The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction Fifth Series

by Edited by Anthony Boucher

  “Here, friend, don’t do that!” The dark man in the next seat half rose, and there was a moment of confusion; Johnny heard a sharp click, and thought he saw something leap from the dark man’s vest pocket. Then, for an instant, he had clinging to his fingers a brown Japanese coin and a pair of glittering pince-nez. And then the two had somehow twisted together in a nasty, writhing way that hurt his eyes to watch, and uncurled again—no coin, no pince-nez, but an impossible little leather change purse.

  Had the coin ever been a coin at all? Was the change purse a change purse?

  “Now look what you’ve done! Ugh!” The dark man, his face contorted with passion, reached gingerly fingers toward the purse. “Don’t move, friend. Let me—”

  Johnny pulled away a trifle. “Who are you?”

  “F.B.I.,” said the dark man impatiently. He flapped a billfold at Johnny; there was some kind of official-looking shield inside. “Now you have torn it, my God! Hold that still-just like that. Don’t move.” He pulled back his sleeves like a conjuror, and began to reach very cautiously for the little brown bit of leather that clung to Johnny’s hand.

  The thing twitched slightly in his fingers. The next moment, people all around them began getting up and crowding into the aisle, heading for the single washroom back in the tail of the plane.

  Palpably, the plane tilted. Johnny heard the stewardess shrieking, “One at a time! One at a time! Take your seats, everyone—you’re making the airplane tail-heavy!”

  “Steady, steady,” moaned the dark man. “Hold it absolutely still!”

  Johnny couldn’t. His fingers twitched again, and abruptly all the passengers in the aisle were tumbling the other way, fighting to get away from the dangerous tail. The stewardess came helplessly after them, squalling futile orders.

  “Am I doing that?” Johnny gasped, staring in horror at the thing in his palm.

  “The gadget is. Hold it steady, friend—”

  But his hand twitched again, and abruptly all the passengers were back in their seats, quietly sitting as if nothing had happened. Then a chorus of shrieks arose. Looking out the window, Johnny saw a terrifying sea of treetops just below, where nothing but empty air had been the moment before. As the plane nosed up sharply, his hand moved again—

  And the shrieks grow louder. Up ahead loomed a blue-violet wall of mountain, topless, gigantic.

  His fingers twitched still again: and once more the plane was droning peaceably along between earth and heaven. The passengers were bored or sleeping. There was no mountain, and no trees.

  Sweat was beaded on the dark man’s forehead. “Now…” he said, gritting his teeth and reaching again.

  “Wait a minute,” said Johnny, pulling away again. “Wait— This is some kind of top secret thing, is it, that I’m not supposed to have?”

  “Yes,” said the dark man, agonized. “I tell you, friend, don’t move it!”

  The purse was slowly changing color, turning a watery violet around the edges.

  “And you’re from the F.B.I.?” Johnny asked, staring hard at the dark man.

  “Yes! Hold it steady—”

  “No,” said Johnny. His voice had a disposition to tremble, but Johnny held it firmly in check. “You forgot about your ears,” he said. “Or are they too hard to change?”

  The dark man showed his teeth. “What are you talking about?”

  “The ears,’’ Johnny said, “and the jawbone. No two people have ears alike. And before, when you were the old man, your neck was too thick. It bothered me, only I was too busy to think about it.” He swallowed hard. “I’m thinking about it now. You don’t want me to move this thing?”

  “Right, friend, right.”

  “Then tell me what this is all about.”

  The dark man made placating gestures. “I can’t do that, friend. I really can’t. Look—”

  The tiny weight shifted in Johnny’s hand. “—out!” shouted the dark man.

  Tiny flickerings gathered in the air around them. In the plane window, the clear blue of the sky abruptly vanished. Instead, Johnny saw a tumbling waste of gray cloud. Rain drummed against the window, and the plane heeled suddenly as if a gust had caught it.

  Scattered shrieks arose from up forward. Johnny swallowed a large lump, and his fingers twitched. The flickering came again.

  The cloud and rain were gone; the sky was an innocent blue again. “Don’t do that,” said the dark man. “Listen, look: you want to know something? Watch me try to tell you.” He moistened his lips and began, “When you have trouble—” but on the fourth word his throat seemed to tighten and lock. His lips went on moving, his eyes bulged with effort, but nothing came out.

  After a moment he relaxed, breathing heavily. “You see?” he said.

  “You can’t talk,” said Johnny. “About that. Literally.”

  “Right! Now, friend, if you’ll just allow me—”

  “Easy. Tell me the truth: is there any way you can get around this, whatever it is, this block or whatever?” He let his fingers twitch, deliberately, as he spoke. “Any gadget, or anything you can take?”

  The dark man glanced nervously out the window, where blue sky had given way to purple twilight and a large sickle moon. “Yes, but—”

  “There is? What?”

  The man’s throat tightened again as he tried to speak.

  “Well, whatever it is, you’d better use it,” said Johnny. He saw the dark man’s face harden with resolution, and jerked his hand away just in time as the dark man grabbed—

  ~ * ~

  III

  There was a whirling moment, then the universe steadied. Johnny clutched at the seat with his free hand. The plane and all the passengers were gone. He and the dark man were sitting on a park bench in the sunshine. Two pigeons took alarm and flapped heavily away.

  The dark man’s face was twisted unhappily. “Now you have done it! Oh, what time is it, anyway?” He plucked two watches out of his vest and consulted them in turn. “Wednesday, friend, at the latest! Oh, oh, they’ll—” His mouth worked soundlessly.

  “Wednesday?” Johnny managed. He looked around. They were sitting in Union Square Park, the only ones there. There were plenty of people on the streets, all hurrying, most of them women. It looked like a Wednesday, all right.

  He opened his mouth, and shut it again carefully. He looked down at the limp bit of leather and metal in his hand. Start from the beginning. What did he know?

  The coin, which had evidently been some kind of telltale or beacon, had in some way joined itself, after Johnny had damaged it, to some other instrument of the dark man’s— apparently the gadget that enabled him to control probability, and move from one time to another, and small chores like that.

  In their present fused state, the two gadgets were ungovernable-dangerous, the dark man seemed to think—and no good to anybody.

  And that was absolutely all he knew.

  He didn’t know where the dark man and his companion had come from, what they were up to, anything that would be useful to know, and he wasn’t getting any nearer finding out.

  —Except that there was some way of loosening the dark man’s tongue. Drugs, which were out of the question—liquor—

  Well, he thought, sitting up a trifle straighter, there was no harm in trying, anyhow. It might not work, but it was the pleasantest thought he had had all afternoon.

  He said, “Come on,” and stood up carefully; but his motion must have been too abrupt, because the scene around them melted and ran down into the pavement, and they were standing, not in the park, but on the traffic island at Sheridan Square.

  It looked to be a little after noon, and the papers on the stand at Johnny’s elbow bore today’s date.

  He felt a little dizzy. Say it was about one o’clock: then he hadn’t got out to the airport yet; he was on his way there now, with Duke, and if he could hop a fast cab, he might catch himself and tell himself not to go. . . .

  Johnny steadied his mind by a strenuous ef
fort. He had, he told himself, one single, simple problem now in hand, and that was how to get to a bar. He took a careful step toward the edge of the island. The thing in his hand bobbled; the world reeled and steadied.

  With the dark man beside him, Johnny was standing on the gallery of the Reptile Room of the Museum of Natural History. Down below, the poised shapes of various giant lizards looked extremely extinct and very dry.

  Johnny felt the rising rudiments of a vast impatience. At this rate, it was clear enough, he would never get anywhere he wanted to go, because every step changed the rules. All right then; if Mahomet couldn’t go to the mountain—

  The dark man, who had been watching him, made a strangled sound of protest.

  Johnny ignored him. He swung his hand sharply down. And up. And down.

  The world swung around them like a pendulum, twisting and turning. Too far~ They were on a street corner in Paris. They were in a dark place listening to the sound of machinery. They were in the middle of a sandstorm, choking, blinding—

  They were sitting in a rowboat on a quiet river. The dark man was wearing flannels and a straw hat.

  Johnny tried to move the thing in his hand more gently: it was as if it had a life of its own; he had to hold it back.

  Zip!

  They were seated on stools at a marble-topped counter. Johnny saw a banana split with a fly on it.

  Zip!

  A library, a huge low-ceilinged place that Johnny had never seen before.

  Zip!

  The lobby of the Art Theatre; a patron bumped into Johnny, slopping his demitasse.

  Zip!

  They were sitting opposite each other, the dark man and he, at a table in the rear of Dorrie’s Bar. Dust motes sparkled in the late afternoon sun. There was a highball in front of each of them.

  Gritting his teeth, Johnny held his hand perfectly upright while he lowered it, so slowly that it hardly seemed to move, until it touched the worn surface of the table. He sighed. “Drink up,” he said.

  With a wary eye on the thing in Johnny’s hand, the dark man drank. Johnny signaled the bartender, who came over with a faintly puzzled expression. “How long you guys been here?”

  “I was just going to ask you,” said Johnny at random. “Two more.”

  The bartender retired and came back looking hostile with the drinks, after which he went down to the farthermost end of the bar, turned his back on them and polished glasses.

  Johnny sipped his highball. “Drink up,” he told the dark man. The dark man drank.

  After the third swift highball, the dark man looked slightly walleyed. “How you feeling?” Johnny asked.

  “Fine,” said the dark man carefully. “Jus’ fine.” He dipped two fingers into his vest pocket, drew out a tiny flat pillbox and extracted from it an even tinier pill, which he popped into his mouth and swallowed.

  “What was that?” said Johnny suspiciously.

  “Just a little pill.”

  Johnny looked closely at him. His eyes were clear and steady; he looked exactly as if he had not drunk any highballs at all. “Let me hear you say ‘The Leith police dismisseth us,’ “ said Johnny.

  The dark man said it.

  “Can you say that when you’re drunk?” Johnny demanded.

  “Don’t know, friend. I never tried.”

  Johnny sighed. Look at it any way you liked, the man had been high, at least, before he swallowed that one tiny pill. And now he was cold sober. After a moment, glowering, he pounded on his glass with a swizzle stick until the bartender came and took his order for two more drinks. “Doubles,” said Johnny as an afterthought. When they arrived, the dark man drank one down and began to look faintly glassy-eyed. He took out his pillbox.

  Johnny leaned forward. “Who’s that standing outside?” he whispered hoarsely.

  The dark man swiveled around. “Where?”

  “They ducked back,” said Johnny. “Keep watching.” He brought his free hand out of his trousers pocket, where it had been busy extracting the contents of a little bottle of antihistamine tablets he had been carrying around since February. They were six times the size of the dark man’s pills, but they were the best he could do. He slid the pillbox out from under the dark man’s fingers, swiftly emptied it onto his own lap, dumped the cold tablets into it and put it back.

  “I don’t see anybody, friend,” said the dark man anxiously. “Was it a man or—” He picked out one of the bogus tablets, swallowed it, and looked surprised.

  “Have another drink,” said Johnny hopefully. The dark man, still looking surprised, swilled it down. His eyes closed slowly and opened again. They were definitely glassy.

  “How do you feel now?” Johnny asked.

  “Dandy, thanks. Vad heter denna ort?” The dark man’s face spread and collapsed astonishingly into a large, loose, foolish smile.

  It occurred to Johnny that he might have overdone it. “How was that again?” Swedish, it had sounded like, or some other Scandinavian language . . .

  “Voss hot ir gezugt?” asked the dark man wonderingly. He batted his head with the heel of his hand several times. “Favor de desconectar la radio.”

  “The radio isn’t—” began Johnny, but the dark man interrupted him. Springing up suddenly he climbed onto the bench, spread his arms and began singing in a loud operatic baritone. The melody was that of the Toreador Song from Carmen, but the dark man was singing his own words to it, over and over: “Dove è il gabinetto?”

  The bartender was coming over with an unpleasant expression. “Cut that out!” Johnny whispered urgently. “You hear? Sit down, or I’ll move this thing again!”

  The dark man glanced at the object in Johnny’s hand. “You don’t scare me, bud. Go ahead and move it. Me cago en su highball.” He began singing again.

  Johnny fumbled three five-dollar bills out of his wallet—all he had—and shoved them at the bartender as he came up. The bartender went away.

  “Well, why were you scared before, then?” Johnny asked, furiously.

  “Simple,” said the dark man. “Vänta ett ögenblick, it’ll come back to me. Sure.” He clapped a hand to his brow. “Herr Gott im Himmel!” he said, and sat down abruptly.

  “Don’t move it,” he said. He was pale and sweat-beaded.

  “Why not?”

  “No control,” whispered the dark man. “The instrument is tuned to you—sooner or later you’re going to meet yourself. Two bodies can’t occupy the same spacetime, friend.” He shuddered. “Boom!”

  Johnny’s hand and wrist, already overtired, were showing a disposition to tremble. He had the hand propped against a bowl of pretzels, and that helped some, but not enough. Johnny was close to despair. The chief effect of the drinks seemed to have been to make the dark man babble in six or seven foreign tongues. The anti-drink pills were safely in his pocket; there was a fortune in those, no doubt, just as a byproduct of this thing if he ever got out of it alive—but that seemed doubtful.

  All the same, he checked with a glare the dark man’s tentative move toward the object in his hand. His voice shook. “Tell me now, or I’ll wave this thing until something happens. I haven’t got any more patience! What are you after? What’s it all about?”

  “Un autre plat des pets de nonne, s’il vous plait, garçon” murmured the dark man.

  “And cut that out,” said Johnny. “I mean it!” Intentionally or not, his hand slipped, and he felt the table shudder under them.

  Zip!

  They were sitting at a narrow table in the Sixth Avenue Bickford’s, full of the echoing clatter of inch-thick crockery.

  “Well?” said Johnny, close to hysteria. The glasses on the table between them were full of milk, not whisky. Now he was in for it. Unless he could break the dark man’s nerve before he sobered up—or unless, which was unlikely in the extreme, they happened to hit another bar—

  “It’s like this, friend,” said the dark man. “I’m the last surviving remnant of the race of Lemurians, see, and I like to pers
ecute people. I’m bitter, because you upstarts have taken over the world. You can’t—”

  “Who’s the lady I saw you with?” Johnny asked sourly.

  “Her? She’s the last surviving remnant of the Atlanteans. We have a working agreement, but we hate each other even more than—”

  Johnny’s fingers were clammy with sweat around the limp leather that clung to them. He let his hand twitch, not too much.

  Zip!

  They were sitting facing each other on the hard cane seats of an almost empty subway train, rackety-clacking headlong down its dark tunnel like a consignment to heil. “Try again,” said Johnny through his teeth.