Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (21 page)

He faced Bach and started to say something to her, then thought better of
it. She saw doubt in his face for the first time, and it made her skin
crawl. Damn it, she had thought he was
sure.

"Chief," he said, quietly, "I want to apologize for the way I treated you
these last few hours. It's not something I can control when I'm on the
job. I …"

This time it was Bach's turn to laugh, and the release of tension it
brought with it was almost orgasmic. She felt like she hadn't laughed for
a million years.

"Forgive me," she said. "I saw you were worried, and thought it was about
the bomb. It was just such a relief."

"Oh, yeah," he said, dismissing it. "No point in worrying now. Either your
people hit it or they don't. We won't know if they don't. What I was
saying, it just sort of comes over me. Honestly. I get horny, I get manic,
I totally forget about other people except as objects to be manipulated.
So I just wanted to say I like you. I'm glad you put up with me. And I
won't pester you anymore."

She came over and put her hand on his shoulder.

"Can I call you Roger? Thanks. Listen, if this thing works, I'll have
dinner with you. I'll give you the key to the city, a ticker-tape parade,
and a huge bonus for a consultant fee … and my eternal friendship.
We've been tense, okay? Let's forget about these last few hours."

"All right." His smile was quite different this time.

Outside, it happened very quickly. The crew on the laser drill were
positioned beneath the bomb, working from ranging reports and calculations
to aim their brute at precisely the right spot.

The beam took less than a tenth of a second to eat through the layer of
rock in the ceiling and emerge in the air above the Leystrasse. It ate
through the metal sheath of the bomb's underside, the critical wire, the
other side of the bomb, and part of the ceiling like they weren't even
there. It had penetrated into the level above before it could be shut off.

There was a shower of sparks, a quick sliding sound, then a muffled thud.
The whole structure of the bomb trembled, and smoke screeched from the two
drilled holes in the top and bottom. Bach didn't understand it but could
see that she was alive and assumed it was over. She turned to Birkson, and
the shock of seeing him nearly stopped her heart.

His face was a gray mask, drained of blood. His mouth hung open. He swayed
and almost fell over. Bach caught him and eased him to the floor.

"Roger … what is it? Is it still … will it go off? Answer
me,
answer me.
What should I do?"

He waved weakly, pawed at her hands. She realized he was trying to give
her a reassuring pat. It was feeble indeed.

"No danger," he wheezed, trying to get his breath back. "No danger. The
wrong wire. We hit the wrong wire. Just luck is all, nothing but luck."

She remembered. They had been trying to remove Hans' control over the
bomb. Was he still in control? Birkson answered before she could speak.

"He's dead. That explosion. That was the detonator going off. He reacted
just too late. We hit the disarming switch. The shield dropped into place
so the masses couldn't come together even if the bomb was set off. Which
he did. He set it off. That sound, that
mmmmmmwooooph!
" He was not
with her. His eyes stared back into a time and place that held horror for
him.

"I heard that sound—the detonator—once before, over the
telephone. I was coaching this woman, no more than twenty-five, because I
couldn't get there in time. She had only three more minutes. I heard that
sound, then nothing, nothing."

She sat near him on the floor as her crew began to sort out the mess, haul
the bomb away for disposal, laugh and joke in hysterical relief. At last
Birkson regained control of himself. There was no trace of the bomb except
a distant hollowness in his eyes.

"Come on," he said, getting to his feet with a little help from her.
"You're going on twenty-four-hour leave. You've earned it. We're going
back to Burning Tree, and you're going to watch me make a par five on the
eighteenth. Then we've got a date for dinner. What place is nice?"

The End

© 1976 by Universal Publications and Distributing Corporation for
Galaxy Magazine. First published Oct 1976.

Charles Beaumont

No fowl had ever looked so posthumous. Its bones lay stacked to one side
of the plate like kindling: white, dry, and naked in the soft light of the
restaurant. Bones only, with every shard and filament of meat stripped
methodically off. Otherwise, the plate was a vast glistening plain.

The other, smaller dishes and bowls were equally virginal. They shone
fiercely against one another. And all a pale cream color fixed upon the
snowy white of a tablecloth unstained by gravies and unspotted by coffee
and free from the stigmata of breadcrumbs, cigarette ash, and fingernail
lint.

Only the dead fowl's bones and the stippled traceries of hardened red
gelatine clinging timidly to the bottom of a dessert cup gave evidence
that these ruins had once been a dinner.

Mr. Aorta, not a small man, permitted a mild belch, folded the newspaper
he had found on the chair, inspected his vest for food leavings, and then
made his way briskly to the cashier.

The old woman glanced at his check.

"Yes, sir," she said.

"All righty," Mr. Aorta said and removed from his hip pocket a large black
wallet. He opened it casually, whistling "The Seven Joys of Mary" through
the space provided by his two front teeth.

The melody stopped, abruptly. Mr. Aorta looked concerned. He peered into
his wallet, then began removing things; presently its entire contents were
spread out.

He frowned.

"What seems to be the difficulty, sir?"

"Oh, no difficulty," the fat man said, "exactly." Though the wallet was
manifestly empty, he flapped its sides apart, held it upside down and
continued to shake it, suggesting the picture of a hydrophobic bat
suddenly seized in midair.

Mr. Aorta smiled a weak, harassed smile and proceeded to empty all of his
fourteen separate pockets. In a time the counter was piled high with
miscellany.

"Well!" he said impatiently. "What nonsense! What bother! Do you know
what's happened? My wife's gone off and forgotten to leave me any change!
Heigh-ho, well—my name is James Brockelhurst: I'm with the Pliofilm
Corporation. I generally don't eat out, and—here, no, I insist. This
is embarrassing for you as well as for myself. I
insist
upon
leaving my card. If you will retain it, I shall return tomorrow evening at
this time and reimburse you."

Mr. Aorta shoved the pasteboard into the cashier's hands, shook his head,
shoveled the residue back into his pockets and, plucking a toothpick from
a box, left the restaurant.

He was quite pleased with himself—an invariable reaction to the
acquisition of something for nothing in return. It had all gone smoothly,
and what a delightful meal!

He strolled in the direction of the streetcar stop, casting occasional
licentious glances at undressed mannequins in department store windows.

The prolonged fumbling for his car token worked as efficiently as ever.
(Get in the middle of the crowd, look bewildered, inconspicuous, search
your pockets earnestly, the while edging from the vision of the conductor—then
take a far seat and read a newspaper.) In four years' traveling time, Mr.
Aorta computed he had saved a total of $211.20.

The electric's ancient list did not jar his warm feeling of serenity. He
studied the amusements briefly, then went to work on the current puzzle,
whose prize ran into the thousands. Thousands of dollars, actually for
nothing. Something for nothing. Mr. Aorta loved puzzles.

But the fine print made reading impossible.

Mr. Aorta glanced at the elderly woman standing near his seat; then,
because the woman's eyes were full of tired pleading and insinuation, he
refocused out the wire crosshatch windows.

What he saw caused his heart to throb. The section of town was one he
passed every day, so it was a wonder he'd not noticed it before—though
generally there was little provocation to sightsee on what was
irreverently called "Death Row"—a dreary round of mortuaries,
columbariums, crematories, and the like, all crowded into a five-block
area.

He yanked the stop signal, hurried to the rear of the streetcar, and
depressed the exit plate. In a few moments he had walked to what he'd
seen.

It was a sign, artlessly lettered though spelled correctly enough. It was
not new, for the white paint had swollen and cracked and the rusted nails
had dripped trails of dirty orange over the face of it.

The sign read:

FREE DIRT
Apply Within
Lilyvale
Cemetery

and was posted upon the moldering green of a woodboard wall.

Now Mr. Aorta felt a familiar sensation come over him. It happened
whenever he encountered the word FREE—a magic word that did strange
and wonderful things to his metabolism.

Free.
What was the meaning, the
essence
of free? Why,
something for nothing. And to get something for nothing was Mr. Aorta's
chiefest pleasure in this mortal life.

The fact that it was dirt which was being offered Free did not oppress
him. He seldom gave more than a fleeting thought to these things; for, he
reasoned, nothing is without its use.

The other, subtler circumstances surrounding the sign scarcely occurred to
him: why the dirt was being offered, where free dirt from a cemetery would
logically come from, et cetera. In this connection he considered only the
probable richness of the soil, for reasons he did not care to speculate
upon.

Mr. Aorta's solitary hesitation encircled such problems as: Was this offer
an honest one, without strings where he would have to buy something? Was
there a limit on how much he could take home? If not, what would be the
best method of transporting it?

Petty problems: all solvable.

Mr. Aorta did something inwardly that resembled a smile, looked about, and
finally located the entrance to the Lilyvale Cemetery.

These desolate grounds, which had once accommodated a twine factory, an
upholstering firm, and an outlet for ladies' shoes, now lay swathed in a
miasmic vapor—accreditable, in the absence of nearby bogs, to a
profusion of windward smokestacks. The blistered hummocks, peaked with
crosses, slabs, and stones, loomed gray and sad in the gloaming: withal, a
place purely delightful to describe, and a pity it cannot be—for how
it looked there that evening has little to do with the fat man and what
was to become of him.

Important only that it was a place full of dead people on their backs
under ground, moldering and moldered.

Mr. Aorta hurried because he despised to waste, along with everything
else, time. It was not long before he had encountered the proper party and
had this sort of conversation:

"I understand you're offering free dirt."

"That's right."

"How much may one have?"

"Much as one wants."

"On what days?"

"Any days; most likely there'll always be some fresh."

Mr. Aorta sighed in the manner of one who has just acquired a lifetime
inheritance or a measured checking account. He then made an appointment
for the following Saturday and went home to ruminate agreeable
ruminations.

At a quarter past nine that night he hit upon an excellent use to which
the dirt might be put.

His backyard, an ochre waste, lay chunked and dry, a barren stretch
repulsive to all but the grossest weeds. A tree had once flourished there,
in better days, a haven for suburbanite birds, but then the birds
disappeared for no good reason except that this was when Mr. Aorta moved
into the house, and the tree became an ugly naked thing.

No children played in this yard.

Mr. Aorta was intrigued. Who could say? Perhaps something might be made to
grow! He had long ago written an enterprising firm for free samples of
seeds and received enough to feed an army. But the first experiment had
shriveled into hard, useless pips, and, seized by lassitude, Mr. Aorta had
shelved the project. Now …

A neighbor named Joseph William Santucci permitted himself to be
intimidated. He lent his old Reo truck, and after a few hours the first
load of dirt had arrived and been shoveled into a tidy mound. It looked
beautiful to Mr. Aorta, whose passion overcompensated for his weariness
with the task. The second load followed, and the third, and the fourth,
and it was dark as a coalbin out when the very last was dumped.

Mr. Aorta returned the truck and fell into an exhausted, though not
unpleasant, sleep.

The next day was heralded by the distant clangor of church bells and the
chink-chink
of Mr. Aorta's spade leveling the displaced graveyard
soil, distributing it and grinding it in with the crusty earth. It had a
continental look, this new dirt: swarthy, it seemed, black and saturnine:
not at all dry, though the sun was already quite hot.

Soon the greater portion of the yard was covered, and Mr. Aorta returned
to his sitting room.

He turned on the radio in time to identify a popular song, marked his
discovery on a post card, and mailed this away, confident that he would
receive either a toaster or a set of nylon hose for his trouble.

Then he wrapped four bundles containing, respectively: a can of vitamin
capsules, half of them gone; a half-tin of coffee; a half-full bottle of
spot remover; a box of soap flakes with most of the soap flakes missing.
These he mailed, each with a note curtly expressing his total
dissatisfaction, to the companies that had offered them to him on a
money-back guarantee.

Now it was dinnertime, and Mr. Aorta beamed in anticipation. He sat down
to a meal of sundry delicacies such as anchovies, sardines, mushrooms,
caviar, olives, and pearl onions. It was not, however, that he enjoyed
this type of food for any aesthetic reasons: only that it had all come in
packages small enough to be slipped into one's pocket without attracting
the attention of busy grocers.