by C. L. Moore
The End
THE PRISONER IN THE SKULL
Astounding Science Fiction - February 1949
with Henry Kuttner
(as by Lewis Padgett)
It isn't often a man gets hold of a slave like that! But John Fowler was just the man to use him hard, and to the last bit of his strength. Which, under the circumstances, was only justice ...
-
He felt cold and weak, strangely, intolerably, inhumanly weak with a weakness of the blood and bone, of the mind and soul. He saw his surroundings dimly, but he saw—other things—with a swimming clarity that had no meaning to him. He saw causes and effects as tangible before him as he had once seen trees and grass. But remote, indifferent, part of another world.
Somehow there was a door before him. He reached vaguely—
It was almost wholly a reflex gesture that moved his finger toward the doorbell.
-
The chimes played three soft notes.
John Fowler was staring at a toggle switch. He felt baffled. The thing had suddenly spat at him and died. Ten minutes ago he had thrown the main switch, unscrewed the wall plate and made hopeful gestures with a screwdriver, but the only result was a growing suspicion that this switch would never work again. Like the house itself, it was architecturally extreme, and the wires were sealed in so that the whole unit had to be replaced if it went bad.
Minor irritations bothered Fowler unreasonably today. He wanted the house in perfect running order for the guest he was expecting. He had been chasing Veronica Wood for a long time, and he had an idea this particular argument might tip the balance in the right direction.
He made a note to keep a supply of spare toggle switches handy. The chimes were still echoing softly as Fowler went into the hall and opened the front door, preparing a smile. But it wasn't Veronica Wood on the doorstep. It was a blank man.
That was Fowler's curious impression, and it was to recur to him often in the year to come. Now he stood staring at the strange emptiness of the face that returned his stare without really seeming to see him. The man's features were so typical they might have been a matrix, without the variations that combine to make up the recognizable individual. But Fowler thought that even if he had known those features, it would be hard to recognize a man behind such utter emptiness. You can't recognize a man who isn't there. And there was nothing here. Some erasure, some expunging, had wiped out all trace of character and personality. Empty.
And empty of strength, too—for the visitant lurched forward and fell into Fowler's arms.
Fowler caught him automatically, rather horrified at the lightness of the body he found himself supporting. "Hey," he said, and, realizing the inadequacy of that remark, added a few pertinent questions. But there was no answer. Syncope had taken over.
Fowler grimaced and looked hopefully up and down the road. He saw nobody. So he lifted his guest across the threshold and carried him easily to a couch. Fine, he thought. Veronica due any minute, and this paper weight barging in.
Brandy seemed to help. It brought no color to the pale cheeks, but it pried the eyelids open to show a blank, wondering look.
"O.K. now?" Fowler asked, wanting to add, "Then go home."
There was only the questioning stare. Fowler stood up with some vague intention of calling a doctor, and then remembered that the televisor instrument hadn't yet been delivered. For this was a day when artificial shortages had begun to supplant real ones, when raw material was plentiful but consumers were wary, and were, therefore, put on a starvation diet to build their appetites and loosen their purse strings. The televisor would be delivered when the company thought Fowler had waited long enough.
Luckily he was versatile. As long as the electricity was on he could jury-rig anything else he needed, including facilities for first aid. He gave his patient the routine treatment, with satisfying results. Until, that is, the brandy suddenly hit certain nerve centers and emesis resulted.
Fowler lugged his guest back from the bathroom and left him on the bed in the room with the broken light switch to recuperate. Convalescence was rapid. Soon the man sat up, but all he did was look at Fowler hopefully. Questions brought no answer.
Ten minutes later the blank man was still sitting there, looking blank.
-
The door chimes sang again. Fowler, assured that his guest wasn't in articulo mortis, began to feel irritation. Why the devil did the guy have to barge in now, at this particular crucial moment? In fact, where had he come from? It was a mile to the nearest highway, along a dirt road, and there was no dust on the man's shoes. Moreover, there was something indefinably disturbing about the—lack in his appearance. There was no other word that fitted so neatly. Village idiots are popularly termed "wanting," and, while there was no question of idiocy here, the man did seem—
What?
For no reason at all Fowler shivered. The door chimes reminded him of Veronica. He said: "Wait here. You'll be all right. Just wait. I'll be back—"
There was a question in the soulless eyes.
Fowler looked around. "There're some books on the shelf. Or fix this—" He pointed to the wall switch. "If you want anything, call me." On that note of haphazard solicitude he went out, carefully closing the door. After all, he wasn't his brother's keeper. And he hadn't spent days getting the new house in shape to have his demonstration go haywire because of an unforeseen interruption.
Veronica was waiting on the threshold. "Hello," Fowler said. "Have any trouble finding the place? Come in."
"It sticks up like a sore thumb," she informed him. "Hello. So this is the dream house, is it?"
"Right. After I figure out the right method of dream-analysis, it'll be perfect." He took her coat, led her into the livingroom, which was shaped like a fat comma and walled with triple-seal glass, and decided not to kiss her. Veronica seemed withdrawn. That was regrettable. He suggested a drink.
"Perhaps I'd better have one," she said, "before I look the joint over."
Fowler began battling with a functional bar. It should have poured and mixed drinks at the spin of a dial, but instead there came a tinkle of breaking glass. Fowler finally gave up and went back to the old-fashioned method. "Highball? Well, theoretically, this is a perfect machine for living. But the architect wasn't as perfect as his theoretical ideas. Methods of construction have to catch up with ideas, you know."
"This room's nice," Veronica acknowledged, relaxing on airfoam. With a glass in her hand, she seemed more cheerful. "Almost everything's curved, isn't it? And I like the windows."
"It's the little things that go wrong. If a fuse blows, a whole unit goes out. The windows—I insisted on those."
"Not much of a view."
"Unimproved. Building restrictions, you know. I wanted to build on the top of a hill a few miles away, but the township laws wouldn't allow it. This house is unorthodox. Not very, but enough. I might as well have tried to put up a Wright house in Williamsburg. This place is functional and convenient—"
"Except when you want a drink?"
"Trivia," Fowler said airily. "A house is complicated. You expect a few things to go wrong at first. I'll fix 'em as they come up. I'm a jerk of all trades. Want to look around?"
"Why not?" Veronica said. It wasn't quite the enthusiastic reaction for which Fowler had hoped, but he made the best of it. He showed her the house. It was larger than it had seemed from the outside. There was nothing super about it, but it was—theoretically—a functional unit, breaking away completely from the hidebound traditions that had made attics, cellars, and conventional bathrooms and kitchens as vestigially unfunctional as the vermiform appendix. "Anyway," Fowler said, "statistics show most accidents happen in kitchens and bathrooms. They can't happen here."
"What's this?" Veronica asked, opening a door. Fowler grimaced.
"The guest room," he said. "That was the single mistake. I'll use it for storage or something. The room hasn't any windows."
"The light doesn't work—"<
br />
"Oh, I forgot. I turned off the main switch. Be right back." He hurried to the closet that held the house controls, flipped the switch, and returned. Veronica was looking into a room that was pleasantly furnished as a bedroom, and, with tinted, concealed fluorescents, seemed light and airy despite the lack of windows.
"I called you," she said. "Didn't you hear me?"
Fowler smiled and touched a wall. "Sound-absorbent. The whole house is that way. The architect did a good job, but this room—"
"What's wrong with it?"
"Nothing—unless you're inside and the door should get stuck. I've a touch of claustrophobia."
"You should face these fears," said Veronica, who had read it somewhere. Fowler repressed a slight irritation. There were times when he had felt an impulse to slap Veronica across the chops, but her gorgeousness entirely outweighed any weakness she might have in other directions.
"Air conditioning, too," he said, touching another switch. "Fresh as spring breeze. Which reminds me. Does your drink want freshening?"
"Yes," Veronica said, and they returned to the comma-shaped room. It was appreciably darker. The girl went to the window and stared through the immense, wall-long pane.
"Storm coming up," she said. "The car radio said it'll be a bad one. I'd better go, Johnny."
"Must you? You just got here."
"I have a date. Anyway, I've got to work early tomorrow." She was a Korys model, much in demand.
Fowler turned from the recalcitrant bar and reached for her hand.
"I wanted to ask you to marry me," he said.
There was silence, while leaden grayness pressed down beyond the window, and yellow hills rippled under the gusts of unfelt wind. Veronica met his gaze steadily.
"I know you did. I mean—I've been expecting you to."
"Well?"
She moved her shoulders uneasily.
"Not now."
"But—Veronica. Why not? We've known each other for a couple of years—"
"The truth is—I'm not sure about you, Johnny. Sometimes I think I love you. But sometimes I'm not sure I even like you."
He frowned. "I don't get that."
"Well, I can't explain it. It's just that I think you could be either a very nice guy or a very nasty one. And I'd like to be quite certain first. Now I've got to go. It's starting to rain."
On that note she went out, leaving Fowler with a sour taste in his mouth. He mixed himself another drink and wandered over to his drawing board, where some sketches were sheafed up in a disorderly fashion. Nuts. He was making good dough at commercial art, he'd even got himself a rather special house—
One of the drawings caught his eye. It was a background detail, intended for incorporation later in a larger picture. It showed a gargoyle, drawn with painstaking care, and a certain quality of vivid precision that was very faintly unpleasant. Veronica—
Fowler suddenly remembered his guest and hastily set down his drink. He had avoided that room during the tour of inspection, managing to put the man completely out of his mind. That was too bad. He could have asked Veronica to send out a doctor from the village.
But the guest didn't seem to need a doctor. He was working on the wall-switch, at some danger, Fowler thought, of electrocuting himself. "Look out!" Fowler said sharply. "It's hot!" But the man merely gave him a mild, blank stare and passed his hand downward before the panel.
The light went out.
It came on again, to show the man finishing an upward gesture.
No toggle switch stub protruded from the slot in the center of the plate. Fowler blinked. "What—?" he said.
Gesture. Blackout. Another gesture.
"What did you do to that?" Fowler asked, but there was no audible reply.
-
Fowler drove south through the storm, muttering about ham electricians. Beside him the guest sat, smiling vacantly. The one thing Fowler wanted was to get the guy off his hands. A doctor, or a cop, in the village, would solve that particular problem. Or, rather, that would have been the solution, if a minor landslide hadn't covered the road at a crucial point.
With difficulty Fowler turned the car around and drove back home, cursing gently.
The blank man sat obediently at his side.
-
They were marooned for three days. Luckily the larder was well-stocked, and the power lines, which ran underground, weren't cut by the storm. The water-purifying unit turned the muddy stream from outside into crystalline nectar, the FM set wasn't much bothered by atmospheric disturbances, and Fowler had plenty of assignments to keep him busy at his drawing board. But he did no drawing. He was exploring a fascinating, though unbelievable, development.
The light switch his guest had rigged was unique. Fowler discovered that when he took the gadget apart. The sealed plastic had been broken open, and a couple of wires had been rewound in an odd fashion. The wiring didn't make much sense to Fowler. There was no photo-electric hookup that would have explained it. But the fact remained that he could turn on the lights in that room by moving his hand upward in front of the switch plate, and reverse the process with a downward gesture.
He made tests. It seemed as though an invisible fourteen-inch beam extended directly outward from the switch. At any rate, gestures, no matter how emphatic, made beyond that fourteen-inch distance had no effect on the lights at all.
Curious, he asked his guest to rig up another switch in the same fashion. Presently all the switches in the house were converted, but Fowler was no wiser. He could duplicate the hookup, but he didn't understand the principle. He felt a little frightened.
Locked in the house for three days, he had time to wonder and worry. He fed his guest—who had forgotten the use of knife and fork, if he had ever known it—and he tried to make the man talk. Not too successfully.
Once the man said: "Forgotten ... forgotten—"
"You haven't forgotten how to be an electrician. Where did you come from?"
The blank face turned to him. "Where?" A pause. And then—
"When? Time ... time—"
Once he picked up a newspaper and pointed questioningly at the date line—the year.
"That's right," Fowler said, his stomach crawling. "What year did you think it was?"
"Wrong—" the man said. "Forgotten—"
Fowler stared. On impulse, he got up to search his guest's pockets. But there were no pockets. The suit was ordinary, though slightly strange in cut, but it had no pockets.
"What's your name?"
No answer.
"Where did you come from? Another—time?"
Still no answer.
Fowler thought of robots. He thought of a soulless world of the future peopled by automatons. But he knew neither was the right answer. The man sitting before him was horribly normal. And empty, somehow—drained. Normal?
The norm? That non-existent, figurative symbol which would be monstrous if it actually appeared? The closer an individual approaches the norm, the more colorless he is. Just as a contracting line becomes a point, which has few, if any, distinguishing characteristics. One point is exactly like another point. As though humans, in some unpleasant age to come, had been reduced to the lowest common denominator.
The norm.
"All right," Fowler said. "I'll call you Norman, till you remember your right name. But you can't be a ... point. You're no moron. You've got a talent for electricity, anyhow."
Norman had other talents, too, as Fowler was to discover soon. He grew tired of looking through the window at the gray, pouring rain, pounding down over a drenched and dreary landscape, and when he tried to close the built-in Venetian shutters, of course they failed to work. "May that architect be forced to live in one of his own houses," Fowler said, and, noticing Norman made explanatory gestures toward the window.
Norman smiled blankly.
"The view," Fowler said. "I don't like to see all that rain. The shutters won't work. See if you can fix them. The view—" He explained patiently, and p
resently Norman went out to the unit nominally called a kitchen, though it was far more efficient. Fowler shrugged and sat down at his drawing board. He looked up, some while later, in time to see Norman finish up with a few swabs of cloth. Apparently he had been painting the window with water.
Fowler snorted. "I didn't ask you to wash it," he remarked. "It was the shutters—"
Norman laid a nearly empty basin on a table and smiled expectantly. Fowler suffered a slight reorientation. "Time-traveling, ha," he said. "You probably crashed out of some booby hatch. The sooner I can get you back there the better I'll like it. If it'd only stop raining ... I wonder if you could rig up the televisor? No, I forgot. We don't even have one yet. And I suspect you couldn't do it. That light switch business was a fluke."
He looked out at the rain and thought of Veronica. Then she was there before him, dark and slender, smiling a little.
"Wha—" Fowler said throatily.
He blinked. Hallucinations? He looked again, and she was still there, three-dimensionally, outside the window—
Norman smiled and nodded. He pointed to the apparition.
"Do you see it too?" Fowler asked madly. "It can't be. She's outside. She'll get wet. What in the name of—"
But it was only Fowler who got wet, dashing out bareheaded in the drenching rain. There was no one outside. He looked through the window and saw the familiar room, and Norman.
He came back. "Did you paint her on the window?" he asked. "But you've never seen Veronica. Besides, she's moving—three-dimensional. Oh, it can't be. My mind's snapping. I need peace and quiet. A green thought in a green shade." He focused on a green thought, and Veronica faded out slowly. A cool, quiet, woodland glade was visible through the window.
After a while Fowler figured it out. His window made thoughts visible.
It wasn't as simple as that, naturally. He had to experiment and brood for quite some time. Norman was no help. But the fact finally emerged that whenever Fowler looked at the window and visualized something with strong emphasis, an image of that thought appeared—a projective screen, so to speak.