“THEY will not help,” the speaker told them, speaking slowly and deliberately. “They will not help you, for you will be past all help. You will be dead, my friends. Dead by the tens of thousands. Dead and restless atoms. My friends, why don’t you heed? The other world awaits. The poor go first. The poor and desperate, the ones for which this world you stand on has no further use. The only way you can go is in utter poverty, by quitting your jobs and giving away all your possessions.
“In that other world there are no bombs. There is a beginning over, a starting over again. An entire new world, almost exactly like this world, with trees and grass and fertile land and game upon the hills and fish teeming in the rivers. The kind of place you dream of. And there is peace.”
There were sirens screaming, getting closer.
Vickers stepped off the sidewalk and dashed across the street.
A squad car roared around a corner, skidding and whipping to get straightened out, its tires screaming on the pavement, its siren a-wail as if in agony.
Almost at the curb, Vickers stumbled and went sprawling. Instinctively, he pulled himself to hands and knees and flicked a sidewise glance to see the squad car bearing down upon him. He knew he could not make it, that before he could get his feet beneath him, the car would crush him.
A hand came down out of nowhere and fastened on his arm and he felt himself catapulting off the street and across the sidewalk.
Another squad car came around the corner, skidding and with flattened tires protesting, almost as if the first had returned to make a second entrance.
The scattered crowd was running in terror.
The hand tugged at his arm and hauled him erect and Vickers saw his benefactor for the first time, a man in a ragged sweater, with an old jagged knife-mark across his cheek.
“Quick,” said the man, the knife-mark writhing as he spoke, teeth flashing in the whisker-shadowed face.
He shoved Vickers into a narrow alleyway between two buildings and Vickers sprinted, shoulders hunched, between the walls of brick that rose on either side.
He heard the man panting along behind him.
“To your right,” said the man. “A door.”
VICKERS grasped the knob “and the door swung open into a darkened hall.
The man stepped in beside him and closed the door and they stood together in the darkness, the sound of their gasping beating like an erratic heart in the confining darkness.
“That was close,” the man said. “Those cops are getting on the ball. You no more than start a meeting and . . .”
He did not finish the sentence. Instead he reached out and touched Vickers on the arm.
“Follow me,” he said. “Be careful. There are stairs.”
Vickers followed, feeling his way down the creaky stairs, with the musty smell of cellar growing stronger with each step.
At the bottom of the stairway, the man pushed aside a hanging blanket and they stepped into a dimly lighted room. There was an old, broken-down piano in one corner and a pile of boxes in another and a table in the center, around which four men and two women sat.
One of the men said, “We heard the sirens.”
Scar-face nodded. “Charley was just going good. The crowd was getting ready to start shouting.
“Who’s your friend, George?” asked another.
“He was running,” said George. “Police car almost got him.”
They looked at Vickers with interest.
“What’s your name, friend?” asked George.
Vickers told them.
“Is he all right?” asked somebody.
“He was there,” said George. “He was running.”
“But is it safe . . .”
“He’s all right,” George insisted, but Vickers noted that he said it too vehemently, too stubbornly, as if he now realized that he might have made a mistake in bringing a total stranger here.
“Have a drink,” offered one of the men. He shoved a bottle across the table toward Vickers.
Vickers sat down in a chair and took the bottle.
One of the women, the betterlooking of the two, said to him, “My name is Sally.”
Vickers said, “I’m glad to know you, Sally.”
He looked around the table. None of the rest of them seemed ready to introduce themselves.
He lifted the bottle and drank. It was cheap stuff. He choked a little on it.
SALLY said, “You an activist?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“An activist or purist?”
“He’s an activist,” said George. “He was right in there with the rest of them.”
Vickers could see that George was sweating a little, afraid he had made a mistake.
“He sure as hell doesn’t look like one,” one of the men stated.
“I’m an activist,” said Vickers, because he could see that was what they wanted him to be.
“He’s like me,” Sally declared. “He’s an activist by principle, but a purist by preference. Isn’t that right?” she asked Vickers.
“Yes,” said Vickers. “Yes, I guess that’s it.”
He took another drink. “What’s your period?” Sally asked.
“My period?” repeated Vickers blankly. “Oh, yes, my period.”
And he remembered the white, intense face of Mrs. Leslie asking him what historic period he thought would be the most exciting.
“Charles the Second,” he said.
“You were a little slow on that one,” said one of the men suspiciously.
“I fooled around some,” Vickers evaded. “Dabbled, you know. Took me quite a while to find the period I liked.”
“And then you settled on Charles the Second,” Sally said.
“That’s right.”
“Mine,” Sally told him, “is Aztec.”
“But Aztec . . .”
“It really isn’t fair, is it? There’s so little known about the Aztecs. But that way I can make it up as I go along. It’s so much more fun that way.”
GEORGE said, “It’s plain damn foolishness. Maybe it was all right to piddle around with diaries and pretend you were someone else when there was nothing else to do. But now there is something else to do.”
“George is right,” nodded the other woman.
“You activists are the ones who’re wrong,” Sally argued. “The basic thing in Pretentionism is the ability to lift yourself out of your present time and space, to project yourself into another era.”
“Now, listen here,” said George. “I . . .”
“Oh, I agree that we must work for this other world. It’s the kind of opportunity we wanted all along. But that doesn’t mean we have to give up . . .”
“Cut it out,” said one of the men, the big fellow at the table’s end. “This ain’t no place for gabbling.”
Sally said to Vickers, “We’re having a meeting tonight. Would you like to come?”
He hesitated. In the dim light, he could see that all of them were looking at him.
“Sure,” he said. “It would be a pleasure.”
He reached for the bottle and took another drink, then passed it on to George.
“There won’t be anybody stirring for a while,” said George. “Not until the cops have a chance to get cooled off a bit.”
He took a drink and passed the bottle on.
THE meeting was just getting under way when Sally and Vickers arrived.
“Will George be here?” asked Vickers.
Sally laughed a little. “George here? George is a roughneck. A red-hot. A born organizer. How he escaped communism is more than I’ll ever know.”
“And you?”
“We are the propagandists,” she said. “We go to meetings. We talk to people. We get them interested. We do the missionary work and get the converts who’ll go out and preach. When we get them, we turn them over to people like George.”
“I see.”
The dowager sitting at the table rapped with the letter opener she was
using as a gavel.
“Please,” she said. Her voice was aggrieved. “This meeting will come to order.”
Vickers held a chair for Sally, then took one for himself. The others in the room were quieting down.
The room, Vickers saw, was really two—the living room and the dining room, with the French doors between them thrown open so that in effect they became one room.
Upper middle class, he thought. Just swank enough not to be vulgar, but failing the grandeur of the really rich. Real paintings on the wall and a Provincial fireplace and furniture that was of some period or other, although he couldn’t name it.
He glanced at the faces around him and tried to place them. An executive type over there—a manufacturer’s representative, he’d guess. And that one who needed a haircut might be a painter or a writer, although not-a successful one. And the woman with the iron-gray hair and the outdoor tan was more than likely a member of some riding set.
But it did not matter, he knew. Here it was upper middle class in an apartment house with its doorman uniformed, while across the city there would be another meeting in a tenement which had never known a doorman. And in the little villages and the smaller cities they would meet perhaps at the banker’s house or at the barber’s house. And in each instance someone would rap on the table and say would the meeting come to order, please. At most of the meetings, too, there would be a woman or a man like Sally, waiting to talk to the members, hoping to make converts.
THE dowager was saying, “Miss Stanhope is the first member on our list to read tonight.”
Then she sat back, contented, now that she had them finally quieted down and the meeting started.
Miss Stanhope stood up and she was, Vickers saw, the personification of frustrated female flesh and spirit. She was forty, he would guess, and manless, and she would hold down a job that in another fifteen years would leave her financially independent—and yet she was running from a specter, seeking sanctuary behind the cloak of another personality from the past.
Her voice was clear and strong, but with a tendency to simper, and she read with her chin held high, which made her neck appear more scrawny than it was, in the manner of an elocution student.
“My period, you may remember,” she said, “is the American Civil War, with its locale in the South.”
She read:
“Oct. 13, 1862—Mrs. Hampton sent her carriage for me today, with old Ned, one of her few remaining servants, driving, since most of the others have run off, leaving her quite destitute of help, a situation in which many of us also find ourselves . . .”
Running away, thought Vickers, running away to the age of crinoline and chivalry, to a war from which time had swept away the blood and agony and made of its pitiful participants, both men and women, figures of pure romantic nostalgia.
She read: “. . . Isabella was there and I was glad to see her. It had been years since we had met, that time back there, in Alabama . . .”
Fleeing, of course. And yet a fleeing now turned into a readymade instrument to preach the gospel of that other world, the peaceful second world behind the scarred and tired Earth.
No more than three weeks and they’re already organized, Vickers thought, with the Georges to do the shouting and the running and occasionally the dying, and Sallys to do undercover work.
And yet, even with the other world before them, even with the promise of the kind of life they seek, they still cling to the old nostalgic ritual of the magnolia-scented past. It was the mark of suspicion upon them, refusing to give up the dream through fear that the actuality, if they reached for it, would dissolve beneath their fingertips.
Miss Stanhope read on: “I sat for an hour beside old Mrs. Hampton’s bed, reading Vanity Fair, a book of which she is fond, having read it herself, and having had it read to her since the onset of her infirmity, more times than she can remember.
EVEN if some of them still clung to the scented dream, there were others, the Georges among them, who would fight for the promise that they sensed in the second world. They would spread the word and they would flee the police when the sirens sounded and they would hide in the dark cellars and come out again when the police were gone.
The world is safe, thought Vickers. It has been placed in hand that will guard and cherish it, that can do no other than guard and cherish it.
Miss Stanhope read on and the old dowager sat behind the table, nodding her head a little drowsily, but with a firm grip still upon the letter opener, and all the others were listening, some of them politely, but most with consuming interest. When the reading was done, they would ask questions on points of research and pose other matters to be clarified and would make suggestions for the revision of the diary and would compliment Miss Stanhope upon the brilliance of her work. Then someone else would stand up and read about life in some other time and place and once again all of them would „ sit and listen and repeat the performance.
Vickers felt the futility of it, the dread, dead hopelessness. It was as if the room were filled with the spice scent of many dusty years.
When Miss Stanhope had finished and the room was stirring with the questions asked and the questions to be asked, he rose quietly from his chair and went out to the street.
The stars were shining.
Tomorrow he would go to see Ann Carter.
And that was wrong, he knew. He shouldn’t see her.
XLIV
HE rang the bell and waited.
When he heard her footsteps coming across the floor, he knew he should turn from the door and run. He had no right to come here and he knew he shouldn’t have. There was no reason why he should see her at all, for the dream of her was dead as the dream of Kathleen.
But he had had to come, literally had to. He had paused twice before the door of the apartment building and then had turned around and gone away again. This time he had not turned back, could not, but had gone in and now here he was, before her door, listening to the sound of footsteps coming toward him.
And what, he wondered wildly, would he say to her when the door was opened? What would he do then? Go in as if nothing at all had happened, as if they each were the same person they had been the last time they had met?
Should he tell her she was a mutant and, more than that, an android, a manufactured woman?
The door came open and she was a woman, as lovely as he remembered her, and she reached out a hand and drew him in and closed the door behind them and stood with her back against it.
“Jay.” she said. “Jay Vickers.”
He tried to speak, but he couldn’t. He only stood there looking at her and thinking: It’s a lie. It can’t be true.
“What happened, Jay? You said you would call me.”
He held out his arms, fighting not to, and she made a quick, almost desperate motion and was in them. He held her close against him and it was if the two of them stood in the final consolation of a misery which each had believed the other did not know.
“I thought at first you were just a little crazy,” she told him. “Remembering some of the things you said over the phone from that Wisconsin town, I was almost sure there was something wrong with you—that you’d gone off the beam. Then I got to remembering things, strange little things you had done or said or written and . . .”
“Take it easy, Ann,” he said.
“You don’t need to tell me.”
“Jay, have you ever wondered if you were quite human? If there might not be something in you that wasn’t quite the usual pattern—something unhuman.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve often wondered that.”
“I’m sure you aren’t. Not quite human, I mean. And that’s all right. Because I’m not quite human, either.”
FEELING her arms around him, he knew finally that here, clinging to one another, were two wan souls, lost and friendless in a sea of humanity. Neither of them had anyone but the other. Even if there were no love between them, they still must be as one and stand against the world.<
br />
The telephone buzzed at them from its place upon the end table and they scarcely heard it.
“I love you, Ann,” he said, and a part of his brain that was not a part of him, but a cold, detached observer that stood off to one side, reminded him that he had known he could not love her, that it was impossible and immoral and preposterous to love someone who was closer than a sister, whose life had once been a part of his own and once more would blend with his life into another personality that might be unaware of them.
“I remembered,” Ann told him in a vague and distant voice. “And I haven’t got it straight. Maybe you can help me get it straight.”
He asked, lips stiff with apprehension, “What did you remember, Ann?”
“A walk I had with someone. I’ve tried, but I can’t recall his name, although I’d know his face, even after all these years. We walked down a valley, from a big brick house that stood on a hill. We walked down the valley and it was springtime because the wild crab apple blossoms were in bloom and there were singing birds and the funny thing about that walk is that I know I never took it, but I remember it. How can you remember something, Jay, when you know it never happened?”
“I don’t know,” said Vickers. “Imagination, maybe. Something that you read somewhere.”
But this was it, he knew. This was the proof of what he had suspected.
There were three of them, Flanders had said, three androids made out of one human life. The three of them had to be himself and Flanders and Ann Carter. Ann remembered the enchanted valley as he remembered it—but because he was a man, he had walked with a girl by the name of Kathleen Preston, and since Ann was a woman, she had walked with a man whose name she could not recall. And when and if she did recall it, of course it would be wrong. For if he had walked with anyone, it had not been with a girl named Kathleen Preston, but a girl with some other name.
“And that’s not all,” said Ann. “I know what other people think. I . . .”
“Please, Ann,” he said.
“I try not to know what they think, now that I realize that I can do it. I’ve been doing it, more or less unconsciously, all the time for years. Anticipating what people were about to say. Getting the jump on them. Knowing their objections before they even spoke them. Knowing what would appeal to them. I’ve been a good businesswoman, Jay, and that may be why I am. I can get into other people’s minds. I did only the other day. When I first suspected that I could do it, I tried deliberately, just to see if I could or was imagining it. And I could. Jay, I could!”
The Complete Serials Page 56