Troublemakers: Stories by Harlan Ellison

by Harlan Ellison

  She accepted the exact change he left for the bill, noted the usual fifteen cents under the plate and said, “Ain’tcha comin’ in for dinner tanight?”

  Hobert assumed an air of bored detachment. “No, no, I think I shall go downtown and take in a show tonight. Or perhaps I shall dine at The Latin Quarter or Lindy’s. With pheasant under glass and caviar and some of that famous Lindy’s cheesecake. I shall decide when I get down there.” He began to walk out, joviality in his walk.

  “Oh, ya such a character,” laughed Florence, behind him.

  But the rain continued, and Hobert only went a few streets down Broadway where the storm had driven everyone off the sidewalks, with the exception of those getting the Sunday editions. “Lousy day,” he muttered under his breath. Been like this all week, he observed to himself. That ought to teach that bigmouth Beigen that maybe I can predict as well as his high-priced boys upstairs. Maybe now he’ll listen to me!

  Hobert could see Mr. Beigen coming over to his desk, stammering for a moment, then, putting his arm around Hobert’s shoulders–which Hobert carefully ignored–telling Hobert he was terribly sorry and he would never scream again, and would Hobert forgive him for his rudeness and here was a fifteen dollar raise and a job upstairs in the analysis department.

  Hobert could see it all. Then the wetness of his socks, clinging to his ankles, made the vision fade. Oh, rain, rain!

  The movie was just opening, and though Hobert despised Barbara Stanwyck, he went in to kill the time. It was lonely for a pot-bellied man of forty-six in New York without any close friends and all the current books and magazines read.

  Hobert tsk-tsked all the way through the picture, annoyed at the simpleton plot. He kept thinking to himself that if he had one wish he would wish she never made another picture.

  When he emerged, three hours later, it was afternoon and the rain whipped into the alcove behind the ticket booth drenching him even before he could get onto the street. It was a cold rain, wetter than any Hobert could remember, and thick, with no space between drops, it seemed. As though God were tossing down all the rain in the heavens at once.

  Hobert began walking, humming to himself the little rain, rain ditty. His mind began trying to remember how many times he had uttered that series of words. He failed, for it stretched back to his childhood. Every time he had seen a rainfall he had made the same appeal. And he was surprised to realize now that it had worked almost uncannily, many times.

  He could recall one sunny day when he was twelve, that his family had set aside for a picnic. It had suddenly darkened and begun to come down scant minutes before they were to leave.

  Hobert remembered having pressed himself up flat against the front room windows, one after another, wildly repeating the phrase over and over. The windows had been cold, and his nose had felt funny, all flattened up that way. But after a few minutes it had worked. The rain had stopped, the sky had miraculously cleared, and they went to Huntington Woods for the picnic. It hadn’t been a really good picnic, but that wasn’t important. What was important was that he had stopped the rain with his own voice.

  For many years thereafter Hobert had believed that. And he had applied the rain, rain ditty as often as he could, which was quite often. Sometimes it never seemed to work, and others it did. But whenever he got around to saying it, the rain never lasted too long afterward.

  Wishes, wishes, wishes, ruminated Hobert. If I had one wish, what would I wish? Would the wish really come true?

  Or do you have to keep repeating your wish? Is that the secret? Is that why some people get what they want eventually, because they make the same wish, over and over, the same way till it comes true? Perhaps we all have the ability to make our wishes come true, but we must persist in them, for belief and the strength of your convictions is a powerful thing. If I had one wish, what would I wish? I’d wish that…

  It was then, just as Hobert saw the Hudson River beginning to overflow onto Riverside Drive, rising up and up over the little park along the road, that he realized.

  “Oh my goodness!” cried Hobert, starting up the hill as fast as he could.

  “Rain, rain, go away, come again another day.”

  Hobert said it, sprayed his throat, and made one more chalk mark on the big board full of marks. He said it again, and once more marked.

  It was odd. All that rain had gone away, only to come another day. The unfortunate part was that it all came back the same day. Hobert was–literally speaking–up the creek. He had been saying it since he was a child, how many times he had no idea. The postponements had been piling up for almost forty-six years, which was quite a spell of postponements. The only way he could now stop the flood of rain was to keep saying it, and say it one more time than all the times he had said it during those forty-six years. And the next time all forty-six years plus the one before plus another. And so on. And so on.

  The water was lapping up around the cornice of his building, and Hobert crouched farther into his rubber raft on its roof, pulling the big blackboard toward him, repeating the phrase, chalking, spraying occasionally.

  It wasn’t bad enough that he was forced to sit there repeating, repeating, repeating all day, just to stop the rain; there was another worry nagging Hobert’s mind.

  Though it had stopped raining now, for a while, and though he was fairly safe on the roof of his building, Hobert was worried. For when the weather became damp, he invariably caught laryngitis.

  NIGHT VIGIL

  The lesson in this “space opera” should be apparent. If you’re hired to do a job, DO THE DAMNED JOB! There are always punk-out reasons you can dream up why: “I’m not being paid enough” or “They work me too hard” or “How come s/he over there is doing the same job as I am, but s/he’s getting paid twice as much” or “They don’t respect me.” You’re supposed to enjoy the work you do, but if circumstances put you in the grease at a Mickey D’s, or under a leaking tranny on somebody’s Yugo, or working the stockroom at a K-Mart or Target, and you have to do it for the dough, and you hate the job, and you hate the hours, and you hate the fact that you can’t be out hanging with the posse, well tough sh-t, Joker; you signed on to do the job, and they pay you to do it, so DO THE DAMNED JOB! If you don’t like the gig, quit. Give ’em notice promptly, don’t leave ’em in the lurch suddenly, don’t trash the area out of baby-spite, and don’t start shoplifting. Just DO THE DAMN JOB! That’s how somebody with strength does it. Don’t whine, don’t piss’n’moan, don’t jerk ’em around, just hang in there as long as it’s ethically necessary, and then get in the wind. But if you sign on to do the job, no matter how onerous the chore, DO THE DAMNED JOB, just do it.

  Darkness seeped in around the little quonset. It oozed out of the deeps of space and swirled around Ferreno’s home. The automatic scanners turned and turned, whispering quietly, their message of wariness unconsciously reassuring the old man.

  He bent over and plucked momentarily at a bit of lint on the carpet. It was the only speck of foreign matter on the rug, reflecting the old man’s perpetual cleanliness and almost fanatical neatness.

  The racks of bookspools were all binding-to-binding, set flush with the lip of the shelves; the bed was made with a military tightness that allowed a coin to bounce high three times; the walls were free of fingerprints–dusted and wiped clean twice a day; there was no speck of lint or dust on anything in the one room quonset.

  When Ferreno had flicked the single bit of matter from his fingers, into the incinerator, the place was immaculate.

  It reflected twenty-four years of watching, waiting, and living alone. Living alone on the edge of Forever, waiting for something that might never come. Tending blind, dumb machines that could say Something is out here, but also said, We don’t know what it is.

  Ferreno returned to his pneumo-chair, sank heavily into it, and blinked, his deep-set grey eyes seeking into the furthest rounded corner of the quonset’s ceiling. His eyes seemed to be looking for something. But there was nothin
g there he did not already know. Far too well.

  He had been on this asteroid, this spot lost in the darkness, for twenty-four years. In that time, nothing had happened.

  There had been no warmth, no women, no feeling, and only a brief flurry of emotion for almost twenty of those twenty-four years.

  Ferreno had been a young man when they had set him down on The Stone. They had pointed out there and said to him:

  “Beyond the farthest spot you can see, there’s an island universe. In that island universe, there’s an enemy, Ferreno. One day he’ll become tired of his home and come after yours.

  “You’re here to watch for him.”

  And they had gone before he could ask them.

  Ask them: who were the enemy? Where would they come from, and why was he here, alone, to stop them? What could he do if they came? What were the huge, silent machines that bulked monstrous behind the little quonset? Would he ever go home again?

  All he had known was the intricate dialing process for the inverspace communicators. The tricky-fingered method of sending a coded response half across the galaxy to a waiting Mark LXXXII brain–waiting only for his frantic pulsations.

  He had known only that. The dialing process and the fact that he was to watch. Watch for he-knew-not-what!

  There at first he had thought he would go out of his mind. It had been the monotony. Monotony intensified to a frightening degree. The ordeal of watching, watching, watching. Sleeping, eating from the self-replenishing supply of protofoods in the greentank, reading, sleeping again, rereading the bookspools till their casings crackled, snapped, and lost panes. The re-binding–and re-re-reading. The horror of knowing every passage of a book by heart.

  He could recite from Stendhal’s LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR and Hemingway’s DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON and Melville’s MOBY DICK, till the very words lost meaning, sounded strange and unbelievable to his ears.

  First had come living in filth and throwing things against the curving walls and ceilings. Things designed to give, and bounce–but not to break. Walls designed to absorb the impact of a flung drink-ball or a smashed fist. Then had come the extreme neatness, then a moderation, and finally back to the neat, prissy fastidiousness of an old man who wants to know where everything is at any time.

  No women. That had been a persistent horror for the longest time. A mounting pain in his groin and belly, that had wakened him during the arbitrary night, swimming in his own sweat, his mouth and body aching. He had gotten over it slowly. He had even attempted emasculation. None of it had worked, of course, and it had only passed away with his youth.

  He had taken to talking to himself. And answering himself. Not madness, just the fear that the ability to speak might be lost.

  Madness had descended many times during the early years. The blind, clawing urgency to get out! Get out into the airless vastness of The Stone. At least to die, to end this nowhere existence.

  But they had constructed the quonset without a door. The plasteel-sealed slit his deliverers had gone out had been closed irrevocably behind them, and there was no way out.

  Madness had come often.

  But they had selected him wisely. He clung to his sanity, for he knew it was his only escape. He knew it would be a far more horrible thing to end out his days in this quonset a helpless maniac, than to remain sane.

  He swung back over the line and soon grew content with his world in a shell. He waited, for there was nothing else he could do; and in his waiting a contentment grew out of frantic restlessness. He began to think of it as a jail, then as a coffin, then as the ultimate black of the Final Hole. He would wake in the arbitrary night, choking, his throat constricted, his hands warped into claws that crooked themselves into the foam rubber of the sleeping couch with fierceness.

  The time was spent. A moment after it had passed, he could not tell how it had been spent. His life became dust-dry and at times he could hardly tell he was living. Had it not been for the protected, automatic calendar, he would hardly have known the years were passing.

  And ever, ever, ever–the huge, dull, sleeping eye of the warning buzzer. Staring back at him, veiled, from the ceiling.

  It was hooked up with the scanners. The scanners that hulked behind the quonset. The scanners in turn were hooked up to the net of tight inverspace rays that inter-locked each other out to the farthest horizon Ferreno might ever know.

  And the net, in turn, joined at stop-gap functions with the doggie-guards, also waiting, watching with dumb metal and plastic minds for that implacable alien enemy that might some day come.

  They had known the enemy would come, for they had found the remnants of those the enemy had destroyed. Remnants of magnificent and powerful cultures, ground to microscopic dust by the heel of a terrifying invader.

  They could not chance roaming the universe with those Others somewhere. Somewhere…waiting. They had formed the inverspace net, joining it with the doggie-guards. And they had hooked the system in with the scanners; and they had wired the scanners to the big, dull eye in the ceiling of the quonset.

  Then they had set Ferreno to watching it.

  At first Ferreno had watched the thing constantly. Waiting for it to make the disruptive noise he was certain it would emit. Breaking the perpetual silence of his bubble. He waited for the bloodiness of its blink to warp fantastic shadows across the room and furniture. He even spent five months deciding what shape those shadows would take, when they came.

  Then he entered the period of nervousness. Jumping for no reason at all, to stare at the eye. The hallucinations: it was blinking, it was ringing in his ears. The sleeplessness: it might go off and he would not hear it.

  Then as time progressed, he grew unaware of it, forgot it existed for long periods. Till it had finally come to the knowledge that it was there; a dim thing, an unremembered thing, as much a part of him as his own ears, his own eyes. He had nudged it to the back of his mind–but it was always there.

  Always there, always waiting, always on the verge of disruption.

  Ferreno never forgot why he was there. He never forgot the reason they had come for him. The day they had come for him.

  The evening had been pale and laden with sound. The flits clacking through the air above the city, the crickets in the grass, the noise of holograph from the living room of the house.

  He had been sitting on the front porch, arms tight about his girl, on a creaking porch glider that smacked the wall every time they rocked back too far. He remembered the taste of the sweet-acidy lemonade in his mouth as the three men resolved out of the gloom.

  They had stepped onto the porch.

  “Are you Charles Jackson Ferreno, age nineteen, brown hair, brown eyes, five feet ten, 158 pounds, scar on right inner wrist?”

  “Y-yes…why?” he had stammered.

  The intrusion of these strangers on a thing as private as his love-making had caused him to falter.

  Then they had grabbed him.

  “What are you doing? Get your hands off him!” Marie had screamed.

  They had flashed an illuminated card at her, and she had subsided into terrified silence before their authority. Then they had taken him, howling, into a flit–black and silent–and whirled him off to the plasteel block in the Nevada desert that had been Central Space Headquarters.

  They had hypno-conditioned him to operate the inverspace communicators. A task he could not have learned in two hundred years–involving the billion alternate dialing choices–had they not planted it mechanically.

  Then they had prepared him for the ship.

  “Why are you doing this to me? Why have you picked me!” he had screamed at them, fighting the lacing-up of the pressure suit.

  They had told him. The Mark LXXXII. He had been chosen best out of forty-seven thousand punched cards whipped through its platinum vitals. Best by selection. An infallible machine had said he was the least susceptible to madness, inefficiency, failure. He was the best, and the Service needed him.

  Then,
the ship.

  The nose of the beast pointed straight up into a cloudless sky, blue and unfilmed as the best he had ever known. Then a rumble, and a scream, and the pressure as the ship had raced into space. And the almost imperceptible wrenching as the ship slipped scud wise through inverspace. The travel through the milky pinkness of that not-space. Then the gut-pulling again, and there! off to the right through the port–that bleak little asteroid with its quonset blemish.

  When they had set him down and told him about the enemy, he had screamed at them, but they had pushed him back into the bubble, had sealed the pressure-lock, and had gone back to the ship.

  They had left The Stone, then. Rushing up till they had popped out of sight around a bend in space.

  His hands had been bloodied, beating against the resilient plasteel of the pressure-lock and the vista windows.

  He never forgot why he was there.

  He tried to conjure up the enemy. Were they horrible slug-like creatures from some dark star, ready to spread a ring of viscous, poisonous fluid inside Earth’s atmosphere; were they tentacled spider-men who drank blood; were they perhaps quiet, well-mannered beings who would sublimate all of man’s drives and ambitions; were they…

  He went on and on, till it did not matter in the slightest to him. Then he forgot time. But he remembered he was here to watch. To watch and wait. A sentinel at the gate of the Forever, waiting for an unknown enemy that might streak out of nowhere bound for Earth and destruction. Or that might have died out millenia before–leaving him here on a worthless assignment, doomed to an empty life.

  He began to hate. The hate of the men who had consigned him to this living death. He hated the men who had brought him here in their ship. He hated the men who had conceived the idea of a sentinel. He hated the Mark computer that had said:

  “Get Charles Jackson Ferreno only!”

  He hated them all. But most of all he hated the alien enemy. The implacable enemy that had thrown fear into the hearts of the men.