A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  He’s still in the crumpled slacks and greasy khaki shirt he left the interior in, but under them a triple-tiered money-belt, twice around the chest and once across the waist, packed with good solid chunky gold eagles, outlawed at home now but as good as ever over here. Fifteen-thousand dollars’ worth; two thousand a week salary, and a thousand bonus for obliterating

  a caterpillar-tank that General Yang didn’t like the looks of. Not bad, two thousand a week. But seven weeks is still a long time, any way you look at it.

  Her voice comes over the wire throbbing with expectancy; every time it’s rung she’s hoped it was he—and now at last it is.

  “O’Shaughnessy.” A love song in one word. She’s never called him by anything but that.

  “Just grounded. I’ve brought back fifteen-thousand-worth of red paint with me. Turn the shower on, lay out my dude-clothes, and get ready for a celebration!”

  He just lingers long enough to see his plane put to bed properly, then grabs a cab at the airport-gate. “The Settlement,” and forgetting that he’s not inland any more, that Shanghai’s snappier than Chicago, “Chop-chop.”

  “Sure, Mike,” grins the slant-eyed driver. “Hop in.”

  A change has come over the city since he went away, he can feel that the minute they hit the outskirts, clear the congested native sections, and cross the bridge into the Settlement. Shanghai is already tuning-up for its oncoming doom, without knowing it. A city dancing on the brink of the grave. There’s an electric tension in the air, the place never seemed so gay, so hectic, as tonight; the roads opening off the Bund a welter of blinking, flashing neon lights, in ideographs and Latin letters alike, as far as the eye can see. Traffic hopelessly snarled at every crossing, cops piping on their whistles, packed sidewalks, the blare of saxophones coming from taxi-dance mills, and overhead the feverish Oriental stars competing with intercrossed searchlight-beams from some warships or other on the Whang-poo. Just about the right town and the right night to have fifteen thousand bucks in, all at one time.

  He says: “Hold it, Sam,” in front of a jewelry-store on Bubbling Well Road, lopes in, comes out again with a diamond solitaire in his pocket.

  The skyscraper Mansions shows up, he vaults out, counts windows up to the tenth floor, three over from the corner. Brightly lighted, waiting for him. Shies a five-dollar bill at the driver.

  The elevator seems to crawl up; he feels like getting out and pushing. A pair of Englishmen stare down their noses at his waste-rag outfit. The rush of her footsteps on one side of the door matches his long stride on the other.

  “I’d recognize your step with cotton in my ears!”

  “Watch it, you’ll get fuel-oil all over you!”

  They go in together in a welter of disjointed expressions, such as any pair might utter. “I thought you were never coming back this time!”

  “Boy, you certainly made time getting dressed. All set to go, aren’t you?” As a matter of fact she isn’t, it’s her gloves that mislead him. She has on a shimmery silver dress, but no shoes. Her hair is still down too.

  He laughs. “What do you do, put on your gloves before your shoes?” A shadow of something passes across her face. Instantly she’s smiling again. “Just knowing you were back got me so rattled—”

  He takes a quick shower, jumps into his best suit. Comes in on her just as she is struggling into a pair of silver dancing-shoes—just in time to catch the expression of livid agony on her pretty face. She quickly banishes it.

  “Matter—too tight? Wear another pair—”

  “No, no, it isn’t that. They’re right for me—my feet got a little swollen wearing those Chinese things all day.”

  He lets it go. “Come on, where’ll it be? Astor House, American Club, Jockey Club?” He laughs again as she drenches herself with expensive perfume, literally empties the bottle over herself. “Incidentally, I think we’ll move out of here. Something seems to be the matter with the drains in this apartment, you can notice a peculiar musty odor inside there—decay—”

  The haunted look of a doomed thing flickers in her eyes. She takes his arm with desperate urgency. “Let’s—let’s go. Let’s get out into the open, O’Shaughnessy. It’s such a lovely night, and you’re back, and—life is so short!”

  That air of electric tension, of a great city on the edge of an abyss, is more noticeable than ever at the White Russian cabaret called, not inappropriately, “New York.” You wouldn’t know you were in China. An almond-eyed platinum-blonde has just finished wailing, with a Mott Street accent, “You’re gonna lose your gal.”

  O’Shaughnessy leads Nova back to the table apologizing. “I knew I wasn’t cut out for dancing, but I didn’t know how bad I was until I got a look at your face just now. All screwed up like you were on the rack. Kid, why didn’t you speak up—”

  “It wasn’t you, O’Shaughnessy,” she gasps faintly. “My—my feet are killing me—”

  “Well, I’ve got something here that’ll cure that. We don’t get together often, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy, but when we do—the sky’s the limit.” He takes the three-thousand-dollar ring out of his pocket, blows on it, shows it to her. “Take off your glove, honey, and lemme see how this headlight looks on your finger—”

  Her face is a white, anguished mask. He reaches toward her right hand. “Go ahead, take the glove off.”

  The tense, frightened way she snatches it back out of his reach gives her away. He tumbles. The smile slowly leaves his face. “What’s the matter—don’t you want my ring? You trying to cover up something with those gloves? You fixed your hair with them on, you powdered your nose with them on—What’s under them? Take ’em off, let me see.”

  “No, O’Shaughnessy. No!”

  His voice changes. “I’m your husband, Nova. Take off those gloves and let me see your hands!”

  She looks around her agonized. “Not here, O’Shaughnessy! Oh, not here!”

  She sobs deep in her throat, even as she struggles with one glove. Her eyes are wet, pleading. “One more night, give me one more night,” she whispers brokenly. “You’re leaving Shanghai again in such a little while. Don’t ask to see my hands. O’Shaughnessy, if you love me . . .”

  The glove comes off, flops loosely over, and there’s suddenly horror beating into his brain, smashing, pounding, battering. He reels a little in his chair, has to hold onto the edge of the table with both hands, at the impact of it.

  A clawlike thing—two of the finger extremities already bare of flesh as far as the second joint; two more with only shriveled, bloodless, rotting remnants of it adhering, only the thumb intact, and that already unhealthy-looking, flabby. A dead hand—the hand of a skeleton—on a still-living body. A body he was dancing with only a few minutes ago.

  A rank odor, a smell of decay, of the grave and of the tomb, hovers about the two of them now.

  A woman points from the next table, screams. She’s seen it, too. She hides her face, cowers against her companion’s shoulder, shudders. Then he sees it too. His collar’s suddenly too tight for him.

  Others see it, one by one. A wave of impalpable horror spreads centrifugally from that thing lying there in the blazing electric light on O’Shaughnessy’s table. The skeleton at the feast!

  She says forlornly, in the stunned stillness: “You wanted me to wear your ring, O’Shaughnessy—” and slips it over that denuded bone protruding like a knobby spine from her hand. Loosely, like a hoop, it falls down to the base of the thing, hangs there, flashing prismatically, an inconceivable horror. Diamonds for the dead.

  The spell breaks; the glitter of the diamond perhaps does it, shattering his hypnosis, freeing him. So lifelike there, so out of place. Not a word has passed between them, but for that one lament of hers. He seizes her to him suddenly, their two chairs go over, their champagne glasses crash to the floor. He pulls out a wing of his coat, wraps it concealingly around the thing that was once her hand, clutches it to him, hurries her out of the place, his arm protectively about her. The f
lash of a silver dress, a whiff of gardenia, a hint of moldy, overturned earth, as they go by, and the dead has been removed from among the living. The ring drops off the insufficient bone-sliver that carries it, rolls unheeded across the floor.

  “Not so fast, O’Shaughnessy,” she pleads brokenly. “My feet too—they’re that way. My knees. My side, where the ribs are. It’s coming out all over me.”

  And then, in the cab hurtling them through the mocking constellations that were the Bund an hour ago, she says: “Life was swell, though, while it lasted. Just knowing you has made—well, everything.”

  He says again what he said before: “No one is going to take you away from me!”

  The English doctor says, “Looks rather bad, y’know, old man.” O’Shaughnessy, white-lipped, growls out something . . .

  The German doctor says, “Neffer before haff I such a thing seen. This case will become zenzational—”

  “The case will, but what about her, that’s what I want to know?”

  “My gut man—”

  “I get it. Send the bill around—!”

  The American doctor says, “There’s just a slim chance—what you might call a thousand-to-one shot, that chaulmoogra oil might benefit her.”

  “I thought you said it wasn’t leprosy?”

  “It isn’t. It may be some Chinese disease none of us ever heard of before. She seems to be dying alive. Her bodily functions are unimpaired, the X-rays show; whatever it is seems to be striking on the surface. If it continues unchecked—and there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do to stop it—the whole skeletal structure will be revealed—you’ll have an animated corpse on your hands! And then of course . . . death.” The French doctor—the French, they are a very logical race and make good doctors—says: “M’sieu, they have all been on the wrong track—” O’Shaughnessy’s wan face lights up. “What can you tell me?”

  “I can tell you only this: there is no hope. Your wife is lost to you. If you are a merciful man—I do not give you this advice as doctor, I give it to you as one husband to another—you will go to one of the opium houses of Chapei, buy a quantity sufficient for two at least—”

  O’Shaughnessy says in a muffled voice, “I’m no quitter. I’ll beat this rap.

  There’s pity in the Frenchman’s face. “Go to Chapei, mon ami. Go tonight. I say this for the sake of your own sanity. Your mind will crumble at the sight of what it will have to behold in a few more weeks.”

  O’Shaughnessy says the name of his Maker twice, puts his arm up swiftly over his face. The doctor’s hand comes to rest on his shoulder. “I can see what led them astray, the others. They sought for disease. There is no disease there. No malady. No infection. It is not that; it is the state of death, itself, that has her. How shall I say? This flesh that rots, drops away, is, paradoxically, healthy tissue. My microscopes do not lie. Just as, let us say, a person who has been shot dead by a bullet is otherwise a healthy person. But he lies in his grave and nature dissolves his flesh. That is what we have here. The effect without the cause—”

  O’Shaughnessy raises his head after a while, gets up, moves slowly toward the door. “You, at least,” he says, ‘are a square shooter. All right, medical science tells me she’s as good as dead. I’m not licked yet. There’s a way.” The doctor shrugs gloomily. “How? What way is there? Lourdes, you are thinking of?”

  “An awful way,” O’Shaughnessy says, “but a way.”

  He stumbles out into the bright sunlight of the Concession, roams around hopelessly. Along the Avenue of the Two Republics, bordering the French Concession, he finds himself beginning to tremble all over, suddenly.

  Fear! Fear again, for the first time since his ’teens. Fear, that he thought he would never know any more. Fear that no weapon, no jeopardy, no natural cataclysm, has ever been able to inspire until now. And now here it is running icily through him in the hot Chinese noon. Fear for the thing he loves, the only fear that can ever wholly cow the reckless and the brave.

  Fear of the Way, the Way that he mentioned to the doctor. Fear of the implication involved in it. A mad voice howling in the darkness sounds in his ears again: “You’ll come crawling back to me, begging me to help! That’ll be my hour!” Oh, not that his own life will assuredly be forfeit as part of the bargain, that isn’t what makes him tremble. Nor any amount of pain and horror that vindictive mania can devise. He can stand it with a smile, to give her an hour, a day, or a week of added life. It’s what will come after, what she must face alone without him, once he’s out of the way. The barbed-wire fence—cooped up with a madman; kept trapped like an animal in a cage, after having known the world. Better if he’d left her as he’d found her . . .

  But that’s the Way, and there is no other. And once his mind’s made up, the trembling and aimless walking stops, and he can look doom in the face without flinching.

  He has their boat-tickets in his pocket when he goes back to the Mansions. All down the corridor, from the elevator-shaft to their door, there’s that cloying odor of perfumery—to conceal another, different one.

  She’s propped up in bed, a native amah sitting by her fanning her. He stops short in surprise. The screwy clock of this bedevilment seems to have spun backward again to that awful night, when he first came out of the interior—and didn’t know yet. For she’s beautiful there, composed, placid again, expressionless as a wax doll, the stigma of the knowledge of approaching doom erased from her face.

  “The mask came,” she says through it, in a slightly resonant voice. Her own features, reproduced by a clever Chinese craftsman, at her terrified request—before anything happens to them. Not for herself, this, for the man who stands there looking at her—the man whom life and love have laughed at, the man to whom life and love and laughter, too, have been denied.

  He gestures the Chinese woman out of the room.

  When they’re alone Nova asks, as tonelessly as though she were asking what the weather was like, “Any hope?”

  “Not here.” It’s not the first time it’s been asked and answered that way, so there’s no shock to it any more.

  He sees a small canvas bag upon the table beside her bed. “What’s that?”

  “Another agent of Yang was here while you were out. He left this bag of gold, and a thinly veiled threat that your tea will be bitter if you don’t report back soon. They think you’ve run out on them. Better go back, O’Shaughnessy.”

  “Not a chance, darling. I’ve sold my plane. We’re taking the early morning boat back to the States. I’m taking you back to Denholt.”

  She is silent for a long minute. He can see her shivering through the thick, brocaded, Chinese jacket, pretty much the way he was, out in the sun-baked streets.

  He sits down close beside her. “You’ve knocked around with me now for almost a year. You’ve talked to lots of other girls your age. You must have found out by now that none of them learned to walk and talk as late as you did. Something happened to you, and there’s only one man alive knows what it was and what’s to be done about it. Those injections—can’t you see that he was keeping you alive in some way? It’s our only chance, we’ve got to go back there, we’ve got to get more of his stuff.” And bitterly, as he hauls out a valise and tosses up the lid, “O’Shaughnessy wasn’t so smart. O’Shaughnessy knows when he’s licked . . .

  Down the Whangpoo to the Yangtse, and out into the China Sea. A race against time now. A race against death. And the odds are so tall against them. The widest body of water in the world to cross. Then a whole continent afterward from west to east. Three weeks at the very least. Can she hold out that long by sheer will-power? Or have they waited too long, like fools? Then too, how can he be sure there is help waiting at the end of the long journey, even the help that they both dread so? Suppose Denholt is gone. How to locate him again in time? He may be in a strait jacket at this very moment, unable to tell a serum from a split of White Rock. The odds are pretty steep. But—at least there are odds.

  She sits i
n a deck-chair covered up to her chin in a steamer-rug; her beautiful masked face above it never smiles, never frowns, never changes—just the eyes alive and the voice. He haunts the chart that marks their daily progress. Comes back to it a hundred times a day, says prayers before it while it lengthens a pitiful notch at a time, in red ink across the graph.

  Kobe. Bad news. A Japanese English-language paper has picked up the story from something that must have come out in Shanghai after they left. Fright sounds through the mask. “It’s—it’s leaked out already. Here. Beautiful girl stricken with living death. First case of its kind on record. Being rushed home by husband—’ ”

  She makes a small, plaintive sound. “Don’t you see? The papers in America will pick it up, follow it through, play it up. And your name’s here. They, whoever they were, they’ll know it means us, they’ll find out we’re coming back. They’ll be waiting for us to land, they’ll—we’ll never make it. Oh, let’s turn back, O’Shaughnessy! Let me die in China—what’s the difference where it is? I’ve brought you enough grief, don’t let me be the cause of—”

  He takes her in his arms and holds her tight. “You don’t seem to think much of my ability to take care of us.”

  She makes a thoughtless gesture to reach out and clasp his hand understanding^; but she remembers and draws the gloved claw back again.

  Days pass. The story has circulated now, and turned the ship into a buzzing beehive of curiosity. People find excuses to go by her on the deck, just so they can turn and stare. O’Shaughnessy overhears two men bet that she won’t reach Frisco alive. She tries to smoke a cigarette through the lips of the mask one afternoon, to buoy up his spirits a little. Smoke comes out at her hair-line, under her chin, before her ears. A steward drops a loaded bouillon-tray at the sight of her. Nova stays in her cabin after that.

  IX

  Three thousand years later they’re at Honolulu. Leis and steel-guitars above deck; and below, something that scarcely stirs, that lies still now, saturated with cologne, smothered with fresh-cut flowers as though she were already on her bier. It’s too painful to force the fleshless footbones to support her tottering body any more, even swathed in bandages, except for a few moments at a time. Reporters try to get in to see her; O’Shaughnessy has to swing his fists to get them to keep their distance.