Killdozer! (41 page)

“Oh, darling—all right. Right away, soon’s I can get a cab. Marie’s here. She’s been wanting to get the police all night. I wouldn’t let her.”

“Bless you! ’Bye!” I hung up. Henry was practically jumping up and down in his impatience to get on the phone and talk to Marie, but I put it behind me. “No you don’t. You’d get to billing and cooing over the phone and Wickersham would ring in on you. We’ve got to get them taken care of first.”

We gathered up our tools and I took them out to the car: I was no Mr. America, but Henry looked like a meat-scrap. I took the precaution
to go in and out through the window after nullifying the U.V. I wasn’t going to issue any invitation to Brother Wickersham, if he didn’t already know we were here, which was doubtful.

But when the girls arrived, I felt I could forget about that. They came running up the path from a taxi, the Widget winning by seven lengths. I caught her up and hugged her till she grunted, and then slung her over one shoulder while I hugged Carole. I didn’t look to see what passed between Marie and Henry, but it must have been something similar.

We trooped into the beauty shop. “Marie first,” I said. “You’ve earned it, Henry.”

“Aha!” grinned Henry. “It’s a privilege now!”

“I’m sure of my stuff now. Come along, Carole, Widge!” I led them into the little laboratory. They both watched with some fascination as I switched on the heaters.

“O.K., Godfrey,” Henry’s voice floated in. I switched on.

“Watch the ring,” I said to Carole. “When it breaks a little at the edge, Marie will forget that that thing happened. I mean, she’ll remember it didn’t happen. I mean—”

“I know, dear.” She sighed.

“Hm-m-m! Why the sigh?”

“I was just thinking—she has a real something to lose. So has the Widget. Oh, I’m sorry, darling. I didn’t mean to—”

“Skip it. You’ll get a treatment. I have the littlest hunch why you reacted the way you did to this thing … oh, I can’t explain it all now, beloved, but I will. In a roundabout and rather agonizing way, I’ve been paid a wonderful compliment.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

“Daddy, where’s the cormium hemlet?”

“Busted, finished, and fixed for good,” I said. “Hey you. Your Daddy did something about it. That suit you?”

She looked me over. “S’about time.”

“Widget!”
said Carole.

“Mummy, every time you take to cryin’ around the place, I’m
gonna be mad at him. Mostly I don’t know why, but I knew men cause womenses tears alla time.”

“Are you precocious, my darling daughter, or are you quoting Mrs. Wilton?”

“Mrs. Wilton,” said the Widget. She considered for a moment, and then said, “Maybe I’m precocious, too.”

Just then the nictating ring on the oscilloscope’s screen wobbled and frayed at one edge. I cut the master switch. “Cut!” I called.

There wasn’t a sound from the beauty shop. I ran out there, did a quick pivot and came back. “Marie and Henry,” I said around the tongue in my cheek, “seem to appreciate each other again.” Carole smiled. It seemed I had been waiting a long time for that smile. I kissed her. “Go on out there now. Do what Henry tells you. When you come back here, I dare you tell me you’re frightened of anything.”

Completely trusting, she went out. I held on to the child when she tried to follow.

“O.K.!” called Henry after a minute.

“What’s Mummy doing?”

“She’s taking a two-minute nap where the helmet used to be,” I said as I threw the switches.

“Kin I?”

“Are you good?”

“Well … I dunno. I busted your shaving mug.”

“Oh-oh.”

“But then I took care of Mummy when you stayed out all night.”

“What did you do?”

“I told her you was wonderful.”

“You did? Bless your little heart!”

“Shucks. It’s no more than you tell her yourself.”

“Think we have her fooled, Widget?” I asked, laughing.

“We wouldn’t if she thought how bad we were instead of how good we are.”

“Now there you have something.”

“Cut it,” Henry called.

“Now you beat it. G’wan; scat, now!”

“Aw. Just ’Cause you and Mummy’s going to get mushy.”

And we did. One look at those unclouded eyes, and I knew that she was all right again.

“A dream, darling,” she murmured when I let her. “A silly dream. And I can’t even remember what it was about. It was a dream that was—just like all of us, you, and me, and the Widget. I can’t think why it was so bad.”

“I know, now,” I whispered. “Tell you later.”

I went to work on the Widget’s treatment, and when I got Henry’s all clear, I went out there with Carole. The child was fast asleep, smiling. Carole leaned over and kissed her.

“Moh-mee?” she said with her eyes closed, the way she used to when she was half her age.

“Hello, Widge,” I said.

“Hi.” She knuckled her eyes.

“Have any dreams, sleepyhead?”

“Mmm-hm,” she said with a rising inflection. She looked at me with eyes suddenly wide-awake and cautious.

“Go on, kiddo. The lid is off,” I said. “You can talk about it now.”

“You know everything, don’t you, I bet. I dreamed about that ol’ doll.”

“Was it a dream?”

“Yes. It was a dream. But I’m going to pretend she was real. I wish she
was
real, that’s what I wish.”

Carole and I exchanged a startled glance.

“And
I wish Mickey Mouse was real too. Mummy!”

“Yes, darling.”

“I din’t have enough breakfuss.”

The Widget was all right.

“What’s going on here!” roared a resonant baritone.

We all froze. “Wickersham,” Henry whispered.

“Who’s in there?” bellowed the voice.

“Your man Godfrey,” I called. “Come on in.”

He came striding in, tall and wide and black. The Widget scuttled
close to her mother. Nobody else moved. Wickersham was halfway across the room when he saw Henry. The blood on Henry’s clothes diverted him a little; he broke stride. He seemed a little less tall, then, as he stopped and swung around, looking at Marie, and Carole, and at the Widget, who twitched, and then at me.

“Company,” I said. An idea crawled out of the back of my mind and out my mouth. “They’re cured,” I said quietly.

Wickersham’s mouth sagged. His eyes darted to the women and back to me. I saw Henry go white.

Henry said, “You knew, then. You did it to them.”

“Yes,” Wickersham said. He said it to me.

Henry stepped up to Wickersham, who towered over him. Henry had the most extraordinary ripple running on the side of his jaw. “Put your hands up,” he said, his voice half a plea, half a caress.

Marie said “Henry.” Carole took Marie’s arm and shook her head at her.

Wickersham glowered suddenly, reached out one long arm and put, rather than shoved, Henry behind him.

“The cure was his idea,” I said, indicating Henry.

Wickersham turned and looked at Henry as if he had never seen him before. “You?
I
couldn’t do it!” he rasped.

Then Henry hit him. Just once. Very fine.

After that, Wickersham was easy to talk to. He slumped on the edge of one of the sinks, with his chin sunk low, and he talked. I couldn’t look at him. I didn’t know him like this. It hurt, in a way. I think I felt, then, a thousandth part of the loss all the others had felt over their solidified dreams.

“I didn’t mean it to come out this way,” said Wickersham. “The wish-fulfillment synapses are what I was after, it’s true. I wanted the brain, under that beam, to become a perfectly efficient machine. I wanted to visualize a goal, and then under the beam, to see the whole thing completed, with all of the intermediate steps obvious. I didn’t know it would do what it did—and it only had to do that once. I didn’t know it would drag something up out of the subconscious, make it real, make it so desirable to return to and so difficult to get
along without. I hated to permit myself to go back to it again, and I couldn’t bear to be away—I missed it so much.”

“What made you subject these women to it?”

“Because of you,” he said. “You two are the best team I have. I didn’t feel I could persuade or drive you to the cure I needed. I didn’t feel you would drive yourselves to the needed extent unless you had a personal reason for doing it.”

“That may be true, Henry,” I said.

“It isn’t,” said Henry clearly. “He couldn’t bring himself to admit to us that he was under the influence of a hellish thing like this. Isn’t that more like it, Wickersham?”

Wickersham didn’t answer.

“What about that fantastically childish business with the burglar alarm and all the U.V.?”

“It had to be difficult for you all the way, or you wouldn’t have had the push to go all the way.”

“Nonsense,” said Henry. I looked at him in amazement. I’d never seen Henry like this. He said, his voice challenging, “You tried to do it and failed. You like to think of us as lesser men than yourself. If you couldn’t do it at all, you didn’t want us to do it easily. Right?”

“I—didn’t think it out that way.”

Henry nodded. “And you want the cure.”

“Yes,” Wickersham whispered. “Yes—please.”

I felt ill. “Do you own this place?”

“I bought it when I saw your wives going there.”

Henry’s jaw twitched again. “The secret,” he said evenly, “is to feed your beam signal back a hundred and eighty degrees out of phase. About fifteen percent reverse feedback. For about fifteen minutes. Le’s go, chillun.”

They moved away from him, all but huddled in a group, toward the door. I stood where I was. Wickersham didn’t move. I looked and saw Carole lingering at the door. When I turned back, Wickersham was looking out the door—not after anybody; not at anything. He was just looking. His great stony face was full of hollows in the wrong places and the shadows were no longer impressive, and distinguished, and strong. The eyes were red-rimmed, pale and yellowed.

“What was your dream, Wickersham, that you couldn’t control?”

He made a movement with his head, a very slight one; but it pointed at Carole and answered my question. I took a step forward, furious, but he said, “No. Not her. Just—what you have.”

And I couldn’t pity him—he was so broken.

So I left him there, looking as if there were nothing alive but his eyes, and they were tied to the dead rest of him. I caught up with Carole at the path, and we walked quickly until we joined Henry and Marie. She was walking in a new way for her, not looking ahead, but holding her husband and watching his face, because she had seen her dream come true and was permitted to believe it. I put my hand on his shoulder. He stopped as if he had been waiting. Carole took Marie’s arm, for she always understood these things without being told about them, and walked ahead.

“Henry,” I said, “You just killed a man.”

“He won’t die.”

“You know what that out-of-phase will do to him.”

“You told me what a microfraction did to me.”

“And he’ll get fifteen minutes. There won’t be anything left.”

“What’s he got now?” asked Henry.

“Very little,” I admitted.

“He’ll be better off after the treatment,” he said steadily.

“Henry, I—”

“You could have told him the other treatment,” he lashed out. “What would he have then?”

I thought of the Wickersham we worked for; silent, morose, efficient, and certainly not much use to himself. “I don’t know why you did it, Henry, or why I let you. I think it’s right, though.” I also thought that for Henry, this was fighting; it was reprisal, and he would have to fight for everything after this. I could tell by the way he walked, by the way Marie walked with him.

We got in the car and took Henry and Marie home; and then at last we were alone—with the exception, of course, of the Widget, who was doing nip-ups in the back seat.

“Godfrey—what was the matter with me?”

I grinned. “Nothing.”

“Nothing? Darling, you needn’t try to hide anything.”

“I’m not, Carole. Really I’m not. There’s only one answer to the way you reacted to the opportunity to know your innermost desire.”

“Well?”

“You just didn’t react. You had everything you wanted. You were completely happy with what you had. You are a very rare creature, m’love.”

“But I don’t see why that should have made me so sickeningly sad—and frightened.”

“The sadness wasn’t much of it. You had your happiness brought to perfection, which is an unnatural state. But your memory of that perfection was so close to reality that you couldn’t tell the difference. It was a very slight difference. It was every wall in the house without a fingermark on it. It was being able to close the oven door without the danger of getting your skirt caught in it, ever. In your particular fugue, only the little, unnoticeable details changed. It was perfection itself you thought you had known, and the lack of it that gave you the sense of loss. And when you felt you had lost something, and couldn’t identify it, you were afraid.”

“Oh—I see,” she said thoughtfully. “Why couldn’t you tell me before?”

“Didn’t want to rub Henry’s nose in it. You see, like the Widget, who wanted a doll, Marie wanted an aggressive husband. Marie and the Widget were both mourning the loss of the thing they wanted. You didn’t lose anything; you were just afraid. Your not losing anything is the compliment I mentioned a while back. But darling, compliment me in a less roundabout way next time!”

“I love you,” she said, with her eyes too.

“That’s what I meant,” I said, and began to drive with one arm.

There was a snort from the back seat. “What—again?” said the Widget.

The Pit, in
AD
5000, had changed little over the centuries. Still it was an angry memorial to the misuse of great power; and because of it, organized warfare was a forgotten thing. Because of it, the world was free of the wasteful smoke and dirt of industry. The scream and crash of bombs and the soporific beat of marching feet were never heard, and at long last the earth was at peace
.

To go near The Pit was slow, certain death, and it was respected and feared, and would be for centuries more. It winked and blinked redly at night, and was surrounded by a bald and broken tract stretching out and away over the horizon; and around it flickered a ghostly blue glow. Nothing lived there. Nothing could
.