American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1953-56 Read online

  There was a general nod. I nodded too, but I paid particular attention to memorizing that plump little goatee. One by one numbers were called, and one by one the new-johns got up, conferred briefly with the goatee, and left, in couples and threes, for unannounced destinations. I was almost the last to be called; besides me, only a very young girl with orange hair and a cast in her eye was still in the room.

  “Okay, you two,” said the man with the goatee. “You two are going to be a team, so you might as well know names. Groby, meet Corwin. Groby’s a kind of copysmith. Celia’s an artist.”

  “Okay,” she said, lighting a Starr from the butt of another in a flare of phosphorus. A perfect consumer type if only she hadn’t been corrupted by these zealots; I noticed her jaws working on gum even while she chain-smoked.

  “We’ll get along fine,” I said approvingly.

  “You sure will,” said the man in the goatee. “You have to. You understand these things, Groby. In order to give you a chance to show your stuff, we’ll have to let you know a lot of stuff that we don’t want to read in the morning paper. If you don’t work out for us, Groby,” he said pleasantly, “you see the fix we’re in; we’ll have to make some other arrangements for you.” He tapped a little bottle of colorless fluid on the desk top. The tinny rattle of the aluminum top was no tinnier than my voice as I said, “Yes, sir,” because I knew what little bottles of colorless fluid could reasonably be assumed to contain.

  It turned out, though, that it wasn’t much of a problem. I spent three difficult hours in that little room, then I pointed out that if I didn’t get back to barracks I would miss the morning work call and there would be hell to pay. So they excused me.

  But I missed work call anyhow. I came out of the Museum into a perfect spring dawn, feeling, all in all, pretty content with life. A figure loomed out of the smog and peered into my face. I recognized the sneering face of the taxi-runner who had brought me to the Museum. He said briskly, “Hel-lo, Mr. Courtenay,” and then the obelisk from behind the Museum, or something very much like it, smacked me across the back of the neck.

  11

  “—awake in a few minutes,” I heard somebody say. “Is he ready for Hedy?”

  “Good God, no!”

  “I was only asking.”

  “You ought to know better. First you give them amphetamine, plasma, maybe a niacin megaunit. Then they’re ready for Hedy. She doesn’t like it if they keep blacking out. She sulks.”

  Nervous laugh with a chill in it.

  I opened my eyes and said: “Thank God!” For what I could see was a cerebral-gray ceiling, the shade you find only in the brain room of an advertising agency. I was safe in the arms of Fowler Schocken Associates—or was I? I didn’t recognize the face that leaned over me.

  “Why so pleased, Courtenay?” the face inquired. “Don’t you know where you are?”

  After that it was easy to guess. “Taunton’s,” I croaked.

  “That is correct.”

  I tried my arms and legs and found they didn’t respond. I couldn’t tell whether it was drugs or a plasticocoon. “Look,” I said steadily. “I don’t know what you people think you’re doing, but I advise you to stop it. Apparently this is a kidnaping for business purposes. You people are either going to let me go or kill me. If you kill me without a Notification you’ll get the cerebrin, so of course you won’t kill me. You’re going to let me go eventually, so I suggest that you do it now.”

  “Kill you, Courtenay?” asked the face with mocking wonder. “How would we do that? You’re dead already. Everybody knows that. You died on Starrzelius Glacier; don’t you remember?”

  I struggled again, without results. “They’ll brainburn you,” I said. “Are you people crazy? Who wants to be brainburned?”

  The face said nonchalantly: “You’d be surprised.” And in an aside to somebody else: “Tell Hedy he’ll be ready soon.” Hands did something, there was a click, and I was helped to sit up. The skin-tight pulling at my joints told me it was a plasticocoon and that I might save my strength. There was no point to struggling.

  A buzzer buzzed and I was told sharply: “Keep a respectful tongue in your head, Courtenay. Mr. Taunton’s coming in.”

  B. J. Taunton lurched in, drunk. He looked just the way I had always seen him from afar at the speakers’ table in hundreds of banquets: florid, gross, overdressed—and drunk.

  He surveyed me, feet planted wide apart, hands on his hips, and swaying just a little. “Courtenay,” he said. “Too bad. You might have turned out to be something if you hadn’t cast your lot with that swindling son of a bitch Schocken. Too bad.”

  He was drunk, he was a disgrace to the profession, and he was responsible for crime after crime, but I couldn’t keep my respect for an entrepreneur out of my voice. “Sir,” I said evenly, “there must be some misunderstanding. There’s been no provocation of Taunton Associates to commercial murder— has there?”

  “Nope,” he said, tight-lipped and swaying slightly. “Not as the law considers it provocation. All that bastard Schocken did was steal my groundwork, take over my Senators, suborn my committee witnesses, and steal Venus from me! ” His voice had risen to an abrupt shriek. In a normal voice he continued: “No; no provocation. He’s carefully refrained from killing any of my people. Shrewd Schocken; ethical Schocken; damned-fool Schocken!” he crooned.

  His glassy eyes glared at me: “You bastard!” he said. “Of all the low-down, lousy, unethical, cheap-jack stunts ever pulled on me, yours was the rottenest. I—” he thumped his chest, briefly threatening his balance. “I figured out a way to commit a safe commercial murder, and you played possum like a scared yellow rat. You ran like a rabbit, you dog.”

  “Sir,” I said desperately, “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re driving at.” His years of boozing, I thought briefly, had finally caught up with him. The words he was uttering could only come from a wet brain.

  He sat down unconcernedly; one of his men darted in and there was a chair seat to meet his broad rump in the nick of time. With an expansive gesture B. J. Taunton said to me: “Courtenay, I am essentially an artist.”

  The words popped out of me automatically: “Of course, Mr.—” I almost said “Schocken.” It was a well-conditioned reflex. “Of course, Mr. Taunton,” I said.

  “Essentially,” he brooded, “essentially an artist. A dreamer of dreams; a weaver of visions.” It gave me an uncanny sense of double vision. I seemed to see Fowler Schocken sitting there instead of his rival, the man who stood against everything that Fowler Schocken stood for. “I wanted Venus, Courtenay, and I shall have it. Schocken stole it from me, and I am going to repossess it. Fowler Schocken’s management of the Venus project will stink to high heaven. No rocket under Schocken’s management is ever going to get off the ground, if I have to corrupt every one of his underlings and kill every one of his section heads. For I am essentially an artist.”

  “Mr. Taunton,” I said steadily, “you can’t kill section heads as casually as all that. You’ll be brainburned. They’ll give you cerebrin. You can’t find anybody who’ll take the risk for you. Nobody wants twenty years in hell.”

  He said dreamily: “I got a mechanic to drop that ’copter pod on you, didn’t I? I got an unemployable bum to plug at you through your apartment window, didn’t I? Unfortunately both missed. And then you crossed us up with that cowardly run-out on the glacier.”

  I didn’t say anything. The run-out on the glacier had been no idea of mine. God only knew whose idea it had been to have Runstead club me, shanghai me, and leave a substitute corpse in my place.

  “Almost you escaped,” Taunton mused. “If it hadn’t been for a few humble, loyal servants—a taxi-runner, a few others— we never would have had you back. But I have my tools, Courtenay.

  “They might be better, they might be worse, but it’s my destiny to dream dreams and weave visions. The greatness of an artist is in his simplicity, Courtenay. You say to me: ‘Nobody wants to be brainburned.’ T
hat is because you are mediocre. I say: ‘Find somebody who wants to be brainburned and use him.’ That is because I am great.”

  “Wants to be brainburned,” I repeated stupidly. “Wants to be brainburned.”

  “Explain,” said Taunton to one aide. “I want him thoroughly convinced that we are in earnest.”

  One of his men told me dryly: “It’s a matter of population, Courtenay. Have you ever heard of Albert Fish?”

  “No.”

  “He was a phenomenon of the dawn; the earliest days of the Age of Reason—1920 or thereabouts. Albert Fish stuck needles into himself, burned himself with alcohol-saturated wads of cotton, flogged himself—he liked it. He would have liked brainburning, I’ll wager. It would have been twenty delightful subjective years of being flayed, suffocated, choked, and nauseated. It would have been Albert Fish’s dream come true.

  “There was only one Albert Fish in his day. Pressures and strains of a very high order are required to produce an Albert Fish. It would be unreasonable to expect more than one to be produced out of the small and scattered population of the period—less than three billion. With our vastly larger current population there are many Albert Fishes wandering around. You only have to find them. Our matchless research facilities here at Taunton have unearthed several. They turn up at hospitals, sometimes in very grotesque shape. They are eager would-be killers; they want the delights of punishment. A man like you says we can’t hire killers because they’d be afraid of being punished. But Mr. Taunton, now, says we can hire a killer if we find one who likes being punished. And the best part of it all is, the ones who like to get hurt are the ones who just love hurting others. Hurting, for instance—you.”

  It had a bloodcurdlingly truthful ring to it. Our generation must be inured to wonder. The chronicles of fantastic heroism and abysmal wickedness that crowd our newscasts—I knew from research that they didn’t have such courage or such depravity in the old days. The fact had puzzled me. We have such people as Malone, who quietly dug his tunnels for six years and then one Sunday morning blew up Red Bank, New Jersey. A Brink’s traffic cop had got him sore. Conversely we have James Revere, hero of the White Cloud disaster. A shy, frail touristclass steward, he had rescued on his own shoulders seventy-six passengers, returning again and again into the flames with his flesh charring from his bones, blind, groping his way along red-hot bulkheads with his hand-stumps. It was true. When there are enough people, you will always find somebody who can and will do any given thing. Taunton was an artist. He had grasped this broad and simple truth and used it. It meant that I was as good as dead. Kathy, I thought. My Kathy.

  Taunton’s thick voice broke in on my reflections. “You grasp the pattern?” he asked. “The big picture? The theme, the message, what I might call the essential juice of it is that I’m going to repossess Venus. Now, beginning at the beginning, tell us about the Schocken Agency. All its little secrets, its little weaknesses, its ins and outs, its corruptible employees, its appropriations, its Washington contacts—you know.”

  I was a dead man with nothing to lose—I thought. “No,” I said.

  One of Taunton’s men said abruptly: “He’s ready for Hedy,” got up and went out.

  Taunton said: “You’ve studied prehistory, Courtenay. You may recognize the name of Gilles de Rais.” I did, and felt a tightness over my scalp, like a steel helmet slowly shrinking. “All the generations of prehistory added up to an estimated five billion population,” Taunton rambled. “All the generations of prehistory produced only one Gilles de Rais, whom you perhaps think of as Bluebeard. Nowadays we have our pick of several. Out of all the people I might have picked to handle special work like that for me I picked Hedy. You’ll see why.”

  The door opened and a pale, adenoidal girl with lank blond hair was standing in it. She had a silly grin on her face; her lips were thin and bloodless. In one hand she held a six-inch needle set in a plastic handle.

  I looked into her eyes and began screaming. I couldn’t stop screaming until they led her away and closed the door again. I was broken.

  “Taunton,” I whispered at last. “Please . . .”

  He leaned back comfortably and said: “Give.”

  I tried, but I couldn’t. My voice wouldn’t work right and neither would my memory. I couldn’t remember whether my firm was Fowler Schocken or Schocken Fowler, for instance.

  Taunton got up at last and said: “We’ll put you on ice for a while, Courtenay, so you can pull yourself together. I need a drink myself.” He shuddered involuntarily, and then beamed again. “Sleep on it,” he said, and left unsteadily.

  Two of his men carted me from the brain room, down a corridor and into a bare cubbyhole with a very solid door. It seemed to be night in executives’ country. Nothing was going on in any of the offices we passed, lights were low, and a single corridor guard was yawning at his desk.

  I asked unsteadily: “Will you take the cocoon off me? I’m going to be a filthy mess if I don’t get out of it.”

  “No orders about it,” one of them said briefly, and they slammed the solid door and locked it. I flopped around the small floor trying to find something sharp enough to break the film and give me an even chance of bursting the plastic, but there was nothing. After incredible contortions and a dozen jarring falls I found that I could never get to my feet. The doorknob had offered a very, very faint ghost of hope, but it might as well have been a million miles away.

  Mitchell Courtenay, copysmith. Mitchell Courtenay, key man of the Venus section. Mitchell Courtenay, destroyer-to-be of the Consies. Mitchell Courtenay flopping on the floor of a cell in the offices of the sleaziest, crookedest agency that ever blemished the profession, without any prospect except betrayal and—with luck—a merciful death. Kathy at least would never know. She would think I had died like a fool on the glacier, meddling with the power pack when I had no business to . .

  The lock of the door rattled and rattled. They were coming for me.

  But when the door opened I saw from the floor not a forest of trousered legs but a single pair of matchstick ankles, nylonclad.

  “I love you,” said the strange, dead voice of a woman. “They said I would have to wait, but I couldn’t wait.” It was Hedy. She had her needle.

  I tried to cry for help, but my chest seemed paralyzed as she knelt beside me with shining eyes. The temperature of the room seemed to drop ten degrees. She clamped her bloodless lips on mine; they were like heated iron. And then I thought the left side of my face and head were being torn off. It lasted for seconds and blended into a red haze and unconsciousness.

  “Wake up,” the dead voice was saying. “I want you. Wake up.” Lightning smashed at my right elbow, and I cried out and jerked my arm. My arm moved—

  It moved.

  The bloodless lips descended on mine again, and again her needle ran into my jaw, probing exactly for the great lump of the trigeminal facial nerve, and finding it. I fought the red haze that was trying to swallow me up. My arm had moved. She had perforated the membrane of the cocoon, and it could be burst. The needle searched again and somehow the pain was channeled to my right arm. In one convulsive jerk it was free.

  I think I took the back of her neck in my hand and squeezed. I am not sure. I do not want to be sure. But after five minutes she and her love did not matter. I ripped and stripped the plastic from me and got to my feet an inch at a time, moaning from stiffness.

  The corridor guard could not matter any more. If he had not come at my cries he would never come. I walked from the room and saw the guard apparently sleeping face-down on his desk. As I stood over him I saw a very little blood and serum puddled and coagulating in the small valley between the two cords of his shrunken old neck. One thrust transfixing the medulla had been enough for Hedy. I could testify that her knowledge of the nervous system’s topography was complete.

  The guard wore a gun that I hesitated over for a moment and then rejected. In his pockets were a few dollars that would be more useful. I hurried o
n to the ladders. His desk clock said 0605.

  I knew already about climbing up stairs. I learned then about climbing down stairs. If your heart’s in good shape there’s little to choose between them. It took me an estimated thirty minutes in my condition to get down the ladders of executives’ country and onto the populated stairs below. The first sullen stirrings of the work-bound consumers were well under way. I passed half a dozen bitter fist fights and one cutting scrape. The Taunton Building nightdwellers were a low, dirty lot who never would have been allowed stairspace in the Schocken Tower, but it was all to the good. I attracted no attention whatsoever in my filthy clothes and sporting a fresh stab wound in my face. Some of the bachelor girls even whistled, but that was all. The kind of people you have in the ancient, run-down slum buildings like R.C.A. and Empire State would have pulled me down if I’d taken their eye.

  My timing was good. I left the building lobby in the very core of a cheek-by-jowl mob boiling out the door to the shuttle which would take them to their wretched jobs. I thought I saw hardguys in plain clothes searching the mob from second-floor windows, but I didn’t look up and I got into the shuttle station.

  At the change booth I broke all my bills and went into the washroom. “Split a shower, bud?” somebody asked me. I wanted a shower terribly, and by myself, but I didn’t dare betray any white-collar traits. She and I pooled our coins for a five-minute salt, thirty-second fresh, with soap. I found that I was scrubbing my right hand over and over again. I found that when the cold water hit the left side of my face the pain was dizzying.