Collected Fiction

by Theodore R. Cogswell

  “I quit!” she said angrily. “I ain’t going to work in no zoo. That pet of yours has gone through fifty boxes of SQUIGGLES in the last twenty-four hours.”

  “What’s the matter?” asked Panzel anxiously.

  Without a word she went over to the closet where the corporation’s demonstration spudget was kept, and dramatically threw open the door. Instead of a twitter of welcome from a tiny glittering dragon, a five hundred pound lizard came wandering into the room, croaked affectionately, and tried to climb into Panzel’s lap.

  “And that ain’t all,” said the secretary as she started toward the door. “Its voice is changing. All morning it’s been trying to sing bass.” She shuddered. “Me, I don’t want to be around when it finally gets its full growth.”

  After the door slammed there was a long moment of silence and Panzel slowly reached for his desk com.

  “The spudget,” said the tinny voice from Central Information, “sometimes known as the dwarf huxle, is a small herbivorous reptile . . .”

  “I know all that,” interrupted Panzel in a shaking voice. “What I want to know is why it’s called the dwarf huxle. The one I’ve got is up to five hundred pounds and it’s still growing.”

  “Its dwarfed size is believed to be due to the absence of an important vitamin complex in its only food, the whortle leaf. This complex has been tentatively identified as K-9, a growth complex essential to reptiles.”

  Panzel looked at Arnot and Arnot looked at Panzel and then they both looked at the box of SQUIGGLES. The large K-9 printed in red on its front seemed to wink at them.

  Herman Panzel, former president of the Intergalactic Breakfast Food Corporation, and Reuban Arnot, former executive vice-president and treasurer of the same organization, having just squandered their last deciuniv on a cup of coffee substitute, sat disconsolately in a small dingy cafeteria down by the spaceport of a small dingy planet, half way across the galaxy, waiting for something to happen. Nothing was.

  “At least we’re alive,” said Arnot. “They wanted to lynch us.”

  “We won’t be for long unless we make some arrangement that involves a meal once in a while,” said Panzel. “Let’s face it, we’re either going to have to go to work or starve, and much as I dislike the former . . .” His voice trailed off as he spotted a morning news-facsimile abandoned on an adjoining table. He went over and got it. Bringing it back, he spread it open to the Help Wanted section and began to pour through the ads.

  “Find something light,” suggested Arnot. “I’ve got a weak back.”

  “That isn’t all that’s weak,” snorted the other. “It was your bright idea about those spudget eggs that got us into all this. Now let’s see you get us out.”

  “Give me the paper then,” said Arnot and pulled it over to him. There was a moment of silence as he considered and then rejected offer after offer. Suddenly his eyes lit up.

  “This is for us!”

  “ ‘Would you like to make 150 univs in just half an hour? T.W. did.’ ”

  “Go ahead,” said Panzel eagerly. “This sounds like what we’ve been looking for.”

  Arnot let out a sudden whistle of amazement and then said in a strangled voice, “Thwilbert!”

  “What?”

  “Look!”

  Sure enough, it was Thwilbert, in fact a pair of Thwilberts. Two pictures stood at the head of a quarter page advertisement. One was of a weak emaciated lizard who looked just like the one who had shambled into their office so many months before. It was captioned BEFORE. The other was of a sleek and handsome saurian, scales iridescent instead of a dirty gray, sunken chest now filled out with bulging muscles, and an alert air of vigorous self-confidence instead of the old diffidence. It was captioned AFTER. Above the pictures stretched a banner caption which proclaimed, FROM A 36 POUND WEAKLING TO THE GALAXY’S MOST PERFECTLY DEVELOPED REPTILE. Underneath it continued, “Rejecting old inefficient substitutes, millions of sentient saurians are now demanding . . .” Arnot’s voice choked off. “Read me the rest,” he said. “All of a sudden I can’t see so good.”

  Panzel took the paper and continued.

  “. . . millions of sentient saurians are now demanding SOUIGGLES, the wonder food that contains the magic reptilian growth element, K-9. Valuable franchises now open. Send 10 univs to Thwilbert Whutzle, President, Intergalactic Breakfast Food Company, Hun, for complete information.”

  There was a long silence and then with a note of almost paternal pride, Herman Panzel said softly, “And he’s making them pay for the privilege of being taken! Arnot, we’re getting old.”

  “But he’s not taking them,” said Arnot. “The stuff works.” He hesitated for a moment and then looked back at the advertisement. “Do you think he’d let us in for nothing? One fifty in half an hour sounds mighty good to me.”

  “Could be,” said Herman Panzel rising decisively to his feet “After all, we’re the ones who gave him his start.”

  THIMGS

  Remember Threesie (F&SF, January, 1956)? Or Impact with the Devil (November, 1956)? If so you’ll recall Ted Cogswell as a particularly ingenious expert at twisting the tail of a standard fantasy theme by revealing unexpected, yet wholly logical implications. The device which he brightly rearranges this time is that of the mysterious small shop which sells strange and unaccountable things . . . and sometimes even

  “. . . and the ground was frozen solid. It took them two hours before they reached Hawkins’ coffin.

  “ ‘See,’ grunted the coroner as he threw back the lid, ‘he’s still there. I told you you were seeing things.’

  “ ‘I’ve got to be sure! said Van Dusen thickly, and grabbing a smoking lantern from beside the grave, he thrust it down into the open casket.

  “A shrill scream tore through the night air and he slumped over—dead! Instead of the heavy features of the man he had killed, Reginald Van Dusen saw HIMSELF!”

  There was a sudden ripple of discordant music from the loudspeaker and then the unctuous voice of The Ghoul broke in.

  “The coroner called it suicide. And in a way I suppose it was . . .” His voice trailed off in a throaty chuckle. “The moral? Only this, dear friends, if you should ever be walking through a strange part of town and come upon a tittle shop you never saw before, especially a little shop with a sign in the window that says SHOTTLE BOP, WE SELL THRINGS, or something equally ridiculous, remember THE CASE OF THE CLUTTERED COFFIN and run, don’t walk, to the nearest morgue. HA HA HA HA HA.”

  As the maniacal laughter trailed away, the background music surged up and then skittered out of hearing to make way for the announcer. He only managed to get three words out before Albert Blotz, owner, manager, and sole agent of World Wide Investigations, reached over and turned off the little radio that stood on the window sill beside his desk.

  “Boy,” he said, “that was really something. Eh, Janie?”

  The little crippled girl behind the typist’s desk at the other side of the dingy office looked up. “What?”

  “The program. Wasn’t it something?”

  “Beats me,” she said. “I wasn’t listening. Somebody has to get some work done around here.” She pulled a letter out of her correspondence basket and waved it in the air. “What about this Harris letter? It’s been sitting here for a month. After spending the guy’s dough the least you can do is write him an answer.”

  The fat man looked blank. “Harris? Who’s he?”

  “The fellow in Denver who wanted you to investigate everybody in New York who had had a big and unexpected windfall within the past year.”

  Blotz snorted impatiently. “That nut! Aw, tell him anything.”

  “Give me a for-instance.”

  “Tell him . . .” Blotz leaned heavily back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. “Tell him that World Wide Investigations assigned its best operatives to the case and that in sixteen cases out of twenty . . . No, better make it twenty-nine out of thirty-four. That way he’ll really feel he’s getting his money’
s worth.”

  “All right, in twenty-nine out of thirty-four cases what?”

  “Don’t rush me.” Blotz pulled a bottle of cheap blend out of his drawer and eyed the remaining inch regretfully.

  “You know the doctor said your heart wouldn’t take much more of that.”

  The fat man shrugged and tossed the liquor down. As his eyes wandered around the office in search of inspiration, they came to rest on the radio.

  “That’s it!” he exclaimed. “What’s it?”

  “The Ghoul! For once crime pays somebody but the actors and the script writers. Tell Harris that in whatever it was out of whatever it was cases, the individuals concerned visited small shops they had never noticed before and were sold objects whose nature they refused to reveal by a strange old man.” Janie looked up from her shorthand pad. “Is that all?”

  “No, we need a clincher.” He thought for a minute. “How’s this? In each case when they went back and tried to find the shop it had disappeared.”

  “You ought to try writing radio scripts yourself.”

  “Too much work,” said Blotz. “I like the mail order detective business better.” He looked regretfully at the empty bottle and then back at Janie. “While you’re at it you might as well tell that yokel that for five bills World Wide will find the shop for him and buy him one of those dingbats.”

  Janie’s lips tightened. “Doesn’t your conscience ever bother you?” Blotz let out a nasty laugh. “If it weren’t for the suckers I’d have to work for a living. This way it’s a breeze. Some old dame in Podunk hasn’t heard from her kid since he took off for the big city and gets worried about him. He doesn’t answer her letters and then one day she sees my ad in the Podunk Gazette and sends me fifty bucks to go look for him. How come you asked?”

  “Because mine bothers me. Every day I work here I feel dirtier.” Blotz grinned. “Then quit.”

  “I’ve been thinking of that. At least I’d be able to sleep nights.”

  “But you wouldn’t be eating so regular. Face it, kid—nobody is going to hire a gimpy sparrow like you unless he’s a big-hearted guy like me. And there ain’t many around.”

  Janie looked from him to the pair of worn crutches that leaned against the wall.

  “Yeah,” she said as she started punching out the letter to Harris. “Yeah, there sure ain’t.”

  Mr. Blotz’s pulse was finally back to normal but he still couldn’t tear his eyes away from the crisp green slip of paper that bore the magic figures $500.00 and the name of a Denver bank.

  “He bit,” he said in an awed voice. “He really bit. May wonders, and suckers, never cease.” He rubbed his fat hands together nervously. “I’d better get this to the bank and cash it before something happens.”

  Half an hour later he was back, carefully stacking bottles of bonded bourbon into his desk drawers. When they were arranged to his satisfaction, he leaned back and hoisted his feet on the desk.

  “Take a letter to Harris.”

  Janie obediently took out her shorthand pad.

  “Usual heading. Eh . . . oh, something like this. ‘Pursuant to your instructions, my agents in all the major cities have been instructed to check for little shops they don’t remember having seen before. They are to be especially alert for basement stores with dusty signs in the window with wordings like WE SELL THRINGS or SHOTTLE BOP. Upon discovery they are to enter immediately. If a small aged man appears from the rear of the shop and presses them to buy something, they are to do so. Once they leave they are to make careful note of the shop’s location and walk around the block. If when they return the shop has disappeared, they are immediately to send their purchase to you.”

  Blotz paused, took a bottle out of his drawer, and uncapped it. “Put something in about unexpectedly heavy expenses at the end. If we play this right we may be able to tap him again. In the meantime we’d better have something ready to send him just in case.”

  “What kind of a something?” asked Janie.

  “Who cares? Go over on Third and prowl some of those junk shops. Pick up something small—that’ll keep the postage down—and old.”

  The little secretary pulled herself painfully to her feet, draped a threadbare coat over her humped back, and took her crutches from beside her typing desk.

  “Just don’t go over a dollar,” added Blotz quickly.

  She started toward the door and then turned and stood blinking at him through thick lensed glasses that made her eyes appear twice their normal size.

  “Well?” he barked.

  “I haven’t got a dollar.”

  With a pained expression on his face he fumbled in an old coin purse. He reluctantly pulled out a quarter, then another, and then finally another.

  “Here,” he said, “see what you can do for seventy-five cents.”

  Blotz was deep in his bottle when Janie finally came hobbling back and placed a small paper-wrapped package on his desk.

  “Any change?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “It was funny,” she ventured. “I mean after what you said about shottles and thrings—”

  “Well, open it up,” he interrupted. “Let’s see what Harris is getting for his money.”

  “—all this shop had in front,” she went on hesitantly, “was just one sign. It said: thimgs.”

  “Poor bastard that owns it, I guess. Some people have funny names,” said Blotz. “Go on—open it.”

  With fingers that trembled slightly she tore off the brown paper wrapping. Inside was a small corroded brass cylinder that on first glance looked like an old plumbing fixture.

  “You paid seventy-five cents for that?” said Blotz in annoyance. “They saw you coming, kid.” He picked it up and turned it over in his hand. On second look he realized that there was more to it than he had first thought. Through the heavy green patina he could make out a series of strange characters. At one end was a knob that seemed to be made out of a slightly different metal than the cylinder proper.

  “I give up, what is it?” he asked. Janie shuddered. “I wish I knew,” she said. “I wish I knew.”

  Blotz frowned and took hold of the knob. He was about to twist it when a sudden thought occurred to him. It might explode or do something equally unpleasant.

  “Here, you try it,” he said to Janie. “It seems to be stuck.”

  She reached out a trembling hand and then jerked it back. “I’m afraid. The man in the shop said—”

  “Take it!” he barked. “When I tell you to do something, you do it. And no back talk!”

  In frightened obedience she took the cylinder and twisted the knob. For a moment nothing happened, and then with an odd flickering she vanished. Before Blotz had a chance to react properly to the sudden emptiness of the office, she was back. At least a not very reasonable facsimile was.

  She might have passed for her sister, there was a strong family resemblance, but the pathetic twist in her spine was gone and so was its accompanying hump. She was thirty pounds heavier, and all the pounds were in the right places. She was—and the realization hit Blotz like a hammer blow as he stood gaping at her—one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen.

  The first thing she did was to pull off her thick-lensed glasses and throw them in the wastebasket. The first thing Blotz did was to grab a bottle out of his desk. He took several long gulps, shook his head, and shuddered.

  “It’s when you’re half drunk that things get twisty,” he mumbled. “I’m just going to sit here with my eyes shut until I’m drunk enough to get back to normal.” He counted to twenty slowly as the fireball in his stomach expanded and trickled a semi-sense of wellbeing through his extremities. Then, as the nightmare slowly dispelled, he let out a long sigh of relief and opened his eyes.

  She was still there!

  There was a strange smile on her face that he didn’t like.

  “Where . . .? What . . .?” Blotz’s vocal chords stopped operating and he just sat there and quivered. She laid the little bronze c
ylinder down on the desk in front of him.

  “Here,” she said softly. “You can go there too if you want to.”

  “Where?” whispered Blotz.

  “I don’t know. It’s someplace else, a tremendous place with rooms filled with whirring machines. There was a man there and he asked what I wanted and I told him. So he did a little reediting and here I am.”

  “Magic,” said Blotz hoarsely. “Black magic, that’s what it is. But . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “But you don’t believe in magic.” Is that what you were going to say?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “But I do. People like me have to. It’s the only way we can keep going. But magic has a funny way of working. Do you know what I was thinking after the little man asked me what I wanted?”

  Blotz moistened his thick lips and shook his head as if hypnotized.

  “I was thinking that in spite of the way things look, there’s just one thing you can always count on.”

  “Yeah?”

  “People always end up getting what they got coming.”

  Blotz let out a half hysterical laugh. “Then where’s mine? Why does a guy with my brains have to scrabble out a living with a two-bit outfit like this?” He raved on for a minute and then got control of himself. The liquor helped. After he’d taken a couple more gulps from his bottle he still couldn’t look what had happened squarely in the face, but with the abatement of the first shock came a gradual return of the old sense of mastery that had made him hire Janie rather than some less experienced but more feminine—and amiable—typist.

  As an awareness of the physical changes that had taken place began to grow, he found his eyes sliding greedily over her. The change hadn’t extended her dress. The garment that had been more than adequate covering for the twisted and scrawny little body she had occupied up until a few minutes before threatened to split at the thrusting of the rich new curves that strained against it.

  “You know, Janie,” he said slowly, “seeing as it was my money that got you what you got, that kind of makes me the copyright owner.” Grabbing hold of the edge of his desk, he pulled himself to his feet and lurched toward her. When he put one flabby arm around her, she didn’t pull away. Emboldened, he let his hand slip down and begin to fumble with the buttons on her blouse.