.
"Wela tee Carib Street."
"How—how do I get there?"
She told him. He still looked baffled. Mary finished her drink.
"Oh, I'll show you. It's something to do. But we'll come back here later."
They caught a bus—no fares were collected—and finally got to a comfortable, old-fashioned house in the suburbs. Mary said she'd wait in the corner drug-store and drink a chang. Tenning was wondering about the color of a chang as he rang the bell.
Old Pelham himself opened the door. He was smaller, a trifle shrunken, and completely bald now. His heavy face, seamed in folds, was inquiring.
"So?"
"Royce. You know me, don't you?"
"No," Royce Pelham said. "Should I?"
"I don't know how long it's been, but ... Tenning. Dave Tenning. The Star. Nineteen forty-five."
"A friend of Tenning?" Pelham asked.
"I've got to talk to you. If I can explain—"
"All right. Come in. I'm alone tonight, the kids are out. Now."
So they sat in a comfortable room with furniture that was mostly old, but had a few new and disquieting things, like the shining, moving, singing crystal on its pedestal in a corner. Pelham was courteous. He sat and listened. Tenning told it all, what he'd experienced, what he'd doped out the whole works.
"But you're not Tenning," Pelham said.
"I told you he's a double."
"You don't look like Tenning."
"I'm older."
"You never were Tenning," Pelham said, and gestured. Part of the wall turned into a mirror. Tenning turned and looked at a man who wasn't Tenning, and who had never been Tenning.
-
THEY'D done that in D'If. There'd been no mirrors there. Only Shan could have told the truth, and Shan couldn't be bothered. Five years, ten, twenty couldn't have made this difference. The bone structure was different. He was older, but he wasn't an older Dave Tenning. Somebody else had grown older in D'If.
"Fingerprints," Tenning said quite a while later. He said it twice more before his voice was right. "Prints, Royce. They couldn't have changed those."
But then he looked at his hands. He knew what his finger-tips should look like. The whorls and spirals had been somewhat unusual.
"I think—" Pelham began.
"Never mind. They didn't forget anything. But my mind's still mine. I can remember the days on the old Star."
He paused. The doppelganger would remember, too. The doppelganger was a perfect double of the 1945 Dave Tenning, complete with memories and everything else. Enoch Arden. A stranger, and afraid, In a world I never made.
"There must be some way of proving—"
"I'm an open-minded man," Pelham said, "but Lord, I've known Tenning for years. I had lunch with him last Questen in Washington. You simply can't expect to get away with—whatever it is you're trying to get away with."
"Maybe not," Tenning said. "So they'll catch up with me eventually, and take me back to my cozy little apartment in wherever-it-is."
Pelham spread his hands.
"All right," Tenning said. "Thanks for something, anyway. I'll let myself out."
He did.
Mary was drinking her orange-colored chang at the counter when Tenning entered the drug-store. He perched on the stool beside her.
"Okay?" she asked.
"Just fine," he said bitterly.
"Got any plans?"
"Not yet. But I will have."
"Come along with me," she ordered. "It's my turn now. There's something I want to see."
He went with her, downtown, to a central plaza he remembered. They stood near the sidewalk, opposite the marquee of a hotel, and in the warm, prescient night the pulse of new life beat dimly in off-beat rhythm.
People were different, Tenning saw. It was nothing tangible. They had just grown older, but not as he had grown. Not as even Mary had grown. They were conditioned to ... offbeat.
But every face held a latent consciousness of security. There would be no revolutions. The roots were firm in old things. And the new things were coming, gradually, inevitably.
"Blast!" Tenning said.
"What?"
It was all wrong. He could have adjusted easily to a completely new world. A civilization a thousand years hence would have been all new. That would have been acceptable. But by Fish decem 7 only the little things had changed. The little things, and the minds of men.
