The policeman drew his gun and fired six shots in the direction of the voice. There was a loud feline yowl and more scrambling, and then the watchman found the light switch. All they saw was a big black cat thrashing around—two of Riley’s bullets had caught him. Of the safe-cracker there was no sign. How he escaped will probably always remain a mystery. There was no way out of the office save the door from which Riley fired.
The report is under investigation at police headquarters.
I can clear up that mystery.
It started well over a year ago, when I was developing my new flexible glass. It would have made me rich, but—well, I’d rather be poor and happy.
That glass was really something. I’d hit on it when I was fooling with a certain mineral salt—never mind the name of it. I wouldn’t want anyone to start fooling with it and get himself into the same kind of jam that I did. But the idea was that if a certain complex sulphide of silicon is combined with this salt at a certain temperature, and the product is carefully annealed, you get that glass. Inexpensive, acid-proof, and highly flexible. Nice. But one of its properties—wait till I tell you about that.
The day it all started, I had just finished my first bottle. It was standing on the annealer—a rig of my own design; a turntable, shielded, over a ring of Bunsen burners—cooling slowly while I was turning a stopper from the same material on my lathe. I had to step the lathe up to twenty-two thousand before I could cut the stuff, and Helix was fascinated by the whine of it. He always like to watch me work, anyway. He was my cat, and more. He was my friend. I had no secrets from Helix.
Ah, he was a cat. A big black tom, with a white throat and white mittens, and a tail twice as long as that of an ordinary cat. He carried it in a graceful spiral—three complete turns—and hence his name. He could sit on one end of that tail and take two turns around his head with the other. Ah, he was a cat.
I took the stopper off the lathe and lifted the top of the annealer to drop it into the mouth of the bottle. And as I did so—whht!
Ever hear a bullet ricochet past your ear? It was like that. I heard it, and then the stopper, which I held poised over the rotating bottle, was whipped out of my hand and jammed fast on the bottle mouth. And all the flames went out—blown out! I stood there staring at Helix, and noticed one thing more:
He hadn’t moved!
Now you know and I know that a cat—any cat—can’t resist that short, whistling noise. Try it, if you have a cat. When Helix should have been on all fours, big yellow eyes wide, trying to find out where the sound came from, he was sitting sphinxlike, with his eyes closed, his whiskers twitching slightly, and his front paws turned under his forelegs. It didn’t make sense. Helix’s senses were unbelievably acute—I knew. I’d tested them. Then—
Either I had heard that noise with some sense that Helix didn’t possess, or I hadn’t heard it at all. If I hadn’t, then I was crazy. No one likes to think he is crazy. So you can’t blame me for trying to convince myself that it was a sixth sense.
Helix roused me by sneezing. I took his cue and turned off the gas.
“Helix, old fellow,” I said when I could think straight, “what do you make of this? Hey?”
Helix made an inquiring sound and came over to rub his head on my sleeve. “Got you stopped too, has it?” I scratched him behind the ear, and the end of his tail curled ecstatically around my wrist. “Let’s see. I hear a funny noise. You don’t. Something snatches the stopper out of my hand, and a wind comes from where it’s impossible for any wind to be, and blows out the burners. Does that make sense?” Helix yawned. “I don’t think so either. Tell me, Helix, what shall we do about this? Hey?”
Helix made no suggestion. I imagine he was quite ready to forget about it. Now, I wish I had.
I shrugged my shoulders and went back to work. First I slipped a canvas glove on and lifted the bottle off the turntable. Helix slid under my arm and made as if to smell the curved, flexible surface. I made a wild grab to keep him from burning his nose, ran my bare hand up against the bottle, and then had to make another grab to keep it off the floor. I missed with the second grab—the bottle struck dully, bounced, and—landed right back on the bench? Not only on it, but in the exact spot from which I had knocked it!
And—get this, now—when I looked at my hand to see how big my hypothetical seared spot might be, it wasn’t there! That bottle was cold—and it should have been hot for hours yet! My new glass was a very poor conductor. I almost laughed. I should have realized that Helix had more sense than to put his pink nose against the bottle if it were hot.
Helix and I got out of there. We went into my room, closed the door on that screwy bottle, and flopped down on the bed. It was too much for us. We would have wept aloud purely for self-expression, if we hadn’t forgotten how, years ago, Helix and I.
After my nerves had quieted a bit, I peeped into the laboratory.
“Come on in here, you dope. I want to talk to you.”
Who said that? I look suspiciously at Helix, who, in all innocence, returned my puzzled gaze. Well, I hadn’t said it. Helix hadn’t. I began to be suspicious as hell of that bottle.
“Well?”
The tone was drawling and not a little pugnacious. I looked at Helix. Helix was washing daintily. But—Helix was the best watchdog of a cat that ever existed. If there had been anyone else—if he had heard anyone else—in the lab, he’d have let me know. Then he hadn’t heard. And I had. “Helix,” I breathed—and he looked right up at me, so there was nothing wrong with his hearing—“we’re both crazy.”
“No, you’re not,” said the voice. “Sit down before you fall down. I’m in your bottle, and I’m in to stay. You’ll kill me if you take me out—but just between you and me I don’t think you can get me out. Anyway please don’t try … what’s the matter with you? Stop popping your eyes, man!”
“Oh,” I said hysterically, “there’s nothing the matter with me. No, no, no. I’m nuts, that’s all. Stark, totally, and completely nuts, balmy, mentally unbalanced, and otherwise the victim of a psychic loss of equilibrium. Me, I’m a raving lunatic. I hear voices. What does that make me, Joan of Arc? Hey, Helix. Look at me. I’m Joan of Arc. You must be Beucephalus, or Pegasus, or the great god Pasht. First I have an empty bottle, and next thing I know it’s full of djinn. Hey, Helix, have a lil drink of djinn …” I sat down on the floor and Helix sat beside me. I think he was sorry for me. I know I was—very.
“Very funny,” said the bottle—or rather, the voice that claimed it was from the bottle. “If you’ll only give me a chance to explain, now—”
“Look,” I said, “maybe there is a voice. I don’t trust anything any more—except you, Helix. I know. If you can hear him, then I’m sane. If not, I’m crazy. Hey, Voice!”
“Well?”
“Look, do me a favor. Holler ‘Helix’ a couple of times. If the cat hears you, I’m sane.”
“All right,” the voice said wearily. “Helix! Here, Helix!”
Helix sat there and looked at me. Not by the flicker of a whisker did he show that he had heard. I drew a deep breath and said softly, “Helix! Here, Helix!”
Helix jumped up on my chest, put one paw on each shoulder, and tickled my nose with his curving tail. I got up carefully, holding Helix. “Pal,” I said, “I guess this is the end of you and me. I’m nuts, pal. Better go phone the police.”
Helix purred. He could see I was sad about something, but what it was didn’t seem to bother him any. He was looking at me as if my being a madman didn’t make him like me any the less. But I think he found it interesting. He had a sort of quizzical look in his glowing eyes. As if he’d rather I stuck around. Well, if he wouldn’t phone the law, I wouldn’t. I wasn’t responsible for myself any more.
“Now, will you shut up?” said the bottle. “I don’t want to give you any trouble. You may not realize it, but you saved my life. Don’t be scared. Look. I’m a soul, see? I was a man called Gregory—Wallace Gregory. I was killed in an a
utomobile accident two hours ago—”
“You were killed two hours ago. And I just saved your life. You know, Gregory, that’s just dandy. On my head you will find a jewelled turban. I am now the Maharajah of Mysore. Goo. Da. And flub. I—”
“You are perfectly sane. That is, you are right now. Get hold of yourself and you’ll be all right,” said the bottle. “Yes, I was killed. My body was killed. I’m a soul. The automobile couldn’t kill that. But They could.”
“They?”
“Yeah. The Ones who were chasing me when I got into your bottle.”
“Who are They?”
“We have no name for Them. They eat souls. There are swarms of Them. Any time They find a soul running around loose, They track it down.”
“You mean—any time anyone dies, his soul wanders around, running away from Them? And that sooner or later, They catch it?”
“Oh, no. Only some souls. You see, when a man realizes he is going to die, something happens to his soul. There are some people alive today who knew, at one time, that they were about to die. Then, by some accident, they didn’t. Those people are never quite the same afterward, because that something has happened. With the realization of impending death, a soul gets what might be called a protective covering, though it’s more like a change of form. From then on, the soul is inedible and undesirable to Them.”
“What happens to a protected soul, then?”
“That I don’t know. It’s funny … people have been saying for millennia that if only someone could come back from death, what strange things he could relate … well, I did it, thanks to you. And yet I know very little more about it than you. True, I died, and my soul left my body. But then, I only went a very little way. A protected soul probably goes through stage after stage … I don’t know. Now, I’m just guessing.”
“Why wasn’t your soul ‘protected’?”
“Because I had no warning—no realization that I was to die. It happened so quickly. And I haven’t been particularly religious. Religious people, and freethinkers if they think deeply, and philosophers in general, and people whose work brings them in touch with deep and great things—these may all be immune from Them, years before they die.”
“Why?”
“That should be obvious. You can’t think deeply without running up against a realization of the power of death. ‘Realization’ is a loose term, I know. If your mind is brilliant, and you don’t pursue your subject—any subject—deeply enough, you will never reach that realization. It’s a sort of dead end to a questioning mind—a ne plus ultra. Batter yourself against it, and it hurts. And that pain is the realization. Stupid people reach it far easier than others—it hurts more, and they are made immune easier. But at any rate, a man can live his life without it, and still have a few seconds just before he dies for his soul to undergo the immunizing change. I didn’t have those few seconds.”
I fumbled for my handkerchief and mopped my face. This was a little steep. “Look,” I said, “this is—well, I’m more or less of a beginner. Just what is a soul?”
“Elementally,” said the bottle, “it is matter, just like everything else in the universe. It has weight and mass, though it can’t be measured by earthly standards. In the present stage of the sciences, we haven’t run up against anything like it. It usually centers around the pineal gland, although it can move at will throughout the body, if there is sufficient stimulus. For example—”
He gave me the example, and it was very good. I saw his point.
“And anger, too,” the bottle went on. “In a fit of fury, one’s soul settles momentarily around the adrenals, and does what is necessary. See?”
I turned to Helix. “Helix,” I said, “we’re really learning things today.” Helix extended his claws and studied them carefully. I suddenly came to my senses, realizing that I was sitting on the floor of my laboratory, holding a conversation with an empty glass bottle; that Helix was sitting in my lap, preening himself, listening without interest to my words, and not hearing those from the bottle. My mind reeled again. I had to have an answer to that.
“Bottle,” I said hoarsely, “why can’t Helix hear you?”
“Oh. That,” said the bottle. “Because there is no sound.”
“How can I hear you?”
“Direct telepathic contact. I am not speaking to you, specifically, but to your soul. Your soul transmits my messages to you. It is functioning now on the nerve centers controlling your hearing—hence, you interpret it as sound. That is the most understandable way of communication.”
“Then—why doesn’t Helix get the same messages?”
“Because he is on a different—er—wavelength. That’s one way of putting it, though thoughtwaves are not electrical. I can—that is, I believe I can—direct thoughts to him. Haven’t tried. It’s a matter of degree of development.”
I breathed much easier. Astonishing, what a difference a rational explanation will make. But there were one or two more things—
“Bottle,” I said, “what’s this about my saving your life? And what has my flexible glass to do with it?”
“I don’t quite know,” said the bottle. “But purely by accident, I’m sure, you have stumbled on the only conceivable external substance which seems to exclude—Them. Sort of an insulator. I sensed what it was—so did They. I can tell you, it was nip and tuck for a while. They can really move, when They want to. I won, as you know. Close. Oh, yes, I was responsible for snatching the stopper out of your hand. I did it by creating a vacuum in the bottle. The stopper was the nearest thing to the mouth, and you weren’t holding it very tightly.”
“Vacuum?” I asked. “What became of the air?”
“That was easy. I separated the molecular structure of the glass, and passed the air out that way.”
“What about Them?”
“Oh, They would have followed. But if you’ll look closely, you’ll see that the stopper is now fused to the bottle. That’s what saved me. Whew! —Oh, by the way, if you’re wondering what cooled the bottle so quickly, it was the vacuum formation. Expanding air, you know, loses heat. Vacuum creation, of course, would create intense cold. That glass is good stuff. Practically no thermal expansion.”
“I’m beginning to be glad, now, that it happened. Would have been bad for you … I suppose you’ll live out the rest of your life in my bottle.”
“The rest of my life, friend, is—eternity.”
I blinked at that. “That’s not going to be much fun,” I said. “I mean—don’t you ever get hungry, or—or anything?”
“No. I’m fed—I know that. From outside, somehow. There seems to be a source somewhere that radiates energy on which I feed. I wouldn’t know about that. But it’s going to be a bit boring. I don’t know—maybe someday I’ll find a way to get another body.”
“What’s to prevent your just going in and appropriating someone else’s?”
“Can’t,” said the bottle. “As long as a soul is in possession of a body, it is invulnerable. The only way would be to convince some soul that it would be to its advantage to leave its body and make room for me.”
“Hmm … say, Bottle. Seems to me that by this time you must have experienced that death-realization you spoke about a while back. Why aren’t you immune from Them now?”
“That’s the point. A soul must draw its immunity from a body which it possesses at the time. If I could get into a body and possess it for just one split second, I could immunize myself and be on my way. Or I could stay in the body and enjoy myself until it died. By the way, stop calling me Bottle. My name’s Gregory—Wallace Gregory.”
“Oh. Okay. I’m Pete Tronti. Er—glad to have met you.”
“Same here.” The bottle hopped a couple of times. “That can be considered a handshake.”
“How did you do that?” I asked, grinning.
“Easy. The tiniest molecular expansion, well distributed, makes the bottle bounce.”
“Neat. Well—I’ve got to go out and get
some grub. Anything I can get for you?”
“Thanks, no, Tronti. Shove along. Be seeing you.”
Thus began my association with Wally Gregory, disembodied soul. I found him a very intelligent person; and though he had cramped my style in regard to the new glass—I didn’t fancy collecting souls in bottles as a hobby—we became real friends. Not many people get a break like that—having a boarder who is so delightful and so little trouble. Though the initial cost had been high—after all, I’d almost gone nuts!—the upkeep was negligible. Wally never came in drunk, robbed the cash drawer, or brought his friends in. He was never late for meals, nor did he leave dirty socks around. As a roommate he was ideal, and as a friend, he just about had Helix topped.
One evening about eight months later I was batting the wind with Wally while I worked. He’d been a great help to me—I was fooling around with artificial rubber synthesis at the time, and Wally had an uncanny ability for knowing exactly what was what in a chemical reaction—and because of that, I began to think of his present state.
“Say, Wally—don’t you think it’s about time that we began thinking about getting a body for you?”
Wally snorted. “That’s about all we can do—think about it. How in blazes do you think we could ever get a soul’s consent for that kind of a transfer?”
“I don’t know—we might try kidding one of them along. You know—put one over on him.”
“What—kid one along when he has the power of reading every single thought that goes through a mind? Couldn’t be done.”
“Now, don’t tell me that every soul in the universe is incapable of being fooled. After all, a soul is a part of a human being.”
“It’s not that a soul is phenomenally intelligent, Pete. But a soul reasons without emotional drawbacks—he deals in elementals. Any moron is something of a genius if he can see clearly to the root of a problem. And any soul can do just that. That is, if it’s a soul as highly developed as that of a human being.”
“Well, suppose that the soul isn’t that highly developed? That’s an idea. Couldn’t you possess the body of a dog, say, or—”
The Ultimate Egoist Page 20