Steel and other stories [SSC]

by Richard Matheson

  Veni, vidi, vici?

  ~ * ~

  Bruin was not a needle in a haystack.

  The moment Talbert entered Hogan’s Alleys his eye was caught by a football huddle of men encircling a portly, rosy-domed speaker. Approaching, Talbert was just in time to hear the punch line followed by an explosion of composite laughter. It was the punch line that intrigued.

  ‘“My God!’ cried the actress,” Mr. Bruin had uttered, “ ‘I thought you said a banana split!’ “

  This variation much excited Talbert who saw in it a verification of a new element—the interchangeable kicker.

  When the group had broken up and drifted, Talbert accosted Mr. Bruin and, introducing himself, asked where Mr. Bruin had heard that joke.

  “Why d’ya ask, boy?” asked Mr. Bruin.

  “No reason,” said the crafty Talbert.

  “I don’t remember where I heard it, boy,” said Mr. Bruin finally. “Excuse me, will ya?”

  Talbert trailed after him but received no satisfaction— unless it was in the most definite impression that Bruin was concealing something.

  Later, riding back to the Millard Fillmore, Talbert decided to put an Oakland detective agency on Mr. Bruin’s trail to see what could be seen.

  When Talbert reached the hotel there was a telegram waiting for him at the desk.

  Mr. Rodney Tassell received long distance call from Mr. George Bullock, Carthage Hotel, Chicago. Was told joke about midget in salami suit. Meaningful?—Axe.

  Talbert’s eyes ignited.

  “Tally,” he murmured, “ho.”

  An hour later he had checked out of the Millard Fillmore, taxied to the airport and caught a plane for Chicago.

  Twenty minutes after he had left the hotel, a man in a dark pin-stripe approached the desk clerk and asked for the room number of Talbert Bean III. When informed of Talbert’s departure the man grew steely-eyed and immediately retired to a telephone booth. He emerged ashen.

  ~ * ~

  “I’m sorry,” said the desk clerk, “Mr. Bullock checked out this morning.”

  “Oh.” Talbert’s shoulders sagged. All night on the plane he had been checking over his notes, hoping to discern a pattern to the jokes which would emcompass type, area of genesis and periodicity. He was weary with fruitless concentration. Now this.

  “And he left no forwarding address?” he asked.

  “Only Chicago, sir,” said the clerk.

  “I see.”

  Following a bath and luncheon in his room, a slightly refreshed Talbert settled down with the telephone and the directory. There were forty-seven George Bullocks in Chicago. Talbert checked them off as he phoned.

  At three o’clock he slumped over the receiver in a dead slumber. At 4:21, he regained consciousness and completed the remaining eleven calls. The Mr. Bullock in question was not at home, said his housekeeper, but was expected in that evening.

  “Thank you kindly,” said a bleary-eyed Talbert and, hanging up, thereupon collapsed on the bed—only to awake a few minutes past seven and dress quickly. Descending to the street, he gulped down a sandwich and a glass of milk, then hailed a cab and made the hour ride to the home of George Bullock.

  The man himself answered the bell.

  “Yes?” he asked.

  Talbert introduced himself and said he had come to the Hotel Carthage early that afternoon to see him.

  “Why?” asked Mr. Bullock.

  “So you could tell me where you heard that joke about the midget in the salami suit,” said Talbert.

  “Sir?”

  “I said—”

  “I heard what you said, sir,” said Mr. Bullock, “though I cannot say that your remark makes any noticeable sense.”

  “I believe, sir,” challenged Talbert, “that you are hiding behind fustian.”

  “Behind fustian, sir?” retorted Bullock. “I’m afraid—”

  “The game is up, sir!” declared Talbert in a ringing voice. “Why don’t you admit it and tell me where you got that joke from?”

  “I have not the remotest conception of what you’re talking about, sir!” snapped Bullock, his words belied by the pallor of his face.

  Talbert flashed a Mona Lisa smile.

  “Indeed?” he said.

  And, turning lightly on his heel, he left Bullock trembling in the doorway. As he settled back against the taxicab seat again, he saw Bullock still standing there staring at him. Then Bullock whirled and was gone.

  “Hotel Carthage,” said Talbert, satisfied with his bluff.

  Riding back, he thought of Bullock’s agitation and a thin smile tipped up the corners of his mouth. No doubt about it. The prey was being run to earth. Now if his surmise was valid there would likely be—

  A lean man in a raincoat and a derby was sitting on the bed when Talbert entered his room. The man’s mustache, like a muddy toothbrush, twitched.

  “Talbert Bean?” he asked.

  Talbert bowed.

  “The same,” he said.

  The man, a Colonel Bishop, retired, looked at Talbert with metal-blue eyes.

  “What is your game, sir?” he asked tautly.

  “I don’t understand,” toyed Talbert.

  “I think you do,” said the Colonel, “and you are to come with me.”

  “Oh?” said Talbert.

  To find himself looking down the barrel of a .45-caliber Webley-Fosbery.

  “Shall we?” said the Colonel.

  “But of course,” said Talbert coolly. “I have not come all this way to resist now.”

  ~ * ~

  The ride in the private plane was a long one. The windows were blacked out and Talbert hadn’t the faintest idea in which direction they were flying. Neither the pilot nor the Colonel spoke, and Talbert’s attempts at conversation were discouraged by a chilly silence. The Colonel’s pistol, still leveled at Talbert’s chest, never wavered, but it did not bother Talbert. He was exultant. All he could think was that his search was ending; he was, at last, approaching the headwaters of the dirty joke. After a time, his head nodded and he dozed—to dream of midgets in frankfurter suits and actresses who seemed obsessed by sarsaparilla or banana splits or sometimes both. How long he slept, and what boundaries he may have crossed, Talbert never knew. He was awakened by a swift loss of altitude and the steely voice of Colonel Bishop: “We are landing, Mr. Bean.” The Colonel’s grip tightened on the pistol.

  Talbert offered no resistance when his eyes were blindfolded. Feeling the Webley-Fosbery in the small of his back, he stumbled out of the plane and crunched over the ground of a well-kept airstrip. There was a nip in the air and he felt a bit lightheaded. Talbert suspected they had landed in a mountainous region; but what mountains, and on what continent, he could not guess. His ears and nose conveyed nothing of help to his churning mind.

  He was shoved—none too gently—into an automobile, and then driven swiftly along what felt like a dirt road. The tires crackled over pebbles and twigs.

  Suddenly the blindfold was removed. Talbert blinked and looked out the windows. It was a black and cloudy night; he could see nothing but the limited vista afforded by the headlights.

  “You are well isolated,” he said, appreciatively. Colonel Bishop remained tight-lipped and vigilant.

  After a fifteen-minute ride along the dark road, the car pulled up in front of a tall, unlighted house. As the motor was cut Talbert could hear the pulsing rasp of crickets all around.

  “Well,” he said.

  “Emerge,” suggested Colonel Bishop.

  “Of course.” Talbert bent out of the car and was escorted up the wide porch steps by the Colonel. Behind, the car pulled away into the night.

  Inside the house, chimes bonged hollowly as the Colonel pushed a button. They waited in the darkness and, in a few moments, approaching footsteps sounded.

  A tiny aperture opened in the heavy door, disclosing a single bespectacled eye. The eye blinked once and, with a faint accent Talbert could not recognize, whispered furtively, �
��Why did the widow wear black garters?”

  “In remembrance,” said Colonel Bishop with great gravity, “of those who passed beyond “

  The door opened.

  The owner of the eye was tall, gaunt, of indeterminable age and nationality, his hair a dark mass wisped with gray. His face was all angles and facets, his eyes piercing behind large, horn-rimmed glasses. He wore flannel trousers and a checked jacket.

  “This is the Dean,” said Colonel Bishop.

  “How do you do,” said Talbert.

  “Come in, come in,” the Dean invited, extending his large hand to Talbert. “Welcome, Mr. Bean.” He shafted a scolding look at Bishop’s pistol. “Now, Colonel,” he said, “indulging in melodramatics again? Put it away, dear fellow, put it away.”

  “We can’t be too careful,” grumped the Colonel.

  Talbert stood in the spacious grace of the entry hall looking around. His gaze settled, presently, on the cryptic smile of the Dean, who said: “So. You have found us out, sir.”

  Talbert’s toes whipped like pennants in a gale.

  He covered his excitement with, “Have I?”

  “Yes,” said the Dean. “You have. And a masterful display of investigative intuition it was.”

  Talbert looked around.

  “So,” he said, voice bated. “It is here.”

  “Yes,” said the Dean. “Would you like to see it?”

  “More than anything in the world,” said Talbert fervently.

  “Come then,” said the Dean.

  “Is this wise?” the Colonel warned.

  “Come,” repeated the Dean.

  The three men started down the hallway. For a moment, a shade of premonition darkened Talbert’s mind. It was being made so easy. Was it a trap? In a second the thought had slipped away, washed off by a current of excited curiosity.

  They started up a winding marble staircase.

  “How did you suspect?” the Dean inquired. “That is to say—what prompted you to probe the matter?”

  “I just thought,” said Talbert meaningfully. “Here are all these jokes yet no one seems to know where they come from. Or care.”

  “Yes,” observed the Dean, “we count upon that disinterest. What man in ten million ever asks, where did you hear that joke? Absorbed in memorizing the joke for future use, he gives no thought to its source. This, of course, is our protection.”

  The Dean smiled at Talbert. “But not,” he amended, “from men such as you.”

  Talbert’s flush went unnoticed.

  They reached the landing and began walking along a wide corridor lit on each side by the illumination of candelabra. There was no more talk. At the end of the corridor they turned right and stopped in front of massive, iron-hinged doors.

  “Is this wise?” the Colonel asked again.

  “Too late to stop now,” said the Dean and Talbert felt a shiver flutter down his spine. What if it was a trap? He swallowed, then squared his shoulders. The Dean had said it. It was too late to stop now.

  The great doors tracked open.

  “Et voilà—” said the Dean.

  ~ * ~

  The hallway was an avenue. Thick wall-to-wall carpeting sponged beneath Talbert s feet as he walked between the Colonel and the Dean. At periodic intervals along the ceiling hung music-emitting speakers; Talbert recognized the Gaieté Parisienne. His gaze moved to a petitpointed tapestry on which Dionysian acts ensued above the stitched motto, “Happy Is the Man Who Is Making Something.”

  “Incredible,” he murmured. “Here; in this house.”

  “Exactly,” said the Dean.

  Talbert shook his head wonderingly.

  “To think,” he said.

  The Dean paused before a glass wall and, braking, Talbert peered into an office. Among its rich appointments strode a young man in a striped silk weskit with brass buttons, gesturing meaningfully with a long cigar while, crosslegged on a leather couch, sat a happily sweatered blonde of rich dimensions.

  The man stopped briefly and waved to the Dean, smiled, then returned to his spirited dictating.

  “One of our best,” the Dean said.

  “But,” stammered Talbert, “I thought that man was on the staff of—”

  “He is,” said the Dean. “And, in his spare time, he is also one of us.”

  Talbert followed on excitement-numbed legs.

  “But I had no idea,” he said. “I presumed the organization to be composed of men like Bruin and Bullock.”

  “They are merely our means of promulgation,” explained the Dean. “Our word-of-mouthers, you might say. Our creators come from more exalted ranks—executives, statesmen, the better professional comics, editors, novelists—”

  The Dean broke off as the door to one of the other offices opened and a barrelly, bearded man in hunting clothes emerged. He shouldered past them, muttering true things to himself.

  “Off again?” the Dean asked pleasantly. The big man grunted. It was a true grunt. He clumped off, lonely for a veldt.

  “Unbelievable,” said Talbert. “Such men as these?”

  “Exactly,” said the Dean.

  They strolled on past the rows of busy offices, Talbert tourist-eyed, the Dean smiling his mandarin smile, the Colonel working his lips as if anticipating the kiss of a toad.

  “But where did it all begin?” a dazed Talbert asked.

  “That is history’s secret,” rejoined the Dean, “veiled behind time’s opacity. Our venture does have its honored past, however. Great men have graced its cause— Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, Dickens, Swinburne, Rabelais, Balzac; oh, the honor roll is long. Shakespeare, of course, and his friend Ben Jonson. Still farther back, Chaucer, Boccaccio. Further yet, Horace and Seneca, Demosthenes and Plautus. Aristophanes, Apuleius. Yea, in the palaces of Tutankhaumen was our work done; in the black temples of Ahriman, the pleasure dome of Kubla Khan. Where did it begin? Who knows? Scraped on rock, in many a primordial cave, are certain drawings. And there are those among us who believe that these were left by the earliest members of the Brotherhood. But this, of course, is only legend. . .

  Now they had reached the end of the hallway and were starting down a cushioned ramp.

  “There must be vast sums of money involved in this,” said Talbert.

  “Heaven forfend,” declared the Dean, stopping short. “Do not confuse our work with alley vending. Our workers contribute freely of their time and skill, caring for naught save the Cause.”

  “Forgive me,” Talbert said. Then, rallying, he asked, “What Cause?”

  The Dean’s gaze fused on inward things. He ambled on slowly, arms behind his back.

  “The Cause of Love,” he said, “as opposed to Hate. Of Nature, as opposed to the Unnatural. Of Humanity, as opposed to Inhumanity. Of Freedom, as opposed to Constraint. Of Health, as opposed to Disease. Yes, Mr. Bean, disease. The disease called bigotry; the frighteningly communicable disease that taints all it touches; turns warmth to chill and joy to guilt and good to bad. What Cause?” He stopped dramatically. “The Cause of Life, Mr. Bean—as opposed to Death!”

  The Dean lifted a challenging finger. “We see ourselves,” he said, “as an army of dedicated warriors marching on the strongholds of prudery. Knights Templar with a just and joyous mission.”

  “Amen to that,” a fervent Talbert said.

  They entered a large, cubicle-bordered room. Talbert saw men; some typing, some writing, some staring, some on telephones, talking in a multitude of tongues. Their expressions were, as one, intently aloft. At the far end of the room, expression unseen, a man stabbed plugs into a many-eyed switchboard.

  “Our Apprentice Room,” said the Dean, “wherein we groom our future . . .”

  His voice died off as a young man exited one of the cubicles and approached them, paper in hand, a smile tremulous on his lips.

  “Oliver,” said the Dean, nodding once.

  “I’ve done a joke, sir,” said Oliver. “May I—?”

  “But of course,” said the
Dean.

  Oliver cleared viscid anxiety from his throat, then told a joke about a little boy and girl watching a doubles match on the nudist colony tennis court. The Dean smiled, nodding. Oliver looked up, pained.

  “No?” he said.

  “It is not without merit,” encouraged the Dean, “but, as it now stands, you see, it smacks rather too reminiscently of the duchess-butler effect, Wife of Bath category. Not to mention the justifiably popular double reverse bishop-barmaid gambit.”