“Maybe we ought to leave,” Art said.
She said, “I want you in the most awful kind of way. So maybe we should. Have you ever seen a woman with a new baby?”
“That’s not me,” he said.
“I won’t hurt you,” she said. “I just want to be close to you; I’ll be careful. But at least let me buy your clothes for you.” She wanted to dress him and comb his hair, but she kept her hands away from him. A great expanding bloom of love and weakness loosed itself inside her, it detached itself from her and rose up. It hovered within her throat, and then it came forth in a muffled shriek; she walked hurriedly away from him, not wanting him to hear. But he was aware, in some dull fashion, so it made no difference. She could not conceal it from him, and anyhow, she thought, he did not care.
“I don’t expect you to give me what I want,” she said.
“You want a baby,” he said knowingly. “That’s what it is.”
“Don’t hate me,” she said, trying not to plead. But it did not matter what she did because she was not going to be able to get what she wanted. He did not have it to give her.
The suitcases were packed in the trunk compartment and in the back seat of the car. She shut off the gas in the kitchen of the apartment; she made certain that the faucets and lights were off and that the door was locked.
“That does it,” she said. They got into the car and she watched the apartment house disappear behind them. They stopped at the bank and then at a men’s clothing store on Market Street. When they, left the clothing store, Art drove in the direction of the freeway. He paid no attention to her he was involved in the driving.
“South?” she asked. “Do you like it better down south?”
Without answering, he made a left turn onto the freeway. Now they were above the houses and streets of the city. Everything was grimy, she thought. Rundown and dismal.
“Art,” she said, “I want to ask you something. If you weren’t married, if you didn’t have a wife and you weren’t expecting a baby, and say you were a couple of years older and I was, say, twenty-four instead of twenty-seven—” She turned to face him. But when it came down to it, she was unable to say it.
“What?” he said.
Struggling, she said, “Would you want to marry me?”
“S-s-sure,” he said, “I want to marry you now.”
“You can’t, Art,” she said. “Don’t even think about it—”
“Why not?”
“Art,” she said, “you’ll just make yourself more miserable.” In that instant she felt like crying; with effort she said, “You can’t leave Rachael. She’s a wonderful person. She’s a lot finer person than I am. I know that.”
“No,” he said.
“It’s the truth. If I were anything at all, I wouldn’t be here with you. I’d have broken it off after that first night. But I don’t have the strength I’m too weak, Art.” And it was true, she thought, it really was true; she could not deny it. “It’s just delaying it. Sooner or later we have to break it off. I keep telling myself: we had to now, right now. I’m too old and you’re too young. But we keep on going along. Someday we’ll have to pay for this.”
“No,” he said, “why do we have to stop?”
“We’ll want to. This isn’t healthy or right. There’s nothing really good between us.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
He listened to her; he heard what she was saying. But he did not agree. Now, turning, he saw her lips, dark and full, moving close to his. She was rising toward him.
Maybe it was true, he thought.
Her lips tingled against his own. With her gloved hand, she touched his face, pressing her fingers to him avidly. Her nostrils flared; out of the corner of his eye, he saw the trembling beneath the layers of powder and lipstick, the quivering of her lips and chin. She smelled like raspberries, a hot, sweet smell, a sticky smell. Her veil was up; she had lifted it aside to kiss him.
And the beautiful long legs, he thought. Nothing in this life was permanent. No sensation, not the most vivid nor the most meaningful. Not even this. She was right. The feel of them was gone already, and one day even the sight would be gone. And, he thought, someday, in a few decades, the legs themselves, the superb body, the arms and face and dark hair and waist would perish and vanish and become ashes.
And he would not remember them because he would be dead, too. All the intricate working parts would stop working; the joints would dissolve and the fluids would dry up and it would be dust, dust.
He thought: If this could go, then anything could and would go. Nothing could be saved. Nothing survived. Where was all the talk, the music and fun and cars and places? Here went the greatest of the sensibilities, here went civilization itself in its blue suit and veil and heels and matching purse and gloves. Thousands of years had gone into the forming of this object. The hell with the buildings and cities and documents and ideas, the armies and ships and societies. They had persons prepared to lament for them. He lamented this. He thought: I was out to get this as soon as I laid eyes on it. And I did get it, and I did have it, and it was every bit as good as I had imagined.
In the vicinity of Redwood City, he left the freeway and crossed to El Camino Real. Near Menlo Park, at the side of the highway, was a motel.
Why not here? he thought.
Starting, Pat raised her head and looked out. “Are you stopping?”
“This looks like what we want,” he said.
“A motel,” she said, reading the sign. “The Four Aces Motel.”
“It looks clean,” he said.
“I’ve never stayed at a motel. We always had the cabin if we wanted to go somewhere. How far is this from San Francisco?”
“Around twenty miles,” Art said.
When he had brought the car up onto the gravel shoulder and had parked, she got out and looked back in the direction they had come.
To the north was San Francisco, too far now to see, but nonetheless there. She felt its closeness. The line of office buildings, like two-dimensional cardboard cutouts, assembled and pasted up against the late-afternoon haze. The air was dry and tasted of cinders. She sniffed; she inhaled the presence of trucks and cars, the sky-borne wastes from factories.
Into San Francisco went concrete ramps, the freeway system over which they had come. The ramps were high off the ground, elevated, remote; the cars whizzed along, and the lines of traffic divided, passed in various directions, passed under the black directional signs with letters as large as the cars themselves. To her this sense of the city, this view of it, was disturbing and at the same time exhilarating. To be here, on the edge of the city . . . to be camped just outside, not in it but beside it, close enough to enter if she wanted, far enough out so that she was away; she was free, on her own, not bound or contained by it.
The trucks rumbled past. The huge diesel trucks. Under her feet the pavement shook.
Ah, she thought, breathing in the air. The freedom, the sense of motion, the trucks, the cars. Everything was on its way somewhere. Transition, she thought; there was nothing stable here. Nothing fixed. She could be anything she wanted. This was the edge.
16
The blue prewar Plymouth halted by the curb, and Ferde Heinke hopped out and ran up the path and down the stairs and knocked on the door of the basement apartment. A light was on behind the shade of the living room window, and he knew either Rachel or Art was home. The door opened and Rachael, looking wan and listless, said, “Hi, Heinke.” Always shy in her presence, he scuffed his feet and said, “What say. Is Art around?”
“No,” she said.
“I sort of wanted to pick up the dummies.” She did not appear to understand, so he explained, “The dummies for Phantasmagoria; they’re around someplace. Art was working on them.”
“Oh,” she said “yes. He asked me to go over the spelling.” She held the door open and Ferde Heinke entered. “I’ll get them.”
Ill at ease, he waited for her. The apartment had a deserted quality, a l
ack of life. While he was standing around, he realized that a man was sitting in the corner with his legs stuck out, a grown man in a suit. At first he thought the man was asleep, and then he realized that the man was awake and looking at him.
“Hi,” Ferde Heinke murmured.
The man said, “Hi, Ferde.”
Recognizing Jim Briskin, he said, “How are you?”
“Not so good,” Jim Briskin said, and that was all.
Rachael appeared with the dummies. “Here,” she said, giving them. He accepted the dummies for his science fiction magazine, thanked her, and went off up the steps to the path.
Behind him Rachael shut the door of the apartment. He continued along the path, past the iron gate, to the car. At the wheel Joe Mantila said, “You didn’t stay long, anyhow.”
“He wasn’t home,” Ferde said, getting into the car.
They stopped at the lithograph shop, which was still open. The man behind the counter, fat and wearing suspenders and a colored shirt with the sleeves rolled up, inspected the dummies. His stubby fingers riffled the pages as Ferde Heinke and Joe Mantila stood circumspectly a short distance away.
“You want it folded and stapled, don’t you?” The man scratched estimates with a ballpoint pen. “How many copies?”
Ferde Heinke told him around two hundred, and the man wrote that down. He also wrote complicated figures about the number of pages, size of pages, and cryptic letters suggesting the weight of paper, the type of chemical process.
“Can we go look at how it works?” Ferde asked, interested as always in seeing printing processes.
“Sure,” the man said, smoking a malacrino cigarette. “Just keep out of the way.”
They wandered past the counter and saw the negatives of several dummies from local corporations, and then the actual photographing equipment. Next door was more interesting material; the Rube Goldberg folding-and-cutting machine was clanking away, and hundreds of pamphlets—all alike—were rattling down an inclined belt. The title of the pamphlet was “Tungsten in Time of War,” and it was put out by a factory in South San Francisco. The pamphlets hung astraddle the moving belt, and at the bottom they were mechanically collected into a pile. The room banged with the noise of the conveyer; metal arms reached and groped.
“It looks like a Martian,” Heinke said. “Or like Abe Merritt’s ‘The Metal Monster.’ I have that in the original edition; it was published in the October 1927 issue of Science and Invention under the title ‘The Metal Emperor.’ ”
“Yeah,” Joe Mantila said, not listening.
“Nobody hardly knows that,” Heinke went on, above the uproar.
“Where was Art?” Joe Mantila said.
“I don’t know. He was out.”
“If I was married to a girl like her,” Joe Mantila said, “I sure wouldn’t be out.”
“That’s no lie,” Ferde Heinke said.
They got their estimate and left the bindery. As they walked back to the car, Joe Mantila noticed a flat manila folder under Heinke’s arm.
“Didn’t you give him that?”
“No,” Heinke said.
“What is it?”
“A story,” Heinke said, becoming instantly cautious. “What kind of story?”
“Science fiction, of course. I wrote it all last week. It runs five hundred words.” He clutched the folder with both hands. “It’s pretty good.”
“Let’s see it,” Joe Mantila said.
An evasiveness crept over Heinke. “No soap.”
“What’s it for?”
“I’m going to submit it to Astounding.”
“If they print it, everybody’ll read it.” Mantila stuck out his hand. “Let’s have it, come on.”
Heinke stalled. “It stinks.”
“What’s it called?”
“ ‘The Peeping Man.’ ”
“What’s that mean?”
Heinke struggled. “That’s the lead character. He’s a mutant, with psionic powers. He can see into alternate Earths. The whole world is destroyed and in ruins, and he sees Earths in which there was no war. It’s not exactly original, but it has a new twist.”
Joe Mantila grabbed the folder from Heinke. “I’ll give it back to you tomorrow; you can submit it then.”
“Give that back, you shit.” Heinke snatched it angrily. “Come on, goddamn you.” The two of them struggled, during which the folder was dropped, stepped on, picked up, dropped again. Joe Mantila tripped Heinke, and Heinke fell sprawling, still trying to catch hold of his folder.
“You!” Heinke yelled from the pavement.
“Why don’t you want me to see it?” Mantila said, gathering up the crumpled sheets. “What’s there that you don’t want anybody to find out?”
Sullenly Heinke climbed to his feet. “When you show things to people you know”—he brushed off his jeans—“they always say it’s about them.”
“Is it about me?”
Heinke plodded along toward the car. “A writer has to gather his materials where he finds them.”
Joe Mantila gave him a swift kick in the rump. “If it’s about me, I’ll deball you.”
“And I’ll sue you for assault and battery, and for theft of my manuscript. How about that?” As he got into the Plymouth, he said, “It’s not about you.”
“Who then?”
After, a long time Heinke muttered, “It’s about Rachael.”
Joe Mantila snorted. “Goddamn, that’s a laugh. You been thinking about her?”
“It’s about her and Art.”
“No kidding.” Seated behind the wheel, Joe Mantila began to read the manuscript:
‘THE PEEPING MAN’
A Science Fiction Story By FERDE R. HEINKE
Col. Throckmorton’s glance turned involuntarily in the direction of the triple-locked chamber around which armed soldiers in uniform with blasters kept a 24 hour vigil. No man had gone into that room. Earth’s last hope was in that room. And the door was sealed.
What thoughts went through the Col.’s head? There was no turning back. They had gone too far. The room contained Earth’s one hope for salvation from the ruins to which the 3-rd world war between Russia and America had brought it.
“It’s eerie,” the Col. trembled. “Is he demon or a god? Sometimes I don’t know which. I tell you, Lt., I haven’t closed my eyes in sleep in days. I hesitate to trust the fate of mankind to that Being. We know nothing about him, Lt. How can homo sapiens understand homo superior? It’s beyond comprehension.”
“But perhaps he can save us.” The Lt.’s voice was quiet as he spoke. “If he wants to.”
* * * * *
In the room sat a man. Head bowed, the man was thinking. His name—Ronald Manchester. He was 23 years old and the Psionic power within him had flowered at last to full bloom. But he was not thinking of that. He was thinking how he was the most powerful human in the world—yet not a human but an incredibly unique godlike superman who could save Earth. He was seeing past the mundane world in which ordinary man lived, he was seeing into an almost unbelievable other universe whose beauty was hidden to all save him.
What did he see in that other universe? For to him it was manifest, alternate presents of other possible Earths that had not been wrecked by man’s greed. They were inside his head. His mind was a space—time continuum that led from one Earth to the next, and his frontal lobe was trained on that miraculous salvation which he alone could see. Beautiful trees he saw and flowers, a great garden very much similar to the Garden of Eden. It was unspoiled by greedy man. Animals lay down with other animals. People walked around in peace and friendship. There was no strife.
Ron saw all this and he was sad, for he knew that man had destroyed his own world. Would man destroy this vertible Garden of Paradise? The heart of the superman was troubled. He knew the greed of homo sapiens, he was the beginning of a new race who lacked that selfish greed. And he had been imprisoned by soldiers because they hated and didn’t understand anything different. He had been c
hased by a howling mob of mass men. He had been stoned and thrown sticks at. Beaten, troubled, he had at the end crept away from the haunts of man. He could not endure among them because he could not kill. He lacked the ability to destroy. He was like God. He loved everybody. He wanted to be friends.
One day be was sitting alone in his cell and he looked into a different other world of such breathtaking beauty that nobody could imagine it. Nobody could believe it existed, it was so fair and untouched. Even the man of tomorrow was stunned and for a time silent. He trembled and grew cold all over as his eyes made it out. A lovely forest pool rippled in the prim-evil glade. Animals besported themselves under mountains that rose against the sky. The sky was star-studded and a moon of arresting beauty hung there beaming down.
Suddenly he saw something, a shape moving among the trees. He looked more closely. He saw a woman.
The woman was a goddess. A large catlike lion whose fur was green instead of the usual was sitting with her at the edge of an untroubled forest pool. The woman stared reflectively down at the water and every now and then dabbled in it sending ripples in ever widening circles. The woman was nude. Her breasts rose in two cones that ended in pink roses that he saw with almost awe. On her face was a sad look as if she was thinking.
Then one day just before they were going to come and shoot him the beautiful woman appeared. A blazing circle of blinding light appeared in the center of the cell and there was the woman.
“Come,” she whispered. Her eyes were large and blue and her lips were red. Her hair was a cascade of black down her bare neck and shoulders, her legs shone long and bare in the light of the flaming circle in which she moved. “I will save you,” were the words her lovely lips formed. “I will lead you to a world in which you can live.”
“Why?” was the other’s instant query. Col. Peterson might possibly appear at any instant.
“I have fallen in love with you. I know your plight, superior mutant. But—hurry!” She seemed to glance into the viewscreen attached to her bare wrist. “Soldiers are coming, if I’m to save you I must as soon as possible.” Their telepathic brains met and he saw what he had to do. He shinnied up the wall to the light-globe. From it he took the platinum atomic fihiment (an invention of the future that operated without power) and ripping wires from the walls he took his belt buckle and brought out the concealed microscopic tools he carried. He quickly made a machine under her telepathic direction.
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