Aunt Jane said something, a long sentence, in a high, anxious voice.
“What?” said Wesson irritably. He couldn’t understand a word.
Aunt Jane was silent. “What, what?” Wesson demanded, pounding the console. “Have you got it through your tin head, or not? What?”
Aunt Jane said something else, tonelessly. Once more, Wesson could not make out a single word.
He stood frozen. Warm tears started suddenly out of his eyes. “Aunt Jane—” he said. He remembered, You are already talking longer than any of them. Too late? Too late?
He tensed, then whirled and sprang to the closet where the paper books were kept. He opened the first one his hand struck.
The black letters were alien squiggles on the page. little humped shapes, without meaning.
The tears were coming faster, he couldn’t stop them: tears of weariness, tears of frustration, tears of hate. “Aunt Jane!” he roared.
But it was no good. The curtain of silence had come down over his head. He was one of the vanguard—the conquered men, the ones who would get along with their stranger brothers, out among the alien stars.
The console was not working any more: nothing worked when he wanted it. Wesson squatted in the shower stall, naked, with a soup bowl in his hands. Water droplets glistened on his hands and forearms: the pale short hairs were just springing up, drying.
The silvery skin of reflection in the bowl gave him back nothing but a silhouette., a shadow man’s outline. He could not see his face.
He dropped the bowl and went across the living room, shuffling the pale drifts of paper underfoot. The black lines on the paper, when his eves happened to light on them, were worm-shapes. crawling things, conveying nothing. He rolled slightly in his walk: his eyes were glazed. His head twitched, even now and then, sketching a useless motion to avoid pain.
Once the bureau chief. Gower, came to stand in his way.
“You fool,” he said, his face contorted in anger, “you were supposed to go on to the end. like the rest. Now look what you’ve done!”
“‘I found out, didn’t I?” Wesson mumbled, and as he brushed the man aside like a cobweb, the pain suddenly grew more intense. Wesson clasped his head in his hands with a grunt, and rocked to and fro a moment, uselessly, before he straightened and went on. The pain was coming in waves now, so tall that at their peak his vision dimmed out, violet, then gray.
It couldn’t go on much longer. Something had to burst.
He paused at the bloody place and slapped the metal with his palm, making the sound ring dully up into the frame of the Station: rroom, rroom.
Faintly an echo came back: boooom.
Wesson kept going, smiling a faint and meaningless smile. He was only marking time now, waiting. Something was about to happen.
The dining-room doorway sprouted a sudden sill and tripped him. He fell heavily, sliding on the floor, and lay without moving beneath the slick gleam of the autochef.
The pressure was too great: the autochef’s clucking was swallowed up in the ringing pressure, and the tall gray walls buckled slowly in . . .
The Station lurched.
Wesson felt it through his chest, palms, knees and elbows: the floor was plucked away for an instant and then swung back.
The pain in his skull relaxed its grip a little. Wesson tried to get to his feet.
There was an electric silence in the Station. On the second try, he got up and leaned his back against a wall. Cluck, said the autochef suddenly, hysterically, and the vent popped open, but nothing came out.
He listened, straining to hear. What?
The station bounced beneath him, making his feet jump like a puppet’s; the wall slapped his back hard, shuddered and was still; but far off through the metal cage came a long angry groan of metal, echoing, diminishing, dying. Then silence again.
The Station held its breath. All the myriad clickings and pulses in the walls were suspended; in the empty rooms the lights burned with a yellow glare, and the air hung stagnant and still. The console lights in the living room glowed like witchfires. Water in the dropped bowl, at the bottom of the shower stall, shone like quicksilver, waiting.
The third shock came. Wesson found himself on his hands and knees, the jolt still tingling in the bones of his body, staring at the floor. The sound that filled the room ebbed away slowly and ran down into the silences: a resonant metallic hollow sound, shuddering away now along the girders and hull plates, rattling tinnily into bolts and fittings, diminishing, noiseless, gone. The silence pressed down again,
The floor leaped painfully under his body: one great resonant blow that shook him from head to foot.
A muted echo of that blow came a few seconds later, as if the shock had traveled across the Station and back.
The bed, Wesson thought, and scrambled on hands and knees through the doorway, along a floor curiously tilted, until he reached the rubbery block.
The room burst visibly upward around him, squeezing the block flat. It dropped back as violently, leaving Wesson bouncing helpless on the mattress, his limbs flying. It came to rest, in a long reluctant groan of metal.
Wesson rolled up on one elbow, thinking incoherently, Air, the air lock. Another blow slammed him down into the mattress, pinched his lungs shut, while the room danced grotesquely over his head. Gasping for breath in the ringing silence, Wesson felt a slow icy chill rolling toward him across the room . . . and there was a pungent smell in the air. Ammonia! he thought; and the odorless, smothering methane with it.
His cell was breached. The burst membrane was fatal: the alien’s atmosphere would kill him.
Wesson surged to his feet. The next shock caught him off balance, dashed him to the floor. He arose again, dazed and limping; he was still thinking confusedly, The air lock, get out.
When he was halfway to the door, all the ceiling lights went out at once. The darkness was like a blanket around his head. It was bitter cold now in the room, and the pungent smell was sharper. Coughing, Wesson hurried forward. The floor lurched under his feet.
Only the golden indicators burned now: full to the top, the deep vats brimming, golden-lipped, gravid, a month before the time. Wesson shuddered.
Water spurted in the bathroom, hissing steadily on the tiles, rattling in the plastic bowl at the bottom of the shower stall. The lights winked on and off again. In the dining room, he heard the autochef clucking and sighing. The freezing wind blew harder: he was numb with cold to the hips. It seemed to Wesson abruptly that he was not at the top of the sky at all, but down, down at the bottom of the sea . . . trapped in this steel bubble, while the dark poured in.
The pain in his head was gone, as if it had never been there, and he understood what that meant: Up there, the great body was hanging like butcher’s carrion in the darkness. Its death struggles were over, the damage done.
Wesson gathered a desperate breath, shouted, “Help me! The alien’s dead! He kicked the Station apart—the methane’s coming! Get help, do you hear me? Do you hear me?”
Silence. In the smothering blackness, he remembered: She can’t understand me any more. Even if she’s alive.
He turned, making an animal noise in his throat. He groped his way on around the room, past the second doorway. Behind the walls, something was dripping with a slow cold tinkle and splash, a forlorn night sound. Small, hard floating things rapped against his legs. Then he touched a smooth curve of metal: the air lock.
Eagerly he pushed his feeble weight against the door. It didn’t move. And it didn’t move. Cold air was rushing out around the door frame, a thin knife-cold stream, but the door itself was jammed tight.
The suit! He should have thought of that before. If he just had some pure air to breathe, and a little warmth in his fingers . . . But the door of the suit locker would not move, either. The ceiling must have buckled.
And that was the end, he thought, bewildered. There were no more ways out. But there had to be—He pounded on the door until his arms would not lift an
y more; it did not move. Leaning against the chill metal, he saw a single light blink on overhead.
The room was a wild place of black shadows and swimming shapes—the book leaves, fluttering and darting in the air stream. Schools of them beat wildly at the walls, curling over, baffled, trying again; others were swooping around the outer corridor, around and around: he could see them whirling past the doorways, dreamlike, a white drift of silent paper in the darkness.
The acrid smell was harsher in his nostrils. Wesson choked, groping his way to the console again. He pounded it with his open hand: he wanted to see Earth.
But when the little square of brightness leaped up, it was the dead body of the alien that Wesson saw.
It hung motionless in the cavity of the Station, limbs dangling stiff and still, eyes dull. The last turn of the screw had been too much for it: but Wesson had survived . . .
For a few minutes.
The dead alien face mocked him; a whisper of memory floated into his mind: We might have been brothers . . . All at once, Wesson passionately wanted to believe it—wanted to give in, turn back. That passed. Wearily he let himself sag into the bitter now, thinking with thin defiance, It’s done—hate wins. You’ll have to stop this big giveaway—can’t risk this happening again. And we’ll hate you for that—and when we get out to the stars—
The world was swimming numbly away out of reach. He felt the last fit of coughing take his body, as if it were happening to someone else beside him.
The last fluttering leaves of paper came to rest. There was a long silence in the drowned room.
Then:
“Paul,” said the voice of the mechanical woman brokenly; “Paul,” it said again, with the hopelessness of lost, unknown, impossible love.
The “Talent” possessed by young Andrew Benson, as those who knew him testify, is a most unusual one indeed—for a ‘humanor an extraterrestrial (and there is some question as to which Andrew might be). In fact, one could say that this talent of his is decidedly monstrous.
Robert Bloch (b. 1917) published his first short story in Weird Tales nearly a half-century ago, at the tender age of seventeen, and has followed it with several hundred more to date. Plus a dozen or so collections and a score of science-fiction, fantasy/horror, and mystery novels. Plus large numbers of radio, television, and film scripts. Plus innumerable nonfiction pieces of different types. Although he is best known to the general reader as the author of Psycho, it is such sometimes grim, sometimes pun-filled and comic—and usually horrific—visions as “Talent” “Enoch ” “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper,” Night-World, and the recently published Strange Eons which are most highly lauded by aficionados of science fiction and the macabre. BEMs in one form or another, human or alien, are one of his specialties, as you’ll shortly discover in the pages that follow.
Talent
Robert Bloch
It is perhaps a pity that nothing is known of Andrew Benson’s parents.
The same reasons which prompted them to leave him as a foundling on the steps of the St. Andrews Orphanage also caused them to maintain a discreet anonymity. The event occurred on the morning of March 3rd, 1943—the war era, as you probably recall—so in a way the child may be regarded as a wartime casualty. Similar occurrences were by no means rare during those days, even in Pasadena, where the Orphanage was located.
After the usual tentative and fruitless inquiries, the good Sisters took him in. It was there that he acquired his first name, from the patron and patronymic saint of the establishment. The “Benson” was added some years later, by the couple who eventually adopted him.
It is difficult, at this late date, to determine what sort of a child Andrew was; orphanage records are sketchy, at best, and Sister Rosemarie, who acted as supervisor of the boys’ dormitory, is long since dead. Sister Albertine, the primary grades teacher of the Orphanage School, is now—to put it as delicately as possible—in her senility, and her testimony is necessarily colored by knowledge of subsequent events.
That Andrew never learned to talk until he was nearly seven years old seems almost incredible; the forced gregarity and the conspicuous lack of individual attention characteristic of orphanage upbringing would make it appear as though the ability to speak is necessary for actual survival in such an environment from infancy onward. Scarcely more credible is Sister Albertine’s theory that Andrew knew how to talk but merely refused to do so until he was well into his seventh year.
For what it is worth, she now remembers him as an unusually precocious youngster, who appeared to possess an intelligence and understanding far beyond his years. Instead of employing speech, however, he relied on pantomime, an art at which he was so brilliantly adept (if Sister Albertine is to be believed) that his continuing silence seemed scarcely noticeable.
“He could imitate anybody,” she declares. “The other children, the Sisters, even the Mother Superior. Of course I had to punish him for that. But it was remarkable, the way he was able to pick up all the little mannerisms and facial expressions of another person, just at a glance. And that’s all it took for Andrew—just a mere glance.
“Visitors’ Day was Sunday. Naturally, Andrew never had any visitors, but he liked to hang around the corridor and watch them come in. And afterwards, in the dormitory at night, he’d put in a regular performance for the other boys. He could impersonate every single man, woman or child who’d come to the Orphanage that day—the way they walked, the way they moved, every action and gesture. Even though he never said a word, nobody made the mistake of thinking Andrew was mentally deficient. For a while, Dr. Clement had the idea he might be a mute.”
Dr. Roger Clement is one of the few persons who might be able to furnish more objective data concerning Andrew Benson’s early years. Unfortunately, he passed away in 1954, a victim of a fire which also destroyed his home and his office files.
It was Dr. Clement who attended Andrew on the night that he saw his first motion picture.
The date was 1949, some Saturday evening in the late fall of the year. The Orphanage received and showed one film a week, and only children of school age were permitted to attend. Andrew’s inability—or unwillingness—to speak had caused some difficulty when he entered primary grades that September, and several months went by before he was allowed to join his classmates in the auditorium for the Saturday night screenings. But it is known that he eventually did so.
The picture was the last (and probably the least) of the Marx Brothers movies. Its title was Love Happy, and if it is remembered by the general public at all today, that is due to the fact that the film contained a brief walk-on appearance by a then-unknown blonde bit player named Marilyn Monroe.
But the Orphanage audience had other reasons for regarding it as memorable. Because Love Happy was the picture that sent Andrew Benson into his trance.
Long after the lights came up again in the auditorium the child sat there, immobile, his eyes staring glassily at the blank screen. When his companions noticed and sought to arouse him he did not respond; one of the Sisters (possibly Sister Rosemarie) shook him, and he promptly collapsed in a dead faint. Dr. Clement was summoned, and he administered to the patient. Andrew Benson did not recover consciousness until the following morning.
And it was then that he talked.
He talked immediately, he talked perfectly, he talked fluently—but not in the manner of a six-year-old child. The voice that issued from his lips was that of a middle-aged man. It was a nasal, rasping voice, and even without the accompanying grimaces and facial expressions it was instantaneously and unmistakably recognizable as the voice of Groucho Marx.
Andrew Benson mimicked Groucho in his Sam Grunion role to perfection, word for word. Then he “did” Chico Marx. After that he relapsed into silence again, and for a moment it was thought he had reverted to his mute phase. But it was an eloquent silence, and soon it became evident that he was imitating Harpo. In rapid succession, Andrew created recognizable vocal and visual portraits of Raymond Burr, Me
lville Cooper, Eric Blore and the other actors who played small roles in the picture. His impersonations seemed uncanny to his companions, and the Sisters were not unimpressed.
“Why, he even looked like Groucho,” Sister Albertine insists.
Ignoring the question of how a towheaded moppet of six can achieve a physical resemblance to Groucho Marx without benefit (or detriment of make-up. it is nevertheless an established fact that Andrew Benson gained immediate celebrity as a mimic within the small confines of the Orphanage,
And from that moment on, he talked regularly, if not freely. That is to say, he replied to direct questions, he recited his lessons in the classroom, and responded with the outward forms of politeness required by Orphanage discipline. But he was never loquacious, or even communicative, in the ordinary sense, The only time he became spontaneously articulate was immediately following the showing of a weekly movie.
There was no recurrence of his initial seizure, but each Saturday night screening brought in its wake a complete dramatic recapitulation by the gifted youngster. During the fall of 49 and the winter of 50, Andrew Benson saw many movies. There was Sorroicful Jones, with Bob Hope: Tarzan’s Magic Fountain: The Fighting O’Flynn; The Lite of Riley: Little Women, and a number of other films, current and older. Naturally, these pictures were subject to approval by the Sisters before being shown, and as a result movies depicting or emphasizing violence were not included. Still, several Westerns reached the Orphanage screen, and it is significant that Andrew Benson reacted in what was to become a characteristic fashion.
“Funny thing,” declares Albert Dominguez, who attended the Orphanage during the same period as Andrew Benson and is one of the few persons located who is willing to admit, let alone discuss, the fact. ‘At first Andy imitated everybody—all the men, that is. He never imitated none of the women. But after he started to see Westerns, it got so he was choosey, like. He just imitated the villains. I don t mean like when us guys was playing cowboys—you know, when one guv is the Sheriff and one is a gunslinger. I mean he imitated villains all the time. He could talk like ’em, he could even look like ’em. We used to razz hell out of him, you know?”
Bug-Eyed Monsters Page 4