Collected Short Fiction, page 161
Sibert straightened his shoulders and smoothed down his rumpled coat. He peered futilely into the hidden corner.
“Who’s there?” he asked.
“To you it doesn’t matter,” Locke said cheerfully. He looked at Sibert steadily. He smiled slowly. “So, the prodigal returns, bearded, weary, but more than welcome, eh? Aged considerably, too. Shall we kill the fatted calf?”
“Maybe.”
Locke’s face sobered. “What brought you back?”
“Money.”
“What for?”
“Cartwright’s kid.”
“Have you got any proof it’s Cartwright’s kid?”
“As you know,” Sibert said, unbuttoning his shirt. “I was shot a-little over two weeks ago.” He spread his shirt open. The scar in his chest was only a pink dimple. “Enough?”
Locke raised his old, hungry eyes to Sibert’s face. “What do you want?”
“Security: money and a guarantee I’ll stay alive to get the transfusions when I need them.”
“The money is easy. How do you propose to get the other?”
“I want the Cartwright story, the whole thing,” Sibert said evenly, “documents, affidavits, complete. I want it out where nobody can touch it. I want it fixed so that on the day I don’t verify that I’m alive it gets released to every news outlet in the United States.”
Locke nodded over it, considering. “You’d feel safe, then, wouldn’t you? Anyone would. Then we’d have to keep you alive, no matter who else went without, no matter who had to die. It would make us all very uncomfortable, but we’d have no choice. If you had Cartwright’s kid.”
“I have.”
“You had,” Locke corrected gently. He touched the arm of his chair. “Bring in the girl.”
Three men brought her into the office. Her blonde head was erect; her dark eyes swept the room. Locke nodded. The men left. As the door closed, out of the hidden corner of the room rolled a self-powered wheelchair. Huddled in it was the oldest man Sibert had ever seen.
The man was completely bald. His face and head were a wrinkled mass of gray flesh discolored with liver spots. Out of it, faded eyes stared fixedly like marbles dropped into decaying fungus. Saliva drooled uncontrollably from the lax mouth.
The eyes stared at Barbara. In spite of her self-control, she shrank back a little.
“Not yet, Mr. Tate,” Locke crooned, as if he were speaking to a small child. “She’ll need a complete physical examination before we can let her give more blood. She’s given a pint recently, and her health ponies first. The children, you know.”
Barbara looked at her future: Mr. Tate. She shuddered. When she looked at Sibert, her face was dead and white. “Why did you do it?” she asked.
“You’ve got it all wrong, Bobs—” he began desperately.
“No,” she said without inflection, “I’ve finally got it all right. I couldn’t let myself wonder, before, why you should fall in love with someone as plain as I am. I was still the princess in disguise; I wouldn’t let myself doubt. Now I’ve got it straightened out.”
“No, Bobs!” Sibert protested hoarsely. “I was following the plan—”
“Your plan, maybe. You changed the ending a little. You were going to sell me, really. I should never have believed that absurd story you told me at the motel. I should have known you could never believe it yourself. You’re too ruthless to understand a human impulse. You’ve killed three people already—”
“Bobs, I swear this wasn’t part of it!”
“Oh, I believe that. You were clever, but not clever enough. They win. And you lose everything. I’m sorry for you, Eddy. I loved you. You could have had immortality. But you threw it away.”
Sibert’s face worked ungovernably as he looked away, unable to endure the cold knowledge in her eyes. When he looked toward her again, the three men were once more beside her. They led Barbara toward the door; she did not look back.
“Put her in the apartment below,” Locke said. “You know the one. It’s been ready for long enough. Man every guard station; she must be watched every second. She’ll try suicide. The man who lets her succeed will take a year dying.”
Then she was gone. Locke turned back to Sibert. He smiled. “You can’t beat the organization; you should have known that. No one can.” He paused. “You told me once that you weren’t a very, good actor, Sibert. You were right; we picked you up at Joplin. As soon as you left the motel, we grabbed the girl. My only problem now is what to do with you.”
“I’ve got protection,” Sibert said quickly.
“That letter you wrote before you were shot?” Locke shook his head pityingly. “It was routine to check the mailbox after your escape.”
The lips of the thing in the wheelchair moved; a thready whisper escaped into the room. Locke nodded.
“Mr. Tate says there is no problem: you must die. You saw his face. You must die, of course. The question is: how? We’d like to hand you over for murder, but you know too much.
“For now, we’ll put you away. You’ll have time to consider your sin. It’s an old one—Adam and Eve succumbed to it, too. And it’s the unforgivable one: too much knowledge.”
The cell somewhere in the interminable levels beneath the monolith was bare except for the metal and canvas bunk. Sibert sat motionless on the bunk, unable to sleep, unable to stop thinking.
Somewhere he had gone wrong. And yet—he couldn’t pin down any moment when he could have acted otherwise. He had to look out for himself; no one else would. He had to make the only possible deal that would give him immortality and freedom from violent death.
You can’t fight organization. He and Barbara could never have escaped permanently and hidden forever. One day they would have been found and then—the end for him, and for her, her destiny, however arrived at. She was too rare a thing ever to be a person, too valuable to be more than a possession. She was something to be used.
Sure Barbara had loved him; many women had loved him. But only because he had earned them, had played upon them, had wooed them skillfully and with eternal patience.
Where had he gone wrong?
The bolt whispered in the solid steel door, the only exit from the cell. Silently, Sibert was on his feet, his body taut. The door swung toward him.
“Liz!”
She stood in the doorway, her eyes fixed on his face. He was beside her in two strides.
“I thought you were—Liz!” he said brokenly. “Am I glad to see you!”
In her hand was an automatic. She held it out. He wrapped his hand around it and around her hand. She pulled her hand free.
“Liz!” he said. “I don’t know what to—”
“Don’t say it!” she said. “You’ve used me, just as you’ve used every other person you ever knew. You’re a cold-blooded snake and a killer. But I couldn’t let them kill you. From now on it’s up to you. Don’t ever let me see you again or I may kill you.”
She turned and walked briskly away.
“Liz!” Sibert called after her in a whisper. “Where’s the girl?”
She looked back at him, pointed a finger straight up, and was gone.
Cautiously Sibert followed her along the dark, concrete corridor. By the time he reached a ramp leading up, even her footsteps were gone. Sibert eased up one ramp. The corridor above was empty. He climbed a second ramp, puzzled by the silence.
In the second corridor a man was crumpled on the cold, concrete floor. Sibert bent over him. He was breathing heavily; there wasn’t a mark on his face or head.
Violently, the corridor began to clang!
Sibert straightened instantly and ran. A few paces along the corridor, beside a window looking into a room within, a second man was stretched on the floor. Sibert didn’t pause.
At the first ramp, he sprinted up again—directly into the midst of a handful of guards descending. They twisted the gun out of his hands. After a moment’s discussion, two of them took him to Locke.
The office was thunder and lightning. Scenes flickered across one wall, revealing room after room of chaos and shouts and madly running men. Locke, spinning from desk to wall to phone, barked orders into the air. In the corner Mr. Tate huddled in his chair, his parchment eyelids closed over sunken eyes.
With a final, vicious gesture, Locke gripped his chair arm, and the wall went dark. With the lightning went the thunder. In the silence, he groaned. “She’s gone.”
“Gone?” Sibert echoed.
“Where is she?” Locke snapped. “How did you do it?”
“What makes you think I did it?”
“Somehow you got out of your cell. Somehow you knocked out five guards and got the girl away. Why you stayed behind I don’t know, but you’d better start answering questions now.”
Slowly Silbert shook his head. “It’s hard to find the hen that lays the golden eggs,” he said softly, “but it’s even harder to keep her.”
“Take him to the interrogation room,” Locke snapped.
The guards gripped his arms tighter. The thing in the corner rolled forward; its mouth opened.
“Wait!” Locke said. The guards hesitated. “Mr. Tate is right. You’re a stubborn man, Sibert, and you’re our only link to the girl. We’ll work with you. If necessary we’ll pay your price. Meanwhile you’ll be watched. You’ll have no chance to escape. One thing I want to know: who helped you?”
“Isn’t there someone else missing?” Sibert asked quietly.
“Sanders,” Locke growled. “It couldn’t be Sanders. He’s been here twenty years?”
“Well?” Sibert said, shrugging. He would save Liz; she might come in handy once more.
He had lost Barbara, but he had won a reprieve. It would last as long as the patience of men who are dying, day by day, and cannot face the night.
They would not catch Barbara now. Not the girl who had snatched a mortally wounded man from among them and hidden him away and nursed him back to health, who had only been caught because that man had delivered her into their hands.
She was wiser now. She would trust no one. It was a lesson immortals should learn early.
Sometime soon, Sibert thought, he would have one chance for escape; he must be ready for it. He would play their game and wait and watch, and before they learned that he’d had nothing to do with Barbara’s escape, his chance would come.
Afterwards would not be pleasant. For as long as his furtive life should last, he would be a fugitive from powerful, fear-driven men, and he would be driven, himself, to a fruitless search for a lost princess disguised as an ordinary mortal— who held a priceless gift he had thrown away.
But he would not think of that now. His mouth twisted at the irony of the way things had worked out: the implausible story he had told Barbara had been true.
Sanders! For twenty long years that colorless, nearly anonymous man had shuffled through dusty papers and waited for an opportunity that might never come. Twenty years! And Cartwright had disappeared twenty years ago! The coincidence was too striking to be accidental.
He could not blame himself. Who would have dreamed that a man who might live forever would risk eternity for a child he had never seen? THE END
1964
The Last Word
A wife can go to the basement for many reasons, but only two of them are universal. The first is to point out to her husband how he has failed her.
The furnace is going to be fixed right now.
“Jimmie!” I call upstairs, banging on the furnace with a poker so that he can’t pretend he doesn’t hear me. “Come down here this minute and fix the furnace!”
I’ve told him and told him. Since last fall the furnace has needed fixing. The house gets cold. I might as well talk to a stump.
Men are mesmerized by figures—of all kinds—and any kind of spurious instrument reading will be believed ahead of a woman. But it’s no use pointing to the thermometer. A woman knows when she’s cold, and all the gadgets ever inflicted upon humanity by men who never outgrew their electric trains won’t convince a woman that she’s comfortable when she’s not.
A dozen times I’ve told him. “Jimmie, you’ve just got to fix the furnace today.” And a dozen times he has kept his anonymity secure behind the paper and answered, “ummmhumph?”
The only thing more certain than that a man will get amorous at the wrong time is that nothing will be fixed around the house unless a woman stands over her husband with a whip.
We don’t like to whip them, but they won’t learn. After 10,000 years, you’d think they’d have absorbed a little initiative about important things. I’ll bet the cave woman had to browbeat her mate fifty times a night before she was certain the stone was properly in front of the mouth of their cave.
Men are funny. Their minds absorb only meaningless, ephemeral data, like the name of the current welterweight champion, and crazy notions—like this latest fantasy Harry invented.
Now Jimmie’s infected. There’ll be no peace in the house until the idea is sealed off, encysted like a tubercle.
Women are aliens!Isn’t that silly?
But it’s the sort of thing you’d expect from Harry. Jimmie thinks Harry is a wit. Well, maybe he is. Wit is something unreal and meaningless. He isn’t funny, though. Humor is basic; it’s about earthy things like children and sex. It isn’t fantasy.
So it didn’t worry me when Harry started spinning out one of his dull stories to Jimmie. We were in the kitchen—Lucille and I—and she told me all about it.
“Sometimes I worry about Harry,” she said soberly. “He gets the craziest ideas.”
“Don’t let it bother you,” I said frankly. “All men are like that.” Which was only a small evasion, hardly worth considering; Harry was worse than most.
Lucille was a bride, you see, and being a bride is an uncomfortable state at best. The man loses those attentive ways he put on before the wedding, and he becomes just as thoughtful and romantic as an old leather slipper. As a matter of fact, the resemblance is surprising.
“Marriage is a poor compromise with necessity,” I pointed out. “I suppose that’s because we have to marry men.”
Lucille shook her head wearily. “Why do we put up with it?”
“Because they’re so lovable.”
She sighed. A slow, tender smile softened the willful lines of her face; I wasn’t surprised that Harry had married her. “I suppose so,” she said thoughtfully. “Harry can really be a dear when I try. But it’s such an effort.”
“What is it this time?”
“Harry has this wild idea that women are aliens. I think he’s half way convinced himself like a boy telling ghost stories until he starts glancing fearfully over his shoulder.”
I tittered. “Not really?”
She nodded helplessly. “He’s working himself into a state—you know the way men do. The things that are close to them are unimportant. But something abstract and distant—some injustice on the other side of the world—will mount them on a white horse and send them charging wild-eyed to the rescue. They get banged-up and bruised, and they come creeping home to be comforted, and we take them back. Men never learn; they just keep on making the same mistakes day after day, year after year. And there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“That’s their charm. They’re just boys grown tall.”
“Somebody said that before,” Lucille said cattily.
“Of course.” I shrugged. “Otherwise it wouldn’t be worth saying. I suppose Harry has got it all worked out?”
“Naturally. You know: men and women are so different it’s as if we belonged to different worlds, the way we think, the way we act, the things we like.”
I smiled slyly. “Well, maybe he’s not so far off at that.”
Lucille wasn’t in the mood for jokes. “He couldn’t be more wrong!”
“That’s true,” I conceded.
“Harry says we were jettisoned. Some time in the past. Our alien mates dumped us here on Earth—to get rid of us because they couldn’t stand having us around any longer.”
I laughed then. I couldn’t help it. “Just like a man!” I gurgled. “Wishful thinkers to the last.”
“You wouldn’t think it was so funny if it was your husband!” she snapped angrily.
“You’re right,” I said, sobering instantly. After all, laughter is a tool, not a master. “You say he’s telling this stuff to Jimmie?”
“So now you’re worried?” she said loftily.
“Of course I’m not. Jimmie’s too sensible to get taken in by a notion like that. Besides,” I added as reassurance, “he’ll think it’s just another of Harry’s stories.”
“I know,” Lucille meowed. “Jimmie’s slow that way.”
“Better slow,” I slashed back, “than paranoiac. Where are you going?”
She stopped at the kitchen door and held a finger to her lips for silence. She listened for a moment. “Harry doesn’t know I know,” she said softly, straightening. “I think he’d die of fright if he thought I’d found out. Right now he’s in the living room torn between a childish pride in his shrewdness and his daring and a nightmare terror that I’ll read his thoughts or find his notes or listen at keyholes.”
“Silly man! As if that were necessary!”
She shook her head at her own frailty. “I can’t bear to think of him in there, shaking. I’ll comfort him.” She pushed open the door and called out, “Harry off on one of his stories again? Tell us when he’s through so we can bring in the refreshments.”
It was just right. Even from the kitchen, I could feel the men in the living room relax. Right then I stopped worrying about Harry. Lucille would handle him. She would wear him on her finger and make him think he was a wild, brave, independent thing. If it were necessary, she could make him believe that the world was flat and that it was created every day anew, when he came home to her.
This is a fine technique. It may be, as some women say, the flowering of male psychology’s 10,000 years, and I certainly won’t minimize anything that works so well. But sometimes I wonder if it’s worth the trouble.
