The overall strategies and objectives of the star people, particularly the people from Groombridge star who were his own masters, were unclear to the purchased person named Wayne Golden. What they did was not hard to understand. All the world knew that the star people had established fast-radio contact with the people of Earth, and that in order to conduct their business on Earth they had purchased the bodies of certain convicted criminals, installing in them tachyon fast-radio transceivers. Why they did what they did was less easy to comprehend. Art objects they admired and purchased. Certain rare kinds of plants and flowers they purchased and had frozen at liquid-helium temperatures. Certain kinds of utilitarian objects they purchased. Every few months another rocket roared up from Merritt Island, just north of the Cape, and another cargo headed for the Groombridge star, on its twelve-thousand-year voyage. Others, to other stars, peopled by other races in the galactic confraternity, took shorter times—or longer—but none of the times was short enough for those star people who made the purchases to come to Earth to see what they had bought. The distances were too huge.
What they spent most of their money on was the rockets. And, of course, the people they purchased, into whom they had transplanted their tachyon transceivers. Each rocket cost at least $10 million. The going rate for a healthy male paranoid capable of three or more decades of useful work was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they bought them by the dozen.
The other things they bought, all of them—the taped symphonies and early-dynasty ushabti, the flowering orchids, and the Van Goghs—cost only a fraction of 1 percent of what they spent on people and transportation. Of course, they had plenty of money to spend. Each star race sold off licensing rights on its own kinds of technology. All of them received trade credits from every government on Earth for their services in resolving disputes and preventing wars. Still, it seemed to Wayne Golden, to the extent that he was capable of judging the way his masters conducted their affairs, a pretty high-overhead way to run a business, although of course neither he nor any other purchased person was ever consulted on questions like that.
By late spring he had been on the move for many weeks without rest. He completed sixty-eight tasks, great and small. There was nothing in this period of eighty-seven days that was in any way remarkable except that on one day in May, while he was observing the riots on the Place de la Concorde from a window of the American Embassy on behalf of his masters, the girl named Carolyn came into his room. She whispered in his ear, attempted unsuccessfully to masturbate him while the liaison attaché was out of the room, remained in all for some forty minutes, and then left, sobbing softly. He could not even turn his head to see her go. Then on the sixth of June the purchased person named Wayne Golden was returned to the Dallas kennel and given indefinite furlough, subject to recall at fifty minutes’ notice.
Sweetest dear Jesus, nothing like that had ever happened to me before! It was like the warden coming into Death Row with the last minute reprieve! I could hardly believe it.
But I took it, started moving at once. I got a fix on Carolyn’s last reported whereabouts from the locator board and floated away from Dallas in a cloud of Panama Red, drinking champagne as fast as the hostess could bring it to me, en route to Colorado.
But I didn’t find Carolyn there.
I hunted her through the streets of Denver, and she was gone. By phone I learned she had been sent to Rantoul, Illinois. I was off. I checked at the Kansas City airport, where I was changing planes, and she was gone from Illinois already. Probably, they weren’t sure, they thought, to the New York district. I put down the phone and jumped on a plane, rented a car at Newark, and drove down the Turnpike to the Garden State, checking every car I passed to see if it was the red Volvo they thought she might be driving, stopping at every other Howard Johnson’s to ask if they’d seen a girl with short black hair, brown eyes and a tip-tilted nose and, oh, yes, the golden oval in her forehead.
I remembered it was in New Jersey that I first got into trouble. There was the nineteen-year-old movie cashier in Paramus, she was my first. I picked her up after the 1 A.M. show. And I showed her. But she was really all wrong for me, much too old and much too worldly. I didn’t like it much when she died.
After that I was scared for a while, and I watched the TV news every night, twice, at six and eleven, and never passed a newsstand without looking at all the headlines in the papers, until a couple of months had passed. Then I thought over what I really wanted very carefully. The girl had to be quite young and, well, you can’t tell, but as much as I could be sure, a virgin. So I sat in a luncheonette in Perth Amboy for three whole days, watching the kids get out of the parochial school, before I found my second. It took a while. The first one that looked good turned out to be a bus kid, the second was a walker but her big sister from the high school walked with her. The third walked home alone. It was December, and the afternoons got pretty dark, and that Friday she walked, but she didn’t get home. I never molested any of them sexually, you know. I mean, in some ways I’m still kind of a virgin. That wasn’t what I wanted, I just wanted to see them die. When they asked me at the pre-trial hearing if I knew the difference between right and wrong I didn’t know how to answer them. I knew what I did was wrong for them. But it wasn’t wrong for me; it was what I wanted.
So, driving down the Parkway, feeling discouraged about Carolyn, I noticed where I was and cut over to Route 35 and doubled back. I drove right to the school, past it, and to the lumberyard where I did the little girl. I stopped and cut the motor, looking around. Happy day. Now it was a different time of year, and things looked a little different. They’d piled up a stack of two-by-twelves over the place where I’d done her. But in my mind’s eye I could see it the way it had been then. Dark gray sky. Lights from the cars going past. I could hear the little buzzing feeling in her throat as she tried to scream under my fingers. Let’s see. That was, oh, good heavens, nine years ago.
And if I hadn’t done her she would have been twenty or so. Screwing all the boys. Probably on dope. Maybe knocked up or married. Looked at in a certain way, I saved her a lot of sordid, miserable stuff, menstruating, letting the boys’ hands and mouths on her, all that . . .
My head began hurting. That’s one thing the plate in your head does, it doesn’t let you get very deeply into things you did in the old days, because it hurts too much. So I started up the car and drove away, and pretty soon the hurting stopped.
I never think of Carolyn, you know, that way.
They never proved that little girl on me. The one they caught me for was the nurse in Long Branch, in the parking lot. And she was a mistake. She was so small, and she had a sweater over her uniform. I didn’t know she was grown up until it was too late. I was very angry about that. In a way I didn’t mind when they caught me, because I had been getting very careless. But I really hated that ward in Marlboro where they put me. Seven, Jesus, seven years. Up in the morning, and drink your pink medicine out of the little paper cup. Make your bed and do your job—mine was sweeping in the incontinent wards, and the smells and the sights would make you throw up.
After a while they let me watch TV and even read the papers, and when the Altair people made the first contact with Earth I was interested, and when they began buying criminally insane to be their proxies, I wanted them to buy me. Anything, I wanted anything that would let me out of that place, even if it meant I’d have to let them put a box in my head and never be able to live a normal life again.
But the Altair people wouldn’t buy me. For some reason they only took blacks. Then the others began showing up on the fast radio, making their deals. And still none of them wanted me. The ones from Procyon liked young women, wouldn’t ever buy a male. I think they have only one sex there, someone said. All these funnies are peculiar in one way or another. Metal, or gas, or blobby, or hard-shelled and rattly. Whatever. And they all have funny habits, like if you belong to the Canopus bunch you can’t ever eat fish.
I think they�
�re disgusting, and I don’t really know why the USA wanted to get involved with them in the first place. But the Chinese did, and the Russians did, and I guess we just couldn’t stay out. I suppose it hasn’t hurt much. There hasn’t been a war, and there’s a lot of ways in which they’ve helped clean things up for us. It hasn’t hurt me, that’s for sure. The Groombridge people came into the market pretty late, and most of the good healthy criminals were gone; they would buy anybody. They bought me. We’re a hard-case lot, we Groombridgians, and I do wonder what Carolyn was in for.
I drove all the way down the coast, Asbury Park, Brielle, Atlantic City, all the way to Cape May, phoning back to check with the locator clerk, and never found her.
The one thing I did know was that all I was missing was the shell of her, because she was working. I could have had a kiss or a feel, no more. But I wanted to find her anyway. Just on the chance. How many times do you get an indefinite furlough? If I’d been able to find her, and stay with her, sooner or later, maybe, she would have been off too. Even if it were only for two hours. Even thirty minutes.
And then in broad daylight, just as I was checking into a motel near an Army base, with the soldiers’ girls lined up at the cashier’s window so their boyfriends could get back for reveille, I got the call: Report to the Philadelphia kennel. Soonest.
By then I was giddy for sleep, but I drove that Hertz lump like a Maserati, because soonest means soonest. I dumped the car and signed in at the kennel, feeling my heart pounding and my mouth ragged from fatigue, and aching because I had blown what would have to be my best chance of really being with Carolyn. “What do they want?” I asked the locator clerk. “Go inside,” he said, looking evilly amused. All locator clerks treat us the same, all over the world. “She’ll tell you.”
Not knowing who “she” was, I opened the door and walked through, and there was Carolyn.
“Hello, Wayne,” she said.
“Hello, Carolyn,” I said.
I really did not have any idea of what to do at all. She didn’t give me a cue. She just sat. It was at that point that it occurred to me to wonder at the fact that she wasn’t wearing much, just a shortie nightgown with nothing under it. She was also sitting on a turned-down bed. Now, you would think that considering everything, especially the nature of most of my thinking about Carolyn, that I would have instantly accepted this as a personal gift from God to me of every boy’s all-American dream. I didn’t. It wasn’t fatigue, either. It was Carolyn. It was the expression on her face, which was neither inviting nor loving, was not even the judgment-reserving look of a girl at a singles bar. What it especially was not was happy.
“The thing is, Wayne,” she said, “we’re supposed to go to bed now. So take your clothes off, why don’t you?”
Sometimes I can stand outside of myself and look at me and, even when it’s something terrible or something sad, I can see it was funny; it was like that when I did the little girl in Edison Township, because her mother had sewed her into her school clothes. I was actually laughing when I said, “Carolyn, what’s the matter?”
“Well,” she said, “they want us to ball, Wayne. You know. The Groombridge people. They’ve got interested in what human beings do to each other, and they want to kind of watch.”
I started to ask why us, but I didn’t have to; I could see where Carolyn and I had had a lot of that on our minds, and maybe our masters could get curious about it. I didn’t exactly like it. Not exactly; in fact in a way I kind of hated it, but it was so much better than nothing at all that I said, “Why, honey, that’s great!”—almost meaning it; trying to talk her into it; moving in next to her and putting my arm around her. And then she said:
“Only we have to wait, Wayne. They want to do it. Not us.”
“What do you mean, wait? Wait for what?” She shrugged under my arm. “You mean,” I said, “that we have to be plugged in to them? Like they’ll be doing it with our bodies?
She leaned against me. “That’s what they told me, Wayne. Any minute now, I guess.”
I pushed her away. “Honey,” I said, half crying, “all this time I’ve been wanting to—Jesus, Carolyn! I mean, it isn’t just that I wanted to go to bed with you. I mean—”
“I’m sorry,” she cried, big tears on her face.
“That’s lousy!” I shouted. My head was pounding, I was so furious. “It isn’t fair! I’m not going to stand for it. They don’t have any right!”
But they did, of course, they had all the right in the world; they had bought us and paid for us, and so they owned us. I knew that. I just didn’t want to accept it, even by admitting what I knew was so. The notion of screwing Carolyn flipped polarity; it wasn’t what I desperately wanted, it was what I would have died to avoid, as long as it meant letting them paw her with my hands, kiss her with my mouth, flood her with my juices; it was like the worst kind of rape, worse than anything I had ever done, both of us raped at once. And then—
And then I felt that burning tingle in my forehead as they took over. I couldn’t even scream. I just had to sit there inside my own head, no longer owning a muscle, while those freaks who owned me did to Carolyn with my body all manner of things, and I could not even cry.
After concluding the planned series of experimental procedures, which were duly recorded, the purchased person known as Carolyn Schoerner was no longer salvageable. Appropriate entries were made. The Probation and Out-Service department of the Meadville Women’s Reformatory was notified that she had ceased to be alive. A purchasing requisition was initiated for a replacement, and her account was terminated.
The purchased person known as Wayne Golden was assigned to usual duties, at which he functioned normally while under control. It was discovered that when control was withdrawn he became destructive, both to others and to himself. The conjecture has been advanced that that sexual behavior which had been established as his norm—the destruction of the sexual partner—may not have been appropriate in the conditions obtaining at the time of the experimental procedures. Further experiments will be made with differing procedures and other partners in the near future. Meanwhile Wayne Golden continues to function at normal efficiency, provided control is not withdrawn at any time, and apparently will do so indefinitely.
Gertrude Atherton
The Striding Place
“Gertrude Atherton has been the subject of more controversey than any other living American novelist. England, we are told, regards her as the greatest living novelist of America. Many Americans so rate her,” said a survey of the American novel in 1918. “A good deal of it comes out of Mrs. Atherton’s long-standing and vigorous assault on the literary schools of William Dean Howells and Henry James.” A bohemian in her youth, who travelled widely, San Francisco writer Gertrude Atherton matured into a grande dame of the literary scene without losing her verve or distinctive style. She was the grand-niece of Benjamin Franklin. Her most famous horror story, “The Striding Place” (1896) was inspired by an actual locale, the setting of a famous crime. She says in her autobiography, “I haunted that spot, fascinated, and consumed with a desire to write a gruesome story of the Strid, but could think of nothing . . . One night I determined to try an experiment. Just before dropping off to sleep I ordered my mind to conceive that story and have it formulated when I awoke. And the moment I opened my eyes, there it was. I wrote it out before leaving the bed.” She first submitted it to The Yellow Book but it was rejected as “far too gruesome.” She concludes, “It seems to me the best short story I ever wrote.” Today, she is remembered only for her historical novel, The Conqueror (1902), based on the life of Alexander Hamilton, and for her two collections of horror stories, The Bell in The Fog (1905) and The Foghorn (1934).
Weigall, continental and detached, tired early of grouse-shooting. To stand propped against a sod fence while his host’s workmen routed up the birds with long poles and drove them towards the waiting guns, made him feel himself a parody on the ancestors who had roamed the moors and forests of this
West Riding of Yorkshire in hot pursuit of game worth the killing. But when in England in August he always accepted whatever proffered for the season, and invited his host to shoot pheasants on his estates in the South. The amusements of life, he argued, should be accepted with the same philosophy as its ills.
It had been a bad day. A heavy rain had made the moor so spongy that it fairly sprang beneath the feet. Whether or not the grouse had haunts of their own, wherein they were immune from rheumatism, the bag had been small. The women, too, were an unusually dull lot, with the exception of a new-minded débutante who bothered Weigall at dinner by demanding the verbal restoration of the vague paintings on the vaulted roof above them.
But it was no one of these things that sat on Weigall’s mind as, when the other men went up to bed, he let himself out of the castle and sauntered down to the river. His intimate friend, the companion of his boyhood, the chum of his college days, his fellow-traveller in many lands, the man for whom he possessed stronger affection than for all men, had mysteriously disappeared two days ago, and his track might have sprung to the upper air for all trace he had left behind him. He had been a guest on the adjoining estate during the past week, shooting with the fervour of the true sportsman, making love in the intervals to Adeline Cavan, and apparently in the best of spirits. As far as was known, there was nothing to lower his mental mercury, for his rent-roll was a large one, Miss Cavan blushed whenever he looked at her, and, being one of the best shots in England, he was never happier than in August. The suicide theory was preposterous, all agreed, and there was as little reason to believe him murdered. Nevertheless, he had walked out of March Abbey two nights ago without hat or overcoat, and had not been seen since.
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