Well, the first step was to see for himself. The sheriff pulled his hat low over his eyes and joined the moving crowd.
IN THE entranceway was a shiny turnstile that clicked, evidently counting visitors. As Seeger pushed through it, from a lensed gray box suspended by cables from a bare wooden joist overhead a voice said quietly, in flat mechanical tones: “Howdy, Sheriff Seeger;
awful weather, ain’t it?”
“Sure is,” Seeger acknowledged, and then turned sharply round to stare at the hanging box.
Behind him, a Mexican cotton-picker in faded denims slipped through the turnstile. The gray box said, “Buenas tardes, Senor Valdes. Que tiempo de perros!”
The sheriff took off his damp hat and scratched his head. If his ears hadn’t deceived him, and the speaker up there had really addressed him by name, somebody must have tipped off whoever was at the concealed microphone.
A glance around the lobby in which he now stood revealed nothings the place was as bare and cheerless as a stable, barren of posters, vending-machines, and all such. At one end stairs led up to a closed door—to the projection-booth, probably. The sheriff could see no indication that the place was being used as a cover for dopepeddling, white slavery, or any other of the hideous possibilities Jesse Hupsman’s fertile mind had suggested, but he told himself that he would keep his eyes open.
Over the door leading to the theater proper there was a sign: Performance Will Begin In 7 Minutes. The sign appeared to be simply painted on the wall, but as the sheriff looked at it the 7 winked out and a 6 appeared in its place.
“Huh,” said Seeger puzzledly. He put his hat back on and pushed resolutely through the curtained inner doorway. It was pitch-dark inside, only the dimly-lighted oblong of the screen up front visible; but a light appeared bobbing along the floor in front of him, he followed it automatically and was directed to a seat near the middle. Only when he had settled his lanky frame on the folding chair that served as a seat did the sheriff realize two things: (a) he had seen, but not touched, the opaque dark curtain through which he had passed at the door, and (b) he should have seen the flashlightcarrying usher silhouetted against the screen, but he had seen nothing but the light moving before him.
He peered suspiciously round him, but could see nothing distinctly in the darkened auditorium. Then he became conscious of another queer thing: a persistent feeling that he was being watched, as if someone’s eyes were literally burrowing into the back of his neck; he twisted round and could see no one immediately behind him, but the nagging sensation was so annoying that he rose and groped his way to the rearmost row of chairs, directly against the wall.
As he was sitting down, a blare of music sounded, and the screen lit up. The sheriff postponed worrying further about the theater’s unusual features, and leaned back to enjoy the show; after all, he was getting it for nothing . . . wasn’t he?
THE PICTURE began, disconcertingly, without title or screen credits—only a lettered notice flashed on for a few seconds: Patrons will please refrain front violence during the performance.
What followed was still more disconcerting. Without warning there was a knot of men fighting—ferociously, vindictively fighting, with fists, clubs, bricks, knives. The voices of the combatants as they trampled to and fro were an inchoate, animal roar that made the hackles rise. The scene was shockingly real—no Hollywood sham-battle, this; faces streamed blood, skulls were crushed, teeth knocked out, bellies ripped up; the smell of rage and blood seemed to well through the theater.
Sheriff Seeger sat forward on the edge of his seat, breathing harshly; he was instinctively aware that he was seeing something altogether exceptional in raw realism. The eye-gouging going on in the foreground just now—cripes, that couldn’t be faked!
Over the uproar rang suddenly a clear silvery note, a bugle call, and there appeared a column of men in some kind of soldiers’ or policemen’s garb, advancing briskly in close order. Over their heads a banner waved, a black lion rampant on a scarlet ground. Commands were shouted, and the bugle sang again, peremptorily. The rioters—those still on their feet—Swayed apart, hesitated; some turned to flee, others brandished weapons and moved belligerently to meet the oncoming troop.
Then a machine-gun began firing. Its closely-spaced reports were deafeningly sharp, and the watcher’s nostrils stung with the acrid odor of burned powder. Some of the rioters collapsed—you could see the bullet holes appear in them as if by some awesomely potent magic—the rest broke and scattered, terrorized. The column of uniformed men swept on without faltering; they swung past in lock-step, and as the firing ceased the only sound was the rhythmic tramp of their marching feet. In the audience there was sporadic clapping.
The scene dissolved. The sheriff blinked and sat back again in his seat, feeling shaken and somehow abashed. There was something funny about those pictures, too; they were in strikingly natural colors and seemed practically three-dimensional, but there was something else that he couldn’t put his finger on . . .
A NEW PICTURE formed. The interior of a cave, low-vaulted, sooted by many fires; firelit now by a blaze that leaped and crackled, fed with sticks and bones and dung. Outside the cave was wet black night, full of wind and the cries of hunting-beasts.
Around the fire crouched the world’s first tyrannicides, planning the world’s first revolution. A circle of fierce hairy men, clad in small animals’ skins sewn together, muttering together in low cautious voices, eyes glittering with uneasy glances at the outer darkness, as they plotted to destroy the striped lord of the Earth. Their women watched them fearfully from the shadows as they argued and gesticulated, drawing diagrams with a charred stick on flat stones.
Outside the circle a young man rose silently to his feet and slipped away. From a crevice of the rocks near the cave mouth he took his stone ax and his bone-pointed spear, and, unnoticed, melted into the darkness.
The wind whipped wild branches against his face, thorns plucked at his skin garments, small animals fled rustling and squeaking from before his feet; and other sounds came to his ears—the raucous screaming of night-fowl high up in the trees, the grunting and wallowing of some huge creature on the banks of the unseen river, and, from afar off, in and under the medley of night-noises, the deep coughing voice of the tiger.
The youth hesitated, his face working, knuckles white on the shaft of his spear. Biting his lips, he pushed ahead, trying to make his movements silent despite the undergrowth. Somewhere he had missed the path. The wet wind chilled him, and in all the black howling night around there were no human eyes to see, no hand to be raised to aid him . . .
Some distance off a heavy body thudded softly, dropping from some low tree-branch to the leaf-mold. Only yards away something rose flapping, on blundering wings. Then again, terrifyingly near this time, the tiger roared.
The young man’s knees shook and his face went blind and blank with terror. Suddenly he cast his spear from him, whirled, and fled crashing and stumbling, plunging recklessly through the brush, back toward the light and warmth and safety of the cave.
THE SCREEN was dark again.
Sheriff Seeger opened his eyes and mopped sweat from his forehead. A few seats away somebody coughed, and the sheriff started. Dammit, these movies didn’t make any sense, but they were real. He’d not only seen and heard, but felt and smelt the dank night of the rain-forest, the dripping moisture and the rotting mold . . .
And all the time the part of him that was conscious of being in the theater had had that uncanny feeling of being watched from behind. The sheriff half-turned and ran a hand along the wall at his back; it was solid, made of unplaned planks, and he got a splinter in his finger. He sucked it and cursed softly, then froze, finger in mouth, as he saw that another episode was beginning.
Palms nodded in hot sunlight above a tropic beach, and a blue, blue ocean dazzled away to a barrier reef where waves broke creaming. On the beach a man hunkered dejected, a man wasted and browned deeply by sun, in bleached rags of clothi
ng, a castaway. Beside him lay gnawed shards of coconut shell; he gazed out to sea, shading his eyes with a listless hand.
Then abruptly he sprang to his feet, shaking with excitement. It was—it was—far out across the waves’ dance and glitter, a moving whiteness that was no illusion, no mere play of white water—
The sail came nearer, blown by strong breezes, and became a tall three-masted ship, tacking toward the island. The castaway performed a wild fandango of rejoicing; then, as the ship heaved to beyond the reef, he tore off his tattered shirt to wave. But with the cloth in his hand,” he stiffened in alarm. The wind had lifted the flag at the vessel’s masthead, and even at that distance he could make out the white death’s-head stark on black.
The man trembled with indecision; then, as he saw a boat being lowered, crept out of sight into the fronded shrubbery beneath the palm trees.
The pirates rowed ashore, a noisy, variegated gang of ferocious-looking cutthroats, scum of all or at any rate most nations—some half-naked, some decked out in looted finery which was perhaps stiff with the blood of its late owners. Their captain, a burly man with a scoundrelly black beard, barked superfluous orders as four of his crew staggered through the surf under the weight of a great chest; then he paced up and down, pondering at length before deciding on the proper spot for the chest’s burial.
Only when the corsair ship was again a speck on the horizon did the concealed watcher creep out of hiding. His breath came fast; he seized an abandoned shovel and began to dig.
His gaunt body was drenched in sweat when at last he uncovered the chest and pried open its lid. He fell panting to his knees, plunged both hands inside and raised them high to let fall a sparkling shower of gold—florins, doubloons, moidores—he groped again, and brought up a double handful of dazzling gems—diamonds, pearls, emeralds, rubies—ablaze with incredible fires in the hot sunlight.
Kneeling in the burning sand, the castaway gazed with lost eyes upon the blinding heap of jewels, and tears of joy scalded down his sunken cheeks.
SHERIFF SEEGER sighed as the scene faded out. “Must’ve been a million dollars there,” he told himself wistfully, then laughed nervously at his own reaction—this was just the movies, and the jewelry was no doubt glass . . . he rubbed his hands together as if to make their palms forget the cool smooth sensuous touch and weight of riches.
An inquiring flute-note thrilled through the theater, lingered and faded, and it was dewy morning in a fresh thicket of late spring, where hidden birds made music, and the air was sweetly heavy with opening wild flowers’ perfume.
In the green depths moved a whiteness; the veiling leaves were parted, and a woman, a girl, stepped into view . . .
The sheriff’s jaw dropped and his eyes bulged as if trying to get closer to what they were seeing. He whispered under his breath, feeling his hands grow moist.
Nude and shameless, she stood for long moments, feasting on the sunrise and letting it feast upon her. Her hair was as black as a crow’s wing and her body was flawless.
She moved with fluid grace, lifting slender arms and bending her whole supple body to avoid the briars that threatened to scratch her soft skin. In a little clearing she fell to her knees in the grass to examine a white flower that nodded there on a fragile stem.
All at once there was a sense of unbearably rising tension, of impending outrage and calamity . . . The kneeling girl shivered with it, and looked sharply up, flinging the hair back from her face; her beautiful eyes widened and darkened with fear, as they traveled upward, over the shaggy crooked legs, the sinewy arms majestically folded on a broad hairy chest, the smiling bearded lips and burning eyes of the god who stood looking down at her.
The girl screamed, and the singing birds fell frightenedly silent. She leaped up and fled, panic-smitten, through the shadowy woodland, until at last she dropped exhausted, her bosom heaving with panting sobs, on a thick soft carpet of green moss that covered the roots of a great gnarly tree.
Then she raised her eyes once more with premonition, and the rapid breath caught in her throat; for there again, as if he had melted silently out of the rough tree bark, the shaggy Pan stood watching her, eyes mocking, brown arms now welcoming.
Terror, fascination, and despair pursued one another across the girl’s mobile features as she crouched motionless; then slowly her long-lashed eyes narrowed and grew knowing, and her scarlet lips moved in the beginning of a smile that was also the beginning of cruelty.
She sprang to her feet and in the same lithe motion, with a wordless crooning like the purr of a great cat, flung both white arms around the neck of the goat-footed god . . .
LIGHTS were on, evidently signifying the end of the show. Sheriff Seeger sat blinking at the theater’s interior—as barnlike as the outside—and the sagging square of white cloth nailed to the unpainted wall; still bemused, he got up and edged through the crowd toward the door—open and uncurtained—by which he’d come.
The audience was surprisingly quiet as it drifted out; most of them stared ahead as if they were ashamed to look at one another. The sheriff did not greet anyone, nor did anyone say hello to him. A startling thought came to him out of nowhere: had all these others seen the same things he had.
Almost out the front entrance, the sheriff stopped short abruptly, recalling why he had come. He scowled, gave a hitch to the gun-belt under his coat, and turned toward the stairway he had noticed earlier.
As he mounted the stairs, his indignation mounted, too. There were a lot of funny things about this place, and when he caught up with the fellow that ran it he was going to demand some explanations. He remembered the box that passed remarks about the weather; the usher that wasn’t there; the curious fact that he’d been able to see the screen better with his eyes shut . . . Recollecting, then, something Jesse Hupsman had said, the sheriff seemed to see the key to the whole business.
“This Bullock must be some kind of a crank,” Jesse had said.
That was it: the fellow was obviously a crank. And Sheriff Seeger didn’t want any such in his county.
The door swung open at a push, and an about-face found him in a narrow corridor that evidently ran along above the lobby; it was dark, but light seeped from under a door a few yards away. The sheriff stalked down the corridor and threw open the second door.
Inside, a cubical chamber blazed with light and bristled with outlandish-looking apparatus. In the midst of this, like a small tidy bird in the midst of a large sloppy nest, a little man looked up from some device which kept blinking and emitting cricket-like noises. He had a round face remarkably like that of an old-fashioned tailor’s dummy, with black hair sleeked back as if painted on, neat regular features, small ears pasted close to his round head.
“Ah—what can I do for you?” inquired the tailor’s dummy.
“Mr. Bullock around?” demanded Seeger brusquely.
“My—ah—name is Bwl!x,” said the little man, pronouncing the w as a vowel rather like a Polish y, the ! as a click, and the x as a velar affricate such as occurs in Very High German dialects. “And you—you must be the Sheriff.”
“That’s right,” admitted Seeger, taken aback by this anticipation. But he rallied and eyed the other sternly: “You a foreigner, Mr. Bullock?”
THE LITTLE man looked somewhat flustered in his turn. “Why, yes, you might say that I am—ah—not native. But how did you know? My accent is imperfect, perhaps? A short circuit, no doubt, but I have no time . . .”
“You’re right you haven’t got much time,” said the sheriff gruffly. “I’m giving you tomorrow to clear outa this county—not a minute more.”
“Why—what is wrong?” asked Bwl!x injuredly.
“You been showing dirty pictures.”
“Some infringement of a sanitary code—but I don’t see—”
“Hell, no!” snorted Seeger disgustedly. “I mean you been showing pictures of things decent folks don’t even talk about.”
“Oh, I see—transgressing a socially establi
shed communication-block. There was the same difficulty at—what was that place? Piatigorsk?—t hey became violent . . . That short circuit must be affecting my memory.” Bwl!x sighed. “I regret the violation of local customs, but it was essential to have response data on all basic drives. Please be assured that I am not performing these experiments out of idle curiosity; they are a strictly business proposition—”
“What kinda business is it where you don’t charge nothing?” Seeger glared suspiciously. “This dump of yours gives me the creeps!”
“The creeps? Curious, I don’t know the term . . . Pardon me, I really must examine your record—I don’t believe I’ve fed it to the analyzer yet—and see what you mean by that.” Bwl!x switched off the chirping apparatus and attacked another one, punching out an elaborate combination of buttons. “There! Sit down. Sheriff; you too may be interested in reexperiencing this . . .”
The Sheriff had no opportunity to answer, for at that moment it began. First the pulse-thudding, adrenalin-charged excitement with which he had involuntarily reacted to the vision of savagely-fighting men, the animal fear and fury of it, followed by the feeling of relief and reassurance as the troops had appeared to restore order; then the sense of supernatural awe and terror that had hung over the smoky cave where the skin-clad men huddled together against the darkness . . . and so on, faithful repetition of every instinctive reaction, every nuance of emotion with which he had responded to the scenes in the theater just now, intolerably compressed and concentrated.
When it came to an end Seeger was slumped back on a providentially handy metal box, breathing loudly through his open mouth. The original performance had left him feeling rather as if he’d been pulled through a wringer by one leg; twice in one evening was twice too often. And the playback of his own sensations, unaccompanied by the stimuli that had evoked them, had an uncanny specific effect of its own. A person who hears his own voice played back by a recording machine usually has the feeling of listening to a rather disagreeable stranger—Seeger felt as if he had peered into that unpleasant stranger’s mind, and it was a cellar where monstrosities sat squalling out their hates and fears and chuckling over their lusts.
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 66