Collected Short Fiction, page 31
“Ibsen?” I suggested, chuckling, dredging a name out of my school days that I vaguely remembered was somehow connected with the subject.
Harry spat, as if he had something vile in his mouth.
“Ibsen! That traitor! That blind fool! It was he who first dramatized the insidious propaganda which led, eventually, to the so-called emancipation of women, and was really the loosing of the chains which kept them from ravening unrestrained.”
“Ravening,” I chortled. “That’s the word, all right—ravening!”
“You must go back to folk sayings to get real truth,” Harry went on, quieting a little. “ ‘A man is happy only two times in his life,’ say the Jugoslavs, ‘when he marries a wife and when he buries her.’ Or the Rumanians: ‘When a man takes a wife, he ceases to dread Hell.’ Or the Spanish: ‘Who hath a wife hath also an enemy.’ ‘Never believe a woman, not even a dead one,’ advise the German peasants. The wisdom of the Chinese: ‘Never trust a woman, even though she has given you ten sons’.”
He stopped, not as if he were near the end of his material, but to begin brooding.
“Did you ever look for something,” he asked, “a collar button, say, or a particular pair of socks—and it isn’t there and you tell your wife? Why is it that she can come and pick it up and it’s been right under your nose all the time?”
“What else have they got to think about?”
“It makes you wonder,” he insisted. “It makes you wonder if it really was there when you looked.”
I agreed with him, and thought, Strange, the odd truths that Harry can link into something excrutiatingly funny.
“They have no respect for logic,” said Harry. “No respect at all for the sanctity of a man’s mind, for what his world is built upon. They argue as it suits them, waving away contradictions and inconsistencies as meaningless. How many of us have our Xanthippes, bent on dragging us down from our contemplation of divine truth to the destructive turmoil of daily strife? It’s maddening, maddening!”
A thought struck me. So far, Harry had a number of strings, amusing in themselves, but lacking the climax that would wind them all up into a neat ball of laughter.
“What would they do,” I asked, smiling, “if they discovered that someone knew their secret? They couldn’t let it get around, could they?”
Harry smiled in return. For one unwary second, I thought he was slipping, giving the joke away.
“There,” said Harry, “you have hit upon the crux. If my surmises are true, why has no one else discovered it? And the answer is—they have!”
“They have?” I repeated, a little surprised.
“Oh, yes,” Harry answered, nodding. “And it provides the clincher. The women would have to do away with them, of course. Silence them. And it would have to show up somewhere—if one knew where to look.”
“Yes?” I prompted, breathlessly.
“Why,” he said, pointing a finger at me, “are there more men in asylums than women?”
“You mean—?”
He nodded.
I collapsed, hysterical. I choked with laughter. It was only with difficulty that I was able to speak when the women came in a moment later with their bowls and potato chips and glasses of beer.
“Hi, alien,” I spluttered at Jane.
And I laughed some more, especially when I looked at Harry and saw the stricken face he was putting on, horrified, terribly frightened, sort of all sunk in on himself—better, much better, than I’ve seen a professional actor do it on the screen.
Finally the look on the women’s faces brought me around—the bored look—and I tried to share the joke. Harry was laughing, too, kind of weakly—surprising, because he always is sort of bland and mildly curious when one of his stories gets everybody writhing.
So I started telling it and got part way through and—well, you know the way it ends. I looked at Harry for help, but he wasn’t giving any, and I kind of died away slowly.
“It must be the way he tells it,” I sighed. “Nobody can tell stories like Harry.”
You see what I mean. Women don’t think Harry’s funny.
The evening turned out all right, though. A little flat at the end, the way evenings usually are.
As we were going out, I heard Lucille say, kind of sharp, “Harry, there’s something wrong with the hot water heater. You’ve been promising to look at it for days, and you’ve just got to do something about it tonight because I’m going to be washing tomorrow,” and I heard Harry answer, “Yes, dear,” mild and obedient, and I thought, The guy’s got to blow off steam somewhere, and figured that I’d be hearing the story again at the office.
Which goes to show how wrong a man can be.
NEXT morning, Lucille called up and said Harry was sick—a stroke or a heart attack or something—and couldn’t come to work. I called there a couple of times, but Lucille told me he was too sick to see anybody. I knew Harry was really sick because Lucille had Dr. Clarke, that woman doctor, and Harry’s said he wouldn’t have her treat his sick dog if he wanted the dog to get well. So I knew Harry was too sick to care.
It’s funny how quick a fellow can go, and I got to thinking what a shame it was that Harry’s finest effort, the climax of his wit, so to speak, should go with him, and how it’s too bad that great vocal art should vanish without leaving a trace.
So I began trying to remember—and I couldn’t remember very good, particularly the quotations—so I did a little research of my own, just to be able to give a sample. I ran across a couple Harry missed.
One of them everybody knows. The one of Kipling’s that begins, “The female of the species . . .” The other one I worked up by myself, just thinking. Why, I asked myself one day, are there more widows than widowers? Of course, I couldn’t think of an answer.
It’s a shame about Harry. A great guy like that, a humorist who never was given the chance to share his gift with the world—if you ask me, funnier than anybody on radio or TV or the stage; anywhere, for that matter—and here he is getting set to kick off. The least I can do is reconstruct this biggest gag he ever put together as a kind of monument to him.
Well, it’s finished. I’ll show it to the boys in the office tomorrow. They’ll get a real kick out of it. No sense showing it to the girls, even Jane—like I said, women never thought Harry was funny.
Something else he left out, but probably only because he didn’t have enough time to develop the gag the way he usually does. What kind of planet did the aliens come from? It must have a lot of carbon dioxide. Ever notice how women always complain when you open a window? It must be a hot world, too; they’re cold all the time, especially their feet, which they like to put against their husband’s legs, making the poor guy practically leap out of bed. I’m an expert on that—Jane’s toes would chill any highball. But their world can’t be that hot, because women can trot around in the coldest weather with practically nothing underneath their coats. And how about those open-toe shoes?
It doesn’t add up at all. I suppose Harry would shrug it off as another proof of their alienness. Possibly he’d say it was just outside that women were warm; it’s in the house that they’re cold.
Well, there you are—Jane is calling me to come down to the cellar and fix the furnace. There isn’t a thing wrong with it. I’m sweating, as a matter of fact. But if I don’t go down and monkey around with the grate and draft, I’ll never hear the end of it. And I’d better go just to save the furnace; Jane’s banging it with a poker, yelling up to me that she’ll fix it if I don’t.
Jane with a poker; there’s a laugh for you. She can’t even wind a clock without breaking the mainspring.
1953
The Boy with Five Fingers
Everybody’s different—but some are more different than others
I LOVE Miss Harrison. The other boys laugh at me and say that Miss Davis is prettier or Miss Spencer is nicer. But I don’t care. I love Miss Harrison.
Miss Harrison’s my teacher. When I grow up we’re going to get married. When I tell her that she gets that kind of crinkling around her eye like she does when she’s pleased about something, and she says that’s fine like she meant it, and I guess she does.
The first time I thought about it was the day Miss Harrison told us about the scientists and the Old Race and the Basic Right. Miss Harrison said we should try to keep track of what the scientists are doing because they are the wisest and maybe if we know more about them we will be wiser, too, and might even be scientists ourselves some day. But I think what she really wanted to talk about was the Basic Right. Somehow, everyday, she talks about the Basic Right and it must be important because she talks about it so much.
So Miss Harrison said that many, many years ago, before any of us were born, the scientists had uncovered ruins and nobody knew what they were and everybody wondered and thought about them because they were really big.
Somebody said that we had built them long ago and left them and forgotten about them but nobody believed that because we live in little houses far apart and we never had built anything as big as the ruins and never had wanted to build anything like that.
Then somebody else said that the ruins had been built by a race that lived on Earth before we did and had died or something because maybe conditions got different or maybe they went to live on another planet. And everybody said that must be right, so they started calling them the Old Race but nobody knew what they looked like, or did, or anything except that they built these huge places and then went away.
Nobody knew any more than that for years and years, Miss Harrison said, until just a year or so ago when the scientists dug up a place that wasn’t all in ruins and found statues and pictures and books and everything. So everybody was all excited and worked on them awfully hard until they could tell what the Old Race was like and just about what was in the books.
Miss Harrison kind of stopped here and looked at us like she does when she’s going to tell us something important and we should all get real quiet and listen carefully so we wouldn’t miss anything.
Then she said that they had just released the news and the Old Race wasn’t really different after all but sort of like ancestors of ours only far away. She said that in lots of ways they were like us only strange and did strange things, and she said we should be sorry for them and glad, too, because maybe if they hadn’t been strange we wouldn’t be-here. Then she told us how strange they were, and I was glad I didn’t live then and that I was living now and I was in Miss Harrison’s class and listening to her tell us about the Old Race.
MOST all of them lived together in these big places, she said, like ants in an ant heap. Everybody gasped at that because we all liked lots of room. But the strangest thing of all. Miss Harrison said, was something else. She stopped again and we all got real quiet. They were all, she said slowly, exactly alike.
Nobody said anything for a moment and then Willie began to laugh the way he does, sort of half-hissing, and pretty soon we were all laughing and Miss Harrison, too. They all had two eyes, she said, and one nose, and one mouth, and two ears, and two arms, and two legs. After every one of those things Willie began hissing again and we all had to laugh. And, Miss Harrison said, they were all stuck in exactly the same place. Their arms and legs all had bones in them that had joints in the middle and at each end.
Though they were all exactly alike, Miss Harrison said, they thought they could see differences and because of this they did all sorts of strange things until they did the strangest thing of all and ruined all their big places and their children weren’t all alike any more. So it went on like that until nobody was alike and here we are. So they were kind of ancestors, like Miss Harrison said.
Then Miss Harrison stopped again and got up slow, the way she does when she wants to make sure everybody will pay attention. We all held our breath. In this room, she said, right now, we have a member of the Old Race.
Everybody let out his breath all at once. We all looked at her but she laughed and said no, she wasn’t it. Johnny, she said, stand up, and I stood up. There, said Miss Harrison, is what the Old Race looked like. Everybody stared at me and I felt kind of cold and lonely all at once. Of course, she said, I don’t mean Johnny is really one of the Old Race but he looks just like they used to and he even has five fingers on each hand.
All at once I felt ashamed. I put my hands behind me where nobody could see.
Willie started hissing again, but he wasn’t laughing now and his thin forked tongue was flickering at me. Everybody moved as far away from me as they could get and started making nasty sounds. If I had been a little younger I might have started to cry, but I just stood there and wished I had a mouth and tongue like Willie’s, or a cart like Louise’s instead of legs, or arms like Joan’s or fingers like Mike’s.
But Miss Harrison stood up straight and frowned, like she does when she’s real mad about something and she said she was very surprised and it would seem like everything she’d said had been wasted. Pretty soon everybody quieted down and listened so she wouldn’t be mad and she said it looked like what she’d said about the Basic Right hadn’t done one bit of good.
Everybody has a right to be different, that was the Basic Right, she said, the foundation of everything and we wouldn’t be here now if it weren’t for that. And the law says that no one shall discriminate against anyone else because they are different, and that applied to being the same, too. And Miss Harrison said a lot more things I don’t remember because I was sort of excited and warm inside. And finally she said she hoped we’d learned a lesson because the Old Race hadn’t, and look where they were.
It was right after that I decided I loved Miss Harrison. The other boys say she should have a neck, like Miss Davis, but I don’t see why. They say she should have two eyes like me or three like Miss Spencer, but I like her just the way she is and everything she does, like the way she wraps her arm around the chalk when she draws on the board. But I’ve already said it. I love Miss Harrison.
When I grow up we’re going to get married. I’ve thought of lots of reasons why we should but there’s one that’s better than any of them.
Miss Harrison and me—I guess we’re more different than anybody.
Breaking Point
The ship was proof against any test, but the men inside her could be strained and warped, individually and horribly. Unfortunately, while the men knew that, they couldn’t really believe it. The Aliens could—and did.
They sent the advance unit out to scout the new planet in the Ambassador, homing down on the secret beeping of a featureless box dropped by an earlier survey party. Then they sat back at GHQ and began the same old pattern of worry that followed every advance unit.
Not about the ship. The Ambassador was a perfect machine, automatic, self-adjusting, self-regulating. It was built to last and do its job without failure under any and all conditions, as long as there was a universe around it. And it could not fail. There was no question about that.
But an advance unit is composed of men. The factors of safety are indeterminable; the duplications of their internal mechanisms are conjectural, variable. The strength of the unit is the sum of the strengths of its members. The weakness of the unit doh be a single small failing in a single man.
Beep . . . boop . . .
“Gotcha!” said Ives. Ives was Communications. He had quick eyes, quick hands. He was huge, almost gross, but graceful. “On the nose,” he grinned, and turned up the volume.
Beep . . . boop . . .
“What else do you expect?” said Johnny. Johnny was the pilot—young, wide, flat. His movements were as controlled and decisive as those of the ship itself, in which he had an unshakeable faith. He slid into the bucket seat before the great master console.
Beep . . . boop . . .
“We expect the ship to do her job,” said Hoskins, the Engineer. He was mild and deft, middle-aged, with a domed head and wide, light-blue eyes behind old fashioned spectacles. He shared Johnny’s belief in the machine, but through understanding rather than through admiration. “But it’s always good to see “her do it.”.
Beep . . . boop . . .
“Beautiful,” said Captain Anderson softly, and he may have been talking about the way the ship was homing in on the tiny, featureless box that Survey had dropped on the unexplored planet, or about the planet itself, or even about the smooth integration of his crew.
Beep . . . boop . . .
Paresi said nothing. He had eyebrows and nostrils as sensitive as a radarscope, and masked eyes of a luminous black. Faces and motives were to him what gauges and log-entries were to the Engineer. Paresi was the Doctor, and he had many a salve and many a splint for invisible ills. He saw everything and understood much. He leaned against the bulkhead, his gaze flicking from one to the other of the crew. Occasionally his small mustache twitched like the antennae of a cat watching a bird.
Barely audible, faint as the blue outline of a distant hill, hungry and lost as the halfheard cry of a banshee, came the thin sound of high atmosphere against the ship’s hull.
An hour passed.
Bup-bup-bup-bup . . .
“Shut that damned thing off!”
Ives looked up at the pilot, startled. He turned the gain down to a whisper. Paresi left the bulkhead and stood behind Johnny. “What’s the matter?” he asked. His voice was feline, too—a sort of purr.
Johnny looked up at him (quickly, and grinned. “I can put her down,” he said. “That’s what I’m here for. I—like to think maybe I’ll get to do it, that’s all. I can’t think that with the autopilot blasting out an ‘on course’.” He punched the veering-jet controls. It served men perfectly. The ship ignored him, homed on the beam. The ship computed velocity, altitude, gravity, magnetic polarization, windage; used and balanced and adjusted for them all. It adjusted for interference from the manual controls. It served men perfectly. It ignored them utterly.
