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

by Edited by Alfred Bester

  My mind which looks down at my imagination and refuses to associate with it, was studying Dr. Slyker and also making sure that I behaved outwardly like a worshipful fan, a would-be Devil’s apprentice. This approach, helped by the alcohol, seemed to be relaxing him into the frame of mind I wanted him to have—one of boastful condescension. Slyker was a plump gut of a man with a perpetually sucking mouth, in his early fifties, fair-complexioned, blond, balding, with the powerlines around his eyes and at the corners of the nostrils. Over it all he wore the ready-for-photographers mask that is a sure sign its wearer is on the Big Time. Eyes weak, as shown by the dark glasses, but forever peering for someone to strip or cow. His hearing bad too, for that matter, as he didn’t catch the barman approaching and started a little when he saw the white rag reaching out toward the spill from his drink. Emil Slyker, “doctor” courtesy of some European universities and a crust like blued steel, movie columnist, pumper of the last ounce of prestige out of that ashcan word “psychologist,” psychic researcher several mysterious rumored jumps ahead of Wilhelm Reich with his orgone and Rhine with his ESP, psychological consultant to starlets blazing into stars and other ladies in the bucks, and a particularly expert disher-out of that goulash of psychoanalysis, mysticism, and magic that is the chef-d’oeuvre of our era. And, I was assuming, a particularly successful blackmailer. A stinker to be taken very seriously.

  My real purpose in contacting Slyker, of which I hoped he hadn’t got an inkling yet, was to offer him enough money to sink a small luxury liner in exchange for a sheaf of documents he was using to blackmail Evelyn Cordew, current pick-of-the-pantheon among our sex goddesses. I was working for another film star, Jeff Crain, Evelyn’s ex-husband, but not “ex” when it came to the protective urge. Jeff said that Slyker refused to bite on the direct approach, that he was so paranoid in his suspiciousness as to be psychotic, and that I would have to make friends with him first. Friends with a paranoid!

  So in pursuit of this doubtful and dangerous distinction, there I was at the Countersign Club, nodding respectfully happy acquiescence to the Master’s suggestion and asking tentatively, “Girls needing attention?”

  He gave me his whoremaster, keeper-of-the-keys grin and said, “Sure, women need attention whatever form they’re in. They’re like pearls in a vault, they grow dull and fade unless they have regular contact with warm human flesh. Drink up.”

  He gulped half of what was left of his martini—the puddle had been blotted up meantime and the black surface reburnished—and we made off without any fuss over checks or tabs; I had expected him to stick me with the former at least, but evidently I wasn’t enough of an acolyte yet to be granted that honor.

  It fitted that I had caught up with Emil Slyker at the Countersign Club. It is to a key club what the latter is to a topcrust bar. Strictly Big Time, set up to provide those in it with luxury, privacy, and security. Especially security: I had heard that the Countersign Club bodyguarded even their sober patrons home late of an evening with or without their pickups, but I hadn’t believed it until this well-dressed and doubtless well-heeled silent husky rode the elevator up the dead midnight office building with us and only turned back at Dr. Slyker’s door. Of course I couldn’t have got into the Countersign Club on my own—Jeff had provided me with my entree: an illustrated edition of the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, its margins annotated by a world-famous recently-deceased psychoanalyst. I had sent it in to Slyker with a note full of flowery expression of “my admiration for your work in the psycho-physiology of sex.”

  The door to Slyker’s office was something. No glass, just a dark expanse—teak or ironwood, I guessed—with emil slykeR, consulting psychologist burnt into it. No Yale lock, but a large keyhole with a curious silver valve that the key pressed aside. Slyker showed me the key with a deprecating smile; the gleaming castellations of its web were the most complicated I’d ever seen, its stem depicted Pasiphae and the bull. He certainly was willing to pay for atmosphere.

  There were three sounds: first the soft grating of the turning key, then the solid snap of the bolts retracting, then a faint creak from the hinges.

  Open, the door showed itself four inches thick, more like that of a safe or vault, with a whole cluster of bolts that the key controlled. Just before it closed, something very odd happened: a filmy plastic sheet whipped across the bolts from the outer edge of the doorway and conformed itself to them so perfectly that I suspected static electrical attraction of some sort. Once in place, it barely clouded the silvery surface of the bolts and would have taken a close look to spot. It didn’t interfere in any way with the door closing or the bolts snapping back into their channels.

  The Doctor sensed or took for granted my interest in the door and explained over his shoulder in the dark, “My Siegfried Line. More than one ambitious crook or inspired murderer has tried to smash or think his or her way through that door. They’ve had no luck. They can’t. At this moment there is literally no one in the world who could come through that door without using explosives—and they’d have to be well placed. Cozy.”

  I privately disagreed with the last remark. Not to make a thing of it, I would have preferred to feel in a bit closer touch with the silent corridors outside, even though they held nothing but the ghosts of unhappy stenographers and neurotic dames my imagination had raised on the way up.

  “Is the plastic film part of an alarm system?” I asked. The Doctor didn’t answer. His back was to me. I remembered that he’d shown himself a shade deaf. But I didn’t get a chance to repeat my question, for just then some indirect lighting came on, although Slyker wasn’t near any switch (“Our talk triggers it,” he said), and the office absorbed me.

  Naturally the desk was the first thing I looked for, though I felt foolish doing it. It was a big deep job with a dark soft gleam that might have been that of fine-grained wood or metal. The drawers were file size, not the shallow ones my imagination had played with, and there were three tiers of them to the right of the kneehole—space enough for a couple of life-size girls if they were doubled up according to one of the formulas for the hidden operator of Maelzel’s chess-playing automaton. My imagination, which never learns, listened hard for the patter of tiny bare feet and the clatter of little tools. There wasn’t even the scurry of mice, which would have done something to my nerves, I’m sure.

  The office was an L with the door at the end of this leg. The walls I could see were mostly lined with books, though a few line drawings had been hung—my imagination had been right about Heinrich Kley, though I didn’t recognize these pen-and-ink originals, and there were some Fuselis you won’t ever see reproduced in books handled over the counter.

  The desk was in the corner of the L with the components of a hi fi spaced along the bookshelves this side of it. All I could see yet of the other leg of the L was a big surrealist armchair facing the desk but separated from it by a wide low bare table. I took a dislike to that armchair on first sight, though it looked extremely comfortable. Slyker had reached the desk now and had one hand on it as he turned back toward me, and I got the impression that the armchair had changed shape since I had entered the office— that it had been more like a couch to start with, although now the back was almost straight.

  But the Doctor’s left thumb indicated I was to sit in it and I couldn’t see another chair in the place except the padded button on which he was now settling himself—one of those stenographer deals with a boxing-glove back placed to catch you low in the spine like the hand of a knowledgeable masseur. In the other leg of the L besides the armchair, were more books, a heavy concertina blind sealing off the window, two narrow doors that I supposed were those of a closet and a lavatory, and what looked like a slightly scaled-down and windowless telephone booth until I guessed it must be an orgone box of the sort Reich had invented to restore the libido when the patient occupies it. I quickly settled myself in the chair, not to be gingerly about it. It was rather incredibly comfortable, almost as if it had adjusted its dimensions a
bit at the last instant to conform to mine. The back was narrow at the base but widened and then curled in and over to almost a canopy around my head and shoulders. The seat too widened a lot toward the front, where the stubby legs were far apart. The bulky arms sprang unsupported from the back and took my own just right, though curving inward with the barest suggestion of a hug. The leather or unfamiliar plastic was as firm and cool as young flesh and its texture as mat under my fingertips.

  “An historic chair,” the Doctor observed, “designed and built for me by von Helmholtz of the Bauhaus. It has been occupied by all my best mediums during their so-called trance states. It was in that chair that I established to my entire satisfaction the real existence of ectoplasm—that elaboration of the mucous membrane and occasionally the entire epidermis that is distantly analogous to the birth envelope and is the fact behind the persistent legends of the snake-shedding of filmy live skins by human beings, and which the spiritualist quacks are forever trying to fake with their fluorescent cheesecloth and doctored negatives. Or-gone, the primal sexual energy?—Reich makes a persuasive case, still . . . But ectoplasm?—Yes! Angna went into trance sitting just where you are, her entire body dusted with a special powder, the tracks and distant smudges of which later revealed the ectoplasm’s movements and origin—chiefly in the genital area. The test was conclusive and led to further researches, very interesting and quite revolutionary, none of which I have published; my professional colleagues froth at the mouth, elaborating an opposite sort of foam, whenever I mix the psychic with psychoanalysis—they seem to forget that hypnotism gave Freud his start and that for a time the man was keen on cocaine. Yes indeed, an historic chair.”

  I naturally looked down at it and for a moment I thought I had vanished, because I couldn’t see my legs. Then I realized that the upholstery had changed to a dark gray exactly matching my suit except for the ends of the arms, which merged by fine gradations into a sallow hue which blotted out my hands.

  “I should have warned you that it’s now upholstered in chameleon plastic,” Slyker said with a grin. “It changes color to suit the sitter. The fabric was supplied me over a year ago by Henri Artois, the French dilettante chemist. So the chair has been many shades: dead black when Mrs. Fair-lee—you recall the case?—came to tell me she had just put on mourning and then shot her bandleader husband, a charming Florida tan during the later experiments with Angna. It helps my patients forget themselves when they’re free-associating and it amuses some people.”

  I wasn’t one of them, but I managed a smile I hoped wasn’t too sour. I told myself to stick to business—Evelyn Cordew’s and Jeff Crain’s business. I must forget the chair and other incidentals, and concentrate on Dr. Emil Slyker and what he was saying—for I have by no means given all of his remarks, only the more important asides. He had turned out to be the sort of conversationalist who will talk for two hours solid, then when you have barely started your reply, give you a hurt look and say, “Excuse me, but if I can get a word in edgewise—” and talk for two hours more. The liquor may have been helping, but I doubt it. When we had left the Countersign Club he had started to tell me the stories of three of his female clients—a surgeon’s wife, an aging star scared by a comeback opportunity, and a college girl in trouble—and the presence of the bodyguard hadn’t made him hold back on gory details.

  Now, sitting at his desk and playing with the catch of a file drawer as if wondering whether to open it, he had got to the point where the surgeon’s wife had arrived at the operating theater early one morning to publish her infidelities, the star had stabbed her press agent with the wardrobe mistress’ scissors, and the college girl had fallen in love with her abortionist. He had the conversation-hogger’s trick of keeping a half dozen topics in the air at once and weaving back and forth between them without finishing any.

  And of course he was a male tantalizer. Now he whipped open the file drawer and scooped out some folders and then held them against his belly and watched me as if to ask himself, “Should I?”

  After a maximum pause to build suspense he decided he should, and so I began to hear the story of Dr. Emil Slyker’s girls, not the first three, of course—they had to stay frozen at their climaxes unless their folders turned up— but others.

  I wouldn’t be telling the truth if I didn’t admit it was a let-down. Here I was expecting I don’t know what from his desk and all I got was the usual glimpses into childhood’s garden of father-fixation and sibling rivalry and the bed-changing Sturm, und Drang of later adolescence. The folders seemed to hold nothing but conventional medico-psychiatric case histories, along with physical measurements and other details of appearance, unusually penetrating précis of each client’s financial resources, occasional notes on possible psychic gifts and other extrasensory talents, and maybe some candid snapshots, judging from the way he’d sometimes pause to study appreciatively and then raise his eyebrows at me with a smile.

  Yet after a while I couldn’t help starting to be impressed, if only by the sheer numbers. Here was this stream, this freshet, this flood of females, young and not-so-young, but all thinking of themselves as girls and wearing the girl’s suede mask even if they didn’t still have the girl’s natural face, all converging on Dr. Slyker’s office with money stolen from their parents or highjacked from their married lovers, or paid when they signed the six-year contract with semi-annual options, or held out on their syndicate boyfriends, or received in a lump sum in lieu of alimony, or banked for dreary years every fortnight from paychecks and then withdrawn in one grand gesture, or thrown at them by their husbands that morning like so much confetti, or, so help me, advanced them on their half-written novels. Yes, there was something very impressive about this pink stream of womankind rippling with the silver and green of cash conveyed infallibly, as if all the corridors and streets outside were concrete-walled spillways, to Dr. Slyker’s office, but not to work any dynamos there except financial ones, instead to be worked over by a one-man dynamo and go foaming madly or trickling depletedly away or else stagnate excitingly for months, their souls like black swamp water gleaming with mysterious lights.

  Slyker stopped short with a harsh little laugh. “We ought to have music with this, don’t you think?” he said. “I believe I’ve got the Nutcracker Suite on the spindle,” and he touched one of an unobtrusive bank of buttons on his desk.

  They came without the whisper of a turntable or the faintest preliminary susurrus of tape, those first evocative, rich, sensual, yet eery chords, but they weren’t the opening of any section of the Nutcracker I knew—and yet, damn it, they sounded as if they should be. And then they were cut off as if the tape had been snipped and I looked at Slyker and he was white and one of his hands was just coming back from the bank of buttons and the other was clutching the file folders as if they might somehow get away from him and both hands were shaking and I felt a shiver crawling down my own neck.

  “Excuse me, Carr,” he said slowly, breathing heavily, “but that’s high-voltage music, pyschically very dangerous, that I use only for special purposes. It is part of the Nutcracker, incidently—the ‘Ghostgirls Pavan’ which Chaikovsky suppressed completely under orders from Madam Sesostris, the Saint Petersburg clairvoyant. It was tape-recorded for me by . . . No, I don’t know you quite well enough to tell you that. However, we will shift from tape to disk and listen to the known sections of the suite, played by the same artists.”

  I don’t know how much of this recording or the circumstances added to it, but I have never heard the “Danse Arabe” or the “Waltz of the Flowers” or the “Dance of the Flutes” so voluptuous and exquisitely menacing—those tinkling, superficially sugar-frosted bits of music that class after class of little-girl ballerinas have minced and teetered to ad nauseam, but underneath the glittering somber fancies of a thorough-going eroticist. As Slyker, guessing my thoughts, expressed it:”Chaikovsky shows off each instrument—the flute, the throatier woodwinds, the silver chimes, the harp bubbling gold—as if he were d
ressing beautiful women in jewels and feathers and furs solely to arouse desire and envy in other men.”

  For of course we only listened to the music as background for Dr. Slyker’s zigzagging, fragmentary, cream-skimming reminiscences. The stream of girls flowed on in their smart suits and flowered dresses and bouffant blouses and toreador pants, their improbable loves and unsuspected hates and incredible ambitions, the men who gave them money, the men who gave them love, the men who took both, the paralyzing trivial fears behind their wisely chic or corn-fed fresh facades, their ravishing and infuriating mannerisms, the trick of eye or lip or hair or wrist-curve or bosom-angle that was the focus of sex in each.

  For Slyker could bring his girls to life very vividly, I had to grant that, as if he had more to jog his memory than case histories and note’s and even photographs, as if he had the essence of each girl stoppered up in a little bottle, like perfumes, and was opening them one by one to give me a whiff. Gradually I became certain that there were more than papers and pictures in the folders, though this revelation, like the earlier one about the desk, at first involved a letdown. Why should I get excited if Dr. Slyker filed away mementos of his clients?—even if they were keepsakes of love: lace handkerchiefs and filmy scarves, faded flowers, ribbons and bows, 20-denier stockings, long locks of hair, gay little pins and combs, swatches of material that might have been torn from dresses, snippets of, silk delicate as ghost dandelions—what difference did it make to me if he treasured this junk or it fed his sense of power or was part of his blackmail? Yet it did make a difference to me, for like the music, like the little fearful starts he’d kept giving ever since the business of the “Ghostgirls Pavan,” it helped to make everything very real, as if in some more-than-ordinary sense he did have a deskful of girls. For now as he opened or closed the folders there’d often be a puff of powder, a pale little cloud as from a jogged compact, and the pieces of silk gave the impression of being larger than they could be, like a magician’s colored handkerchiefs, only most of them were flesh-colored, and I began to get glimpses of what looked like X-ray photographs and artists’ transparencies, maybe life size but cunningly folded, and other slack pale things that made me think of the ultra-fine rubber masks some aging actresses are rumored to wear, and all sorts of strange little flashes and glimmers of I don’t know what, except there was that aura of femininity and I found myself remembering what he’d said about fluorescent cheesecloth and I did seem to get whiffs of very individual perfume with each new folder.