Her legs were reaching out and taking precise one-yard strides, and when she looked down at little clumps of grass alongside the drive she saw she was passing them at a normal rate. But with the gate, it was a different matter. The longer she walked, the slower her approach became, until at last, in spite of what her senses told her about her rate of locomotion it seemed a though she was standing still.
On and on she went; but even her stubbornness had a limit, and when the dinner gong finally rang, she became aware that she was ravenously hungry as well as being somewhat footsore.
“I’ll make a fresh start early tomorrow morning,” she promised herself, and turned back toward the hotel. The pudgy man waved at her sympathetically and went in to dinner.
It took her just as long to go back as it had to go out. When she finally staggered back up the steps onto the veranda and collapsed into the nearest chair, it was pitch dark and dinner had been over for two hours. After she partially recovered her breath, she walked stiffly back through the lobby, looking neither left nor right, stonily ignoring the desk clerk’s pleasant question as to whether she had enjoyed her walk.
Aunt Hester was an austere person little given to tears, but when she finally got back into her dingy room and shut the door behind her, she could control herself no longer. Exhausted and discouraged, she threw herself on her hard bed, buried her face in her lumpy pillow, and sobbed convulsively until the slight remaining swelling in her long nose was matched by a tearful puffiness around her reddened eyes.
Eventually, her lamentations were cut short by a knock at her door.
“Who’s there?” she sniffled.
“Mr. McCreary. I’m the one who was talking to you out on the veranda this afternoon. I saved a piece of chicken for you from supper.”
“Go away…please.”
There was a moment of silence, and then as her stomach growled protestingly, she began to regret her words.
“Er…Mr. McCreary”? she said finally in a weak voice.
He was still there. “Yes?” he said eagerly.
“Did you say chicken?”
“I did. I brought some bread and butter, too.”
“Just a moment,” said Aunt Hester. Going over to the wash basin, she dampened a towel and did what she could to repair the ravages of tears.
“Come in,” she said finally.
Ten minutes later, she felt somewhat happier about life. Conversation was a bit strained at first, of course—Aunt Hester had never been alone in a hotel room with a man before, and she was careful to leave the door partly open for appearance’s sake.
“I guess I should have listened to you this afternoon,” she said finally.
“There are some things people just have to find out for themselves,” he said. “I did. I turned back after a half an hour, though.” He patted his fat paunch apologetically. “I’ve got too much bulk on me to do very much in the way of long distance walking. If I ever get back, I’m going to get myself in condition again.”
“What do you mean, ‘if?’” said Aunt Hester. “You can’t just give in and let them keep you here! There must be some way out!”
He shook his head. “There isn’t. I’ve checked. There’s some sort of area of distortion that goes all around the place —no matter how long you walk, you never quite get out. No matter how far you go, it always takes as long to cover half the remaining distance as it did to get where you are. Before very long, you’re moving forward so slowly that you might as well be standing still. The mathematicians have a name for the process, but I’ll be darned if I can remember it.”
“Then we’re trapped?” Aunt Hester was on the verge of tears again, but didn’t want to show it.
“You can call it that. Once a person is brought here, he isn’t allowed to return until he has learned his lesson.”
“What lesson?” demanded Aunt Hester. “What’s all this talk about lessons? What am I doing here? Why can’t I remember?”
“You will,” said Mr. McCreary soothingly, “in due time.” He stroked his jaw and grinned wryly. His pudgy face took on a boyish expression that Aunt Hester found strangely attractive.
“For once,” he said, “I’m going to keep my big mouth shut. It’s something you just have to figure out for yourself.”
“Will I have to stay here long?” asked Aunt Hester anxiously. “After all, I’ve got responsibilities. I’ve got a job. I’ve got a family. I can’t stay away when everything needs taking care of!”
At the mention of the word family, Mr. McCreary’s face fell.
“You’re married?”
“No. First there was Mother to take care of, and then my niece, Muriel. I’ve raised her since her mother died, and I don’t know what she’ll do without me being around to take care of her.”
“How old is she?” asked Mr. McCreary.
“Twenty-two. But she’s still a child. Right now, she wants to marry some penniless writer, and if I’m not around to show her what’s best for her, she’s apt to make a terrible mistake! She’s a sweet child, Mr. McCreary, but she just isn’t practical… I’ve had Mr. Keeler, our branch manager, over for dinner a dozen times just so the two of them could get to know each other, and instead of playing her cards right, she practically ignores him just because he’s a little fat and bald.”
“I can understand that,” said Mr. McCreary sadly. “It’s been a long time since a girl’s eyes kindled upon looking at me. I’m not married myself,” he added. “For some reason, most people here aren’t. It’s usually the lonely ones that start tampering with the lives of those around them because they have nothing better to do.”
He stood up and smiled shyly. “It’s been nice being with you. Good night.”
He was almost to the door when her voice halted him. “Mr. McCreary.”
“Yes?”
“Please tell me why I’m here.”
“I’m sorry, my dear—” the words seemed to slip out without his realizing it—“but I can’t. If I did, they’d give me a special refresher course.” He wiggled his lower jaw reflectively. “I don’t know whether I could take it.”
As he shut the door behind him, Aunt Hester sat staring blankly after him, the words my dear ringing pleasantly in her ears.
“Perhaps,” she whispered to herself, “perhaps after all these lonely years…
But when she thought of her long horse-face and her jutting beak of a nose, the words turned flat and cold. Sighing wearily, she undressed and crawled into bed.
* * * *
At seven, she was awakened by the buzz of her telephone.
“Yes?” she said sleepily.
“Mr. Higgens and Mr. Montgombery will be up in twenty minutes to give you your lesson. They have a very tight schedule today, and the management would appreciate it if you would be as cooperative as possible.”
The next quarter-hour was the longest and worst she had ever known. She thought again of flight, but knew it was hopeless—there was no lock on the door and no place to hide.
When they finally came in, she didn’t fight them. She lay back on her bed and closed her eyes.
“That’s good, ma’am,” said Mr. Montgombery encouragingly. “It’ll all be over in a minute.”
Mr. Higgens took hold of her long nose with his strong right hand, braced himself against the bed, and then, with a sudden wrench, ripped it off her face. It was worse than the day before, because she knew what was coming. She screamed, though she had resolved not to—and by the time Mr. Montgombery had completed his work of reassembly, she was almost unconscious.
It was several minutes after they left before she realized that she was alone—that the lesson for the day was over.
Five minutes later, her memory suddenly came back.
She found Mr. McCreary on the veranda.
He rose to his feet with a look of honest pleasure on his face, and held out his hands to her. Without thinking, she took them.
“It’s good to see you,” he said.
“It’s good to see you, too.” she answered. Then, suddenly aware that she was still holding his hands, she dropped them in embarrassment.
“How was the lesson?” he asked.
“Horrible,” she said, “horrible.”
“So was mine. But no more so than usual.”
He led her over to a chair and they both sat in silence, looking out across the bright green grass to the gate that led to…someplace. The haze along the wall rippled and danced like heat waves. There was heavy traffic on the highway beyond, traffic that moved both ways; but it was seen merely as a series of wavering blurs.
“I don’t know,” he said at last, in response to her unspoken question. “I can guess where they are going, but I have no way of checking on it. All I can say is that if by some weird chance you should discover a way to get through the gate, when you get on the road, turn right.”
A faint sound of marching feet came from the other side of the wall, and a faint murmur as if voices were counting cadence. Aunt Hester strained her eyes, but the haze in front of the gate seemed to thicken and she could see nothing. “They sound like soldiers,” she said.
“They are,” said Mr. McCreary soberly.
“They pass every day now. And every night, too. Sometimes they glow in the dark.”
There was another moment of silence and then Aunt Hester said, “Mr. McCreary.”
“Why don’t you call me Henry?” he said shyly, his eyes fixed on the worn wooden floor of the veranda.
“All right, Henry; if you’ll call me Hester.”
She paused.
“Henry.”
“Yes, Hester?”
“I remember now…the haze inside my head is all gone.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
She nodded.
“Tell me.”
“Well,” she began, “Muriel and I were setting the table for supper, and I was arguing with her. I had invited Mr. Keeler for dinner, and I was planning to go out afterward and leave them alone. From the hints he’d dropped that day, I knew he was ready to propose. I was trying to persuade Muriel to say yes, and she was being stubborn—she had always been a very dutiful child, Henry, but now her head was so filled with that young writer that I couldn’t seem to get any place with her. Then I’m afraid I lost my temper.” She hesitated. “It’s not very pleasant now that I look back on it…”
“Go ahead,” said Mr. McCreary sympathetically. “Sometimes it’s better to talk things out.”
“I told her,” said Aunt Hester in a subdued voice, “that I’d given up my whole life for her—that I’d passed up chances to marry and have a home and children of my own, just so that I could raise her properly. Then I asked her if all those years meant nothing. Her face went white and all the resistance rushed out of her. I told her to pick up the phone and call her young man and tell him that she was getting married and could never seen him again. She stood like a dead person, and I picked up the phone and closed her fingers over it. She started to dial his number…and then suddenly the whole room vanished, and I found myself standing in the hotel lobby. Did something like that happen to you?”
“Yes,” said Henry. “Just about. Everybody here has a story something like that. I’ve always talked too much, and sometimes the things I say hurt people. I don’t intend to, but things just slip out. It kept getting worse and worse.
“You see,” he said, “I haven’t any family, and ever since I’ve been in Allentown I’ve lived down at the Athletic Club. I’ve always been afraid of women, and sitting around the lounge talking is one of the only ways I have of fighting off loneliness. I guess you could call me an old gossip. I had no life of my own, so I gained a sort of vicarious excitement by talking about the lives of others.”
As he talked, his hand crept over and touched hers. She shivered, but didn’t pull away.
“I live in Allentown, too,” she said.
It was two weeks later, after a most difficult lesson, that Mr. Montgombery paused at the door of her room and said: “Mr. McCreary is leaving us today, ma’am. I thought you might like to know.”
She felt the old familiar loneliness start to grow within her again. “Can I say good-bye to him?”
Mr. Montgombery nodded. “You’d better hurry, ma’am. He’s waiting for you out on the veranda.”
She ran down the stairs and out to him.
“Henry,” she said, and her voice choked. “I…I…” She stopped, annoyed at her sudden inarticulateness. All her life she had prided herself on her ability to call a spade a spade, and now she found herself blushing and stuttering like a schoolgirl. “I’m very glad for you,” she finished lamely.
“Is that all?” he asked.
She started to say “no” but she couldn’t form the word. There was a moment of awkward silence.
“Well,” he said finally, “I guess I’ve finally learned to keep my big mouth shut.” He fingered his chronically swollen jaw. “After thirty-seven hundred disassemblies, I should have.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Any minute now.” He, too, seemed to be having trouble with his vocal cords. He swallowed twice and then said, “Hester…”
“Yes, Henry?”
“When you come back, could I come and see you sometime?”
“Of course, Henry. Mine is a big house and an empty one. With Muriel gone, I’ll be lonely.”
Mutely, he reached out his arms as if to draw her to him. She shut her eyes and waited, her pulse throbbing in her throat. She felt suddenly young again. Then, just as suddenly, the warm feeling vanished, and she felt worn and tired and alone.
She opened her eyes to the empty veranda. Henry had been taken back.
Dry-eyed she went back to her room and picked up the telephone beside her bed.
“Desk.”
“I want to see the man in charge of this place at once.”
“He’s terribly busy,” said the clerk uncertainly.
Something had happened to Aunt Hester. Instead of snapping back, she said humbly, “I know, but this is terribly important.”
There was a moment of silence at the other end of the wire and then he said, “He’ll be right up.”
Two minutes later, the blond young desk clerk walked into her room. Aunt Hester looked past him expectantly, waiting for somebody to follow him in. Nobody did.
“Isn’t he coming?” she said finally.
The young man chuckled. “He did. I’m him. In addition to running the elevator, I also run the whole place. I wasn’t kidding when I said we were short-handed. Now, what can I do for you?”
“I’ve got to get back,” said Aunt Hester quietly. “I’m needed.”
“Yes?”
“I want to triple my lesson load.”
The young man looked suddenly grave. “I suppose you have a special reason?”
“A very special one.”
“Mr. McCreary?”
Aunt Hester laughed mirthlessly and pointed at the mirror. “With a nose like that, what chance do you think I stand? No, it’s my niece—she’s about to make a stupid marriage, and I’ve got to get back in time to stop it.”
“But Mr. McCreary seemed most attentive to you while he was with us.”
“He was just lonely,” said Aunt Hester sadly. “He won’t be any more, once he gets back with his friends. Can I take the extra lessons?”
“Increasing the number doesn’t necessarily mean shortening your stay, you know,” warned the young man, “and once you’ve contracted for them, it is forbidden to cancel. Most of our students are barely able to keep going with one a day. Nobody has ever tried to take three.”
“In that case, I’ll be the first,” said Aunt Hester grimly. “My mind’s made up!”
“It may take you years yet.”
“I know.”
He picked up the phone and spoke softly into it. “In that case, we will begin at once,” he said, turning back to her. “Mr. Montgombery and Mr. Higgens will be up in a minute.” He s
at down in one of the straight-backed chairs and lit a cigarette. “Have you figured out where you are yet?”
She shook her head. “I know it isn’t Hell, because people can return. And if there is anything to what I’ve heard in church all my life, this certainly isn’t Heaven.”
“It’s under the same central management, though. This is my baby,” he said proudly, “and I’ve got a private hunch that within another hundred years Hell will be running at less than twenty per cent of its rated capacity.
“I got the idea from watching Pavlov’s experiments on conditioned reflexes in dogs. If it works on animals I thought, why shouldn’t it work on humans? It was a tough fight to get permission to set this place up—the older group, with all their ideas about hellfire and damnation, have more power than you might think. But when I pointed out that after all these millennia of running Hell at full blast, the damnation rate has never dropped by a single per cent, they had to give in.
“‘Reform’s the ticket,’” I said. “‘Catch them before they’ve damned themselves and recondition them. What’s the point in locking the bam door after the horse has been stolen?’ They finally agreed to let me set up an experimental operation. I have a ridiculously small budget, and my teaching and research staff is only half the size it should be, but in spite of that I’ve had a redemption rate of one hundred per cent since I first started operations.
“Redemption through reconditioning! It’s a simple matter of managerial common sense: Catch them when they first start to slip off the straight and narrow, correct the slight moral defect that’s causing the difficulty, and you’ve got no more trouble after that. I remember the case of a decent enough fellow whose only fault was that he’d talk the leg off somebody who came near him. He just wanted to be sociable, but it got so that people started shunning him. This just made matters worse, and he started to grow sour inside. Then one night he cornered some poor fellow at a party and…”
Aunt Hester never did find out what happened then, because Mr. Montgombery and Mr. Higgens made a sudden entrance.
“This is your last chance to change your mind,” said the young man sternly. “Remember, it may be years before you will be permitted to leave here.”
The First Theodore R. Cogswell Megapack Page 8