Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by James H. Schmitz

  “It isn’t going to be a crap game, silly,” Jean informed him. “I told you Ira thinks these people can tell whether you were just lucky last week or whether you’ve developed some sort of special ability. They’ll test you—somehow.”

  COMMAGER looked down at her curiously. Jean was a slim blonde who could look crisp as chilled lettuce after an afternoon of smashing tennis matches followed by an hour of diving practice off the high board. She wasn’t intellectually inclined, but, understandably, Ira Bohart had never seemed to mind that. Neither did Commager. However, she seemed disturbed now.

  “Are you beginning to get interested in that sort of thing yourself?” he inquired lightly.

  “No,” she said. “I’m just worried about that husband of mine. Honestly, Alan, this is as bad a metaphysical binge as he’s ever been on! And some of those exercises he was showing me yesterday sort of scared me. If they do something like that tonight, I’d like to know what you think of it.”

  “It’s just somebody else on the trail of the Bohart stocks and bonds, Jeannie! Ira will get disillusioned again before any harm is done. You know that, Jeannie.”

  “That’s what I keep telling myself,” Jean agreed unhappily. “But this time—”

  Commager shook his head, parked the car and let her out, a block and a half from the Hawkes home. “Did you try any of those exercises yourself?”

  “I’m not that loony,” Jean said briefly. “Anyway, Ira advised me not to.”

  They walked back to the house in brooding silence. Between them, they’d seen Ira through a bout of Buddhism and successive experiences with three psychological fringe groups, in relentless pursuit of some form of control of the Higher Mind. After each such period, he would revert for a while to despondent normalcy.

  Four years ago, it had seemed rather amusing to Commager, because then it had been Lona Commager and Ira Bohart who went questing after the Inexpressible together, while Alan Commager and Jean Bohart went sea-fishing or skin-diving off Catalina. But then Lona had died and the Inexpressible stopped being a source of amusement. Sometimes Ira bored Commager to death these days. But he still liked Jean.

  “WHY PICK on me to expose these rascals anyway?” he asked as they came in sight of the house. “I may have surprised the boys at Las Vegas last week, but I couldn’t tell a psychic phenomenon from a ringing in my ears.”

  She patted his arm. “That may be true, but you do intimidate people,” she explained.

  “Shucks!” Commager said modestly. It was true, though; he did. “So I’m to sit there and glare at them?”

  “That’s the idea. Just let them know you see through their little tricks and I’ll bet they lose interest in Ira before the evening’s out! Of course, you don’t have to put it on too thick . . .”

  Their host, Herbert Hawkes, for one, didn’t look like a man who’d be easy to intimidate. He was as big as Commager himself and about the same age; an exfootball player, it turned out. He and Commager exchanging crushing hand-grips and soft smiles, as big men will, and released each other with mutual respect.

  Ira, who didn’t seem any more gaunt and haggard than usual, had appeared a little startled by their entry, possibly because they were early, but more likely, Commager thought, because of a girl who had coiled herself becomingly on the couch very close to Ira.

  At first glance, this siren seemed no more than seventeen—a slender, brown-skinned creature in an afternoon dress the exact shade of her skin—but by the time they were being introduced, Commager had added twelve years to her probable age.

  She was Ruth MacDonald, she told him, secretary of the Para-psychological Group of Long Beach. Had he heard of it? He said it sounded familiar, which was untrue, but it seemed to please Miss MacDonald.

  The only other person present, a fifty-odd, graying teddy-bear of a man with very thick eyebrows, announced he was the Reverend Wilson Knox, president of the Temple of Antique Christianity. The Reverend, Commager realized, was pretty well plastered, though there was no liquor in sight.

  THEIR INTERESTS might be unusual, but they hardly seemed sinister. Commager was practically certain he could identify Herbert Hawkes as the owner of one of the biggest downtown automobile agencies—which made him an unlikely sort of man to be a member of a group called the Guides. It was Hawkes’s own affair, but it promised to make the evening more interesting than Commager had expected.

  “Were we interrupting anything?” he inquired, looking around benevolently.

  Ira cleared his throat. “Well, as a matter of fact, Alan, we were conducting a series of experiments with me as the guinea-pig at the moment. Rather interesting actually—” He seemed a trifle nervous.

  Commager avoided Jean’s glance. “Why not just continue?”

  “We can’t,” the Reverend Knox informed him solemnly. “Our high priestess was called to the telephone a few minutes ago. We must wait until she returns.” Ira explained hurriedly, “Mr. Knox is talking about Paylar. She’s connected with the new group I’m interested in, the Guides. I suppose Jean told you about that?”

  “A little.” Commager waved his hand around. “But I thought you people were the Guides.” Hawkes smiled.

  Wilson Knox looked startled. “Goodness, no, Mr. Commager! Though as a matter of fact—” he glanced somewhat warily at his two companions—“if someone here were a Guide, that person would be the only one who knew it! And, of course, Paylar. That’s right, isn’t it, Ruth?”

  Miss MacDonald nodded and looked bored.

  Jean said to Ira, “All I really told Alan was that some friends of yours would like to experiment with—well, whatever you think he was using in that crap game last week.” She smiled brightly at the group. “Mr. Commager actually won eleven hundred dollars in fifteen minutes of playing!”

  “Ah, anybody could if they kept the dice for fifteen minutes,” Commager said airily. “Question of mind over matter, you know.”

  “Eleven hundred dollars? Phenomenal!” Wilson Knox came wide awake. “And may I ask, sir, whether you employ your powers as a professional gambler?”

  Commager replied no, that professionally he was a collector, importer, wholesaler and retailer of tropical fish. Which was, as it happened, the truth, but the Reverend looked suspicious.

  A DOOR opened then and two other people came in. One was a handsome though sullenfaced young man whose white-blond hair had been trimmed into a butch haircut. He was deeply tanned, wore a tee-shirt, white slacks, sneakers and looked generally as if he would be at home on Muscle Beach.

  The other one had to be Paylar: a genuine Guide or, at least, a direct connection to them. She was downright cute in a slender, dark way. She might be in her early twenties . . .

  But for a moment, as Commager stood up to be introduced, he had the confused impression that jungles and deserts and auroras mirrored in ice-flows had come walking into the room with her.

  Well, well, he thought Along with Hawkes, here was another real personality.

  They didn’t continue with the experiments on Ira. Wilson Knox reported Commager’s feat in Las Vegas to Paylar, who seemed to know all about it, and then went bumbling on into a series of anecdotes about other dice manipulators he had known or heard about.

  Except for the Boharts, the others listened with varying expressions of polite boredom. But Ira seemed genuinely fascinated by the subject and kept glancing at Commager, to see how he was taking it. Jean became argumentative.

  “Nobody can really prove that anyone has such abilities!” she stated decisively. “Ira’s been working around with this sort of thing for years and he’s never shown me anything that couldn’t have been a coincidence!”

  Ira grinned apologetically. Wilson Knox sent a quick glance toward Paylar, who had settled herself in an armchair to Commager’s left. The Reverend, Commager thought, seemed both miffed and curiously apprehensive.

  Commager’s own interest in the group became suddenly more lively.

  “There are people in this world toda
y, my dear young lady,” Wilson Knox was telling Jean, “who control the Secret Powers of the Universe!”

  Jean sighed. “When Ira tells me something like that, I always want to know why we don’t hear what these mysterious people are doing.”

  WILSON KNOX glanced at Paylar again. And this time, Commager decided, there was no question about it: the odd little man seemed genuinely alarmed. The bushy eyebrows were working in unconcealed agitation.

  “We must consider,” he told Jean helplessly, “that such people may have their own reasons for not revealing their abilities.”

  “Hm!” sniffed Jean.

  Commager laughed. “Mrs. Bohart has a point there, you know,” he said to Paylar. “I understand the Guides imply they can, at any rate, train people to develop extrasensory abilities, Would you say they can produce some tangible proof for that claim?”

  “Sometimes,” she said. “With some people.” She looked a little tired of the subject, as if it were something she had heard discussed often, as she probably had, so Commager was surprised when she added in the same tone, “I could, I think, produce such proofs very easily for you, Mr. Commager. To your own satisfaction, at least.”

  As she turned to look at him, her dark elfin face sober and confident, Commager was aware of a sudden stillness in the room. Wilson Knox started what seemed to be a protesting gesture and subsided again. And Jean was frowning, as if she had just discovered an unexpected uncertainty in herself.

  “It’s a fair offer,” Commager acknowledged. “If you’re suggesting an experiment, I’ll be glad to cooperate.”

  For a moment, he saw something almost like compassion in the serious young face that studied him. Then Paylar turned to the others. “Would you arrange the lighting in the usual way? Mr. Commager, I should like you to sit here.”

  It was what they had come here for, Commager thought. Hawkes and the blond young man, whose name was Lex Barthold, went about the room adjusting the lights. Commager had a strong impression that Jean now would just as soon keep the experiment from being carried out, if she could think of a good enough reason.

  But the experiment would be a flop anyway. No such half-mystical parlor games had worked on Commager since Lona had died.

  II

  IN COMMAGER’S tropical fish store on Wilshire Boulevard, there were display tanks that were laid out with the casual stateliness of an English park and others that had the formal delicacy of a Chinese garden or that appeared to copy, in fantastic miniature detail, sections of some dreamland salt-water reef. These were the designs of two artistically minded girls who managed the store for Commager and they were often expensively duplicated by artists themselves in the homes of the shop’s less talented patrons.

  But the tanks that most interested Commager were the big ones in the back of the store, partitioned off from the plate-glass windows and the displays that faced the boulevard. Here fish and plants were bred, raised and stocked without regard for art, and the effect, when you sat down to watch them for a while, was that of being in the center of a secret, green-lit jungle out of which God knew what might presently come soaring, wriggling or crawling at you.

  It wasn’t a bad way, in Commager’s opinion, to pass a few hours at night, when you didn’t happen to be in a mood either for sleep or human company. In his case, that might happen once or twice a week, or perhaps less than once a month. When it happened more often, it was time to get organized for another one of those trips that would wind up at some warm and improbable point on the big globe of Earth, where people were waiting to help Commager fill his transport tanks with brightly colored little water-creatures—which, rather surprisingly, provided him with a very good income.

  It was a pattern he had followed for most of the second half of his thirty-four years, the only two interruptions having been the second world war and the nineteen months he’d been married to Lona.

  It was odd, he thought, that he’d never found anything more important to do with his life than that, but the personal games he could watch people play didn’t seem to be even as interesting as the one he’d chosen for himself.

  Also, he went on thinking half-seriously, if you got right down to it, probably all the important elements of life were contained right inside the big tank he was observing at the moment, so that if he could really understand what was going on in there, brightly and stealthily among the green underwater thickets, he might know all that could be known about the entire Universe.

  Considered in that light, the tank became as fascinating as a stage play in a foreign language, in which the actors wore the bright masks of magic and played games that weren’t so very unlike those being played by human beings. But any real understanding of the purpose of the play, human or otherwise, always had seemed a little beyond Commager’s reach.

  HE YAWNED and shifted position in the chair he had pulled up for himself. Perhaps he was simply a bit more stupid than most. But there was a fretting feeling that this game playing, whether on a large scale or a small one, never really led to much, beyond some more of the same. There was, he conceded, a good deal of satisfaction in it for a time, but in the long run, the returns started to diminish.

  It seemed that things—in some way Commager couldn’t quite fathom—should have been arranged differently.

  A car passing on the street outside sent a whisper of sound along the edge of his consciousness. With that came the awareness that it had been some time since he’d last heard a car go by and he found himself wondering suddenly what time of night it was.

  He glanced at his wristwatch. Three-thirty. A little startled, he tried to compute how long he had been sitting there.

  Then it struck him in a surge of panic that he couldn’t remember coming to the store at all!

  But, of course, his memory told him, you went with Jean to that house . . .

  And Paylar had asked him to sit down and . . .

  What kind of stunt had she pulled on him?

  The blackness of terror burst into his consciousness as soon as his thoughts carried him that far—and it wiped out memory. He tried again.

  A black explosion. He pushed at it and it retreated a little.

  It had been between ten and eleven o’clock. Five hours or so ago. What was the last specific thing he could remember?

  HE HAD been sitting in a chair, his eyes closed, a little amused, a little bored. It had been going on for some time. Paylar, a quiet voice off to his left, was asking him a series of odd questions.

  PAYLAR: But where are you, Mr. Commager?

  COMMAGER: (tapping his forehead): Right here! Inside my head.

  PAYLAR: Could you be more specific about that?

  COMMAGER (laughing): I’m somewhere between my ears. Or somewhere back of my eyes.

  PAYLAR: How far do you seem to be from the right side of your head? Do you sense the exact distance?

  Commager discovered he could sense the exact distance. As a point of awareness, he seemed to be located an inch inside the right side of his skull. Simultaneously, though, he noticed that his left ear was less than an inch and a half away from the same spot—which gave him briefly an odd impression of the general shape of his head!

  But he realized then that his attention was shifting around in there, rapidly and imperceptibly. His ears seemed to be now above him, now below and, for a moment, the top of his skull seemed to have moved at least a yard away.

  He laughed. “How am I doing?”

  Paylar didn’t answer. Instead, she asked him to imagine that he was looking at the wall in front of him.

  After a while, that wasn’t too difficult; Commager seemed to be seeing the wall clearly enough, with a standing lamp in either corner, where Hawkes had placed them. Next, the voice told him to imagine that the same wall now was only a few inches in front of his face—and then that it suddenly had moved six feet behind him. It gave him an odd feeling of having passed straight through the wall in the moment of shifting it.

  “Put it twenty feet in
front of you again,” she said. “And now twenty feet behind you.”

  Again the sensation of shifting in space, as if he were swinging back and forth, past and through the wall. Commager had become alert and curious now.

  On the third swing, he went straight into the blackness . . . with panic howling around him! After that, everything was blotted out.

  HE COULDN’T, Commager discovered, close the gap any farther now. Somewhere near eleven o’clock in the evening, he’d gone into that mental blackout with its peculiarly unpleasant side-effects. His next memory might have been twenty minutes ago, when he found himself staring into the miniature underwater forest of the fish tank in his store.

  He could phone the Bohart apartment, he thought, and find out what actually had happened. Immediately, then, he became aware of an immense reluctance to carry out that notion and he grimaced irritably. It was no time to worry about what the Boharts might think, but he could imagine Jean’s sleepy voice, annoyedly asking who was calling at this hour.

  And he’d say, “Well, look, I’ve lost my memory, I’m afraid. A piece of it anyway—”

  He shook his head. They’d gone there to show up the Guides, after all! He’d have to work this out by himself. As if in response to his line of thought, the office telephone, up in the front of the store, began ringing sharply.

  The unexpected sound jolted Commager into a set of chills. He sat there stiffly, while the ring was repeated four times; and then, because there was really no reason not to answer it, no matter how improbable it was that someone would be calling the store at this time of night, he got up and started toward the telephone down the long aisle of back-store tanks. Here and there, one of the tanks was illuminated by overhead lights, like the one before which he’d been sitting.

  At the corner, where he turned from the aisle into the office, something lay in his path.

  He almost stepped on it. He stopped in shock.