Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  "Try and come too, Mr. Watkins, try and come too," he said.

  Watkins laughed. "I'll make out okay, son. I like my hide pretty well." He waved with the gun. "Be seeing you." Then he tossed the dark weapon into the box and slammed the door.

  XI

  There was darkness, then bright sun. They stood on a street corner, and Summersby could read the signs as plainly as Watkins must have read them in the focusing lens of the matter transmitter on the unknown planet.

  Broadway and 42nd Street. The five of them had clicked into being on the busiest corner of New York.

  "That old crook," said Adam, gulping. "He focused us here for a gag."

  "I look awful," gasped Mrs. Full, and Summersby, glancing at her, agreed. Like all of them, she had lost weight; her skin showed the effects of a week's washing without soap; and her skirt and blouse were mussed up, to say the least. All the men needed shaves. Calvin Full, recovering gradually from the shock of the goad, and still supported by Villa, looked like a Bowery wino.

  "Is he coming?" asked Adam, addressing Summersby. "Will Watkins be along too?"

  "I don't know," said Summersby. He stared up at as much of the sky as he could see beyond the block-high ads. "I hope so."

  "My chili stand!" shouted Villa, suddenly awakening to the fact of New York about him. "That no-good relief man! I've got to see what he's done to it!" Pushing Calvin to Adam, who grasped him by an arm, the Mexican waved hurriedly. "Come and see me," he said to all of them. "I'll give you a bowl free." He hastened away into the crowd.

  "We've got to see about our clothes at the hotel," said Mrs. Full. She sounded apologetic. "I hope we'll see you again, Adam, and Mr. Summersby."

  "I doubt it," said Summersby. He looked at Full. "Coming out of it?" he asked.

  "Thanks," said Cal, nodding. He took his wife's hand. "Gave you my address, didn't I?"

  "I have it," said Summersby.

  "Well, good-bye," said Mrs. Full.

  "You did a fine job up there," said Adam Pierce. "I'm proud to have known you, ma'am."

  "Thank you, Adam. Good-bye." They were gone.

  "I suppose you'll be going too," said Adam, somewhat wistfully.

  "I guess so. You'll go home?"

  "I guess so," Adam repeated. "My folks will be sore. They'll never believe such a story. They'll think I ran wild or something."

  Summersby, still looking upward, and wondering if he could be staring blindly at the planet which Watkins must be trying to leave even now, put a hand on his heart. "Was he right? They did fix up everyone else." He laughed. It was the first time he had laughed normally in seven months. "I could get into the rangers again," he said. "Adam, I've got to see a doctor. I've got to find out something."

  "Yes, sir," said Adam unhappily. Summersby looked at him. "Really worried about your folks?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "I'll come home and tell them, if you like."

  Adam said gratefully, "Mr. Summersby, you're a gentleman."

  "No," said Summersby, "no."

  "Yes, sir, you are. Can we wait just a minute more? Mr. Watkins might be along any minute now."

  "We'll wait."

  After a while Adam said, "Remember that first feed we got up there, pies and cookies and glass?"

  "I remember it."

  "They must have just aimed that machine at a bakery window here on Earth, and taken glass and all."

  "That's it."

  "Probably it was called a smash-and-grab robbery, down here." He kicked something, bent down and picked it up. It was the safe-cracker's gun. "I didn't think he'd carry one," said the boy. He looked closer at it. "God!"

  "What is it?" Summersby shifted the briefcase and held out a hand. Adam laid the weapon in his big palm. "He must have won it at the park that day," Adam said. "That old crook! Old faker!"

  Summersby held it up. It looked like a small automatic of blued steel, but it was plastic. He turned it over. A pencil-sharpener.

  Summersby grunted. "A toy," he said, giving it back to Adam. "Nothing but a kid's toy."

  * * *

  Contents

  THE OLD DIE RICH

  By H. L. Gold

  It is the kind of news item you read at least a dozen times a year, wonder about briefly, and then promptly forget--but the real story is the one that the reporters are unable to cover!

  "You again, Weldon," the Medical Examiner said wearily.

  I nodded pleasantly and looked around the shabby room with a feeling of hopeful eagerness. Maybe this time, I thought, I'd get the answer. I had the same sensation I always had in these places--the quavery senile despair at being closed in a room with the single shaky chair, tottering bureau, dim bulb hanging from the ceiling, the flaking metal bed.

  There was a woman on the bed, an old woman with white hair thin enough to show the tight-drawn scalp, her face and body so emaciated that the flesh between the bones formed parchment pockets. The M.E. was going over her as if she were a side of beef that he had to put a federal grade stamp on, grumbling meanwhile about me and Sergeant Lou Pape, who had brought me here.

  "When are you going to stop taking Weldon around to these cases, Sergeant?" the M.E. demanded in annoyance. "Damned actor and his morbid curiosity!"

  For the first time, Lou was stung into defending me. "Mr. Weldon is a friend of mine--I used to be an actor, too, before I joined the force--and he's a follower of Stanislavsky."

  The beat cop who'd reported the D.O.A. whipped around at the door. "A Red?"

  * * * * *

  I let Lou Pape explain what the Stanislavsky method of acting was, while I sat down on the one chair and tried to apply it. Stanislavsky was the great pre-Revolution Russian stage director whose idea was that actors had to think and feel like the characters they portrayed so they could be them. A Stanislavskian works out everything about a character right up to the point where a play starts--where he was born, when, his relationship with his parents, education, childhood, adolescence, maturity, attitudes toward men, women, sex, money, success, including incidents. The play itself is just an extension of the life history created by the actor.

  How does that tie in with the old woman who had died? Well, I'd had the cockeyed kind of luck to go bald at 25 and I'd been playing old men ever since. I had them down pretty well--it's not just a matter of shuffling around all hunched over and talking in a high cracked voice, which is cornball acting, but learning what old people are like inside--and these cases I talked Lou Pape into taking me on were studies in senility. I wanted to understand them, know what made them do what they did, feel the compulsion that drove them to it.

  The old woman on the bed, for instance, had $32,000 in five bank accounts ... and she'd died of starvation.

  You've come across such cases in the news, at least a dozen a year, and wondered who they were and why they did it. But you read the items, thought about them for a little while, and then forgot them. My interest was professional; I made my living playing old people and I had to know as much about them as I could.

  That's how it started off, at any rate. But the more cases I investigated, the less sense they made to me, until finally they were practically an obsession.

  Look, they almost always have around $30,000 pinned to their underwear, hidden in mattresses, or parked in the bank, yet they starve themselves to death. If I could understand them, I could write a play or have one written; I might really make a name for myself, even get a Hollywood contract, maybe, if I could act them as they should be acted.

  So I sat there in the lone chair, trying to reconstruct the character of the old woman who had died rather than spend a single cent of her $32,000 for food.

  * * * * *

  "Malnutrition induced by senile psychosis," the M.E. said, writing out the death certificate. He turned to me. "There's no mystery to it, Weldon. They starve because they're less afraid of death than digging into their savings."

  I'd been imagining myself growing weak from hunger and trying to decide that I ough
t to eat even if it cost me something. I came out of it and said, "That's what you keep telling me."

  "I keep hoping it'll convince you so you won't come around any more. What are the chances, Weldon?"

  "Depends. I will when I'm sure you're right. I'm not."

  He shrugged disgustedly, ordered the wicker basket from the meat wagon and had the old woman carried out. He and the beat cop left with the basket team. He could at least have said good-by. He never did, though.

  A fat lot I cared about his attitude or dogmatic medical opinion. Getting inside this character was more important. The setting should have helped; it was depressing, rank with the feel of solitary desperation and needless death.

  Lou Pape stood looking out the one dirty window, waiting patiently for me. I let my joints stiffen as if they were thirty years older and more worn out than they were, and empathized myself into a dilemma between getting still weaker from hunger and drawing a little money out of the bank.

  I worked at it for half an hour or so with the deep concentration you acquire when you use the Stanislavsky method. Then I gave up.

  "The M.E. is wrong, Lou," I said. "It doesn't feel right."

  Lou turned around from the window. He'd stood there all that time without once coughing or scratching or doing anything else that might have distracted me. "He knows his business, Mark."

  "But he doesn't know old people."

  "What is it you don't get?" he prompted, helping me dig my way through a characterization like the trained Stanislavskian he was--and still would have been if he hadn't gotten so sick of the insecurity of acting that he'd become a cop. "Can't money be more important to a psychotic than eating?"

  "Sure," I agreed. "Up to a point. Undereating, yes. Actual starvation, no."

  "Why not?"

  "You and the M.E. think it's easy to starve to death. It isn't. Not when you can buy day-old bread at the bakeries, soup bones for about a nickel a pound, wilted vegetables that groceries are glad to get rid of. Anybody who's willing to eat that stuff can stay alive on nearly nothing a day. Nearly nothing, Lou, and hunger is a damned potent instinct. I can understand hating to spend even those few cents. I can't see going without food altogether."

  * * * * *

  He took out a cigarette; he hadn't until then because he didn't want to interrupt my concentration. "Maybe they get too weak to go out after old bread and meat bones and wilted vegetables."

  "It still doesn't figure." I got up off the shaky chair, my joints now really stiff from sitting in it. "Do you know how long it takes to die of starvation?"

  "That depends on age, health, amount of activity--"

  "Nuts!" I said. "It would take weeks!"

  "So it takes weeks. Where's the problem--if there is one?"

  I lit the pipe I'd learned to smoke instead of cigarettes--old men seem to use pipes more than anything else, though maybe it'll be different in the next generation. More cigarette smokers now, you see, and they'd stick to the habit unless the doctor ordered them to cut it out.

  "Did you ever try starving for weeks, Lou?" I asked.

  "No. Did you?"

  "In a way. All these cases you've been taking me on for the last couple of years--I've tried to be them. But let's say it's possible to die of starvation when you have thousands of dollars put away. Let's say you don't think of scrounging off food stores or working out a way of freeloading or hitting soup lines. Let's say you stay in your room and slowly starve to death."

  He slowly picked a fleck of tobacco off his lip and flicked it away, his sharp black eyes poking holes in the situation I'd built up for him. But he wasn't ready to say anything yet.

  "There's charity," I went on, "relief--except for those who have their dough in banks, where it can be checked on--old age pension, panhandling, cadging off neighbors."

  He said, "We know these cases are hermits. They don't make contact with anybody."

  "Even when they're starting to get real hungry?"

  "You've got something, Mark, but that's the wrong tack," he said thoughtfully. "The point is that they don't have to make contact; other people know them or about them. Somebody would check after a few days or a week--the janitor, the landlord, someone in the house or the neighborhood."

  "So they'd be found before they died."

  "You'd think so, wouldn't you?" he agreed reluctantly. "They don't generally have friends, and the relatives are usually so distant, they hardly know these old people and whether they're alive or not. Maybe that's what threw us off. But you don't need friends and relatives to start wondering, and investigate when you haven't shown up for a while." He lifted his head and looked at me. "What does that prove, Mark?"

  "That there's something wrong with these cases. I want to find out what."

  * * * * *

  I got Lou to take me down to Headquarters, where he let me see the bankbooks the old woman had left.

  "She took damned good care of them," I said. "They look almost new."

  "Wouldn't you take damned good care of the most important thing in the world to you?" he asked. "You've seen the hoards of money the others leave. Same thing."

  I peered closely at the earliest entry, April 23, 1907, $150. My eyes aren't that bad; I was peering at the ink. It was dark, unfaded. I pointed it out to Lou.

  "From not being exposed to daylight much," he said. "They don't haul out the bankbooks or money very often, I guess."

  "And that adds up for you? I can see them being psychotics all their lives ... but not senile psychotics."

  "They hoarded, Mark. That adds up for me."

  "Funny," I said, watching him maneuver his cigarette as if he loved the feel of it, drawing the smoke down and letting it out in plumes of different shapes, from rings to slender streams. What a living he could make doing cigarette commercials on TV! "I can see you turn into one of these cases, Lou."

  He looked startled for a second, but then crushed out the butt carefully so he could watch it instead of me. "Yeah? How so?"

  "You've been too scared by poverty to take a chance. You know you could do all right acting, but you don't dare giving up this crummy job. Carry that far enough and you try to stop spending money, then cut out eating, and finally wind up dead of starvation in a cheap room."

  "Me? I'd never get that scared of being broke!"

  "At the age of 70 or 80?"

  "Especially then! I'd probably tear loose for a while and then buy into a home for the aged."

  I wanted to grin, but I didn't. He'd proved my point. He'd also shown that he was as bothered by these old people as I was.

  "Tell me, Lou. If somebody kept you from dying, would you give him any dough for it, even if you were a senile psychotic?"

  I could see him using the Stanislavsky method to feel his way to the answer. He shook his head. "Not while I was alive. Will it, maybe, not give it."

  "How would that be as a motive?"

  * * * * *

  He leaned against a metal filing cabinet. "No good, Mark. You know what a hell of a time we have tracking down relatives to give the money to, because these people don't leave wills. The few relatives we find are always surprised when they get their inheritance--most of them hardly remember dear old who-ever-it-was that died and left it to them. All the other estates eventually go to the State treasury, unclaimed."

  "Well, it was an idea." I opened the oldest bankbook again. "Anybody ever think of testing the ink, Lou?"

  "What for? The banks' records always check. These aren't forgeries, if that's what you're thinking."

  "I don't know what I'm thinking," I admitted. "But I'd like to turn a chemist loose on this for a little while."

  "Look, Mark, there's a lot I'm willing to do for you, and I think I've done plenty, but there's a limit--"

  I let him explain why he couldn't let me borrow the book and then waited while he figured out how it could be done and did it. He was still grumbling when he helped me pick a chemist out of the telephone directory and went along to the lab with m
e.

  "But don't get any wrong notions," he said on the way. "I have to protect State property, that's all, because I signed for it and I'm responsible."

  "Sure, sure," I agreed, to humor him. "If you're not curious, why not just wait outside for me?"

  He gave me one of those white-tooth grins that he had no right to deprive women audiences of. "I could do that, but I'd rather see you make a sap of yourself."

  I turned the bankbook over to the chemist and we waited for the report. When it came, it had to be translated.

  * * * * *

  The ink was typical of those used 50 years ago. Lou Pape gave me a jab in the ribs at that. But then the chemist said that, according to the amount of oxidation, it seemed fresh enough to be only a few months or years old, and it was Lou's turn to get jabbed. Lou pushed him about the aging, asking if it couldn't be the result of unusually good care. The chemist couldn't say--that depended on the kind of care; an airtight compartment, perhaps, filled with one of the inert gases, or a vacuum. They hadn't been kept that way, of course, so Lou looked as baffled as I felt.

  He took the bankbook and we went out to the street.

  "See what I mean?" I asked quietly, not wanting to rub it in.

  "I see something, but I don't know what. Do you?"

  "I wish I could say yes. It doesn't make any more sense than anything else about these cases."

  "What do you do next?"

  "Damned if I know. There are thousands of old people in the city. Only a few of them take this way out. I have to try to find them before they do."