The Eye of the Sibyl and Other Classic Strories (18 page)

The phoce said, “I have to get used to this body; it’s heavy. I feel gravity… I’m used to just floating about. You know what? I think these extensors are swell. I can do a lot with them already.” The extensors whipped about, touched a picture on the wall, flicked in the direction of the transmitter. “I have to go find Edie,” the phoce said. “I want to tell her I’m okay; she probably thinks I died.”

Turning on the microphone, Stockstill prepared to contact the satellite overhead. “Walt Dangerfield,” he said, “this is Doctor Stockstill in West Marin. Can you hear me? If you can, give me an answer.” He paused, then repeated what he had said.

“Can I go?” Bill Keller asked. “Can I look for Edie now?”

“Yes,” Stockstill said, rubbing his forehead; he drew his faculties together and said, “You’ll be careful, what you do… you may not be able to switch again.”

“I don’t want to switch again,” Bill said. “This is fine, because for the first time there’s no one in here but me.” The thin phoce-face broke into a smile. “I’m not just part of someone else.”

Stockstill pressed the mike button once more. “Walt Dangerfield,” he repeated. “Can you hear me?” Is it hopeless? he wondered. Is it worth keeping on?

The phoce, rolling about the room on his ‘mobile, like a great trapped beetle, said, “Can I go to school now that I’m out?”

“Yes,” Stockstill murmured.

“But I know a lot of things already,” Bill said. “From listening with Edie when she was in school; I like Mr. Barnes, don’t you? He’s a very good teacher… I’m going to like being a pupil in his class.” The phoce added, “I wonder what my mother will say?”

Jarred, Stockstill said, “What?” And then he realized who was meant. Bonny Keller. Yes, he thought, it will be interesting to see what Bonny says. This will be repayment in full for her many, many affairs… for her years of love-making with one man after another.

Again he pressed the mike button. And tried once more.

To Bonny Keller, Mr. Barnes said, “I had a talk with your daughter after school today. And I got the distinct impression that she knows about us.”

“Oh Christ, how could she?” Bonny said. Groaning, she sat up; she rearranged her clothes, buttoned her blouse back up. What a contrast this man was to Andrew Gill, who always made love to her right out in the open, in broad daylight, along the oak-lined roads of West Marin, where anyone and anything might go past. Gill had seized her each time as he had the first time—yanking her into it, not babbling or quaking or mumbling… maybe I ought to go back to him, she thought.

Maybe, she thought, I ought to leave them all, Barnes and George and that nutty daughter of mine; I ought to go live with Gill openly, defy the community and be happy for a change.

“Well, if we’re not going to make love,” she said to Barnes, “then let’s walk down to the Forresters’ Hall and listen to the afternoon pass of the satellite.”

Barnes, pleased, said, “Maybe we can find some edible mushrooms on the way.”

“Are you serious?” Bonny said.

“Of course.”

“You fruit,” she said, shaking her head. “You poor fruit. Why did you come to West Marin from Oregon in the first place? Just to teach little kids and stroll around picking mushrooms?”

“It’s not such a bad life,” Barnes said. “It’s better than any I’ve ever known before, even before the war. And—I also have you.”

Gloomily, Bonny Keller rose to her feet; hands thrust deep in her coat pockets she plodded down the road. Barnes trailed along behind her, trying to keep up with her strides.

“I’m going to remain here in West Marin,” Barnes said. “This is the end of my travels.” Puffing, he added, “Despite my experience with your daughter today—”

“You had no experience,” Bonny said. “It was just your guilty conscience catching up with you. Let’s hurry—I want to hear Dangerfield; at least when
he
talks it’s fun to listen.”

Behind her, Mr. Barnes found a mushroom; he had stopped to bend down. “It’s a chanterelle!” he exclaimed. “Savory and edible—” He picked it, close to the ground, and then began to search for another. “I’ll make you and George a stew,” he informed her as he found another.

Waiting for him to finish, Bonny lit a special deluxe Gold Label cigarette of Andrew Gill’s manufacture, sighed, wandered a few steps along the grass-infested oak-lined country road.

Sunlight ascended and a penetrating mechanical voice declared, “All right, Lehrer. Time to get up and show ‘em who you are and what you can do. Big man, that Niehls Lehrer; everybody acknowledges it—I hear them talking. Big man, big talent, big job. Much admired by the public at large. You awake now?”

Lehrer, from the bed, said, “Yes.” He sat up, batted the sharp-voiced alarm clock at his bedside into nullification. “Good morning,” he said to the silent apartment. “Slept well; I hope you did, too.”

A press of problems tumbled about his disordered mind as he got grouchily from the bed, wandered to the closet for clothing adequately dirty. Supposed to nail down Ludwig Eng, he said to himself. The tasks of tomorrow become the worse tasks of today. Reveal to Eng that only one copy of his great-selling book is left in all the world; the time is coming soon for him to act, to do the job only he can do. How would Eng feel? After all, sometimes inventors refused to sit still and do their job. Well, he decided, that actually consisted of a syndicate-problem; theirs, not his. He found a stained, rumpled red shirt; removing his pajama top he got into it. The trousers were not so easy; he had to root through the hamper.

And then the packet of whiskers.

My ambition, Lehrer thought as he padded to the bathroom with the whisker packet, is to cross the W.U.S. by streetcar. Whee. At the bowl he washed his face, then lathered on foam-glue, opened the packet and with adroit slappings managed to convey the whiskers evenly to his chin, jowls, neck; in a moment he had expertly gotten the whiskers to adhere. I’m fit now, he decided as he reviewed his countenance in the mirror, to take that streetcar ride; at least as soon as I process my share of sogum.

Switching on the sogum pipe he accepted a good masculine bundle, sighed contentedly as he glanced over the sports section of the San Francisco
Chronicle,
then at last walked to the kitchen and began to lay out soiled dishes. In no time at all he faced a bowl of soup, lambchops, green peas, Martian blue moss with egg sauce and a cup of hot coffee. These he gathered up, slid the dishes from beneath and around them—of course checking the windows of the room to be sure no one saw him—and briskly placed the assorted foods in their proper receptacles which he placed on shelves of the cupboard and in the refrigerator. The time was eight-thirty; he still had fifteen minutes to get to work. No need to kill himself hurrying; the People’s Topical Library section B would be there when he arrived.

It had taken him years to work up to B. He did not perform routine work any longer, not at a section B desk, and he most certainly did not have to arrange for the cleaning of thousands of identical copies of a work in the early stages of eradication. In fact strictly speaking he did not have to participate in eradication at all; minions employed wholesale by the library took care of that coarse duty. But he did have to deal tête-à-tête with a vast variety of irritable, surly inventors who balked at their assigned—and according to the syndicate mandatory—final cleaning of the sole-remaining typescript copy of whatever work their name had become linked with—linked by a process which neither he nor the assorted inventors completely understood. The syndicate presumably understood why a particular given inventor received a particular assignment and not some other assignment entirely. For instance, Eng and HOW I MADE MY OWN SWABBLE OUT OF CONVENTIONAL HOUSEHOLD OBJECTS IN MY BASEMENT DURING MY SPARE TIME.

Lehrer reflected as he glanced over the remainder of the newspaper. Think of the responsibility. After Eng finished, no more swabbles in all the world, unless those untrustworthy rogues in the F.N.M. had a couple illicitly tucked away. In fact, even though the ter-cop, the terminal copy, of Eng’s book still remained, he already found it difficult to recall what a swabble did and what it looked like. Square? Small? Or round and huge? Hmmm. He put down the newspaper and rubbed his forehead while he attempted to recall—tried to conjure up an accurate mental image of the device while it was still possible to do so. Because as soon as Eng reduced the ter-cop to a heavily inked silk ribbon, half a ream of bond paper and a folio of fresh carbon paper there existed absolutely no chance for him or for anyone else to recall either the book or the mechanism which the book described.

That task, however, would probably occupy Eng the rest of the year. Cleaning of the ter-cop had to progress line by line, word by word; it could not be handled as were the assembled printed copies. So easy, up until the terminal typescript copy, and then… well, to make it worth it to Eng, to compensate him for the long, arduous work, a really huge bill would be served on him: the task would cost Eng something on the order of twenty-five thousand poscreds. And since eradication of the swabble book would make Eng a poor man, the task…

By his elbow on the small kitchen table the receiver of the phone hopped from its mooring onto the table, and from it came a distant tiny shrill voice. “Goodbye, Niehls.” A woman’s voice.

Lifting the receiver to his ear he said, “Goodbye.”

“I love you, Niehls,” Charise McFadden stated in her breathless, emotion-saturated voice. “Do you love me?”

“Yes, I love you, too,” he said. “When have I seen you last? I hope it won’t be long. Tell me it won’t be long.”

“Most probably tonight,” Charise said. “After work. There’s someone I want you to meet, a virtually unknown inventor who’s desperately eager to get official eradication for his thesis on, ahem, the psychogenic origins of death by meteor-strike. I said that because you’re in section B—”

“Tell him to eradicate his thesis himself.”

“There’s no prestige in that.” Earnestly, Charise pleaded, “It’s really a dreadful piece of theorizing, Niehls; it’s as nutty as the day is long. This boy, this Lance Arbuthnot—”

“That’s his name?” It almost persuaded him. But not quite. In the course of a single day he received many such requests, and every one, without exception came represented as a crank piece by a crank inventor with a crank name. He had held his chair at Section B too long to be easily snared. But still—he had to investigate this; his ethical structure insisted on it. He sighed.

“I hear you groaning,” Charise said brightly.

Lehrer said, “As long as he’s not from the F.N.M.”

“Well—he is.” She sounded guilty. “I think they threw him out, though. That’s why he’s here and not there.”

But that, Lehrer realized, proved nothing. Arbuthnot—possibly—did not share the fanatical militant convictions of the ruling elite of the Free Negro Municipality; possibly he was too moderate, too balanced for the Bards of the republic carved out of quondam Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas and Missouri. But then again he perhaps had too fanatical a view. One never knew; not until one met the person, and sometimes not even then. The Bards, being from the East, had managed to dribble a veil over the faces of three-fifths of mankind, a veil which successfully obscured motive, intention and God knew what else.

“And what is more,” Charise continued, “he personally knew Anarch Peak before Peak’s sad shrinking.”

“Sad!” Lehrer bristled. “Good riddance.” There: that had been the foremost eccentric and idiot of the world. All Lehrer needed was the opportunity to rub shoulders with a follower of the newly parasitic Anarch. He shivered, recalling from his professional eclectic books—examining at the library the accounts of mid-twentieth century race violence; out of the riots, lootings and killings of those days had come Sebastian Peak, originally a lawyer, then a master spellbinder, at last a religious fanatic with his own devout following… a following which extended over the planet, although operating primarily in the F.N.M. environs.

“That could get you in trouble with God,” Charise said.

“I have to get to work now,” Lehrer said. “I’ll phone you during my coffee break; meanwhile I’ll do some research on Arbuthnot in the files. My decision as regards his nut-head theory of psychosomatic meteor-strike deaths will have to wait until then. Hello.” He hung up the phone, then, and rose swiftly to his feet. His soiled garments gave off a truly gratifying odor of must as he made his way from his apartment to the elevator; satisfaction as to his grooming made him brighten. Possibly—despite Charise and this, her newest fad, the inventor Arbuthnot—today might be a good day after all.

But, underneath, he doubted it.

When Niehls Lehrer arrived at his section of the library, he found his slim blonde-haired secretary Miss Tomsen trying to rid herself—and him, too—of a tall, sloppily-dressed middle-aged gentleman with a briefcase under his arm.

“Ah, Mr. Lehrer,” the individual said in a dry, hollow voice as he made out Lehrer, obviously recognizing him at once; he approached Niehls, hand extended. “How nice to meet you, sir. Goodbye, goodbye. As you people say out here.” He smiled a flashbulb instantly-vanishing smile at Niehls, who did not return it.

“I’m quite a busy man,” Niehls said, and continued on past Miss Tomsen’s desk to open the inner door to his private suite. “If you wish to see me, you’ll have to make a regular appointment. Hello.” He started to shut the door after him.

“This concerns the Anarch Peak,” the tall man with the briefcase said. “Whom I have reason to believe you’re interested in.”

“Why do you say that?” He paused, irritated. “I don’t recall ever expressing any interest in anyone of Peak’s sort.”

“You must recall. But that’s so. You’re under Phase, here. I’m oriented in the opposite, normal time-direction; therefore what for you will soon happen is for me an experience of the immediate past.
My
immediate past. May I take a few minutes of your time? I could well be of great use to you, sir.” The man chuckled.