The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction 8 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Alfred Bester

  He could only cry in return, “I must get you all licenses.”

  They parted to let him leave on that errand of mercy. Only Alice followed him.

  ~ * ~

  Nitely met Alexander at the door of the balcony and turned him back toward the open and fresh air. Professor Johns came at that moment to join them all.

  Nitely said, “Alexander. Professor Johns. The most extraordinary thing has occurred—”

  “Yes,” said the professor, his mild face beaming with joy. “The experiment has been a success. The principle is far more effective on the human being, in fact, than on any of my experimental animals.” Noting Nitely’s confusion, he explained what had occurred in brief sentences.

  Nitely listened and muttered, “Strange, strange. There is a certain elusive familiarity about this.” He pressed his forehead with the knuckles of both hands, but it did not help.

  Alexander approached Alice gently, yearning to clasp her to his strong bosom, yet knowing that no gently nurtured girl could consent to such an expression of emotion from one who had not yet been forgiven.

  He said, “Alice, my lost love, if in your heart you could find-”

  But she shrank from him, avoiding his arms though they were outstretched only in supplication. She said, “Alexander, I drank the punch. It was your wish.”

  “You needn’t have. I was wrong, wrong.”

  “But I did, and oh, Alexander, I can never be yours.”

  “Never be mine? But what does this mean?”

  And Alice, seizing Nitely’s arm, clutched it avidly. “My soul is intertwined indissolubly with that of Mr. Nitely, of Nicholas, I mean. My passion for him—that is, my passion for marriage with him—cannot be withstood. It racks my being.”

  “You are false?” cried Alexander, unbelieving.

  “You are cruel to say ‘false,’ “ said Alice, sobbing. “I cannot help it.”

  “No, indeed,” said Professor Johns, who had been listening to this in the greatest consternation, after having made his explanation to Nitely. “She could scarcely help it. It is simply an endocrinological manifestation.”

  “Indeed that is so,” said Nitely, who was struggling with endocrinological manifestations of his own. “There, there, my—my dear.” He patted Alice’s head in a most fatherly way and when she held her enticing face up toward his, swooningly, he considered whether it might not be a fatherly thing—nay, even a neighborly thing—to press those lips with his own, in pure fashion.

  But Alexander, out of his heart’s despair, cried, “You are false, false—false as Cressid,” and rushed from the room.

  And Nitely would have gone after him, but that Alice had seized him about the neck and bestowed upon his slowly melting lips a kiss that was not daughterly in the least.

  It was not even neighborly.

  ~ * ~

  They arrived at Nitely’s small bachelor cottage with its chaste sign of Justice of the Peace in Old English letters, its air of melancholy peace, it’s neat serenity, its small stove on which the small kettle was quickly placed by Nitely’s left hand (his right arm being firmly in the clutch of Alice, who, with a shrewdness beyond her years, chose that as one sure method of rendering impossible a sudden bolt through the door on his part).

  Nitely’s study could be seen through the open door of the dining room, its walls lined with gentle books of scholarship and joy.

  Again Nitely’s hand (his left hand) went to his brow. “My dear,” he said to Alice, “it is amazing the way—if you would release your hold the merest trifle, my child, so that circulation might be restored—the way in which I persist in imagining that all this has taken place before.”

  “Surely never before, my dear Nicholas,” said Alice, bending her fair head upon his shoulder, and smiling at him with a shy tenderness that made her beauty as bewitching as moonlight upon still waters, “could there have been so wonderful a modern-day magician as our wise Professor Johns, so up-to-date a sorcerer.”

  “So up-to-date a—” Nitely had started so violently as to lift the fair Alice a full inch from the floor. “Why, surely that must be it. Dickens take me, if that’s not it.” (For on rare occasions, and under the stress of overpowering emotions, Nitely used strong language.)

  “Nicholas. What is it? You frighten me, my cherubic one.”

  But Nitely walked rapidly into his study, and she was forced to run with him. His face was white, his lips firm, as he reached for a volume from the shelves and reverently blew the dust from it.

  “Ah,” he said with contrition, “how I have neglected the innocent joys of my younger days. My child, in view of this continuing incapacity of my right arm, would you be so kind as to turn the pages until I tell you to stop?”

  Together they managed, in such a tableau of preconnubial bliss as is rarely seen, he holding the book with his left hand, she turning the pages slowly with her right.

  “I am right!” Nitely said with sudden force. “Professor Johns, my dear fellow, do come here. This is the most amazing coincidence—a frightening example of the mysterious unfelt power that must sport with us on occasion for some hidden purpose.”

  Professor Johns, who had prepared his own tea and was sipping it patiently, as befitted a discreet gentleman of intellectual habit in the presence of two ardent lovers who had suddenly retired to the next room, called out, “Surely you do not wish my presence?”

  “But I do, sir. I would fain consult one of your scientific attainments.”

  “But you are in a position—”

  Alice screamed, faintly, “Professor!”

  “A thousand pardons, my dear,” said Professor Johns, entering. “My cobwebby old mind is filled with ridiculous fancies. It is long since I—” and he pulled mightily at his tea (which he had made strong) and was himself again at once.

  “Professor,” said Nitely. “This dear child referred to you as an up-to-date sorcerer and that turned my mind instantly to Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Sorcerer.”

  “What,” asked Professor Johns, mildly, “are Gilbert and Sullivan?”

  Nitely cast a devout glance upward, as though with the intention of gaging the direction of the inevitable thunderbolt and dodging. He said in a hoarse whisper, “Sir William Schwenck Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan wrote, respectively, the words and music of the greatest musical comedies the world has ever seen. One of these is entitled The Sorcerer. In it, too, a philtre was used: a highly moral one which did not affect married people, but which did manage to deflect the young heroine away from her handsome young lover and into the arms of an elderly man.”

  “And,” asked Professor Johns, “were matters allowed to remain so?”

  “Well, no.—Really, my dear, the movements of your fingers in the region of the nape of my neck, while giving rise to undeniably pleasurable sensations, do rather distract me.—There is a reunion of the young lovers, Professor.”

  “Ah,” said Professor Johns. “Then in view of the close resemblance of the fictional plot to real life, perhaps the solution in the play will help point the way to the reunion of Alice and Alexander. At least, I presume you do not wish to go through life with one arm permanently useless.”

  Alice said, “I have no wish to be reunited. I want only my own Nicholas.”

  “There is something,” said Nitely, “to be said for that refreshing point of view, but tush—youth must be served. There is a solution in the play, Professor Johns, and it is for that reason that I most particularly wanted to talk to you.” He smiled with a gentle benevolence. “In the play, the effects of the potion were completely neutralized by the actions of the gentleman who administered the potion in the first place: the gentleman, in other words, analogous to yourself.”

  “And those actions were?”

  “Suicide! Simply that! In some manner unexplained by the authors, the effect of this suicide was to break the sp—”

  But by now Professor Johns had recovered his equilibrium and said in the most sepulchrally forceful tone
that could be imagined, “My dear sir, may I state instantly that, despite my affection for the young persons involved in this sad dilemma, I cannot under any circumstances consent to self-immolation. Such a procedure might be extremely efficacious in connection with love potions of ordinary vintage, but my amatogenic principle, I assure you, would be completely unaffected by my death.”

  Nitely sighed. “I feared that. As a matter of fact, between ourselves, it was a very poor ending for the play, perhaps the poorest in the canon,” and he looked up briefly in mute apology to the spirit of William S. Gilbert. “It was pulled out of a hat. It had not been properly foreshadowed earlier in the play. It punished an individual who did not deserve the punishment. In short, it was, alas, completely unworthy of Gilbert’s powerful genius.”

  Professor Johns said, “Perhaps it was not Gilbert. Perhaps some bungler had interfered and botched the job.”

  “There is no record of that.”

  But Professor Johns, his scientific mind keenly aroused by an unsolved puzzle, said at once, “We can test this. Let us study the mind of this—this Gilbert. He wrote other plays, did he?”

  “Fourteen, in collaboration with Sullivan.”

  “Were there endings that resolved analogous situations in ways which were more appropriate?”

  Nitely nodded. “One, certainly. There was Ruddigore.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Ruddigore is a place. The main character is revealed as the true bad baronet of Ruddigore and is, of course, under a curse.”

  “To be sure,” muttered Professor Johns, who realized that such an eventuality frequently befell bad baronets and was even inclined to think it served them right.

  Nitely said, “The curse compelled him to commit one crime or more each day. Were one day to pass without a crime, he would inevitably die in agonizing torture.”

  “How horrible,” murmured the soft-hearted Alice.

  “Naturally,” said Nitely, “no one can think up a crime each day, so our hero was forced to use his ingenuity to circumvent the curse.”

  “How?”

  “He reasoned thus: If he deliberately refused to commit a crime, he was courting death by his own act. In other words, he was attempting suicide, and attempting suicide is, of course, a crime—and so he fulfills the conditions of the curse.”

  “I see. I see,” said Professor Johns. “Gilbert obviously believes in solving matters by carrying them forward to their logical conclusions.” He closed his eyes, and his noble brow clearly bulged with the numerous intense thought waves it contained.

  He opened them. “Nitely, old chap, when was The Sorcerer first produced?”

  “In eighteen hundred and seventy-seven.”

  “Then that is it, my dear fellow. In eighteen seventy-seven, we were faced with the Victorian age. The institution of marriage was not to be made sport of on the stage. It could not be made a comic matter for the sake of the plot. Marriage was holy, spiritual, a sacrament—”

  “Enough,” said Nitely, “of this apostrophe. What is in your mind?”

  “Marriage. Marry the girl, Nitely. Have all your couples marry, and that at once. I’m sure that was Gilbert’s original intention.”

  “But that,” said Nitely, who was strangely attracted by the notion, “is precisely what we are trying to avoid.”

  “I am not,” said Alice, stoutly (though she was not stout, but, on the contrary, enchantingly lithe and slender).

  Professor Johns said, “Don’t you see? Once each couple is married, the amatogenic principle—which does not affect married people—loses its power over them. Those who would have been in love without the aid of the principle remain in love; those who would not are no longer in love—and consequently apply for an annulment.”

  “Good heavens,” said Nitely. “How admirably simple. Of course! Gilbert must have intended that until a shocked producer or theater manager—a bungler, as you say-forced the change.”

  ~ * ~

  “And did it work?” I asked. “After all, you said quite distinctly that the professor had said its effect on married couple was only to inhibit extra-marital re—”

  “It worked,” said Nitely, ignoring my comment. A tear trembled on his eyelid, but whether it was induced by memories or by the fact that he was on his fourth gin and tonic, I could not tell.

  “It worked,” he said. “Alice and I were married, and our marriage was almost instantly annulled by mutual consent on the grounds of the use of undue pressure. And yet, because of the incessant chaperoning to which we were subjected, the incidence of undue pressure between ourselves was, unfortunately, virtually nil.” He sighed again. “At any rate, Alice and Alexander were married soon after and she is now, I understand, as a result of various concomittant events, expecting a child.”

  He withdrew his eyes from the deep recesses of what was left of his drink and gasped with sudden alarm. “Dear me! She again.”

  I looked up, startled. A vision in pastel blue was in the doorway. Imagine, if you will, a charming face made for kissing; a lovely body made for loving.

  She called, “Nicholas! Wait!”

  “Is that Alice?” I asked.

  “No, no. This is someone else entirely: a completely different story.—But I must not remain here.”

  He rose and, with an agility remarkable in one so advanced in years and weight, made his way through a window. The feminine vision of desirability, with an agility only slightly less remarkable, followed.

  I shook my head in pity and sympathy. Obviously, the poor man was continually plagued by these wondrous things of beauty who, for one reason or another, were enamored of him. At the thought of this horrible fate, I downed my own drink at a gulp and considered the odd fact that no such difficulties had ever troubled me.

  And at that thought, strange to tell, I ordered another drink savagely, and a scatological exclamation rose, unbidden, to my lips.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  FRITZ LEIBER

  Although by profession a writer and editor, Fritz Leiber has many connections with show business. Back in the days when he signed his stories “Fritz Leiber, Jr.,” his father was a noted Shakespearean actor (whose reading of Lear’s curse upon his daughters is one of the most exciting memories in my four decades of theater-going) and later a distinguished interpreter of character roles in films. Young Leiber played minor parts in his father’s company, and only a few years ago starred in a Chicago production of othello. And if (like me) you stay up late to watch old horror movies, you may come across something called weird woman that derives remotely from Leiber’s magnificent novel conjure wife. Now Leiber examines one of the strangest phenomena of the entertainment business: the sex goddess— in a terrifyingly vivid story of a psychologist with a craving for power, a weakness for occultism, and a unique office fixture:

  A DESKFUL OF GIRLS

  Yes, I said ghostgirls, sexy ones. Personally I never in my life saw any ghosts except the sexy kind, though I saw enough of those, I’ll tell you, but only for one evening, in the dark of course, with the assistance of an eminent (I should also say notorious) psychologist. It was an interesting experience, to put it mildly, and it introduced me to an unknown field of psycho-physiology, but under no circumstances would I want to repeat it.

  But ghosts are supposed to be frightening? Well, who ever said that sex isn’t? It is to the neophyte, female or male, and don’t let any of the latter try to kid you. For one thing, sex opens up the unconscious mind, which isn’t exactly a picnic area. Sex is a force, a rite that is basic, primal; and the caveman or cavewoman in each of us is a truth bigger than the jokes and cartoons about it. Sex was behind the witchcraft religion, the sabbats were sexual orgies. The witch was a sexual creature. So is the ghost.

  After all, what is a ghost, according to all traditional views, but the shell of a human being—an animated skin? And the skin is all sex—its touch, the boundary, the mask of flesh.

  I got that notion about skin
from my eminent-notorious psychologist, Dr. Emil Slyker, the first and the last evening I met him, at the Countersign Club, though he wasn’t talking about ghosts to begin with. He was pretty drunk and drawing signs in the puddle spilled from his triple martini.

  He grinned at me and said, “Look here, What’s-Your-Name—oh yes, Carr Mackay, Mister Justine himself. Well, look here, Carr, I got a deskful of girls at my office in this building and they’re needing attention. Let’s shoot up and have a look.”

  Right away my hopelessly naive imagination flashed me a vivid picture of a desk swarming inside with girls about five or six inches high. They weren’t dressed—my imagination never dresses girls except for special effects after long thought—but these looked as if they had been modeled from the drawings of Heinrich Kley or Mahlon Blaine. Literal vest-pocket Venuses, saucy and active. Right now they were attempting a mass escape from the desk, using a couple of nail files for saws, and they’d already cut some trap doors between the drawers so they could circulate around. One group was improvising a blowtorch from an atomizer and lighter fluid. Another was trying to turn a key from the inside, using tweezers for a wrench. And they were tearing down and defacing small signs, big to them, which read: you belong to dr. emil slyker.