Selected Stories of Alfred Bester

by Alfred Bester

  “I could have sworn that alligator was stuffed,” Violet muttered.

  “Vhat vas that, Audrey?”

  “That alligator . . . Yes, I was right! Excuse me, Miss Garbo. I’ve got to be going.”

  The alligator had risen to its hind legs and was now strolling down Strawberry Lane. Violet left the telephone booth and began following it at a leisurely pace. The spectacle of a strolling alligator followed, at a discreet distance, by a strolling frogman evoked no particular interest in the passers-by of Hollywood East.

  The alligator glanced back over his shoulder once or twice and at last noticed the frogman. He quickened his pace. The frogman stayed with him. He began to run. The frogman ran, was outdistanced, turned on her oxygen tank and began to close the gap. The alligator leaped for a handle on the crosstown straphanger and was borne east, dangling from the cable. The frogman hailed a passing rickshaw. “Follow that alligator!” she cried into the hearing aid of the robot.

  At the zoo, the alligator dropped off the straphanger and disappeared into the crowd. The frogman leaped out of the rickshaw and hunted frantically through the Berlin House, the Moscow House and the London House. In the Rome House, where sightseers were tossing pizzas to the specimens behind the bars, she saw one of the Romans lying naked and unconscious in a small corner cage. Alongside him was an empty alligator skin.

  Violet looked around hastily and saw Bauer slinking out, dressed in a striped suit and a Brosalino hat.

  She ran after him. Bauer pulled a small boy off an electric carrousel pony, leaped on its back and began galloping west.

  Violet leaped onto the back of a passing Lama. “Follow that carrousel,” she cried. The Lama began running. “Ch-iao hsi-fu nan tso mei mi chou,” he complained. “But that’s always been my problem.”

  At Hudson Terminal, Bauer abandoned the pony, was corked in a bottle and jetted across the river. Violet leaped into the coxswain’s seat of an eight-oared shell. “Follow that bottle,” she cried. On the Jersey side (Nevada East) Violet pursued Bauer onto the Freeway and thence, by Dodge-Em Kar, to Old Newark, where Bauer leaped onto a trampoline and was catapulted up to the forward cylinder of the Block Island & Nantucket Monorail. Violet shrewdly waited until the monorail left the terminal, and then just made the rear cylinder.

  Inside, at point of harpoon, she held up a teenage madam and forced her to exchange clothes. Dressed in opera pumps, black net stockings, checked skirt, silk blouse and hair rollers, she threw the cursing madam off the monorail at the blast Vine Street station and began watching the forward cylinder more openly. At Montauk, the eastermost point on Catalina East, Bauer slipped off.

  Again she waited until the monorail was leaving the station before she followed. On the platform below, Bauer slid into a Commuters’ Cannon and was shot into space. Violet ran to the same cannon, carefully left the coordinate dials exactly as Bauer had set them, and slipped into the muzzle. She was shot off less than thirty seconds after Bauer, and bounced into the landing net just as he was climbing down the rope ladder.

  “You!” he exclaimed.

  “Me.”

  “Was that you in the frog suit?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought I ditched you in Newark.”

  “No, you didn’t,” she said grimly. “I’ve got you dead to rights, Kid.”

  Then she saw the house.

  It was shaped like the house that children used to draw back in the twentieth century: two stories; peaked roof, covered with torn tar paper; dirty brown shingles, half of them hanging; plain windows with four panes in each sash; brick chimney overgrown with poison ivy; sagging front porch; the rotted remains of a two-car garage on the right; a clump of sickly sumac on the left. In the gloom of evening it looked like a haunted house.

  “Oh, Sam,” she breathed. “It’s beautiful!”

  “It’s a home,” he said simply.

  “What’s it like inside?”

  “Come and see.”

  Inside it was unadulterated mail-order house; it was dime store, bargain basement, second hands castoff, thrift shop, flea market.

  “It’s sheer heaven,” Violet said. She lingered lovingly over the power sweeper, canister-type, w. vinyl bumper. “It’s so—so soothing. I haven’t been this happy in years.”

  “Wait, wait!” Bauer said, bursting with pride. He knelt before the fireplace and lit a birch-log fire. The flames crackled yellow and orange. “Look,” he said. “Real wood, and real flames. And I know a museum where they’ve got a pair of matching andirons.”

  “No! Really?”

  He nodded. “The Peabody, at Yale High.”

  Violet made up her mind. “Sam, I’ll help you.”

  He stared at her.

  “I’ll help you steal them,” she said. “I—I’ll help you steal anything you want.”

  “You mean that, Violet?”

  “I was a fool. I never realized... I—You were right. I should never have let such a silly thing come between us.”

  “You’re not just saying that to trick me, Violet?”

  “I’m not, Sam. Honest.”

  “Or because you love my house?”

  “Of course I love it, but that’s not the whole reason.”

  “Then we’re partners?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shake.”

  Instead she flung her arms around his neck and pressed herself against him. Minutes later, on the Serofoam recliner chair w. three-way mechanism, she murmured in his ear, “It’s us against everybody, Sam.”

  “Let ‘em watch out, is all I have to say.”

  “And ‘everybody’ includes those women named Jane.”

  “Violet, I swear it was never serious with them. If you could see them—”

  “I have.”

  “You have? Where? How?”

  “I’ll tell you some other time.”

  “But—”

  “Oh, hush!”

  Much later he said, “If we don’t put a lock on that bedroom door, we’re in for trouble.”

  “To hell with the lock,” Violet said.

  “ATTENTION LOUIS JOURDAN,” a voice blared.

  Sam and Violet scrambled out of the chair in astonishment.

  Blue-white light blazed through the windows of the house. There came the excited clamor of a lynch mob, the galloping crescendo of the William Tell Overture, and sound effects of the Kentucky Derby, a 4-6-4 locomotive, destroyers at battle stations, and the Saskatchewan Rapids.

  “ATTENTION LOUIS JOURDAN,” the voice brayed again.

  They ran to a window and peered out. The house was surrounded by blinding Klieg lights. Dimly they could see a horde of Jacqueries with a guillotine, television and news cameras, a ninety-piece orchestra, a battery of sound tables manned by technicians wearing earphones, a director in jodhpurs carrying a megaphone, Inspector Robinson at a microphone, and a ring of canvas deck chairs in which were seated a dozen men and women wearing theatrical makeup.

  “ATTENTION LOUIS JOURDAN. THIS IS INSPECTOR EDVARD G. ROBINSON SPEAKING. YOU ARE SURROUNDED. WE—WHAT? OH, TIME FOR A COMMERCIAL? ALL RIGHT. GO AHEAD.”

  Bauer glared at Violet. “So it was a trick.”

  “No, Sam, I swear it.”

  “Then what are they doing here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You brought them.”

  “No, Sam, no! I— Maybe I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. Maybe they trailed me when I was chasing you; but I swear I never saw them.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “No, Sam.” She began to cry.

  “You sold me out.”

  “ATTENTION LOUIS JOURDAN. ATTENTION LOUIS JOURDAN. YOU WILL RELEASE AUDREY HEPBURN AT ONCE.”

  “Who?” Bauer was confused.

  “Th-that’s me,” Violet sobbed. “It’s the name I took, just like you. Audrey Hepburn and Violet Dugan are one and the s-same person. They think you captured me; but I didn’t sell you out, S-Sam. I’m no fink.”

  “Yo
u’re leveling with me?”

  “Honest.”

  “ATTENTION LOUIS JOURDAN. WE KNOW YOU ARE THE ARTSY-CRAFTSY KID. COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP. RELEASE AUDREY HEPBURN AND COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP.”

  Bauer flung the window open. “Come and get me, copper,” he yelled.

  “WAIT UNTIL AFTER THE NETWORK I.D., WISE GUY.”

  There was a ten-second pause for network identification.

  Then a fusillade of shots rang out. Minuscule mushroom clouds arose where the fission slugs struck. Violet screamed. Bauer slammed the window down.

  “Got their ammunition damped to the lowest exponent,” he said. “Afraid of hurting the goodies in here. Maybe there’s a chance, Violet.”

  “No! Please, darling, don’t try to fight them.”

  “I can’t. I haven’t got anything to fight with.”

  The shots came continuously now. A picture fell off the wall.

  “Sam, listen to me,” she pleaded. “Give yourself up. I know it’s ninety days for burglary, but I’ll be waiting for you when you come out.”

  A window shattered.

  “You’ll wait for me, Violet?”

  “I swear it.”

  A curtain caught fire.

  “But ninety days! Three whole months!”

  “We’ll make a new life together.”

  Outside, Inspector Robinson suddenly groaned and clutched his shoulder.

  “All right,” Bauer said, “I’ll quit. But look at them, turning it into a damned Spectacular—’Gang Busters’ and ‘The Untouchables’ and ‘The Roaring Twenties.’ I’m damned if I let them get anything I’ve pinched. Wait a minute....”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Outside, the Bunco Squad began coughing, as if from tear gas.

  “Blow it all up,” Bauer said, rooting around in a sugar canister.

  “Blow it up? How?”

  “I’ve got some dynamite I lifted from Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Marx when I was after their pickax collection. Didn’t get a pickax, but I got this.” He displayed a small red stick with a clockwork top. On the side of the stick was stenciled: TNT.

  Outside, Ed (Begley) clutched his heart, smiled bravely and collapsed.

  “I don’t know how much time the fuse will give us,” Bauer said. “So when I start it, go like hell. All set?”

  “Y-yes,” she quavered.

  He snapped the fuse, which began an ominous ticking, and tossed the TNT onto the sage-green sofabed.

  “Run!”

  They charged out through the front door into the blinding light with their hands up.

  The TNT stood for thermonuclear toluene.

  “Dr. Culpepper,” Mr. Pepys said, “this is Mr. Christopher Wren. That is Mr. Robert Hooke. Pray, be seated, sir. We have begged you to wait upon the Royal Society and advantage us with your advice as the foremost physician-astrologer in London. However, we must pledge you to secrecy.”

  Dr. Culpepper nodded gravely and stole a glance at the mysterious basket resting on the table before the three gentlemen. It was covered with green felt.

  “Imprimis,” Mr. Hooke said, “the articles we shall show you were sent to the Royal Society from Oxford, where they were required of various artificers, the designs for same being supplied by the purchaser. We obtained these specimens from the said craftsmen by stealth. Secundo, the fabrication of the objects was commissioned in secret by certain persons who have attained great power and wealth at the colleges through sundry soothsayings, predictions, auguries and premonstrations.

  Mr. Wren?”

  Mr. Wren delicately lifted the felt cloth as though he feared infection. Displayed in the basket were: a neat pile of soft paper napkins; twelve wooden splinters, their heads curiously dipped in sulphur; a pair of tortoise shell spectacles with lenses of a dark, smoky color; an extraordinary pin, doubled upon itself so that the point locked in a cap; and two large Puffy flannel cloths, one embroidered HIS, and the other, HERS.

  “Dr. Culpepper,” Mr. Pepys asked in sepulchral tones, “are these the amulets of witchcraft?”

  * * *

  The Men Who Murdered Mohammed

  There was a man who mutilated history. He toppled empires and uprooted dynasties. Because of him, Mount Vernon should not be a national shrine, and Columbus, Ohio, should be called Cabot, Ohio. Because of him the name Marie Curie should be cursed in France, and no one should swear by the beard of the Prophet.

  Actually, these realities did not happen, because he was a mad professor; or, to put it another way, he only succeeded in making them unreal for himself.

  Now, the patient reader is too familiar with the conventional mad professor, undersized and overbrowed, creating monsters in his laboratory which invariably turn on their maker and menace his lovely daughter. This story isn’t about that sort of make-believe man. It’s about Henry Hassel, a genuine mad professor in a class with such better-known men as Ludwig Boltzmann ( see Ideal Gas Law), Jacques Charles, and André Marie Ampère (1775-1836).

  Everyone ought to know that the electrical ampere was so named in honor of Ampère. Ludwig Boltzmann was a distinguished Austrian physicist, as famous for his research on black-body radiation as on Ideal Gases. You can look him up in Volume Three of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, BALT to BRAI. Jacques Alexandre César Charles was the first mathematician to become interested in flight, and he invented the hydrogen balloon.

  These were real men.

  They were also real mad professors. Ampère, for example, was on his way to an important meeting of scientists in Paris. In his taxi he got a brilliant idea (of an electrical nature, I assume) and whipped out a pencil and jotted the equation on the wall of the hansom cab. Roughly, it was: dH = ipdl/r2 in which p is the perpendicular distance from P to the line of the element dl; or dH = i sin ¸ dl/r2. This is sometimes known as Laplace’s Law, although he wasn’t at the meeting.

  Anyway, the cab arrived at the Académie. Ampère jumped out, paid the driver and rushed into the meeting to tell everybody about his idea. Then he realized he didn’t have the note on him, remembered where he’d left it, and had to chase through the streets of Paris after the taxi to recover his runaway equation. Sometimes I imagine that’s how Fermat lost his famous “Last Theorem,” although Fermat wasn’t at the meeting either, having died some two hundred years earlier.

  Or take Boltzmann. Giving a course in Advanced Ideal Gases, he peppered his lectures with involved calculus, which he worked out quickly and casually in his head. He had that kind of head. His students had so much trouble trying to puzzle out the math by ear that they couldn’t keep up with the lectures, and they begged Boltzmann to work out his equations on the blackboard.

  Boltzmann apologized and promised to be more helpful in the future. At the next lecture he began, “Gentlemen, combining Boyle’s Law with the Law of Charles, we arrive at the equation pv = p0 v0 (1 + at). Now, obviously, if aSb = f (x) dxÇ(a), then pv = RT and vS f(x,y,z) dV = 0. It’s as simple as two plus two equals four.” At this point Boltzman remembered his promise. He turned to the blackboard, conscientiously chalked 2 + 2 = 4, and then breezed on, casually doing the complicated calculus in his head.

  Jacques Charles, the brilliant mathematician who discovered Charles’s Law (sometimes known as Gay-Lussac’s Law), which Boltzmann mentioned in his lecture, had a lunatic passion to become a famous paleographer—that is, a discoverer of ancient manuscripts. I think that being forced to share credit with Gay-Lussac may have unhinged him.

  He paid a transparent swindler named Vrain-Lucas 200,000 francs for holograph letters purportedly written by Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and Pontius Pilate. Charles, a man who could see through any gas, ideal or not, actually believed in these forgeries despite the fact that the maladroit Vrain-Lucas had written them in modern French on modern notepaper bearing modern watermarks. Charles even tried to donate them to the Louvre.

  Now, these men weren’t idiots. They were geniuses who paid a high price for their genius because
the rest of their thinking was other-world. A genius is someone who travels to truth by an unexpected path. Unfortunately, unexpected paths lead to disaster in everyday life. This is what happened to Henry Hassel, professor of Applied Compulsion at Unknown University in the year 1980.

  Nobody knows where Unknown University is or what they teach there. It has a faculty of some two hundred eccentrics, and a student body of two thousand misfits—the kind that remain anonymous until they win Nobel prizes or become the First Man on Mars. You can always spot a graduate of U.U. when you ask people where they went to school. If you get an evasive reply like: “State,” or “Oh, a freshwater school you never heard of,” you can bet they went to Unknown. Someday I hope to tell you more about this university, which is a center of learning only in the Pickwickian sense.

  Anyway, Henry Hassel started home from his office in the Psychotic Psenter early one afternoon, strolling through the Physical Culture arcade. It is not true that he did this to leer at the nude coeds practicing Arcane Eurhythmics; rather, Hassel liked to admire the trophies displayed in the arcade in memory of great Unknown teams which had won the sort of championships that Unknown teams win—in sports like Strabismus, Occlusion, and Botulism. (Hassel had been Frambesia singles champion three years running.) He arrived home uplifted, and burst gaily into the house to discover his wife in the arms of a man.

  There she was, a lovely woman of thirty-five, with smoky red hair and almond eyes, being heartily embraced by a person whose pockets were stuffed with pamphlets, microchemical apparatus, and a patella-reflex hammer—a typical campus character of U.U., in fact. The embrace was so concentrated that neither of the offending parties noticed Henry Hassel glaring at them from the hallway.

  Now, remember Ampère and Charles and Boltzmann. Hassel weighed one hundred and ninety pounds. He was muscular and uninhibited. It would have been child’s play for him to have dismembered his wife and her lover, and thus simply and directly achieve the goal he desired—the end of his wife’s life. But Henry Hassel was in the genius class; his mind just didn’t operate that way.