by Sladek, John
This fine-looking young instrument implies a world error of prediction and its environment, yet this is a strange and terrible business at the Y. I know personally the average of A, or change in this inhuman thing.
I hope all business people will see it in their hearts to forgive me for this crime, which I see in my heart was a crime against all people of the Hotel Pierre. The fine-looking young man of the Camel arms – gave birth!
They are of Y, the people of great length and military beauty. That belongs to the co-ordinates of soul and office, Miss Bunne, yours of the history,
H.H. Murd
‘So it was you who called me all those times!’ Marilyn said with a laugh. ‘I wondered who it was.’
‘I thought you knew my voice,’ said the other woman. ‘But now that you know who it was, you know who loves you, too.’
‘Of course! Oh, this calls for a drink! Joe, would you bring us two invoices, plenty of ice?’
Stoat got them all together in the drawing room for a showdown. There were maps all over his face and clothes, and he did not in general look well.
‘Averaging all the worth-situations as main-part factors,’ he said, ‘the arrival at an approximation of the practical value (or value-set) for any projected application can be implemented in such cases where extrinsic worth-situations are assumed intrinsic. Otherwise, Heiliger’s Law applies.
‘Eric could not have arrived at the scene of the real crime until at least nine-thirty, by the clock in the hall. Since Murd had set this clock forward ten minutes at ten minutes before the other butler lit the fire, the body (which was cold) would have had to be lying before the fire before Marilyn phoned David. In other words, whoever came from the library into here, out through the dining room and up the back stairs to change and come down the front way again, looking as if they had just got up to see if that was a gunshot, that person would have thought the real time was nine twenty. But at nine twenty, Max here was out front, shovelling snow and unwittingly clearing away the first set of footprints, the footprints of …’
‘Oh God, I can’t stand it!’ Marilyn cried, and ran to bury her mutilated face in the comforting padded shoulder of Mr Murd. Stoat, smiling dangerously, ground on towards the inevitable Conclusion.
‘The clock was fast; the hands pointed to nine. The dog pointed to something frozen fast in the snow – a hand. As Phil pointed out, he was fast asleep. On the other hand, Murd moved fast. The hour was at hand. At this point, Eric gave Max a hand with his fast car, which needed a new set of points. David showed his hand a little too soon, and Anne, we know, was in fast company. Kravon pointed to a portrait by a false hand, a second-hand copy that still had its points. The point is …’
‘I confess,’ said the bandaged man, taking out a peculiar little gun.
‘Too late,’ Stoat reproached him. ‘I resume: Leprosy struck. The hour struck. The workers at the plant struck. A match was struck. I struck up a new acquaintance. Lightning struck the lightning rod. And so on.’
‘You have nothing on me,’ Freag sneered.
‘Max discovered he was white, an ex-Nazi from Argentina, with amnesia – and he knew Marilyn, despite her sympathetic birthmark, was an Israeli spy!
‘Murd, seeing the game was up, took the deathkit from his hollow heel and used it – but was it on himself? Kravon, posing as the other butler, came in to light the fire – really to get close enough to Anne to do what he had to do, what he had been plotting all those years in stir!
‘Phil, having thought for years he was of the royal house of Thailand, discovered that he had been changed in the cradle for Eric! Almost too late, Phil learned that Marilyn was his cousin!
‘At this point, the lights went out. David found himself not down in the lab at all, but somewhere in the mob on Breughel Street. Eric, thinking he was in the library, took down a book – it was a brick from the lab wall! He felt a stealthy step behind him, turned and struck out! Is it really necessary to describe the president, Hernando Horario Murd? Expiring in the flamethrower’s flames, David steadfastly refused to name the noble-woman who had betrayed him to the National Guard. Travers promised himself – one more interview, and he would have enough to retire – just one more big one. “Good God!” Eric realised what Freag and Logan had been creating all those months, down in that infernal laboratory. David, expiring, offered a prayer for the transmission of sins. Marilyn, locked in a creaking tower of the old self, suddenly turned and ran for her life! The lights went out again.’
The lights went out again, and when they came on, Stoat lay in a pool of ink. Eric had vanished. Marilyn, without her birthmark, was nowhere to be seen.
‘This is just the way poor Marty got it,’ Max said, sipping the tea that contained he knew not what. The figure of Connecticut on the floor groaned and moved. Everyone filed out.
The figure on the floor raised itself on one peninsula and spoke: ‘It’s what I’ve been trying and trying to get through to all of you; the murderer is …’
And making a vague gesture that took in everything, it fell back.
MARILYN MEETS MYSTERIOUS CALLER – SELF!
Girl with miraculous vanishing birthmark does it again
KRAVON TO DRIVE ‘BAD-LUCK’ LOTUS IN INDY 500
‘I’ve found new heart,’ he quips
EX-NAZI NAMED HEAD OF SOUTH AFRICAN MILITARY
Peculiar pigmentation causes scowls in Johannesburg
Eric, who called himself ‘David’ these days, sat in the Automat over a cup of black coffee, wondering if that girl over there with the thirty-one perfect freckles would like a date with him. He didn’t suppose so, but you never knew …
Marilyn sat in the Automat eating pale jello, wondering if Eric was ever going to get up and come over and speak to her, or what. Why didn’t he screw up his courage? The way he had screwed up their lives?
She could hardly keep this up. Seven dishes of jello so far, and no action. Was this the Eric of seaside newspaper days? Maybe he didn’t recognise her since ‘Mother-Scrubber’, with its deep-down cleansing action, had removed the hidden dirt and the clearly exposed dirt from her face. Well, here goes jello number eight.
She sure liked jello, Eric noted admiringly. Reminded him of a girl he once knew. That was a good opening line:
‘Excuse me, miss, but you sure seem to like jello. Reminds me …’
Something else drew his attention. A peculiar man was standing in the line at the cashier’s window. He was tall, rather stiff, and amazingly symmetrical, and he seemed to be wearing a toupee.
‘Ten dollars?’ the cashier said. ‘All change?’
‘… yes … please …’ The man spoke faintly in a tinny voice. When the change was finally before him, he removed his hat, bent from the hips, and scooped in all the coins in one movement.
As the man turned from the window, Eric noticed again how symmetrical his features were: two perfect halves, with a thin scar or seam running down the middle. He glided without hesitation to the section marked PIES. Eric, along with a few others, craned his neck to watch.
Inserting a coin next to ‘lemon meringue’, the man twisted the knob. The window popped open. Instead of removing the pie, he reached in a fist and smashed it, smearing it well around in its stainless steel box. Then he repeated this performance at the next window down, and the next.
After finishing the ‘lemon meringue’ column, he moved one step to the left and began on ‘apple’. Other customers froze, looking from the columns of windows smeared with broken pastry to the man’s constantly-moving left hand, which became in turn covered with apple, peach, cherry and berry syrup, custard, whipped cream, and gouts of pumpkin.
‘Hey!’
‘Hey, what the hell here! Dis pie’s all crumbled up!’
‘Him, he’s the guy. Hey, Mr Rich Man! You don’t care if anybody else wants ta eat?’
A manager bustled over. ‘What’s going on here? You can’t do that!’
The stranger said nothing, and the manager to
o was frozen, hypnotised by the combination of violent action and serene, even indifferent expression.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked again, baffled and afraid. ‘You don’t like pie or something?’
Having finished the PIES section, the odd man seized a handful of paper napkins and began wiping off his fingers, one by one. ‘… yes …’ he said, ‘… like … pies … very … much …’ Then he headed for the section marked BEVERAGES. Soon the spouts of ‘Coffee’, ‘Coffee with Cream’, ‘Coffee with Extra Cream’, ‘Tea’ and ‘Hot Chocolate’ were gushing beverages enough to overflow their respective drains, cover the counter top, and drizzle from the edge. The stranger continued to plug in nickles and pull cranks, standing in a puddle of mixed beverages.
Eric looked around to see if the freckled girl were sharing this experience with him. She was gone, and a busboy in white was hurrying to remove all trace of her existence.
Well, to sum up: I opened my eyes, etc., etc., and then the last doctor wanted to leave the room. In pity, I created an ‘outside’, reducing the thickness of the walls from infinity to just ‘thick’, and making part of one wall moveable. I made a kind of ‘hole’ that could be opened or closed. On the ‘other’ side of it, I lettered:
DRUM INC.
RESTRICTED AREA
NO VISITORS
Then he ‘opened’ it and went ‘out’.
A cop in crash helmet and other cop togs came into the Automat. Someone pointed out the peculiar man, and the cop went over to teach him a lesson. People speculated about it over the clatter of dishes and the metronomic beat of the billy.
‘Too much book if you ask me. Too much book.’
The cop sat down afterwards for a coffee and donut. When he had finished, someone pointed out Eric. So the cop came over and taught Eric a lesson, too.
Marilyn noticed she was headed for the river. People, scraps of newspaper flew by her:
GOD TAKES BRIBE
‘… suit becomes him …’
‘He sat up on the …’
U.S. TO TEST ‘SUN BOMB’
She had known her boyfriend since they were both eighteen. They were now twenty. They had always had a stormy relationship – one minute very happy together, the next arguing and miserable. Sometimes he’d say they would get married soon, and then he’d say he was ambitious, and marriage was impossible for at least five years. She’d suggested they part, but he didn’t want that. Now her belly was heavy, painfully swollen with jello, and she felt so unhappy and discontented. What do you advise?
ORIGINAL APPEARANCES
‘198-, A Tale of “Tomorrow”’ – New Worlds #197, © 1970
‘Anxietal Register B’ – New Worlds #186, © 1969
‘The Communicants’ – The New SF ed. Langdon Jones, © 1969
‘The Interstate’ – Quark/2 ed. Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker, © 1971
‘Masterson and the Clerks’ – New Worlds #175, © 1967
‘Name (Please Print):’ – New Worlds Quarterly #5, © 1973
‘New Forms’ – New Worlds #181, © 1968
‘Scenes from the Country of the Blind’ – A Book of Contemporary Nightmares ed. Giles Gordon, © 1976
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Also by John Sladek
Novels
The Reproductive System (1968) (aka Mechasm)
The Muller-Fokker Effect (1970)
Roderick (1980)
Roderick At Random (1983)
Tik-Tok (1983)
Bugs (1989)
Wholly Smokes
Collections
The Steam-Driven Boy(1970)
Keep The Giraffe Burning (1977)
Alien Accounts (1982)
The Lunatics Of Terra (1984)
Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek (2001)
John Sladek (1937 – 2000)
John Sladek was born in Iowa in 1937 but moved to the UK in 1966, where he became involved with the British New Wave movement, centred on Michael Moorcock’s groundbreaking New Worlds magazine. Sladek began writing SF with ‘The Happy Breed’, which appeared in Harlan Ellison’s seminal anthology Dangerous Visions in 1967, and is now recognized as one of SF’s most brilliant satirists. His novels and short story collections include The Muller Fokker Effect, Roderick and Tik Tok, for which he won a BSFA Award. He returned to the United States in 1986, and died there in March 2000.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © The Estate of John Sladek 1982
All rights reserved.
The right of John Sladek to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11063 2
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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