by Gahan Wilson
Doren felt suddenly tired. He could not cope with the plots and plans which flashed through his mind. He saw himself gathering an armful of books and taking them up to Steiner, shuffling them before the old man's eyes like a magician with a pack of cards, burying the black book in a flurry of unimportant others. He imagined himself waiting until a rush of customers were at the dealer's desk, and then shoving the book hurriedly into view, giving him money and going before the old man could properly take in what had happened. He seriously considered just slipping the book into his pocket and leaving without paying.
He sighed. He could do any of these things, but in his present peculiar state of exhaustion he felt he wouldn't be up to the simplest of them. For the first time in his life he found himself a convinced fatalist. If it was to happen, it would happen, he decided; if it wasn't, then it wouldn't.
He walked up to Steiner's desk with the black book in his hand. Doren noticed that he looked thin and haggard, as if he had been through a bad illness. Perhaps the dealer was sick. That might explain it.
"Well, Mr. Doren? You found something you want?"
"Yes," said Doren. He put the book on the desk and pushed it toward the old man.
Steiner opened it without curiosity and noted the price. "One dollar and seventy-five cents, please," he said, and when Doren had given him the exact change, he said, "Thank you, Mr. Doren."
Doren took the black book, knew it was now his, and was torn between the impulse to shout in triumph and, oddly, to cry in sorrow. He nodded at the old man and walked unsteadily through the shop. He paused at the door and blinked at the sunlight. It was too bright. It seemed unfriendly. He hunched his shoulders and went down the street, patting and stroking the book with his hands.
Steiner watched him leave. When Doren had passed out of sight the old man turned to look at the cat which perched calmly on the stall where the black book had been.
"All right," said Steiner wretchedly. "Its gone. Now you go."
The cat smiled broadly at the old man. It was a horrible smile. It was bigger by half than the cat's small head. The teeth were thick, white, and pointed like a shark's. The cat leaped gracefully to the floor and, still grinning hugely, left the shop in stalk of Doren.
Then the old man sagged in his chair, alone, completely alone, with his bleak awareness that he had gained no reprieve, after all.
M-1
Seen from across the desert, from miles away, the statue had been dwarfed and easily understood, and Henderson had smiled at its familiar outlines as he sat in the bouncing jeep. Now, climbing from the jeep at the statue's base, he found it unrecognizably distorted by its grotesque height.
Bentley, sweating in khaki, came up to him and shook his hand.
"You'll break your neck if you keep gawking up at it like that," he said, smiling.
They stood near the statue's left foot, a huge, gleaming thing of curving yellow.
"Five hundred and thirty feet from here to the top of its toe," said Bentley. "Sixteen hundred feet from the toe to the heel. Four hundred and eighty feet across at its widest point."
The two men walked to the side of the foot, and Henderson reached out to lay his hand flat against its surface. The Nevada sun had made it uncomfortably hot to touch. He moved his hand back and forth over the gleaming yellow and marveled at its smoothness.
"It's like butter!" he said.
Bentley nodded, lighting a cigarette and squinting up.
"No damned traction possible, to speak of," he said. "Makes climbing around on the thing a real bitch. And you can't dig steps into it. You can't even drive stakes to hold ropes. Folger slid off its instep yesterday. Would have fallen to his death if he hadn't managed to grab the scaffold."
Against the side of the foot, and.extending partway up the shank of the black leg, the towering scaffold looked absurdly small and unimportant next to the bulk of the statue. Henderson could see an army of men working at the top of it, slowly extending it.
"I can't decide if we're building another Eiffel Tower or playing Tinkertoys," said Bentley. "You get funny shifts in your self-image, living with this thing."
He dropped his cigarette and pushed it into the sand with his foot.
"You want to wash up and all that, or do you want to get on with looking it over?"
"Let's look it over."
"Right," said Bentley. He signaled to a man who detached himself from a group standing by the entrance to one of the scaffold's elevators and came walking toward them. The man wore curved sunglasses and a leather jacket. He was lean and had an easy stride. Bentley introduced him to Henderson.
"This is Captain Harry Grant. Captain Grant's on loan to us from the Navy, and how far away from water can you get? He flies us around the statue so we can all get a better look at it and fully realize how little we understand it. He hasn't lost one of us yet."
They shook hands, and the three of them began walking over to the helicopter which stood on a little pad of concrete. Like everything else next to the statue, it looked tiny and delicate.
"Sometimes I like to get the layman's point of view, Harry," said Bentley. "What do you make of our wonder?"
Grant smiled and shook his head.
"I used to like him when I was a kid," he said, pointing up at the statue with his thumb, "but now I don't know. Now I think he scares me."
"I believe you've got just about as far with him as us scientists, Harry," said Bentley.
They climbed into the helicopter, and Grant started the big blades turning. Henderson peered up at the statue through the lightening blur.
The helicopter began to climb slowly. When it drew abreast of the top of the scaffold, several of the men turned to wave at them. Bentley smiled and waved back.
"I wish we could get that thing to climb as quickly as this gadget," he said. "I figure with all the luck in the world we might get up to its left tit by late August."
They had reached its midsection, now. Its red pants sparkled in the sunlight, and the two vast yellow buttons seemed to twinkle.
"The buttons are two hundred feet across," said Bentley. "You get so you can really rattle off the statistics. They have a way of burning themselves into your head."
"Have you tried digging into its upper parts?" asked Henderson. He'd never been in a helicopter before. It wasn't as hard speaking over the roar of the propellers as he had thought it would be.
"Hell, yes," said Bentley. "Once, in a fit of pique, old Wellman even let fly at it with an explosive rocket. Didn't leave a goddamn mark."
Now they were up to its black, sprawling chest. One of its arms hung down at its side, the other was raised high in a titanic salute.
"We've had expeditions on the head and shoulders times past counting. We've drilled at it, lit fires on it, poured acid over it, and usually ended up kicking at it with our feet. None of it's had the slightest effect. I honestly don't think an H-bomb would dent it."
Suddenly they were opposite its face, and Henderson found the confrontation unexpectedly horrible. Somehow this nearness to the head was the thing which brought the monstrous enormity of the statue home to him. He had to look from side to side to follow the sweep of the inane grin. Sitting there in the helicopter, hovering feet away from the swollen bulb at the end of the thing's nose, Henderson had an abrupt and hideously convincing fantasy that the statue would come to life and crush them with a pinch of its tremendous yellow fingers.
The helicopter worked its way past a gigantic black eye set into the blinding whiteness of the face, around to the side of the head where it swung by one of the circular ears.
"The ears are quite thin, really," said Bentley. "Only average about seven feet thick. The flat surface has a diameter of more than one thousand feet. The point of attachment to the head is a piddling one-hundred-foot line around three feet thick. Gives you an idea of the structural peculiarities of our friend, here, doesn't it? We've mounted recording devices on the ears, just to see, and we've found they don't even wiggle
in a high wind. If we tried to build something like that out of what we've got to hand in our advanced technology, you'll excuse the ironic tone I'm sure, we'd find we couldn't."
Henderson stared at the ear as the helicopter rose gently over its upper curve.
"Somebody built it," he said.
"That's right," said Bentley. "Somebody has. And they put it up here between National flight four-oh-five, which didn't see anything at all when it passed by here at four thirty-eight P.M., Wednesday, February the seventh, and five seventeen the same date, when the Reno air taxi flew right into the son of a bitch."
"Why didn't they see it?"
"My own theory is that they did see it," said Bentley. "They just couldn't believe it. Saw the damned thing smiling away at them with its big eyes with the little chips cut out of the sides, saw it waving at them in the moonlight, and there was plenty of moonlight, I checked, and maybe the pilot thought of a movie he'd seen once, or a Big Little Book, I don't know, and maybe he was screaming, and maybe he wasn't, and he just smashed into it."
They were over the top of its head now. Henderson looked down at the shadow speck the helicopter made moving across the shiny black dome of the statue's skull. Far, far down below he could see the long, thin, curling tail coming out of the rear of the bright red pants. Bentley followed the direction of his stare and smiled.
"Seven thousand feet, if you straightened it out," he said.
The helicopter began to descend. Henderson folded his hands and looked down at his knuckles. He didn't want to see any more of the statue, not just now. He'd have plenty of time to study it in the months and weeks coming.
Bentley lit a cigarette and shook the match out carefully.
"It's still a rumor," he said. "But it keeps checking out better all the time."
He took a quick puff at his cigarette. Henderson was watching him.
"The last word I got on it came from Schillar," said Bentley. "He believes it. He said Brandt told him he'd seen photographs."
"What do you mean?" asked Henderson. "What's true?"
Bentley licked his lips.
"They say the Russians got Minnie."
Come One, Come All
Professor Marvello tightened two guy ropes with an expert twist of his strong, pudgy little hands in order to make the poles holding the big canvas sign spread out above the platform stand a little taller, then he squinted upward at it with a slightly grim, lopsided smile of satisfaction.
The sign read:
* MARVELLO’S * MIRACULOUS * MIDWAY *
in ornate, gold-encrusted letters four and a half feet high— exactly the height of Professor Marvello, himself, by his personal instructions—and a multitude of spotlights helped each letter glitter proudly out at the silent, surrounding darkness.
Marvello regarded the effect with satisfaction as he carefully and neatly made the ropes' ends fast around their shared cleat, then he meticulously brushed a speck of Kansas dust off the lapel of his red and white checkered coat and adjusted the bright yellow plastic carnation in its buttonhole.
"A nice night," he murmured to himself softly, sweeping the horizon with a benign if slightly wary gaze, and taking a long, fond sniff of the warm, wheat-smelling night air blowing in from the dark fields all around. Professor Marvello had been plain Homer Muggins of Missouri in his youth and he still admired simple, farmy scents. "A helluva nice night."
Then, adjusting his straw boater, he turned to business, flicking his bright little blue eyes down to see if the light was glowing on the solar battery like it ought to be, jabbing back a switch to start the circus music whooping, and plucking the microphone from its metal perch on the banner-bedecked rostrum. That done, Marvello squared his small but sturdy shoulders, softly cleared his throat, and spoke:
"LADIES AND GENTLE-"
Too loud. You didn't need it that loud because there was no competition. No competition at all. He stooped with a slight grunt, bending to turn the knob down on the speaker system, then straightened his rotund little body so that it stood proudly erect as before, and spoke again.
’’Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls," he said, and the nasal drone of his voice swirled out from a baker's dozen of speakers and rolled over the midnight landscape of flat, dimly furrowed earth, sparse trees, and long-deserted farmhouses. "Come on, come on, come on. Welcome to the fabulous, most wonderful, undeniably, and by far greatest show left in the world. Come and see and be astounded by the one, the only Marvello's Miraculous Midway—the sole remaining sideshow in the world."
He paused, hacked, and spat over the edge of the platform onto the dusty ground. He gazed at the dust, at its dryness, half reached for the flask of whiskey in his hip pocket, but then decided against it. Not yet. Later.
Did he hear a shuffle? His eyes guardedly darted this way and that. Not sure. Sometimes they stayed hidden just out of sight, watching you put up the show, standing on one foot and then the other, no idea what to do with their hands, hardly able to wait. Like kids, he thought, like kids.
"Don't miss it, don't miss it, don't miss it," he intoned. "Come one, come all, and bring your friends and loved ones so that everyone in this lovely area, in this beautiful county of this remarkable state, can be fortunate enough to experience the entertainment thrill of their lifetime, so to speak. So to speak."
Yes, yes indeed, there was a shuffle. He avoided looking in its direction, plucked a large polka-dotted handkerchief from his other hip pocket, the one not containing the flask, and wiped his brow in order to conceal his covert peering.
There it was, just by the popcorn stand. Raggedy, forlorn, and skeletal. It was dressed in torn blue denim overalls and the tattered remains of a wide-brimmed straw hat. There was no shirt, there were no shoes. It stared at him, mouth agape, and he could just make out the dull last remnant of a glint in its eyes and a vague glistening in its mouth.
"Good evening, sir," Professor Marvello said, giving it a formal little bow, an encouragingly toothy grin. "I observe you possess the percipiency to have been attracted by the sounds and sights of our outstanding exhibition. May I be so bold as to congratulate you on your good taste and encourage you to step a little closer?"
It swayed, obviously undecided. Professor Marvello increased the wattage of his grin and, producing a bamboo cane from inside the rostrum, employed it to point at an enormous depiction of a huge-breasted Hawaiian hula dancer painted in classic circus poster style on a bellying rectangle of canvas.
"Miss La Frenza Hoo Pah Loo Hah," he announced proudly, and leaning forward toward the wary watcher, winked confidentially and continued in a lower tone as one man of the world speaking to another, his S-shaped smile taking on a new chumminess and his voice growing increasingly husky and intimate.
"I am sure, my dear sir, that a man of your obvious sophistication and, if I may say it, je ne aaia quci, is well aware of the extraordinary sensual jollies which may be produced by the skilled locomotion of swaying hips and other anatomical accessories on the part of a well-trained and imaginative practitioner of the art of hula dancing. Permit me to assure you that the lovely Miss Hoo Pah Loo Hah is extremely knowledgeable in these matters and will not fail to delight the sensibilities of a bon vivant such as yourself. Come a little closer, there, my good man, don't be shy."
The figure swayed, its dark green, arms stiff and lolling, and then one large, bony foot pushed forward, stirring up a little puff of dust.
"That's the way, that's the way," said Marvello in an encouraging tone. "There's the brave fellow. Excellent. You're doing just fine. I trust, in passing, you've observed how plump the lovely Miss La Frenza Hoo Pah Loo Hah is, my dear fellow: how fat her hips, how round and fulsome her breasts, how meaty she is in all respects. I trust you've not let those aspects of our lovely dancer get by you, my good sir."
The overalled figure paused as if to study the poster with increased intensity, or perhaps it was only getting its balance. There was a kind of gathering, a moment of staggering confusion, th
en it lurched itself forward with a series of crablike waddles until it had worked its way well into the brightly lit area before Professor Marvello s platform. This one had semi-mummified, its skin had dried more than rotted, and the dark green-brown of its bony, beaky head and face bore more than a slight resemblance to an Egyptian pharaoh's.
"Over here, over here, my wizened chum," said Professor Marvello with encouraging enthusiasm, indicating the tents entrance with a wave of his bamboo cane. "Keep heading toward that welcoming aperture before you, spur yourself on with rapt contemplation of the sexual gyrative wonders the lovely Hoo Pah Loo Hah will perform before you as envisioned of in your most private dreams, and of course never forget nor neglect the generous pulchritude of her charms, which is to say the amazingly large amount of tender flesh which bedecks her frame,"
When the mummy farmer paused at the entrance, Professor Marvello raised the tent flap invitingly with the tip of his cane.
"No need to pay, my good man," he intoned, though the thing had not made the slightest attempt to reach into its pockets, "The Marvel Miracle Midway is a rare phenomenon indeed in this hard world, my dear sir, being gratis, entirely free of charge. A generous, altruistic effort to brighten the, ah, lives of such unfortunates as yourself. Go right on in, do go right on in.''
A few prompting prods from the tip of Marvello's cane between the separating vertebrae of its narrow, bony back, and the overalled entity finally committed itself and lurched on into the tent to be greeted by the soft throbbings of Hawaiian music issuing from within along with a gentle, perfumed wafting of the heady scents of tropical flowers.
"Almost looked happy for a moment there," murmured Professor Miracle thoughtfully, nudging the tent flap so that it fell softly back into place as the music and the scent of flowers ceased abruptly.
Nearly at once there was another timid shuffling, this from the far left, hard by the ring toss stand, and two figures edged sidewise into view. What was left of a mother and daughter.