Killdozer! (12 page)

They sat down and again Donzey switched on the juice. His fingers found the key as his eyes found Farrel’s face; and then his fingers forgot about the key.

Farrel’s heavy lids closed for a long second, while his lantern jaw slowly lit up. Then the eyes began to open, slowly. At just the halfway mark, they stopped and the man did something extraordinary with his nostrils. A long sigh escaped him, and his wide lips flapped resoundingly in the breeze. His head tilted slowly to one side.

“Mmmwaw,” he said.

“Farrel!” snapped Donzey, horrified.

“M-m-ba-a-a-a—”

Before Donzey could reach him he reared up out of his chair, tossing his head back. By some miracle the earphones stayed in place. Farrel’s hands hit the floor; he landed on one palm and one wrist, which grated audibly. His huge feet kicked out and his arms gave way. He landed on his face, the wire from the headset tightened and the table on which the radio stood began to lean out from the wall. Donzey squalled and put out his arms to catch his darling; and catch it he did. His hands gripped the chassis, perfectly grounded, and as he hugged the set to him to save it, the upper terminal of a 6D6 tube contacted his chin. He suddenly felt as if a French 75 had gone off in his face. He saw several very pretty colors. One of them, he recalled later, looked like the smell of a rose, and another looked like a loud noise. He hit the floor with a bump, number instinct acting just far enough to twist his body under the precious radio. Nothing broke but the power line; and as soon as that parted, Farrel scrambled most profanely to his feet.

“Get up, you hind-end of a foot,” he roared, “so I can slap you down again!”

“Wh-wh-whooee!” said Donzey’s lungs, trying to get the knack of breathing again.

“Go away,” breathed the quivering mass under the radio. Donzey waited a few seconds, and when Farrel still continued to hang over him, he decided to go on waiting. He knew that the canny old sheriff
would never plow through a cash investment to get to him. As long as the radio was perched on his chest he was safe.

“Who you fink you’re pwayin’ twickf on?” said the sheriff through a rapidly swelling lip.

“I wasn’t pwaying any twickf,” mimicked Donzey. “Sizzle down, bud. What happened?”

“I ftarted to go cwavy, vat’s all. What kind of devil’f gadget iv vat, anyway?”

Sensing that the sheriff’s anger was giving way to self-pity, Donzey took a chance on lifting the radio off himself. “My gosh, man—you’re hurt!”

Farrel followed Donzey’s eyes to his rapidly swelling wrist. “Yeah … I—Hey! It hurts!” he said, surprised.

“It should,” said Donzey. While Farrel grunted, he bound it against a piece of board, and then went for a couple of ice cubes for the now balloon-like lip. As soon as Farrel was comfortable, Donzey started asking questions.

“What happened when I switched on the set?”

Farrel shuddered. “It was awful. I seen pictures.”

“Pictures? You mean—pictures, like television?” Donzey’s gadgeteer’s heart leaped at the ideas that thronged into his cluttered mind. Maybe his set, by some odd circuiting, could induce broadcast television signals directly on the mind! Maybe he had invented an instrument for facilitating telepathy. Maybe he had stumbled on something altogether new and unheard of. Any way you looked at it, there was millions in it.
Piker
, he told himself,
there’s billions in it!

“Nah,” said Farrel. His face blanched; like many a bovine character before him he suddenly realized he had swallowed his cud.

“Don’t worry about it,” said the observant Donzey. “Chewing gum won’t hurt you. Chew some more and forget it. Now, about those pictures—”

“Them … they wasn’t like television. They wasn’t like nothin’ I ever heard about before. They were colored pictures—”

“Moving pictures?”

“Oh, yeah. But they were all foggy. Things close to me, they were clear. Anything more’n thirty feet away was—fuzzy.”

“Like a camera out of focus?”

“Um. But things ‘way far away, they were clear as a bell.”

“What did you see?”

“Hills—fields. I didn’t recognize that part of the country. But it all looked different. The grass was green, but sort of gray, too. An’ the sky was just—blank. It all seemed good. I dunno—you won’t laugh at me, Donzey?” asked the sheriff suddenly.

“Good gosh no!”

“Well, I was—
eatin’
the grass!” Farrel peered timidly at the mechanic and then seemed reassured. “It was queer. I couldn’t figure time at all. I don’t know how long it went on—might ’a’ been years. Seemed like it was raining sometimes. Sometimes it was cold, an’ that didn’t bother me. Sometimes it was hot, and boy, that did.”

“Are you telling me you
felt
things in those pictures?”

Farrel nodded soberly. “Donzey, I was
in
those pictures.”

Donzey thought,
What have I got here? Transmigration? Teleportation? Clairvoyance? Why, there’s ten billion in it!

“What got me,” said Farrel thoughtfully, “was that everything seemed so good. Until the end. There was miles of alleys, like, and then a great big dark building. I was scared, but everyone else seemed to be going my way, so I went along. Then some feller with a … a cleaver, he … I tried to get away, but I couldn’t. He hit me. I hollered.”

“I’ll say you did.” They shuddered together for a moment.

“That’s all,” said Farrel. “He hit me twice, and I woke up on the floor with a busted wing and saw you all mixed up with the radio. Now you tell me—what happened?”

“You seemed to go into a kind of trance. You hollered, and then started thrashing around. You did a high-dive onto the deck an’ dragged the radio off the table. I caught it an’ my chin hit it where it was hot. It knocked me silly. The whole thing didn’t last twenty seconds.”

“Donzey,” said the sheriff, standing up, “you can keep the money I put into this thing. I don’t want no more of it.” He went to the door. “Course, if you should make a little money, don’t forget who helped you get a start.”

Donzey laughed. “I’ll keep in touch with you,” he said. “Look—about that big building you went into. You said you were scared,
but everybody else was going the same way, so you went along. What were the others like?”

Farrel looked at him searchingly. “Did I say ‘everybody else’?”

“You did.”

“That’s funny.” Farrel scratched his head with his unbandaged arm. “All the rest of ’em was—sheep.” And he went out.

For a long time after Farrel had gone, Donzey sat and stared at the radio. “Sheep,” he muttered. He got up and set the transmitter carefully back on the table, rapidly checking over the wiring and tubes to see that all was safe and unbroken. “Sheep?” he asked himself. What had an FM radio to do with sheep? He put away his pliers and sal ammoniac and solder and flux; hung his friction tape on its peg; picked up the soldering iron by the point and was reminded that it was still plugged in. He looked down at his scorched palm. “Sheep!” he said absently.

It wasn’t anything you could just figure out, like what made an automobile engine squeak when you ran it more than two hundred miles without any oil, or why most of the lift comes from the top surface of an airplane’s wing. It was something you had to try out, like getting drunk or falling in love. Donzey switched on the radio, sat down and picked up the headset. As he adjusted the crownpiece back down to man-size, he was struck by an ugly thought. Farrel had been in a bad way when he was inside this headset. He was—dreaming, was it?—that some guy was striking him with a cleaver just as he lurched forward and cut the juice. Suppose he hadn’t cut it—would he have died, like the … the sheep he thought he was?

Donzey lay the earphones down and went into the bedroom for his alarm clock. Bolting it to the table, he wrapped a cord around the alarm key and led it to the radio switch. Then he set it carefully, so it would go off in one minute and turn off the set. He put on the headset, waited twenty-five seconds, and turned it on. Fifteen seconds to warm up, and then—

It happened for him, too, that gray grass and blank sky, the timelessness, the rain, the cold, the heat, and the sheep. The
—other
sheep. He ate the grass and it was good. He was frightened and milled with
the others through those alleyways. He saw the dark building. He—and the alarm shrilled, the set clicked off, and he sat there sweating, a-tremble. This was bad. Oh, but bad.

Any money in it? Would anybody pay for pictures you could live in? And die in?

He had a wholesome urge to take his little humdinger—a machinist’s hammer—and ding the hum out of the set. He got the better of the urge. He did, however, solemnly swear never to eat another bite of lamb or mutton. That noise Farrel had made—

Mutton? Wasn’t there some mutton involved in the radio? He looked at it—at the phone condenser. An innocent-looking little piece of bone, hollow, with the tinfoil inside and out. Giggling without mirth, he took a piece of wire and shorted the homemade condenser out of the circuit, set his time switch, and put on the phones. Nothing happened. He reached over, snatched the wire away. Immediately he was eating gray-green grass under a blank sky, and it was good—good—and now the cold—and then the alarm, and he was back in his chair, staring at the mutton-bone condenser.

“That bone,” he whispered, “just ain’t dead yet!”

He went and stood at the front door, thinking of the unutterable horror of that dark building, the milling sheep. Farrel’s sprained wrist. The mutton bone. “Somewhere, somehow,” he told himself, “there’s a hundred billion in it!”

Ringing a doorbell with a hand burdened by a huge bundle of groceries while the other is in a sling, presents difficulties, but Sheriff Farrel managed it. Turning the knob was harder, but Farrel managed that, too, when there was no response to the bell. From the inside room came the most appalling series of sounds—a chuckling, hysterical gabbling which rose in pitch until it was cut off with a frightful gurgling. Farrel tossed his burden on a seedy divan and ran into the workshop.

Donzey was lolling in the chair by the radio with the earphones on. His face was pale and his eyes were closed, and he twitched. The radio, in the two weeks since Farrel had seen it, had undergone considerable change. It was now compactly boxed in a black enameled
sheet-iron box, from which protruded the controls and a pair of adjustable steer clips, which held what looked like a small white stick. The old speaker, the globular antenna, and all of the external spaghetti was gone. Among the dials on the control panel was that of a clock with a sweep second-hand. This and Donzey’s twitching were the only movements in the room.

Suddenly the set clicked and Donzey went limp. Farrel gazed with sad apprehension at the mechanic, thinking that being his pallbearer would be little trouble.

“Donzey—”

Donzey shook his head and sat up. He was thinner, and his eyes told the sheriff that he was in the throes of something or other. He leaped up and pumped Farrel’s good hand. “Just the man I wanted to see. It works, Farrel—it works!”

“Yeah, we’re rich,” said Farrel dourly. “I heard all that before. Heck with it. Come out o’ here.” He dragged Donzey into the living room and indicated the bundle on the divan. “Start in on that.”

Donzey investigated. “What’s this for?”

“Eatin’, dope. The whole town’s talkin’ about you starvin’ yourself. If I hadn’t given you that money, you wouldn’t have built that radio.”

“Well, you don’t have to feed me,” said Donzey warmly.

“I feed any stray dog that follers me home,” said Farrel. “An’ I ain’t responsible for ’em bein’ hungry. Eat, now.”

“Who said I was hungry?”

“Goes without sayin’. A guy that goes scrabblin’ around Tookey’s butcher shop lookin’ for bones twice a day just ain’t gettin’ enough Vitamin B.”

Donzey laughed richly, looked at the sheriff and laughed again. “Oh—that! I wasn’t hungry!”

“Don’t start pullin’ the wool over my eyes. You’ll eat that stuff or I’ll spread it on the floor and roll you in it.” He took the bag and upended it over the couch.

Donzey, with awe, looked at the bread, the butter, the preserves, canned fruit, steak, potatoes, lard, vegetables—“Farrel, for gosh sakes! Black market. It must be, for all that—”

“It ain’t,” said the sheriff grimly. He herded Donzey into the kitchen, brushed a lead-crucible and a miniature steam engine off the stove and started to cook.

Donzey protested volubly until the steak started to sizzle, and then was stopped by an excess of salivary fluid. He was a little hungry, after all.

Farrel kept packing it in him until he couldn’t move, and then sat down opposite and began to eye him coldly. “Now what’s all this about?” he asked. “Why didn’t you come to me for a handout?”

“I didn’t need a handout,” said Donzey, “and if I did I was too busy to notice it. Farrel, we’ve got the biggest thing of the century sitting in there!”

“It shoots a signal where you want it to, like you said?”

“Huh? What do you.… Oh, you mean the Heaviside beam thing? Nah,” said Donzey with scorn. “Son, this is
big!
”

“Hm-m-m,” said Farrel, looking at his sling. “But what good is it?”

“An entirely new school of thought will be built up around this thing,” exulted Donzey. “It touches on philosophy, my boy, and metaphysics—the psychic sciences, even.”

“What good is it?”

“Course, I can only guess on the whys and wherefores. When you came in, I was a chicken. I got my neck wrung. Sound silly? Well, it wouldn’t to you … you
know
. But nobody else would believe me. I was a chicken—”

“What good is it?”

“—because between the clips I’ve built on the set I put a sliver of chicken bone. There was mutton on it when you tried it. I’ve been cattle and swine through that gadget, Farrel. I’ve been a sparrow and a bullfrog and an alley cat and a rock bass. I know how each one of them lived and died!”

“Swell,” said Farrel. “But what good is it?”

“What good is it? How can you ask me such a question? Can’t you think of anything but money?”

This sudden reversal caught Farrel right between the eyes. He rose with dignity, as if he were sitting on an elevator. “Donzey,” he
said, “you’re a thief an’ a robber, an’ I don’t want no more to do with you. Miz’ Curtis was sayin’ the other day that Donzey is a boy that’s goin’ places. I guess it’s up to me to tell you where to go.” He told him and stamped out.