Freddy took a book from his bag. It was a rather serious book with which he intended to put himself to sleep, Painting and Reality by Gilson, but it had one of those false jackets slipped over it. You know the kind, Safe-cracking for Pleasure and Profit, Arson Can Be Fun, Care and Feeding of the Polecat, Seduction for the Anxious Amateur. The jacket of this book was Brain-Surgery Self-Taught. Freddy read it and dozed till there was a tug on his arm. It was the fifth man.
“I beg your pardon, Doctor,” that fifth man said, “but that's a title with which I am not familiar. I am Doctor Jurgens, a general practitioner, not at all a brain specialist. I am interested, however, in anything at all that pertains to our profession.”
“O'Claire, Doctor O'Claire, with an O, not an A-u,” said Freddy. “It is a real pleasure, sir.”
“I sometimes believe, Doctor O'Claire, that we general practitioners get a larger picture of the world than do you more talented specialists.”
“Yes, I'm sure that you do, Doctor Jurgens.”
“Yet I must make a confession before I proceed further. I am lately disbarred. I am appealing the action. I have done nothing wrong. But there is a penalty for doing things differently. You need not continue to talk to me if you do not wish to.”
“I'm quite willing to talk to you,” said Foley-O'Claire.
“Thank you. It was for an unorthodox paper of mine that I have been disbarred. ‘The Precursors.’ You may have read it.”
“I'm a little behind in that department, Doctor Jurgens. There's so much literature in our profession that, as they say, it's very difficult for a man to remain abreast. I'm sure there's a copy of it at my home office; I'll make a point to read it. What is the main thesis of it?”
“That there is a Precursor, a forerunner to every great disaster, to every great epidemic, to every high happening of every sort. You will recall that there was a failure of the apple crop the year before the great Gothic assault on Rome, a partial but quite serious failure of the grape the year before the battle of Tours, and the pomegranate harvest was far below average the season before the great Persian attack on Attica. We might even couple the crop failures with the great militancy happenings: cabbages and Crecy, millet and Malplaquet, turnips and Tourcoing.”
“Watermelons and Waterloo?”
“O'Claire, I'm thunderstruck! That was right under my nose all the time and I never guessed it. Yet it's a fact that 1814 was a poor watermelon year in the United States, in Africa, and in Russia. I had always equated the quince crop with Waterloo, but you have opened my eyes.”
“But isn't this a rather odd field of interest for a doctor?”
“Oh, this isn't my field. I only cite these historical commonplaces by way of analogy. You can find Precursors in the field of mineralogy, in literature, in politics, in weather. My field, of course, is Precursors in the field of medicine.”
“Ah, now you fascinate me, Doctor Jurgens.”
“To every great epidemic, O'Claire, there is a Precursor, apparently unrelated, impossible of connection, yet infallible as to prediction. When the Precursor appears, then the more serious epidemic will follow as surely as season follows season. I maintain that if these were correctly analyzed, then the great epidemics might be prevented. These run in advance, sometimes a year or more in advance, and this gives time for worldwide precaution.
“For an instance, a full year before an outbreak of meningitis in an area, there will be a minor, barely reported, outbreak of cotton-mouth accompanied by quite small irruptions on the inner gums. I cannot prove the connection. Medically there would seem to be none. But the coincidence is so uniform as to be more than coincidence.”
“Yes, I had noted it myself,” said Foley-O'Claire, “but perhaps I hadn't assigned to it the significance it deserved.”
There are people who do not like to talk to crackpots, who are bored with boors, who shy off from fools. Foley had none of their reluctance. His profession was gathering information. He knew that fools talk on while wise men hold their tongues, that he could get more information from one fool than from seven sages, that if any man talks long enough he will say something. Besides, he had nothing else to do.
“There is another striking example or coincidence,” Doctor Jurgens continued. “Two years before every outbreak of influenza (which always varies as to type) there is a heavy outbreak of erythema, or rash, which also varies as to type. Again there can be no medical connection, but there is some connection.”
“It would seem that the Precursors, the predictors, could be crossed up,” Foley-O'Claire said. “An epidemic depends on contagion and contagion depends on many tenuous threads easily broken. The Precursor could be made a liar.”
“I hope so, O'Claire, for that is my mission. I cannot, however, find where it has ever been a liar. I'm trying to make a liar out of it now in one of its most horrible predictions. I'm going to the capital with my appeal. If I cannot make a liar out of it, then there is something unnatural about the Precursors. It will mean that they are of another realm, that they are real predictors of the future, that the future cannot be altered. I have made a personal adversary out of this Precursor. And such very small blisters they are!
“Between the fingers, O'Claire, right at the base. They itch a little, and then they are gone. There's not one person in a hundred who really notices them or seeks medication for them.”
“I had such just last week,” said Foley-O'Claire. It was true. He had.
“Half the nation had such just last week, O'Claire, and now they've forgotten them. They've forgotten them so completely that I wonder how it happened to be noted the other times. Yet it was noted, and clearly, but in so random and offhand a manner that it seems a miracle. Boccaccio mentions it, Defoe mentions it, the Welshire Chronicles mention it twice. Everywhere do we find the clear account of this peculiar between-the finger itching coming about a year before the Thing itself.”
“The Thing? What is it, Doctor Jurgens?”
“Oh, the Plague. It'll be here in the present year, you know, unless of course I can persuade the Federal to take steps, just what steps I don't know, to stop it. Well, good night, Doctor. My time is upon me. The natural cycle, you know.”
“Oh? What is that, Doctor Jurgens?”
“The thirty-four hour cycle, the natural cycle. I fall into it whenever I'm taking long journeys. You have never noticed why we do not want to go to bed at night? Or why we do not want to get up in the mornings? How can we be expected to adjust to the cycle in just a few thousand years? Wherever mankind originated, we know it was not on this world. It was on some planet body with an equivalent thirty-four hour day. This may narrow the hunt for our original home on that day after tomorrow when we really go looking for such things. Good night.”
“Tut, Doctor Jurgens, tut,” said Foley-O'Claire. “That's scientific heresy you talk.”
“Doctor O'Claire, it has been said that a heresy is the revenge of a forgotten truth. I say that every monstrous appearance or movement is the revenge of a strength or variety unused, of a vitality untapped in us. And it looks like a good year for monsters.”
Doctor Jurgens flung himself into a deep seat and went to snoozing. Then Foley also napped a few of those quick naps that may be taken only on trains. There was a special element in them for him now, though. One who has been touched by a brain-weave will no longer snooze or dream alone. He will do it out of the vortex.
What the mind of the brain-weave was doing tonight (and it was the mutated Jim Bauer mind that was dominant in it; the rest of them were tired) was killing people, or causing them to kill themselves. Jim Bauer, and the brain-weave through him, seemed to have selective hatreds. He killed a dozen of them. He was killing the thirteenth. “I wouldn't have killed some of those,” Fred Foley said to himself, and also said back through the entire brain-weave, “Some of them are pretty good people, some of them are a lot better than Jim Bauer. It's going to be a lopsided world if they keep killing that sort of people.”
> The thirteenth man didn't much want to go. He sat at a table and scrawled on paper, I do not kill myself. I have no reason. This is dream-stupid. Even if I wished, I have no gun. And now I have a gun before me, and where did it come from? But I don't know how to shoot it. I never shot a gun in my life. But yes, now I know how to shoot it. There was a lot of pressure in that brain-weave, icy elegance, green-mottled humor, helical passion, cinnamon-colored dying, ashen weeping of dead Letitia, danger-incitement of live Letitia who wondered in her broken sleep what sort of living nightmare she had been gobbled up by, Klee-fish and the comical death-bubbles, O'Claire's octopus escaped from the fountain and loose in the world, patricks alerted, and the third stage of the world perhaps beginning.
Something else through the brain-weave that the weave itself didn't know how to monitor, two young men who had become kindred by being touched by the tentacles. Real blood flowing on the border now in savage night fighting. Thirteen of Miguel's men killed in a busted raid, and thirty joining him to replace them. How is a man going to sleep with that stuff going through his head?
Foley had to change trains in Kansas City. He went to the telegraph office. No, he didn't want that stuff to go by wire, though. He phoned Tankersley and got that man up. He gave the names and stations of thirteen prominent men who had just died or suicided.
“You'll vouch for it?” Tankersley asked him.
“I'll vouch for it, Tank.”
Then Freddy gave him an eyewitness account of bloody doings on the border.
“You're sure this happened, Freddy?”
“Most of it did. The rest of it will happen momentarily. No use waiting for it to happen to print it, not if it's sure. Rely on me, Mr. Tankersley.”
“Where are you, Freddy?”
“Kansas City.”
“How come you sound so funny?”
“I'm half asleep. Print it, Tankersley, just as soon as you can.”
And Tankersley would print it just as soon as he could. It had to come right or he was dead. And it did come right. It all happened.
A mother put an eleven-year-old daughter on the train at Kansas City. “Don't blow it, kid,” the mother said. “Ain't no way, Charley,” the daughter answered. So it had become a byword of the times. Everything was coming right up to the point of perfection, rich harvests abounding, pearls beyond price to be dug from every field, all well with the country and the world, no hurry, we were just about there. Any danger of busting it or blowing it finally? Not on the popular level there wasn't. “Ain't no way to blow it, Charley,” the people said.
Freddy read two pages, then dozed till there was a tug on his arm, a blue-eyed tug (Freddy, touched by the weave, could now see in all parts of him).
“I beg your pardon, but I was wondering if you were One of Us?” asked the man with the snapping blue eyes.
“Possibly, just possibly,” Foley said.
“I am a rooted man, sir,” said Blue-eyes. “There are those who chop off their own roots in the name of the old ‘new’ fashion. They wither from that moment. But radix-form mock roots burgeon out of the ground and surround them grotesquely, and these nourish nothing. I say that a man should not allow himself to be surrounded by such weightless weirdness. His own weirdness (that most necessary thing) he should keep inside himself where it is a strength. Beware that you not chop it down or cut it out of yourself. It grows again, externally and poisonously, unsustaining roots. I noticed the jacket of the book you were reading. It is a facetious title, but you do not seem to be a facetious man. Then I asked myself, Why should a man put such a jacket on a book other than for a joke? Why, for concealment, I told myself. What you are actually reading is not for prying eyes. The book (and it may not be a book) does not correspond to the title on the jacket. That is my guess.”
“There is a fascination about guesses which must remain unverified,” Freddy Foley said.
“I believe that it is a precis, a resume of your own project,” the blue-eyed man said. “You may not care to discuss it. I do not care to discuss my own project, but I can always spot a fellow inventor. Every time I go up to Washington with one of my new great inventions, and it is several times a year, I see others who are quite unmistakably of my kind. We inventors are a curious breed.”
“Ah, we are that. We are not as other men,” Freddy said.
“Though I would not reveal the slightest detail of what I am carrying, yet there is no harm in telling you that it is basically an Enervator.”
“I surmised as much.”
“But perhaps you have surmised that I have only invented one more relaxer? No. If that were the case my trip would not be of so great moment. If that were the case I would not be followed and shadowed. There is one man in this coach who sleeps with his ears and eyes open and misses nothing. He is a shadow. His job is to watch and follow someone, and that someone cannot be other than myself.”
“Or myself,” said Freddy.
“Most inventors have the tendency to overestimate the value of their own inventions,” said the blue-eyed man, “and perhaps you overestimate yours. The shadow-man looks at you with veiled eyes, it is true, but that is only so he will not seem to be looking at me. No, I'm sure that it is me he is following. What I have is a device that will change humanity completely, that will erase the decades and centuries, that will enable one to span — but I cannot tell you more. My life is in danger as it is.”
“Why should your life be in danger for inventing a relaxing machine?”
“I tell you, it is much more. It will enable man to remove death to the incredibly distant future.”
“It would seem a boon. Who would prevent it?”
“Those who have already achieved my aims without my machine. There are such men. I have reason to believe that there is a small jealous group who will kill to prevent their special benefits from going to all humanity.”
“I've more fear that humanity will be killed by special benefits going to it unasked,” Foley said. “It's a cat that's going to be killed with too much kindness. I wish you'd put a relaxer on all over-kind and over-zealous groups.”
“But I will, sir. So many things appear out of due season. I'd freeze them a while. Ah — we both understand that I have been talking nonsense. My machine is not like this at all, but it may be of some aid in integrating the personal and world ego. We both understand that ‘Enervator’ is no more than a code description.”
“Yes, we both understand that,” said Fred Foley. That Fred Foley drew some strange ones, but there was a shadow-man on the coach and he was as likely shadowing Fred Foley as the blue-eyed inventor.
The rails were making rhymes to the tune of Kansas City Star:
Piles of money, piles of barley,
Piles of peace, each man a king.
Ain't no way to blow it, Charley,
Ain't no way to blow the thing.
Really, everything was better than it had ever been before, if you didn't look too closely behind the screen. “Bad news, bad news!” Tankersley stormed sometimes. “What do they make reporters out of nowadays? Can't anybody find just a little bad news to lead off one more edition?” There wasn't much bad news any more. In two more weeks a popular president would be reelected. People were sharper and kinder and happier than they had ever been. All molehills had been leveled. The world was flat and tidy, a perfect takeoff platform for … something. Ah well, what are a few bat-wings in the night, a few pet hydras escaping from fountain prisons, a few men living too many times? More power to them. And by dusk of the day that was dawning Fred Foley would come to the fine place itself, Washington the Capitol City, where all difficulties are resolved.
“Your creature had not escaped, Auclaire,” Bertigrew Bagley growled. “What's the matter with you? Have you only one set of eyes? It's back in your fountain now, at any rate. I can see it. I don't believe it ever escaped into the world at all.”
“No, Bagley, no. That's a simulacrum in my fountain now. It left it there to fool me. The
thing itself is loose in this city and in this world. It has fragmented into seven or eight people but it still has its unity. The arms of it are persons. They always have been. We were wrong to believe that the arms of the polypus were movements. We saw them as Communism and as Secular-Liberalism and as such deadly things, but it is only when they inhabit persons that they are dangerous. That Foley knows the names of all of them, but he has slipped me. The sorrel-snake woman is the only one I know.”
“Go easy on the sorrel-snake girl. I've a great affection for her. She doesn't laugh at me as viciously as most of them do. Oh, I know all the members, Auclaire. I can have my dog kill them easily enough, but I'm not sure that I should. We lived with dragons in the earlier days; why are we fastidious now? Every fine castle used to have its own dragon in the cellar. Every fine world has always had.”
“This one is deadly, Bagley. It is one of those which has not raised itself, has not broken loose for centuries. It begins to eat up the children now. It killed thirteen good and high men this morning and it has hardly come awake yet.”
“Three of those men needed killing, Auclaire. You've got to admit that, whichever side of the aisle you're on.”
“And the worst part of it, Bagley, is that it won't do any good to have your dog kill the members. They have already set up a real weave. They have already mutated. And one of them is already dead and it makes no difference at all. She comes on even stronger and weirder after she's dead. And the leader, what is his name?”
“Jim Bauer. He's the biologist, but he knew all along that the biology of the thing was only part of the hoax, only part of the trigger.”
“He is torn between two ideas for strengthening the weave now. He will either kill himself and go to hell — he believes that he might do better work from there — or he will enlist an actual demon of hell and expend the weave to nine members. He is already playing Demon Lover with both his dead and his living wife — what is their name?”
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